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VDARE Fights Blocking By Censorware
Bennett Haselton writes "The anti-immigration site VDARE is publicizing the fact that it has been blocked as a 'hate site' by several Internet blocking programs, although some of them backed off and un-blocked it after receiving a letter from VDARE's lawyer. Since blocking software is bound to remain in use in most public schools for the foreseeable future, this raises the question: Is it possible for a blocking company to define a 'hate site' in a consistent way, without including conservative groups that might file a First Amendment lawsuit if their sites were blocked from public school computers? See what VDARE says about the content on their own site, and how blocking software companies have handled this issue in the past and what they might do this time." This is the first in a series of article by Bennett Haselton, writing for us from the Peacefire group. Read on for the rest of his piece.
The anti-immigration site VDARE.com is publicizing the fact that their site is blocked as a "hate site" by several different blocking programs. They don't name the programs, although they say that four companies used to block VDARE and "backed off after receiving a lawyer's letter".
It seems to be working, since according to the online lookup forms provided by WebSense, N2H2, SurfControl and SmartFilter, only SmartFilter lists the site under "hate speech"; the rest either don't categorize it or list it in innocuous categories. (N2H2 lists it as "Web Page Hosting/Free Pages", which makes no sense -- but not only that, N2H2 is now owned by the same company that makes SmartFilter, which means the company has VDARE listed one way in one product, and a different way in another.)
VDARE says they decided that showing legal muscle was a good way to get unblocked, after reading about an experiment Peacefire did in which we found that censorware companies would block sites with anti-gay content when they thought the sites were run by individuals, but would not block the *exact same content* when it was hosted by "mainstream" groups like Focus on the Family. Concludes VDARE: "The obvious reason for the double standard is that the foundations have lawyers on staff, and volunteer lawyers, and the Censorware companies are afraid of them." True -- although we did nominate AFA.net as a "hate site" at about the same time, and it did get blocked by Cyber Patrol, so it is possible if the content is extreme enough.
I'm against blocking VDARE, even from people under 18, but only because I'm against such blocking in general. Polls show that most people under 18 are more liberally-minded about race than their parents, suggesting that if you want to end racism, give minors more rights and freedom of information, not less. There was a big flap when it came out that in some Islamic schools in New York, parents had their children taught with textbooks which said that "the Jews killed their own prophets" and "you will find them ever deceitful", but without more civil rights for people under 18 to seek information for themselves, there's not much that anybody can do about it.
But as for whether VDARE really should be listed as a "hate site", the site owner himself says that VDARE is not "white nationalist", but adds, "We also publish on VDARE.COM a few writers, for example Jared Taylor, whom I would regard as 'white nationalist'". Well even if VDARE itself claims not to be 'white nationalist', if they host white nationalist writings, it's still accurate to classify the site as a place where such content is located. VDARE itself is also listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. VDARE's founder insists they are merely anti-immigration, not white nationalist, although he admits he once thought about adding a chapter to his anti-immigration book Alien Nation about the "last white family" (not the "last non-illegal-immigrant family") to leave Los Angeles.
Like BoingBoing.Net did before them, VDARE is retaliating against the block by encouraging people to learn how to get around blocking software. I wonder if they looked closely at our site first, since we fight censorship from the point of view of advocating greater civil rights for minors, which would probably not be a popular view with VDARE's ultra-conservative base. And if that's not enough, I'm planning to contact WebSense, SurfControl, and any other company that doesn't currently list VDARE as a "hate site", and ask them why not. So, VDARE sends us traffic, and this is how we repay them.
It seems to be working, since according to the online lookup forms provided by WebSense, N2H2, SurfControl and SmartFilter, only SmartFilter lists the site under "hate speech"; the rest either don't categorize it or list it in innocuous categories. (N2H2 lists it as "Web Page Hosting/Free Pages", which makes no sense -- but not only that, N2H2 is now owned by the same company that makes SmartFilter, which means the company has VDARE listed one way in one product, and a different way in another.)
