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Delayed Outrage Over A Censored Site; What's a Better Way To Spread News?
This is a tale of censorship. From about December 7th until February 3rd, Arizona State University was blocking all users of its network from accessing the Change.org website, where users can create petitions and circulate them for other users to sign. (The lame excuse offered by the university was that a student had created a petition and was using the change.org site to "spam" other ASU accounts; of course, even if that had been the real reason, it would have easily been possible for ASU to block mail from the change.org servers, without blocking all students from accessing the website.) On February 3rd, after a furor of sudden media attention, the block was lifted.
But that's not the worst instance of censorship in this story. What's more disconcerting is that for the two months that the block was in place, the university's decision to block the website received no media coverage at all. This despite the fact that it was a political website being blocked, at a university with over 70,000 students — a publicly funded university, where a court would have almost certainly found that the blocking violated the First Amendment, had the case ever gone to trial.
I first heard about the original tumblr blog post describing the blocking situation, when someone posted the link on my Facebook wall. So as I went to my profile to read it, I was already predisposed to be pissed off, since almost every link that someone posts on my wall is either an outright scam, or a one-sided rant about an issue that is actually much more complicated than the author thinks it is. Well, it was a one-sided rant, all right, but it was about an issue where there was really only one side: ASU evidently got annoyed about a petition on change.org protesting tuition hikes, so they blocked the site. As I re-read the post, I kept thinking: How can this be true, if we haven't heard about it anywhere else? Perhaps an overzealous ASU network admin put the block in place, and it was reversed just a few hours later, but the tumblr post never got updated? I emailed the blog post's author, Eric Haywood, and the owners of change.org, asking how long the block had lasted before the site was un-blocked — I just assumed that the block couldn't possibly still be in place, two months later. But they confirmed that it was.
The link got blogged and re-blogged around tumblr a few times in December and January, and then, at about the same time as I was sending my emails, the issue suddenly "tipped" into public awareness as it was linked from a widely-read reddit post. Then the blocking received its first official "media" coverage in an article in the ASU student newspaper, the State Press. (Eric Haywood called the article "just ASU spreading it's own propaganda about this issue (they own, run and control the State Press)". I don't know about propaganda, but it did seem a little amateurish — the article says "The author of the original blog post is unknown", even though the guy's name, Eric Haywood, was listed in the post, along with his email address.) Then finally the story spilled over into the "real" media with an article in the Huffington Post, in which the author pointed out that the blocking likely violated the First Amendment. (A few hours after that article appeared, the university unblocked the site so that ASU students could access Change.org on their network again.)
None of the articles commented, however, on how the issue had remained buried for so long; the State Press article said only that the tumblr blog "began circulating the Internet Thursday." A reader could be forgiven for reading the articles and scratching their head and thinking: What is it that just happened? If the site has been blocked for two months, why is this only being written about now?
The answer, I think, is that most people don't realize how arbitrary the process is that determines what issues get news coverage and which ones don't. Before I got involved in a few issues that did receive media coverage (in my late teens, through Peacefire and in co-operative projects with others), I had just assumed that "the news" consisted of all stories that somebody in the media business considered to be "news-worthy." Some journalists just want to sell papers (or attract page-views), while other (better) journalists strive to tell the most important stories — but either way, surely their decision to cover something, or not, should depend on attributes of the story, right? Not on whatever else happened to be going on, or other random circumstances? But then, when I started to be involved in efforts to actually get media coverage for this or that issue, some issues ended up receiving far more coverage than even I thought they really deserved, and others received far less.
Sometimes reporters would frankly admit that they thought something was a good story, but they couldn't cover it because their plate was full that day, and even if they had time later, by that time the issue would be too "cold." Some years ago, I wrote in Slashdot about an experiment in which I sued some spammers in Small Claims court, and filed the court briefs with some of the pages stuck together with a sliver of paper. When the judges rejected the motions (as I expected, since Small Claims judges have been near-uniformly hostile to spam suits), I went to the courthouse to look at the files and found the pages still attached, indicating that the judges had rejected the motions without reading them. What I didn't mention in the original article, was that I had planned at first to give the exclusive story to a Seattle Times reporter, who came down to the courthouse to see the files and interviewed me afterwards. The paper must have thought there was a real story there, since they later sent a photographer to come down and take pictures of the files as well. But then something else landed on the reporter's desk and pushed the story back a few days, and days became weeks, and then the beat switched to a different reporter. When I eventually called to ask if they were still interested, they replied, essentially, that without a current "hook", they couldn't write the story, because now it would look like they weren't doing their jobs for the long intervening period when they didn't write about it, so it was better now to drop it entirely.
