Worst Censorware Blocks Cannot Be Fixed

Slashdot regular Bennett Haselton writes "The ACLU has targeted a group of Tennessee school districts for blocking websites categorized by a blocking company as 'LGBT.' I hope the ACLU wins, but it may create the mistaken impression that egregious overblocking of websites is easy to fix. On the contrary, the vast majority of errors are hard-coded into the products and cannot be fixed by unblocking a single category." Hit that tantalizingly entitled 'Read More' link to read his essay.

The ACLU is threatening to sue a group of Tennessee School Districts for using blocking software that blocks sites categorized as "LGBT" — that is, sites themed around lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender issues that would not be classified as pornographic. Some of the blocked sites include the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the Human Rights Campaign.

Legally, the school districts' decision to block these sites seems fairly indefensible. The content being censored is political speech, not illegal to distribute to minors, and as the ACLU points out, by blocking these sites the school districts are engaging in "viewpoint discrimination," since the schools allow access to anti-gay sites like Americans for Truth Against Homosexuality (which, ironically, features a disclaimer saying its content is not suitable for children). But, you never can tell with judges. A judge in Utah once ruled in favor of a school that suspended a student for wearing a t-shirt with the word "Vegan." (Do you think the judge would have made the same ruling if the student's t-shirt had said "Christian"?)

However, while the ACLU would be right to bring this case, there may be another unintended side effect. By focusing on the fact that the "LGBT" category is enabled to be blocked in these districts, this sets up a contrast with districts that do not have the "LGBT" category enabled, which could lead people to think that such districts are not blocking LGBT sites. This is not the case.

When a school district buys blocking software, the software comes with an encrypted list of websites listed in different categories; categories like Pornography and Nudity are typically blocked, while categories like LGBT would usually not be. If a site falls into one or more of the blocked categories, then attempts to access that site will be blocked (at least until some reprobates help you get around the filter.) However, it's the blocking company that decides what to put on the list under each category. And even if only categories like "Pornography" are enabled, there are likely to be many non-pornographic sites categorized as "Pornography," and hence blocked wherever that category is turned on.

When the ACLU of Washington sued the North County Regional Library system for enabling blocking software for all patrons (including adults), they asked me to test the Fortinet Web filter that the library was using. I used a random sample of 100,000 .com and 100,000 .org domains and ran them through an automated script to find 536 .com domains and 207 .org domains that were blocked by Fortinet. Of those, about one out of every eight .com sites categorized as "Pornography" or "Adult Materials," and one of out of every four .org sites blocked in those categories, was a site with content that could not possibly be considered "adult" — some of the sites blocked in these categories included the Dabar Worship Center, the immigrant-rights group Families for Freedom, and the Seattle Women's Jazz Orchestra. Extrapolating these ratios to the set of all .com and .org domains in existence, one could conclude that there were about 71,000 non-pornographic .com sites and 5,800 non-pornographic .org sites blocked by FortiNet as "Pornography" or "Adult Materials" — a number almost certain to grow into six figures when you add in all the sites outside of .com and .org. Years earlier, I had run similar tests for Cyber Patrol and SurfWatch (products which have since been discontinued) and found that an absolute majority of sites blocked by each program were actually non-pornographic, which translated into an estimate of hundreds of thousands of .com and .org sites wrongly classified as "porn."

Only the blocking companies know for sure how such stupid mistakes end up on their lists, but the most widely accepted explanation is that they use machines to crawl the Web and guess which sites are pornographic, and add those sites to their blacklists without any human intervention. In their early years, the makers of SurfWatch and Cyber Patrol claimed that employees actually did review sites before adding them to their lists, but that claim became increasingly untenable as more and more reports came out of sites being blocked with no adult content on them.

Nobody has yet done a similar study for the ENA blocking program, but every blocking program that has ever been tested has had a non-trivial error rate that extrapolates to at least hundreds of thousands of non-pornographic websites being blocked under "Pornography" and similar categories. There is no reason to think that the ENA blocker is different; at the very least, if they claim that it is, then the burden of proof should be on them.