VDARE says they decided that showing legal muscle was a good way to get unblocked, after reading about an experiment Peacefire did in which we found that censorware companies would block sites with anti-gay content when they thought the sites were run by individuals, but would not block the *exact same content* when it was hosted by "mainstream" groups like Focus on the Family. Concludes VDARE: "The obvious reason for the double standard is that the foundations have lawyers on staff, and volunteer lawyers, and the Censorware companies are afraid of them." True -- although we did nominate AFA.net as a "hate site" at about the same time, and it did get blocked by Cyber Patrol, so it is possible if the content is extreme enough.
I'm against blocking VDARE, even from people under 18, but only because I'm against such blocking in general. Polls show that most people under 18 are more liberally-minded about race than their parents, suggesting that if you want to end racism, give minors more rights and freedom of information, not less. There was a big flap when it came out that in some Islamic schools in New York, parents had their children taught with textbooks which said that "the Jews killed their own prophets" and "you will find them ever deceitful", but without more civil rights for people under 18 to seek information for themselves, there's not much that anybody can do about it.
But as for whether VDARE really should be listed as a "hate site", the site owner himself says that VDARE is not "white nationalist", but adds, "We also publish on VDARE.COM a few writers, for example Jared Taylor, whom I would regard as 'white nationalist'". Well even if VDARE itself claims not to be 'white nationalist', if they host white nationalist writings, it's still accurate to classify the site as a place where such content is located. VDARE itself is also listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. VDARE's founder insists they are merely anti-immigration, not white nationalist, although he admits he once thought about adding a chapter to his anti-immigration book Alien Nation about the "last white family" (not the "last non-illegal-immigrant family") to leave Los Angeles.
Like BoingBoing.Net did before them, VDARE is retaliating against the block by encouraging people to learn how to get around blocking software. I wonder if they looked closely at our site first, since we fight censorship from the point of view of advocating greater civil rights for minors, which would probably not be a popular view with VDARE's ultra-conservative base. And if that's not enough, I'm planning to contact WebSense, SurfControl, and any other company that doesn't currently list VDARE as a "hate site", and ask them why not. So, VDARE sends us traffic, and this is how we repay them.
They simply need a new category "political controversy" that people can optionally block, for items/sites where it's subjective to label them as "hate."
There is a historical pattern of the "hate" bans leaning "a certain way," if you know what I mean, and with a broad brush. Some sites are also the target of campaigns to have them labeled as "hate" by political opponents.
I don't think VDARE would be able to argue that they don't foster political controversy, though I'm sure the new category would elicit some argument. I used to follow links there from time to time, and while I would categorize them as "strident" I don't think I could honestly condemn them as a "hate" site, anymore than (and probably less than) I could CNN or Reuters.
One of the biggest problems with blocking is that definitions of "offensive" vary from person to person.
Ok, sure, we got the net nanny stuff blocking things it maybe should and maybe shouldn't, and we can have that debate for the 47th time. But do we need the giant screed about whether these people are white supremacists or not? Shouldn't that have been, oh, I dunno, edited out? By someone whose job it is to edit things? Like some kind of an editor? And why is there this weird aside about some Islamic textbook thing wedged in there?
I mean, I don't know what the article-publishing mechanism is. I wouldn't imagine you'd design it as just a button labeled "Publish" and no edit controls, but I don't really see any evidence to the contrary.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
I see no rights violation here.
Just junk food for thought...
It's hard to be a pro-gun site and not be blocked, too. You need not necessarily be promoting violence or have any images of people even using guns, much less anything that's been shot by a gun. All you need to do is show guns positively and the blockers think, "Oh, horrors! Kiddies might go on a rampage!" and you're on the blacklist. Of course, anti-gun sites are fine, and get right through. Hard for a schoolkid to get any balanced information.
If one is going to filter (let's just assume for the moment that filtering is inevitable), then one needs to distinguish between responsible sites that talk about the political issues involved and the ones that glorify the elements of that issue that some find unsavory. There's a big difference between NRA.org and WatchMeBlastEverythingThatMovesIntoBloodyPulp.net - you can't lump them together as "gun sites" and block both.