Traditional media seems hamstrung by two limitations here: (1) an inefficiency at finding the most important stories that most "deserve" to be written about; and (2) a convention that you can't cover something that's more than a few days old, because then the story looks "dated." The Internet doesn't seem to suffer from limitation #2, as demonstrated by the fact that the blocking of change.org at ASU on December 7th was still able to ignite a controversy on February 3rd. But it does still suffer from limitation #1, as illustrated by the Internet's near-total silence on the issue from December 7th through February 2nd.
Many other people have a pet issue that they think is being "suppressed" by the "liberal media" or the "corporate-owned media" (depending on which side they're on), but the evidence suggests that no conspiracy is necessary to keep an important story from being written about. Sometimes arbitrariness and chance is enough.
My naive earlier assumption — that stories received media coverage because of some combination of attributes of those stories — seems to be a specific instance of a cognitive fallacy, where if you observe that some group of things achieved some end result Z, and all of those things started out possessing some attribute X, then you think that attribute X caused the achievement of result Z. In this case, because we observe that most stories which receive news coverage are important and interesting (with obvious exceptions), we assume that most interesting and important news stories will receive news coverage. Thus, it's frustrating and counterintuitive when we find out about an issue that cries out to be written about, but was ignored by the media. The truth is more likely to be that for every important and interesting story that gets coverage, there are likely to be many other equally important and interesting stories that never make it into the news.
(By the way, I've been unable to find a precise name for the cognitive fallacy wherein if you observe that all things which achieve goal Z have attribute X, then you come to think that attribute X is a good predictor of achieving goal Z. It's not the same as the "post hoc fallacy" or the mistaken belief that "correlation equals causation," because both of those are about the illusion of causation. I'm talking about the correlation being an illusion in the first place — where people come to believe that attribute X is a good predictor of achieving result Z, ignoring the fact that there may be enormous numbers of cases where attribute X is true, but which never go on to achieve result Z. If you know the exact name of that fallacy, shoot me an email and submit a comment below.)
In an earlier article, I proposed a system that would eliminate the arbitrariness in determining which pieces of content are selected to be "the best" and broadcast to a larger audience. I suggested using the algorithm to determine which songs could be pushed out to listeners of a streaming music system, but it could be modified to select which news stories would be considered "important" enough to push out to readers of a news site. (The gist of the idea is that you have each piece of content rated by a random sample of users chosen from the system, and if their average rating is high enough, it gets pushed out to everyone else. If the random sample size is large enough, their average rating will be non-arbitrary, and will be determined by the attributes of the content itself.)
Maybe that algorithm is flawed or maybe someone could find a better one, but the more important thing to realize is that we don't live in that world now, where the attention given to an event is determined by attributes of that event. In the world we actually live in, it's safe to assume that many events take place every day that would have been covered by the news, if it hadn't been for a reporter's missed phone call or some other random happenstance. I have no doubt that the blocking of Change.org on ASU's network could have been a front-page story on CNN, under the right circumstances. I just think that in an ideal world, it should have ended up as a front-page story on CNN regardless of the "circumstances" — but real life, no favorable circumstances means no CNN story.
That might seem like a lot to read into a single case of media silence about a political website being censored at a state university. But while Change.org is no longer blocked at ASU, the inefficient and arbitrary means by which news "events" are discovered and distributed to a wide audience will be with us for a long time.
Just start a petition on change.org to demand faster response to change.org being blocked!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
...and ends with Assange. I'm pretty sure I've seen WikiLeaks used for this before.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
They never really accomplish anything.
They're actually worse than useless because they lead lazy people to believe all they need to do is go to a website, click an "I agree" button and they've fixed the world.
Its as pathetic as a "Facebook Group", if not worse.
My workplace blocks websites, where is the media?
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
Universities should not be censoring arbitrary websites on the internet.
No student at ASU could figure out how to post to Twitter?
If I was on ASU's campus, would I not be able to get to change.org on my smartphone? Of course I would be able to, 'cause I got my own damn Inernet service. That's why no one cares.
And students shouldn't be warezing stuff and downloading music and movies.
not for political reasons. Most schools or universities will filter Internet content, this is nothing new, and usually it's for security reasons. I would like to know if their Content Filter picked up “change.org” by accident, or was it intentional. I'm not sure if there is anything that can be done though, since the Internet on campus is a privilege. It's no different than a Cyber Cafe, or Motel blocking access to some websites, it's their decision how they want to control their Internet.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
What's more disconcerting is that for the two months that the block was in place, the university's decision to block the website received no media coverage at all.
I think the fact that this author thinks the bigger issue is that the media didn't cover it is the real problem. So he really should be complaining that we need more cable news channels, more twitter-like services, more talk radios shows, and I should start getting the newspaper again, just so I can be overwhelmed with unimportant news that I don't have time to take read.