So, the ACLU will probably succeed in persuading the Tennessee Schools Cooperative to stop blocking the "LGBT" category, but that doesn't mean that LGBT sites — or any other category of non-pornographic sites — will no longer be blocked. A student who encounters a blocked LGBT site could request an override, but what if they don't want to "out" themselves as someone who was browsing an LGBT site? Is Tennessee the best place to be known as the "queer who wanted to get around the porn filter"? And there may not be an option of getting an override anyway. Some of the correspondents on Peacefire's mailing list for new proxy sites to get around blockers are teachers who aren't given a password to bypass the blocker on their school's computers.

Then of course — you know what's coming — there is the other "larger sense" in which unblocking the LGBT category doesn't "fix the problem," which is that there would be no "problem" if we didn't think of teenagers as children instead of adults. You've probably already decided which side you're on in that debate, but consider it as a scientific question instead of a moral one. Do you think there is any objective evidence that teenagers, if they were given the opportunity to have the same rights and responsibilities as adults, would behave differently from adults to a large degree — more differently than, say, men and women behave from each other? The trouble with the "evidence" that we gather from personal interactions is that it's not truly objective — if someone believes that teenagers are immature and adults are not, they're likely to see and remember only the pieces of evidence that confirm that belief. A true double-blind experiment might involve talking to someone through a computer terminal and rating the other person's "maturity" just based on their responses. That's a start, but the trouble with that experiment is that adults tend to know a larger set of words, so a participant might rate the other person as more "mature" because of their large vocabulary, even though having a large vocabulary is completely different from having mature thoughts or logical reasoning skills. A fairer test might be to take a non-native-English-speaking adult and a native-English-speaking young teenager who scored about the same on a test of English vocabulary, and see if participants could tell the difference in maturity between those two test subjects while talking to them through a computer terminal. I am not aware of any experiment along these lines that has been done, but this is the sort of evidence of differences between adults and minors, that would be truly objective.

Most of the evidence in favor of the innate "adulthood" of teenagers is also anecdotal and not scientific, but it is compelling. As psychologist Robert Epstein has pointed out in The Case Against Adolescence, for thousands of years humans in their early teens were giving birth and raising children of their own. That obviously does not mean that that is a good idea in today's society, it just means that somewhere along the way, we must have lost sight of the level of responsibility that human teenagers are biologically capable of handling. If one of our Stone Age forebears could be brought back to life, he might eventually get used to the Web, but he'd probably always be amused by the idea of Web blockers for teenagers who are older than he was when he was raising his first child.

Comments

So, basically the parents are screwed?

[Shivetya]

Because while little Timmy can have his internet activities monitored by his parents at home when he gets to school his parents wishes are cast into the ditch because other people have decided they know what is best.

People love to demonize parents for not getting involved in the lives of the children but when those children are outside of their control for eight hours a day what are they to do?

Frankly I do not believe they need internet access outside of what is required to finish a class assignment. I figure most of this comes down from haters who look for any chance to embarrass or otherwise annoy religious oriented Americans who send their kids to public school. The parents are legally responsible for most of the actions of their kids and legally prevented from knowing about many of them.

Public education should have standards on EDUCATION. What a locality wants to do beyond that should be off limits to the Feds. As long as they don't try to indoctrinate based religion/race it should be fine. The problem with education is that the system is keeping parents out and then blaming them for it.

Let them be more involved, but realize freedoms you claim the students don't have should not be granted by the system over the wishes of their parents. If you do that then you absolve the parents of any liability for their children thus making them wards/products of the state. Then again maybe that is what these people want.

Re:So, basically the parents are screwed?

[MasterOfMagic]

People love to demonize parents for not getting involved in the lives of the children but when those children are outside of their control for eight hours a day what are they to do?

Let the children learn that there are other viewpoints out there. That's what school is supposed to be for.

I figure most of this comes down from haters who look for any chance to embarrass or otherwise annoy religious oriented Americans who send their kids to public school.

When they stop trying to embarrass or otherwise annoy me by trying to ram through "academic freedom" bills that force teachers to teach a fairytale as science and act as a wedge to break down the church/state separation, then they'll earn my sympathy and respect. When they stop putting their fingers in their ears and shouting out that "abstinence is the only way, sex is sinful and dirty, and condoms will give you AIDS", then I'll be concerned about what they think. When they stop telling people that the genitals of the person they like are more important than the love that they have for them, then I'll entertain their cries of oppression.