Constitutionally Correct
You mean it begs the question?
Wait a minute . . .
WTF! A Slashdot summary that gets it right? What next? Dogs and cats living together?
-Dave
Who are we defending here...the website, or the filters?
Because it seems to me that the companies filtering sites are the ones being trampled on by lawyers, forced by threat of litigation to back off their initial judgement that the page contained racist ideas. It sounds like it's THEIR rights being interfered with here.
After a quick reading of a few things on the site, I'd say that if it's not racist, it teeters on the edge of it.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
I was going to slam the submitter about their "anti-immigration" remark, which is usually weasel speak for characterizing anti-ILLEGAL immigration views. But what the hell, I put off the knee-jerk reaction and checked Wikipedia's VDARE entry to see who these guys really are.
They're not only anti-immigration (which is un-American IMHO), they sound like a bunch of racists. But should they be blocked?
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
to do something objectively that essentially a subjective task
however, that doesn't mean:
1. you should stop trying
2. you should consider getting it perfect as your goal
it is wrong to block a site that shouldn't be blocked
it is also wrong to allow unfettered access to the web by kids in school
but you can't stop doing one wrong without committing the other, so that there exists a tension between two perfectly valid goals, where you always have to be careful about what you block, mindful of the fact that no matter what you do, you won't get it perfect
but there are a lot of people out there who are idealists, who believe that if you can't do something perfect, you shouldn't try to do it all. there are also a lot of people who are only capable of looking at wrongs completely out of context. in other words, they see a downside, a negative, but they don't understand that for some thankless challenges in life, there is a downside no matter what you do, and the goal is not get something upside, or even a wash, but to just minimize the downsides. and yet some people therefore:
1. don't recognize the nature of the problem, and oppose an action just because a downside exists (nevermind that it is impossible for a downside not to exist for some problems in life)
2. don't recognize that acting imperfectly in some problems beats not acting at all. but because they can't be perfect, they'd rather not act, but they only wind up compounding the problem, simply because of their idealism
the fact that these tensions between two competing wrongs exist for some tasks in life doesn't mean you stop trying, but it does mean that you unfortunately must continually whether withering criticism from howling idealists who just don't understand the nature of the dilemna
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Any form of censoring inherently violates the right to free speech, for the simple reason that it is impossible to objectively define universally acceptable standards for censoring.
For example, take something which we, for the most part, can equally identify: Pornography. Now define it. If you're reaching for a dictionary, note that it will use the word "obscene" or somesuch - a subjective, qualitative adjective. To make the impossible even harder on yourself, try to come up with a strict definition that would clearly differentiate pornography from nude art. You can't.
There is a reason that former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart came up with the famous case-law definition of pornography: "I know it when I see it." I cannot think of a more ambiguous definition for something which we know so well, and if we can't even come up with a suitable definition for something so clear as pornography, how ever could we come up with a clear definition for anything else?
Taking time to read about them on their site, they do seem slighty rascist- but to quote Avenue Q, "Everybody's a little bit rascist". They aren't advocating killing other ethnicities, denying rights to hispanics, or anything illegal- they seem primarily concerned with enforcing existing immigration laws and supporting Free Speech rights of extremists. If having an extreme political view is cause for censorship, /. should be high on the ban list.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
to characterize anti-immigration politics as racist? It's nothing but a patent, ad hominem rhetorical trick to try to change the subject from "Are U.S. immigration and naturalization policies sound?" to "Are people who want to change U.S. immigration and naturalization policies racists or not?" I am a liberal democrat and I'm fucking offended by it. It insults the intelligence of everyone who wants to have a rational debate about the immigration issue.
Why? Has any scientific study ever concluded that watching pornography harms children?
Or is it fear that they might actually learn something parents don't want them to learn?
Like authentic footage from WWII, Viet Nam, L.A. and Iraq you mean? Heavens forbid that the kids see the level of horror that actually happened and happens. They might catch politics or become peaceniks. Oh vey.