Osgeld and theArtificial have great points! I believe that we've become a culture of folks that have a pretty large entitlement complex - not "entitled to have freedom" but entitled to always be able to do whatever we want wherever we want with other people's resources. I work for an organization whose mission it is to help enable social media freedom while still protecting companies from malware, lawsuits, personal misuse of company online resources, etc. If the university had our controls in place, their blocking wouldn't be arbitrary, and their policies could be more uniform and better understood. Unfortunately users wouldn't see it that way, they would attach themselves to the Orwellian idea of it all...
TL;DR
Adjust your sarcasm detector
I think that it has now been well established that Schools, Universities, and Colleges no longer care about free speech. They care more about Zero Tolerance, preventing protests, and ensuring public funding.
Universities are supposed to be all about learning. Part of this involves the free exchange of ideas and understanding of social responsibility. This includes being able to protest against the institution itself when it does something objectionable to the students. Educated and free thinking citizens are the best defense against the erosion of freedoms. Without this, I fear that the next generation of citizens will have little understanding of their responsibility as citizens.
I agree in general, change.org and sites like it should not be blocked for their content. If the site was being used maliciously, perhaps the block was appropriate. I don't know. If access is a privilege, perhaps the privilege was lost through bad behavior.
I'm more concerned (as I'm a college IT administrator myself) on the question of censorship. From what I understand censorship is only a First Amendment issue when the government is doing the censorship. Is this an appropriate viewpoint? At what point am I as an IT administrator, or the system I manage, infringing on the first amendment rights of a member of the college community? Does it only apply to state schools, or to any school which accepts government funding? Some college administrators are state employees. Does it only count as government censorship if a state employee (or a system managed by said employee) blocks a specific web site?
From a technical viewpoint, IT Administrators have an obligation to protect their infrastructure and their community members from threats, both perceived and actual. Consider for a moment the viewpoint that the messages from change.org were deceptive, harrassing, or threatening in some way, either politcally or technically. If so, was it correct to block change.org?
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
They did. It's included in their tuition.
Check your premises.
Most schools or universities will filter Internet content, this is nothing new, and usually it's to appease social conservatives who think of the children a little too often
FTFY
Palm trees and 8
Don't forget, as a publicly funded institution, they have to preserve their students' free speech rights as much as they are reasonably able. Arbitrarily blocking websites because they might be critical of the institution treads into censorship for the sake of censorship and likely violates their free speech rights.
I believe Hanlon's Razor may apply here.
fart oo long
...from change.org?
"The technology fee funds technology initiatives including expanding ASU's wireless network on all of its campuses, increasing the number of technology-enabled classrooms, developing a system to allow students to access University-licensed software, reducing dependence on computing labs and expanding and improving online self-service environment."
I dont see internet in there...
... is the best method of censorship
What part of PUBLICLY FUNDED UNIVERSITY do you not understand?
Good-bye
$wc thisArticle.txt
31 2003 11585 thisArticle.txt
2003 words about it...
Help eliminate speeding tickets.
If you want to get your message across, learn to edit yourself.
.. herd moderation up or down here on Slashdot. It's a property of memes working in chaotic crowds that some memes propagate more, some less, and if it passes a central node, it gets to more people. For every example of Streisand Effect, there are many unknown successful censorings happening all the time. Journalists are people with families and personal interests outside of their work and they are human.
Google News could be said to be partially a way around the complete dependence on human judgement and error, but even Google depends on how many connections of what type the story has with important nodes in the information network. Reddit is a fine example of a network where a lot of stuff gets read by and voted on at least a few people - but even there, the same rules apply if only to a varying extent depending on the audience demographic.
A global anti-censorship feed would be a good starting point for this, which already has a bunch of candidates - rawstory, reddit, digg used to be, fark, delicious(used to be). Facebook being a social network with tracking is not a pure news feed. Slashdot is rather slow for developing events and focus is on discussions rather than story visibility.
tl;dr
the media sucks ass; just keep downloading until they go away...
not for political reasons. Most schools or universities will filter Internet content, this is nothing new, and usually it's for security reasons. I would like to know if their Content Filter picked up “change.org” by accident, or was it intentional. I'm not sure if there is anything that can be done though, since the Internet on campus is a privilege. It's no different than a Cyber Cafe, or Motel blocking access to some websites, it's their decision how they want to control their Internet.
There is a huge difference when the government does it vs when a business does it. This was the government censoring the web site.
By the way, I've been unable to find a precise name for the cognitive fallacy wherein if you observe that all things which achieve goal Z have attribute X, then you come to think that attribute X is a good predictor of achieving goal Z. It's not the same as the "post hoc fallacy" or the mistaken belief that "correlation equals causation,"
No, it really is just "correlation equals causation". Simply realise that "being a good predictor" is what's been fallaciously caused by the correlation.
Sometimes it's acceptable to be verbose. You're trying to remove an upper layer of indirection to create more concise language, the term for this is: HD, ie High Definition (especially if stoned).
Wait two months and post it on slashdot, apparently.