Let them be more involved, but realize freedoms you claim the students don't have should not be granted by the system over the wishes of their parents.

If they feel that their children are being exposed to viewpoints that they don't agree with, let them home school their kids or send them to a private school.

While I agree that there should be local control of schools, the reason this lawsuit was filed was to challenge what the locality thinks should be acceptable and if those standards are reasonable. Community standards, the basis of most obscenity claims, were never meant to be static and unchanging - they were meant to be influenced by society as a whole. What works for one community may not work for another, but reasonable community standards are important.

I'm sure that you'll find some towns in the south that feel showing a black man and a white woman kissing is obscene. Luckily, society as a whole as advanced passed that racist and backward world view, and any obscenity trial involving that community will take that into account.

Re:So, basically the parents are screwed?

[PhxBlue]

People love to demonize parents for not getting involved in the lives of the children but when those children are outside of their control for eight hours a day what are they to do?

They have a couple of options -- either (A) hold the schools to account for what they're doing and not doing; or (B) homeschool.

Public education should have standards on EDUCATION. What a locality wants to do beyond that should be off limits to the Feds. As long as they don't try to indoctrinate based religion/race it should be fine. The problem with education is that the system is keeping parents out and then blaming them for it.

No, the problem is that parents don't want to expose their children to any ideas contrary to the parents' beliefs. Problem is, the real world doesn't work that way, and neither do the public schools that are a reflection of the real world. It's all well and good to teach your child that homosexuality is sinful or whatever -- hey, it's your belief, and the U.S. thrives upon a wide variety of beliefs.

But what does it teach your child when you tell him that he's not allowed to even explore other beliefs and ways of looking at the world? In my view, it teaches him that you're not confident your beliefs will stand up to scrutiny, and it's going to encourage him to find out what you're trying to hide.

Re:So, basically the parents are screwed?

[droopycom]

Frankly I do not believe they need internet access outside of what is required to finish a class assignment.

Yeah, and they dont need books outside of the one required for their classes. Nor should they being able to watch any videos programs unless they are some kind of homework... Good lord, I dont want my kids to ever develop any kind of independent thoughts that might reflect bad on me. They dont need to hear the thoughts from other people than their parents. Those are MY children after all, they should think like me and act like me...

Re:So, basically the parents are screwed?

[Daniel_Staal]

Frankly I do not believe they need internet access outside of what is required to finish a class assignment.

Ok, now create a system that A: Knows all student's current class and extra-credit assignments, at all times; B: Knows what student is accessing which computer wherever they are on the campus; C: Knows what websites are relevant to each assignment and student at all times; D: Can then enforce that on a case-by-case basis.

B is difficult, but could probably be dealt with. If you solved all the rest, D is not a major problem. A and C are nearly impossible: They actually require the system to know more than the teachers (A) (remember: many assignments are along the line of 'pick a topic and write a report on it') and Google (C) simultaneously.

Good luck with that. In the meantime, I can see why schools would put in blocks on 'known non-relevant' sites, for sites that should never be needed for any class assignment. (And, since it's not on adults, I can even see decent arguments for doing so.)

Re:So, basically the parents are screwed?

[gbjbaanb]

They have a couple of options -- either (A) hold the schools to account for what they're doing and not doing

the biggest issue here is that school are allowing kids access to the freaking internet. I'm sure none of the kids there give a damn about any gay/lesbian website - they're too busy talking crap with their mates on facebook. Instead of learning stuff.

So yeah, sure we should be outraged at some faceless company deciding what's allowable or not on the internet, but we should be equally outraged that kids have access to all the rest of the internet whilst at school.

now, I'm going to go back to surfing those sites my employer deems acceptable for me to waste... sorry, "profitably leverage my skills in a proactive self-learning manner" on.

Re:So, basically the parents are screwed?

[Main Gauche]

Maybe, the school systems are going about it all wrong. Instead of having "blockers," poke "holes."

This is an interesting idea, and I'm sure some must do it that way already. The problem with this approach is that the students are then spoon-fed their sources. Giving them an assignment with a pre-approved list of sites takes away the part where they have to actually dig for information.