If there's anyone who deserve full uncensored access to any and all information, it's children. How else can they make informed decisions and grow up into the best they can be? If adults wants to censor something for themselves based on beliefs or tradition, I'm not going to stop them, but don't limit the information children get. They deserve a chance to make their own choices, with a full knowledge of both sides of any issues.
Regards,
--
*Art
"[Please clarify] how a "First Amendment lawsuit" is relevant. As I understand, the First Amendment only restricts the government.
It's conceivable that the organization could file lawsuits citing the First Amendment against public schools, public libraries, or other government entities that provide public internet access through a filter.
It's far more likely that the organization would file lawsuits based on some form of defamation tort against the filtering businesses themselves, since "hate speech" does have a rather well defined meaning within the law, and if the organization's activities fall short of hate speech, it probably wouldn't be difficult to show the requisite economic and reputational injury.
Of course, the writer has noted that the SPLC has labeled the organization as a hate group, but then, VDARE would just invite trouble by suing an organization full of lawyers who's mission is to track hate groups. There's nothing like a group of activists combing through your entire business thanks to a discovery request to convince you that sometimes a lawsuit is not a solution to a problem.
Where does common sense enter into your argument? Should parents let their kids read disgusting stuff on KKK web sites, and NAMBLA web sites? This web site is just as offensive and equally brain dead. I see no possible benefit for anybody to read a website like this one other to say, "Wow! There are some sick fuckers out there!" If I were a parent, I don't know that I'd want my kids to be reading this idiotic propganda without me by their side explaining to them that there are some really unbelievably stupid people out there.
I work for the State of New Mexico. Governor Richardson has mandated that all state offices use a central blocking system, currently WebSense. Quite a bit is blocked: porn, or course, but also personal sites, blogs, hate sites, games, IM related sites (made installing Jabber here fun), and many others. Oddly, Slashdot is not blocked, neither is Penny Arcade, nor The Onion :-)
For some categories, we have half an hour discretionary time per day we can use for anything but porn, hate sites, etc. Personally, I'm glad my tax dollars aren't being wasted. No! I'm not wasting tax dollars here, as I explained to my supervisor, my visits to slashdot are for "researching industry trends" and "developing valuable contacts in the open source community."
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
One of the largest (mostly) completely rabid atheist sites out there. Yep, right here. You just did it! YOU. You obviously hate "religious fundies" because that is a deragotory term the way you used it, you "hate" folks because of their religion! HAHAHAHAH! gotcha! No wiggling, admit it!
See how this works? Constant attacks on religion of all types, and as extreme as it gets, complete with stuff pretty close to threats..I've seen it here. Hate speech? Looks like it to me following this dubious "logic". Is it cool to block slashdot?
How about those "everything hispanic is just so damn cool" sites, the bronze warrior aztlan overlord la raza reconquista sites?(despite them all wanting to move here and theior own nations are cesspools) Are they being blocked by these softwares? They go so far as to want to kill off all the whites in the south west US, I've read some on their sites, I've seen pics of posters some of them have carried at rallies, complete with graphical representations of white folks with their heads cut off by bronze warrior machetes.. Blocked? Are they? The US attorney general is a member of a hispanic separatist organization! I have seen quite a bit of "hate speech" there at those sites following these strict guides. How about Free Republic and D.U.? You honestly want to say you (anyone you, not being specific at all) haven't seen a variety of "hate speech" there?
And so on.
Here's some reality. You have to be 100% pro gay or be classed as a hater. You have to be 100% zionist and pro everything israel does or you are a "hater" (that's a HUGE one in this society, go on, admit it) You have to be 100% pro ultra radical feminism or you are a hater. You have to either bend over and spread 'em with a smile on your face for clinton or bush or you are a hater. And so on.
There's a HUGE list, and if you look close EVERYONE ON THE PLANET has some semblence of "hate speech" naughty thoughts and the occassional "hate" scribble or "hate" utterences, so let's just block everything and go back to living in caves and grunting. Then instead of hate speech we can engage in mass "club love" and be "sharing" with the "multicultural" neighbors.