And it'll still be more topical than most of the other stories.
TYIHAWTTNS
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If Arizona State wants to block that site on their network, why should that spark outrage? If you want to see that site take your money and buy your internet elsewhere. College students should know what to expect when the get hit be the Barracuda when they try to visit sites that their employers don't want viewed on their networks.
Stop being a cry-baby.
The answer, I think, is that most people don't realize how arbitrary the process is that determines what issues get news coverage and which ones don't.
People know the selection of news is biased, sloppy, influenced by money and other media. They may not understand the particular mechanisms, like press releases or that newspapers follow the N.Y. Times, but they know it isn't some fair and balanced selection process. Why do newspapers have a business section and not a labor section?
In an earlier article, I proposed a system that would eliminate the arbitrariness in determining which pieces of content are selected to be "the best" and broadcast to a larger audience. I suggested using the algorithm to determine which songs could be pushed out to listeners of a streaming music system, but it could be modified to select which news stories would be considered "important" enough to push out to readers of a news site.
Instead of making an algorithm, you should try to create a framework that replaces the existing system in a more open manner. Otherwise you're just trying to make a better newspaper. Try to create new tools and options for the people selecting stories, so they don't just review the AP wire and what the NYT printed yesterday.
If what you really want to do is promote stories you think are important, you should just do what well funded PR groups do: pre-package the stories with quotes, photos, background facts, make people available for interviews, and offer pre-written stories.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
Read it! By Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. On the topic of the mass media, it is the most extensive analysis available. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
News coverage is a finite resource put together by a finite number of people with shrinking resources. Legitimate stores are not covered every second of every day because you can only do so much - there is a necessary but subjective element of choosing what to cover and not cover.
For example, consider that the time spent covering this issue means those reporters weren't covering something else, therefore "ignoring" issues with outraged advocates of their own. In fact, just think of all the important isses that Slashdot "ignored" in order to post this one - people dying in Syria and the Congo and North Korea, legislative shenanigans of all kinds, fascinating scientific discoveries ... they're all being overlooked while we spend time with this issue.
Social media and technology are changing this, but they still face the limitation of time and attention - we all subjectively pick and choose what to read and care about.
I'm a newspaper reporter, so you can take my opinion with whatever grain of salt you think is appropriate.
It isn't just social conservatives, it is also liberal elites as well. ANYTIME someone says "for the children" it is probably NOT for the children.
I've seen plenty of sites blocked because of some liberal outrage of the week. Here are some choice topics: Big Pharma, Big Oil, Tobacco, Guns and Ammo, anything deemed "not green", almost anything "too Religious" (aka hate, no kidding), sites opposed to Abortion, etc.
So, no, you did not FTFY properly.
Also, there are often ties to funds to implement some filters, and filters don't work, and are broken by design. We all know this, but that doesn't stop the people who have the money from making the rules associated with receiving that money. If you want to fix the problem learn this phrase:
"Technology doesn't solve sociological problems, it can only mask them"
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Your mistaken assumption is that they are supposed to report the news. That is not their primary function. It is to get ratings, sell newspapers, magazines, or get people to click on ads at their website.
To this end, they would rather run stories about Snookie or Kim Kardsahian.
YOU are not relevant. Unless of course, you're willing to appear in a bikini, have a reality show or sex tape, and boobies. In that case, you matter. Otherwise, get lost.
The American public couldn't care less about censorship. Their rights have already vanished in a puff of smoke and mirrors. They are oppressed under paranoid government, but as long as they have a StupidBowl, America is Number One.
And Please.... Censorship in Arizona?? This is a state that refuses to recognize daylight savings time, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's holiday, and issues a gun license to a known psychopath. Censorship doesn't even rate very high in their list of crimes as a state.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Except a university is not a private entity, and thus has no "rights." They are a government entity and are bound by the Bill of Rights. To say censoring the Internet is OK because it's a privilege is like saying censoring the campus newspaper is ok. No.
"Herd moderation" always means "waaah, my stupid post got modded down and I am angry even though it was totally deserved!"
"The technology fee funds technology initiatives including expanding ASU's wireless network on all of its campuses, increasing the number of technology-enabled classrooms, developing a system to allow students to access University-licensed software, reducing dependence on computing labs and expanding and improving online self-service environment."
I dont see internet in there...
As a public university, the internet access is funded by either tuition, government grants, or both.
No matter how you slice it, the students (and the rest of AZ taxpayers) are funding ASU's internet service.
What that has to do with a public institution breaking the law and violating the civil liberties of their students, I don't know.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
seriously.... there is a problem here of a U.S. based university to censor a democratic process.
It's a no brainer, you don't need a college education to know this.
> I've been unable to find a precise name for the cognitive fallacy wherein if you observe that all things which achieve goal Z have attribute X, then you come to think that attribute X is a good predictor of achieving goal Z.