I think as a practical matter, the "blockers" approach provides the best cost/benefit ratio. That doesn't mean it's perfect. But as GP put it (in one of the best posts I've ever seen on slashdot), the students are in school to work on their learning, not to watch sports, investigate alternative lifestyles, or do anything else like that.

When my daughter reaches that age, I'll be happy to explain the diverse nature of people in the world. In the meantime, I don't want to hear that this is what constitutes school work.

Re:So, basically the parents are screwed?

[Shakrai]

It's not quite that simple. Not all parents are supportive and nurturing. Kids should have access to certain types of information no matter how their parents feel about it.

I disagree. Parents should be able to raise their kids as they see fit, provided they aren't abusing them. Why is it any business of the state if I want to shield my kids from a lifestyle that I may not approve of?

(Disclaimer before I get modded down by the PC police: I don't have any objections to homosexuality, but I do have objections to the state telling me how to raise my kids and the above paragraph is intended to play devil's advocate)

Re:So, basically the parents are screwed?

[a whoabot]

"Let the children learn that there are other viewpoints out there. That's what school is supposed to be for."

Of course no one actually follows this, but only says it to allow the viewing of some viewpoints with which others disagree, but not others. They should be allowed to read about advocacy for homosexual lifestyles, but should they be allowed to read about advocacy for white nationalism or holocaust denial?

And then creating reasonable community standards involving society as a whole. How would that work? Where does one society end and another begin? It seems that we increasingly live in one global society, but if you take into account the beliefs of the world as a whole you run into all sorts of problems. Just look at what's happening with this latest UN World Conference Against Racism. Most of the world appears to be in support of the conference proceeding as it is with a stand against blasphemy and zionism, but a handful of countries including the US are boycotting it because of the language against zionism and blasphemy.

"If they feel that their children are being exposed to viewpoints that they don't agree with, let them home school their kids or send them to a private school."

Both of those options can be prohibitively costly.

Re:So, basically the parents are screwed?

[tecnico.hitos]

Maybe, the school systems are going about it all wrong. Instead of having "blockers," poke "holes." I would assume that the access to the internet is not intended to be for the entertainment of the student. It likely has a purpose, namely assisting with research, email, or whatever else. The simple solution is to tell the student users, "This is for [purpose] only." And allow sites that assist with that purpose. If a student really wants to read about some other subject, they can research it at home, or at a local library, or a freaking coffee shop if they really want to. I'm sure that even Tennessee has a Starbucks or something to provide that in the towns.

I used to work in a place where the "hole poking blocking system" was used. They called it "whitelist" (as opposed to blacklist).

It was very burocratic and slow. Teachers often weren't able to teach the scheduled topics because of delay on unblocking, and kids would often just play educational games.

It could work, but involved more effort than the people wanted to spend there.

Re:So, basically the parents are screwed?

[HTH NE1]

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

That statement is demonstrably false for multiple values of "broken" and "clock".

And before you ask, the sky in my world is capable of many colors.

Re:Fight...for your right....

[merrickm]

Some gays and lesbians don't like transgendered people. Many others are okay with them. Some gays and lesbians don't like bisexuals either, but they keep the B in the acronym anyway. It's just a convenient acronym for identifying a set of people who are often discriminated against for sex/gender-related reasons.

Re:tl;dr

[MightyYar]

lgbt wont be happy till they get "equal time" to indoctrinate kids.

But why isn't that fair? Wanna bet that these assholes aren't on the block list? These nutballs even keep a list, making the blocking very easy. If "indoctrinating kids" is your objection, you'd expect them all to be blocked, right?

Sorry, but Schools DO have Totalitarian control...

[A. B3ttik]

Exactly what laws is the school breaking by not allowing them to access certain sites?

It may be wrong and hardheaded and backwards... but I'm sorry... it _is_ the schoolboard's right to do it. If they really wanted to, they could block Mac Sites and keep IBM sites or block Evolution Sites and keep Creationist ones. They're not bound by the US Constitution since they're not the Federal Government and I highly doubt that you can classify a local school board as the State Government, so they're probably not bound by the State's Constitution, either. The schoolboard is subject to state _laws_ and local ordinances, neither of which say anything about this, I am guessing.