As to the original example in the article, it appears you can be pro anything, anything at all, any other race or tribe or ethnicity, other than having european heritage in your family tree. Then that becomes "hate speech".
Screw that, screw "current political correctness"..because that is the root of all hate. Want to see the simply best possible examples of the most intolerant and bigoted people on the planet, just in general terms, I mean just raw extremism, no matter the subject being discussed, where there exists only black and white but never the shades of gray? Go to any university and watch the young folks there when they discover politics.
Been there, done that,guilty as charged. Learn from history and learn from the mistakes of youth, because YOU will be making them, a lot of them. You just won't see it for many years, that's all.
Who's The Illegal Alien Now Pilgrim?
/Lives in Texas by the way...
There goes my karma, but I don't care. The message that the image portrays speaks for itself. My ancestors were here first. Someone should tell these guys that.
Any kind of 'hate' speech is protected under the first amendment. I do not believe that schoolkids doing research should be blocked from any kind of protected speech, other than pornography. Even for porn, I'd classify it right with gaming and chat sites; nothing that will harm them, just a useless time waster when they should be learning.
Political extremists, racism, zealotry... we should be exposing kids to this, and explaining why it is wrong; not hiding them from it to the point where they don't recognize it when they see it. My children shouldn't need to use the Internet at home to do their research.
I am fundamentally opposed to limitations on speech. I believe that censorship is almost universally wrong, and suppression of ideas has no place in a school setting.
Raven
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Maddox has a commentary over here.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
I've seen people who describe themselve as supporting open borders, and lots of people with different views on immigration, and none of them are "pro-illegal-immigration".
This one doesn't quite make sense to me. If someone supports "open borders", doesn't that mean they think people should just be able to walk over the border at will and go wherever they want? Maybe they're not "pro-illegal-immigration", but it seems like they want the laws changed so that anyone can immigrate with no restrictions whatsoever, so that people who are now illegally immigrating can do so legally.
OTOH, a lot of people who make arguments based not on the legal status of immigration but about reducing the total level of immigration like to hide behind the word "illegal" and pretend that they are anti-illegal-immigration, but their concern is very much about reducing the level of immigration, not so much about the legal status of immigrants.
I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that the vast majority of immigration currently is illegal rather than legal. So eliminating illegal immigration would have the side effect of vastly reducing the total level of immigration, unless the laws and limits/quotas were changed to allow more legal immigration. Therefore, it seems rather difficult to tell whether someone who is anti-illegal-immigration is really against the illegality, or wants to reduce the total level, or what. This seems similar to how many pro-illegal-immigration people (namely people in Mexico who promote it) play the race card, calling those who disagree "racist", just because almost all illegal immigrants happen to be from Mexico and other Latin American countries. Correlation does not imply causation.
Of course you can. Provided you follow the 11th Commandment, you can do it with impunity. That, in fact, is the tech person's main form of power. The tech person rarely has the skills to be a politician, administrator, or lawyer. So the option of changing policies, laws, and rules through the political system or the courts are not open to him. But, since the technical person knows how those rules are implemented, he has the option of bypassing or subverting them at that level (provided he doesn't get caught).
You're running the entire show... you can make a permanent hole in the firewall just for yourself (and the other techie). What's to stop you? Is the other guy going to rat you out?Well, if only things were so simple. Modern research is showing that the population of the Americas is more complicated than originally thought, with people migrating from both Europe and Asia. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/first/claimbonn.html
So which argument should we follow, "We were here first" or "We were here last"? Because you may not have been as first as you think you are, and hell, we're probably related anyway.
At least one President and a majority in both the Congress and Senate decided that certain types of speech should be against the law. I guess that means hate speech isn't really treated the same way as other forms of speech.
Cite please.
There aren't, that I know of, any Federal laws against hate speech, when it is simply "speech" and not action-producing. It is still protected as political speech, just like anything else. There are certain types of "speech" which are prohibited if they incite particular actions, but they prohibited by virtue of being actions-as-speech rather than speech per se. This has broad historical basis in the prohibitions against inciting riots, and the "fire in a crowded theater" example.