Sampling bias
...the part that says that full, free, unfettered, and unlimited access to the Internet is some kind of student right. It's not. The students are provided the Internet subject to the discretion of ASU. If ASU doesn't want them to see playboy.com, it has the right to not allow them to see it on its network, passing through its servers, on its campus, etc. ASU is not a general-purpose ISP. ASU is not required to provide any Internet access whatsoever.
Additionally, the University has responsibilities via the in loco parentis doctrine, though they may not apply in this case.
If ASU blocked this site - and I would need to be convinced this wasn't stupidity or a mistake before I'd believe it was some kind of sinister intentional plan - then they are within their rights. It may run counter to the generally accepted American anti-censorship idea of free inquiry in public universities, but let's not bleat about student rights because in this case, they have none.
Advice: on VPS providers
Because broke as dirt students are going to favor being rectally explored by some large telecom versus hopping on the University's free (with tuition) and fast as lightning network?
Righto.
Wikipedia admins routinely reject facts that haven't been reported by the mainstream media, even if reliable sources exist. For example, when the study of Pääbo et al. came out that found Neanderthal genes in Eurasian humans, I tried to have it included in the relevant article, but it was rejected as speculation. Only months later, when the news had reached the mainstream media in popsci form, someone added it to the article. (Svante Pääbo isn't some crackpot. He's the founder of paleogenetics.)
So as long as the corporate media haven't reported on something, it is outright rejected without even checking the available sources. Once it is press released, all corporate media will jump on it and copy it from each other without checking anything, and then whatever distorted version was published becomes the accepted truth.
You say this like it's an iron-clad fact.
Why not? (And go and look up the definition of "arbitrary".)
I think the most important factor in what gets into the newspapers is the political/social biases of editors and their bosses. For example, there's been a fair amount of coverage of the US government agent Alan Gross's imprisonment in Cuba, but practically zero about the imprisonment of five Cubans (known as the Cuban Five).
Maybe I'm just becoming more and more cynical in my old age, but how in the world can online petitions be trusted? We can't even trust electronic voting machines, purpose built through and through to be infallible (I'm not saying they are, but that the were built under that premise from the ground up). Who would actually trust the results from one of these websites? Granted, I've never used one, but what are they doing? Requiring a valid credit card number to prevent multiple signatures? Is CAPTCHA so advanced now that we can rest assured that the majority of the "signatures" aren't fake?
Better known as 318230.
Universities should not be censoring arbitrary websites on the internet.
Chances are ten to one that this isn't censorship at all. I work in a university IT department. We have constant problems with spam, worms, password guessers. We block IP addresses all the time. Generally these are the addresses of botnet members. Since nobody wants to connect to spam bots anyway, nobody ever complains about these blocks. I suspect that a system administrator in this case saw the flow of spam, mistook change.org's e-mail server for a spam bot, and just blocked the IP address.
I believe this is a common practice. That being so, it is unlikely that the person who blocked the address even knew about the Change.org website. And who consults the university administration before blocking a spammer?
(By the way, I've been unable to find a precise name for the cognitive fallacy wherein if you observe that all things which achieve goal Z have attribute X, then you come to think that attribute X is a good predictor of achieving goal Z. It's not the same as the "post hoc fallacy" or the mistaken belief that "correlation equals causation," because both of those are about the illusion of causation. I'm talking about the correlation being an illusion in the first place â" where people come to believe that attribute X is a good predictor of achieving result Z, ignoring the fact that there may be enormous numbers of cases where attribute X is true, but which never go on to achieve result Z. If you know the exact name of that fallacy, shoot me an email and submit a comment below.)
Sounds kinda like the base rate fallacy to me.
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
Blocking political websites using taxpayer money is a big no-no. You are dead wrong about the students having no rights. When I was in college (not ASU), i was the liaison to the deans regarding technology and network access.
Good-bye
Is Bennett Haselton is he a student at ASU, a parent paying for a student at ASU or a Citizen of Arizona?
If not then he has no dog in the fight and thus no right to expect this to be high on his radar. Not every little thing is, nor should be, national news.
How can we "respond faster"? Simple. Pay attention to what is going on around you, instead of looking all over the Internet and back for something to be outraged about.
Get involved in local issues, learn your neighbor's names and just in general stop thinking your opinion is so damned important that you need to express it to people on the other side of the country.
In short, mind your own damned business and quit being a busybody.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Consider your reply censoor.
The closest term I can think of to describe the cognitive fallacy you described is within the Representativeness Heuristic, called Reverse Conditional Probability. This is where when people think that the probability of X given Y is the same as Y given X. For example, if 70% of depressed people are blond, the heuristic tells us that 70% of blond people are depressed (or to remove the confusion of percentages, if more depressed people are blond than other hair colors, then more blond people are depressed than not depressed).