This sort of thing is determined at PTO meetings by elected school board officials, and therefore, the appropriate action is to take it before the schoolboard, before a PTO meeting, and to parents and teachers who make the decisions, not some judge who is likely to uphold whatever the aforemetioned committee happens to decide, even if it's something as stupid as the right to ban a kid for wearing a t-shirt.

This may sound weird and backwards and stupid but I actually think that's how it should be: the local community decides what they want, specifically, so long as it meets certain state standards. Some may want 5th Grade Sex Education, others may want to wait until high school. Some may want to "shield" their kids from the influences of the world and keep out anything related to sexuality, others may think it's important to teach tolerance. Certainly, if this were a predominantly Quaker Community, nobody would even raise an eyebrow. And if you don't like the community, there are several million others in the US to choose from.

Re:Fight...for your right....

[Intron]

While we're at it, why are Country and Western lumped together, but Folk is separate?

Re:tl;dr

[Amouth]

you said the problem

"oftware company to develop a filtering solution that blocks 100% of what you don't want kids to see"

translate

"[someone else] filters reality for your child how you feel it should be filtered with no action from you"

what it should be is "parents take the time to teach their child about the world and what is appropriate when and where"

i'm just getting sick and fucking tired of parents that want to shove all the problems onto someone else and when that someone else doesn't get it right they sue them.. i'm sorry but that someone else never agreed to raising your child..

personaly .. i feel if a child fucks up the parents should be punished along with the child. lets get some accountability in parenting for a fucking change

What did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tennessee is, after all, not exactly known as a center of tolerance and enlightenment.

Re:Sorry, but Schools DO have Totalitarian control

[Obyron]

To save anyone from having to look it up, parent is referring to the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment, which has been interpreted as giving the several states the same responsibility for upholding the Bill of Rights as the federal government. The fact that school boards are not the federal government in no way diminishes their responsibilities under the First Amendment.

school privitization

[uigrad_2000]

The ACLU has happened on yet one more issue that would be completely a non-issue if schools were not an extension of government.

Schools should be able to do whatever they want, or whatever the parents want.

When the Bill of Rights was written, it's intention was to restrict what laws congress writes, not the sites should be in whitelists and blacklists in a web filter.

Re:school privitization

[cptnapalm]

"The ACLU has happened on yet one more issue that would be completely a non-issue if schools were not an extension of government."

I'm currently of the opinion that there shouldn't be any government schools at all. Sure, give people vouchers or whatever and require an education of some sort. There is no reason why the government should be doing it directly.

Are you nuts? Schools Must Censor out this content

[Anonymous Coward]

None of you have children? There is a cadence to growing up. There is a an appropriate age for gaining such knowledge. Unless you are trying to indoctrinate young minds full of mush, what is the purpose in providing this content?

Re:Bias goes both ways.

[gnick]

Apologies in advance to all for feeding the troll.

I've yet to see a case anywhere in the US barring prayer in school. If it's happened (as so many people seem to complain about), please cite a reference. All that I've seen is action taken against school officials leading prayer services - Good. I don't want my kids' Christian/Muslim/Satanist/Pagan/What-freaking-ever-ist teacher trying to install their religion into my kids' heads. That's a job for me/the-church-we-attend/"holy"-books/themselves - And selecting from that list is up to me and my kids, not the schools.

Please show me one case where a student has been stopped from "silently ask[ing] grace for their school lunches" without being overturned.

On a semi-related note (and more on-topic with TFA), does a site really need to be pornographic to be on a filtered list? I'd be much more disturbed to find my child watching videos of people beheading their enemies or reading rhetoric encouraging them toward white supremacy than watching consenting adults have sex. I'm not implying that all of the banned/allowed sites are appropriate, but porn/non-porn is not an end-all metric.

Re:Fight...for your right....

[Lord Ender]

Homosexuality was very historically accepted. See: ancient Greece, the basis of Western Civilization.

Re:tl;dr

[Archangel Michael]

what it should be is "parents take the time to teach their child about the world and what is appropriate when and where"

Exactly why we shouldn't have Public Education involved with anything "sociological" and teaching PC crap and all that, and trying to correct the crap that parents subject their children to.