Neither one is really a type of speech being against the law, when the speech is considered independently of the action it provokes. This may seem like an academic point, but it is not. It's the difference between it actually being illegal to say something due to subject matter, and being illegal to say something in a particular time and place, to a particular audience, in order to produce a particular effect. Both situation and motivation play into its prohibition.
There is a very big difference between saying that you can't deny the Holocaust, period, and saying that you can't tell a bunch of people at a white supremacist rally to go out and kill Jews. The second case is clearly an incitement to violence and thus isn't just speech, it's also action-causing in a direct and predictable way. The first case is blatantly censorious and (although it is the case in many European countries,) would not pass Constitutional muster in the U.S. -- even if a simple majority of Congress and the President wanted to make it illegal.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Find free books.
Unfortunately, not everyone can afford a lawyer.
The first amendment isn't only supposed to apply to those with deep enough pockets to protect themselves.
What would make more sense (and provide some legal shelter for blackhole list servers & the like) would be to serve multidimensional karma ratings compiled from a diverse set of viewpoints, and let the clients be the ones to decide what level to browse at on any given indicator.
... by just not displaying them at all.
I think you've got the right idea. Really, we need to make web "censorship" -- if we need to do it at all -- more of a recommendation-based system. Sort of like the reverse of Amazon's "you might like this if..." system. If something offensive snuck through, then you could hit a big red button and it would add it to the block list, while also updating your preferences in its database, so that people similar in preferences to you would automatically share the block. In the same way that Last.FM suggests music based on your previous playlists, this would "suggest" censored sites to you
Basically, you could surf and when you hit a site that you find offensive, or maybe when you first ran the site it would give you examples of sites and you could pick which offend you, and it would then match you to various profiles of real people, who had rated sites based on "offensiveness." If you find Fox News particularly repugnant, then Ann Coulter is probably going to be totally off-limits.
The technology to do this seems readily available; 'recommendation engines' that take a person's preferences and extrapolate them out based on similar people are used in everything from music to movies, and they're getting better all the time. If people really want web censorship, than this is better than just turning over authority to some centralized body and letting them possess a giant God-sized rubber "censored" stamp.
The net effect of a system like this, if it were put into wide use, would probably be that people would filter out opinions that were contrary to their own. The internet would, as the software learned about you, become a little bobble-headed yes-man to your every opinion and thought. If you're conservative, than your Internet would be filled with conservatives. If you're a liberal, it'd be full of Liberals (and the occasional Bush gaffe). If you were a pro-life Objectivist anti-gun neo-Stalinist pagan, however hypocritical, as long as the system could find various combinations of preferences to match you to in its database, then you would only see stuff that matched your biases. I'm not saying this would be a good thing -- but hey, it's basically what we have already, just with less senseless screaming at each other in some pathetic attempt at rational discourse.
If we can't have an actual diversity of opinion without trying to take away each others' right to speak freely, then at least let's have a diversity of censorship.
(FYI, tongue is planted firmly in cheek throughout this, although I don't mean it as a total joke. If web censorship is a must, then a system like this would be better than where we're headed. Thus if you think this would really suck, maybe we need to re-evaluate whether we really want to start down the path at all.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
When a journalist is covering a conflict, they have an obligation to cover both sides of the story. You cited a few anecdotal examples of obvious journalistic screw-ups in this regard, but I think you'll find that if *you* do your homework (and don't just restrict it to a right-wing media criticism site or right-leaning Israeli news site), people with opposing political views to yours have just as many examples. Witness Judith Miller's ridiculously biased reporting of an Israeli interrogation or CNN's failure to balance dubious assertions that the Qana photos were staged and uncritical airing of Israeli intelligence contradicting our own.
The same journalists who embedded with Hezbollah, of course, regularly embed with American, Iraqi, and Israeli forces (most also make the controlled nature of their experience part of the story). In most cases, there's little to suggest that these incidents stem from an explicit bias rather than just poor journalism or Reuter's stupid practice of hiring stringers virtually sight unseen.