When talking about Universities, people often tend to have this reaction that seems at home in the private world. If Starbucks doesn't want me to connect to Change.org and are providing me with free internet service, they should have the right to block that site. After all, they have no obligation to provide me with internet service in the first place, so they are free to limit the access.
As pointed out by others, the first major difference here is that ASU is partially funded by Arizona tax payers and therefore operates by different rules. But, more importantly, ASU is a *university* and universities should operate by different rules. Good universities are either government entities or non-profits with a mission to educate students with the interest of developing them into well-educated citizens. Unfettered access to different ideas is absolutely critical to that process. A university that restricts access to free speech is simply failing at its primary mission: preparing students to be active participants in a democratic society. It's not a matter of whether ASU gets government money or not, it's that ASU has a mission that they are actively thwarting.
Uh... what? First.. ASU may not be technically required to provide internet, but enrollment wouldn't be anywhere near 70k if there was no internet connectivity while on campus. Not, at least, until cellular data service gets quite a bit faster and ceases to give a shit about tethered devices.
Second.. if in loco parentis was relevant, it still wouldn't permit ASU to squelch the student body's right to free speech. Even if the actual parents of any given student could enforce the same block at home. Because yeah, the students do have rights.
Maybe someone should handwave your rights away. See how much you enjoy it. Of course, no one would hear you complain. Because nobody will bleat about your rights, since you don't have any.
I think all right-thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that ordinary, decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I'm certainly not. But I'm sick and tired of being told that I am.
I'm guessing the University's free (with tuition) and fast as lightning network already blocks pr0n and most kinds of w4r3z, so the chances are that yes, they do.
And most students are so far in debt that dirt is actually one of their creditors. When it gets to that stage, there are two major mindsets that set in. One can be soundbit[1] as "waste not, want not", the other is "fuck it, what's a few hundred on top of 30 grand?"
[1] Yes it fucking is, I just invented it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Alright "Archangel Michael," besides just offhand accusations of blocking, could you please give some examples of website "the liberal elite" has blocked and what agency has blocked them?
The article points out that it was a First Amendment concern "had the case ever gone to trial." I submit that it is *still* a First Amendment concern, and that regardless of the fact that the concern has passed, it remains a violation of rights that the university could be made to answer for in court.
This has nothing to do with "student rights". A university supports free thought and expression, or what the Hell is the point of the thing? A university that censors ideas that it finds inconvenient serves no public purpose, and deserves neither accreditation nor public funding.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It seems you presume the media is, after exercising self-interest, promotion, and the profit-seeking actions necessary to perpetuate themselves, essentially agnostic about the news it gathers and distributes.
I haven't believed that for my entire adult life.
The media, being made up of opinionated members, certainly does have a point of view, and filtering the news is one way to both express that point of view and promote that view.
Since many universities are resoundingly leftist, even the administrations of them, the press doesn't often leap to criticize them on matters of free speech and similar political issues.
Not that such a thing is afoot here, of course not, for in this case surely the press was just inattentive. No conspiracy at all, just an accident.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
You didn't read the article:
"The lame excuse offered by the university was that a student had created a petition and was using the change.org site to "spam" other ASU accounts; of course, even if that had been the real reason, it would have easily been possible for ASU to block mail from the change.org servers, without blocking all students from accessing the website."
The so called spam was email sent to students from a petition not a spam bot. As the author indicated you can block it via email you don't have to block the actual site.
Seem like the nomal operating procedure of a web filtering appliance. Of course, that does not excuse the slow response time to white list the site.
Good article, BTW.
The fallacy could be a faulty generalization fallacy, specifically a hasty generalization. That is, given:
If A then Z.
If B then Z.
If C then Z.
A = X and (other things).
B = X and (other things).
C = X and (other things).
We faultily conclude, therefore, that for all D = X and (other things), the statement "D then Z" is true.
Towards the Singularity.
So the campus should open the Internet to everything, not filter porn sites or anything? Obviously they have authority to regulate their Internet usage, such as access to torrent sites etc. Maybe there was too much traffic going to this one website and the Firewall put a stop to it.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
You didn't read the article:
"The lame excuse offered by the university was that a student had created a petition and was using the change.org site to "spam" other ASU accounts; of course, even if that had been the real reason, it would have easily been possible for ASU to block mail from the change.org servers, without blocking all students from accessing the website."
The so called spam was email sent to students from a petition not a spam bot. As the author indicated you can block it via email you don't have to block the actual site.
This does not refute my point. Yes, you _can_ block e-mail without blocking web traffic. No, it wasn't a spam bot. But network administrators do not generally waste a lot of time investigating the sources of things that look like spam. They just drop in a total block on the IP address and forget about it.
The article was written by someone who does not know this. He seems to be surprised that outbound traffic was blocked. Again, this is common practice. He also seems to be surprised that the university spokesman could not provide another example of a website that they had blocked. This is probably because they do not deliberately block websites.