And while you may want(or not want) kids to know about that stuff, other people don't (or do). Who is gonna sort out what is allowed, or not allowed?

If we cut the crap out of the schools, and let parents instill their values (or lack thereof), then we won't have these types of crap showing up in schools in the first place.

And what may be okay for 16 year olds may not be appropriate for 7 year olds. And while you may want your 7 year old to know everything about everything, who are you to say that is okay for everyone else's kids too?

Here's a suggestion. Lets focus education on, you know ... reading, writing, math and science, and perhaps some art and music, and getting people literate before we start our little social experiments.

I work for a school, and there aren't enough hours in the day for teachers to teach all the required crap, and it is REALLY showing up.

When I go to McDonalds and the bill comes to $5.58 and I give the brain dead clerk $6.08 and she starts to cry because she can't figure out the change we have a seriously under educated populace.

i'm just getting sick and fucking tired of parents that want to shove all the problems onto someone else and when that someone else doesn't get it right they sue them.. i'm sorry but that someone else never agreed to raising your child..

It happened when the state started to demand that parents turn their kids over to their schools. You want to fix the problem? Look to the cause of the problem.

personaly .. i feel if a child fucks up the parents should be punished along with the child. lets get some accountability in parenting for a fucking change

Good luck with that.

Re:Fight...for your right....

[fish_in_the_c]

At the end of the day they are all lumped together, because they are allies in a common cause and they recognize that they all suffer the same type of what this group categorizes as persecution. As the parent post pointed out, all of these individuals have a predilection to take actions which historically have been considered perverse and wrong.
Of course the basic issue of having a right, first requires that one be 'right' about what you are fighting for, so it implies a moral stance.
As a whole they basically claim that society has no business regulating where and what they do with their genitalia or how they identify themselves from as sexual perspective.
Given the way the group is currently defined there is no real reason not to include people who are into bestiality or necrophilia in the group.
Of course, this is why the claim that they should be treated as a minority group is utterly ridiculous.
First they are not one group.
You cannot define a minority group based on its actions because minority status needs to be based on something objectively measurable.
This is not the case with the GLBT community which has X members and has new people that join their ranks. So I hope the ACLU looses this one.
Besides that, there is a secondary rights issue being missed here.
As much as people have a right to freedom of speech, other people have a right NOT TO LISTEN, and not to subsidize wrongheaded speech. If he ACLU was actually interested in civil liberties in this case they would recognize the liberty of parents to raise their children as they see fit.

Re:Bias goes both ways.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please show me one case where a student has been stopped from "silently ask[ing] grace for their school lunches" without being overturned.

Roberts vs Madigan: Teacher who silently read the Bible while students took a test was banned from doing that.

See the difference?

Re:Fight...for your right....

[MightyYar]

If he ACLU was actually interested in civil liberties in this case they would recognize the liberty of parents to raise their children as they see fit.

But this is a public school. They are free to raise their kids any way that they see fit, but they can't make a public school into a private Christian school, no matter how matter how many in the community are so inclined.

Re:You have been unfairly modded

[afabbro]

Give me a break. The idea that a heterosexual man finds another man coming on to him revulsive is not some failure of empathy, latent homosexuality, an expression of homophobia, or due to immaturity.

Heterosexual guys don't like gay guys coming on to them and find it revulsive. It's been that way for 20,000 years and is not going to change. Guys who do like other guys coming on to them are called homosexual.

Note that the original poster didn't say "and therefore I poured gasoline over him and set him afire" or "and therefore me and my friends beat him up" or "and therefore I think we should put all gays in concentration camps." He simply said he felt an inner revulsion. So what. For all you know, he was polite about it and amicably declined.

I would find myself revulsed at a woman with a moustache coming on to me - does that mean I have deep-seated facial hair issues? Do I lack empathy? Should I question my own shaving practices? According to your line of thought, simply saying "no thanks" while being revolted inside means I've somehow done something wrong.

Saying that the original poster is somehow defective, evil, or less enlightened because someone gave him the heebie-jeebies is ridiculous. You can fault someone for how they choose to act, but not how they react inside.