The university spokesman is not making lame excuses. He is saying, "look, we were spammed and we blocked it. That is what we do in such cases."
Since we are second guessing the system adminstrator's decision and suggesting more limited blocks that he could have put in place, why not second-guess the decision of Change.org to send e-mail from their web server. If they stopped doing that, it is less likely that it would get blocked.
This is what the RIAA/MPAA actually believe!
You can't take the sky from me...
From the submitter:
The lame excuse offered by the university was that a student had created a petition and was using the change.org site to "spam" other ASU accounts; of course, even if that had been the real reason, it would have easily been possible for ASU to block mail from the change.org servers, without blocking all students from accessing the website.
Actually this "lame" excuse is completely plausible. Perhaps there was a less ham-handed way to stop the spam, but that would have taken up an IT person's time, and there are 70-heptillion other sites on the Internet to be whacked when they start consuming too many IT resources.
Universities should be bastions of free speech, of course. But their IT Depts. have resources and a mission more in line with a medium-sized corporation that doesn't specialize in IT. And a lot of the time, their junior positions are staffed by undergraduates who work part-time, so there's that too. I guarantee you, if the IT Dept. at the company where you worked noticed a lot of resources being consumed by a site employees don't need to do their jobs, they'd block it too. Ideology has nothing to do with it.
This reminds me of a debate when I was in college, and the university decided to stop distributing alt.binaries.* Usenet groups (Get off my lawn!) "Censorship!" the (mostly male) undergraduates cried. Dude, nobody at the university cared whether you were looking at titties. Alt.binaries was sucking up like 90% of the school's bandwidth. The right to free porn is not without limits.
it's the hippie family across the street whose wifi he monitors for terrorist behavior.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I wonder if reporters are quite as responsive as this post suggests. Public relations consultants, corporate marketers and lobbyists well outnumber news reporters and bombard them with fresh angles daily. They follow up, curry favor and generally make it harder for the average journalist to see the wood for the trees. I suggest the media landscape is less random than this article implies, but no more likely to cover 'worthwhile' issues.
(By the way, I've been unable to find a precise name for the cognitive fallacy wherein if you observe that all things which achieve goal Z have attribute X, then you come to think that attribute X is a good predictor of achieving goal Z. It's not the same as the "post hoc fallacy" or the mistaken belief that "correlation equals causation," because both of those are about the illusion of causation. I'm talking about the correlation being an illusion in the first place — where people come to believe that attribute X is a good predictor of achieving result Z, ignoring the fact that there may be enormous numbers of cases where attribute X is true, but which never go on to achieve result Z. If you know the exact name of that fallacy, shoot me an email and submit a comment below.)
See here for a list of conitive biases and logic/predictive fallacies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases [wikipedia]
It sounds like even the university students can't be bothered to generate more than a tepid response to this matter. What if... instead of there being a conspiracy of silence on the matter... What if maybe, just maybe, it's not really all that outrageous?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
He said their tuition, not the technology fee. You can be assured, no matter how the accounting is handled, it comes out of fees paid by the students or the tax payers somewhere, some how.
Is as even the most delusional, flag waving, inbred, illiterate blockhead with 90/IQ's will attest, just so much BULLSHIT!
The corporate "news" doesn't exist to report the (NEWS) it exists to sell advertising time!
Watch/read foreign (non US) news.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
You didn't read the article: "The lame excuse offered by the university was that a student had created a petition and was using the change.org site to "spam" other ASU accounts; of course, even if that had been the real reason, it would have easily been possible for ASU to block mail from the change.org servers, without blocking all students from accessing the website."
I read the article, and my first reaction was "how disengenuous". Had ASU blocked all email from the site, it is more than likely that this guy, who admits he was looking for something to complain about, would be here whining about how ASU was blocking email from a political site.
Find the reporters who have covered similar stories and contact them directly via e-mail, twitter or phone. Targeting reporters who have covered something similar will greatly increase your chances of coverage.
Reporters have beats -- we all love scoops, but it has to fit in our limited scope or most won't touch it (even if we find it personally interesting). Also note we get hit with 100+ PR pitches per day, so don't make your pitch sound like it's coming from a PR person (If an e-mail, in the subject line put something like "I'm a reader and I thought you might be interested in this...." )
Obviously they have authority to regulate their Internet usage
Maybe. But they're definiitely restricted in how they regulate it.
That's not the problem. If they were censoring based on usage, or even arbitrarily, there wouldn't be an issue.
The issue is that they appear to be censoring based on political considerations (i.e., somebody was criticizing the university over the decision to raise tuition). This makes it appear, to me, to be illegal censorship. Not that I think anyone will prosecute them for it, but someone SHOULD. I'm not sure who would have standing, but whether it's a student (or their parents, i.e. funding source) or the DA I think it quite unlikely that the prosecution will happen. In the first case it's too expensive in both money and time, and in the second place, he's not interested in getting the state political structure angry with him.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Yea, that'd be the idea. We are talking about adults, here, right? I mean, as a general point, a University doesn't cater to children, so even the questionable argument of filtering at schools doesn't really hold up. And on most campuses, it's the case that internet access is available not only in labs, libraries, etc but also in dorm rooms and other private areas, which removes the argument that one needs to filter to protect the general public which is used at public libraries.
How does that follow? Are you suggesting that Universities are either (a) constantly monitoring their users and hence track illegal usage or (b) are constantly monitoring for new illegal torrent sites and are legally bound to block them? Clearly there's a lot of legitimate usage for torrents; considering how many Universities mirror Linux distros, it only makes sense that Universities themselves would be distro torrent seeders to ease outgoing bandwidth requests. But even if that wasn't the case, a University is like any other ISP and going around poking into the affairs of its users on its own prerogative is bad to get a backlash from its users, both students and professors.
Golly, a lot of people keep going to cnn.com. We should setup a Firewall to autoblock it! Oh, wait, no, that's dumb. Our purpose is the flow of information and knowledge. It makes more sense to proxy cache the website. In fact, there's services like Akami which are precisely for that purpose, to ease outgoing bandwidth requirements while still providing access. You might question the legally murky issue of caching, especially with illegal content. To that end, there's things like the DMCA and court orders to block content if it comes to that, for which the University if it complies should be legally in the clear like any other ISP. There's certainly no reasonable legal position that demands firewalling first and caching never, especially in any sort of preemptive measure.
Really, everything about the mandate of what a University is really undermines all of what you've said. It's one reason why Libraries fought rather hard against filtering (but eventually acquiesced because there was too much public support blocking creepy people looking at porn where children could walk by). But a University is the epitome of ivory tower, adult considerations, so to suddenly flush seeming 1st Amendment considerations down the toilet (whether or not there really are any) is incredibly absurd and honestly quite horrible. It seems along the same lines of expecting in anarchy laws against theft and murder enforced by a governmental law enforcement body.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
"In loco parentis" does not apply to adults. Adults are supposed to be their own moral/ethical/rules council. (That's the theory, anyway). So long as the college students are legally adults, then this is a legal relationship between adults. Colleges have no more right to "parent" "adult" college students than parents have to put their adult children in "time-out". College students have every right that any other adult has (comparable to the rights of employees).
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Students have a property right in Internet access based on the technology fees they pay, in addition to the obligation of Arizona State University to adhere to the First Amendment.
FFS ...
It breaks my heart that a couple half drunk college students couldn't drum up BS petitions on a full time basis. Yeah ... almost breaks my heart.
GO GET A LIFE
Umm, the reason people may not have noticed and made a big deal about it is that the outage appears to have occurred during winter break.
(Apologies if this is redundant. I tried to look for an existing thread on the issue to no avail.)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
[...] where a court would have almost certainly found that the blocking violated the First Amendment, had the case ever gone to trial.
I agree that the media Should have covered this. But failing that, why not escalate the case yourself, by hiring a lawyer to send a letter to the school: "You have 7 days to lift the block, or the case goes to court."
Note: I am not a {lawyer,American,person who read the wall of text}
What?
not for political reasons. Most schools or universities will filter Internet content, this is nothing new, and usually it's for security reasons. I would like to know if their Content Filter picked up “change.org” by accident, or was it intentional.
This is regarding a petition against ASU fee hikes, that ASU itself claims was being spammed to their students through email. So the filtering was clearly intentional. But ASU didn't just filter the email messages containing the link to the petition, or the email headers related to the alleged spam, which would have been easy to do with spam administrative tools, the school chose to go above and beyond that by filtering the entire domain name from being accessible by the student's browsers.
This extra step only helped ensure that even the students who tried accessing the web site from other sources couldn't even access the site as well.
Now imagine if ASU tried using the same excuse for the next election and decided to filter out a democratic web site (or filter out a republican web site) because of some supposed spam one party was sending out. What do you think would happen to them as a State-sponsored public University? Yes, that's right. They'd lose State funding, or someone would be made the scapegoat and they'd be made to resign.
After all, it's dead easy to impersonate a web site and send spam on its behalf. And if admins really did filter on links alone, spammers would be taking advantage of that as a way to get their competitor's sites banned.
I'm not sure if there is anything that can be done though, since the Internet on campus is a privilege. It's no different than a Cyber Cafe, or Motel blocking access to some websites, it's their decision how they want to control their Internet.
Congratulations! Your University did a great job educating you about your rights.
This isn't Stanford or some other private institution, this is a publicly funded institution that is using our tax dollars. And it's just not blocking porn or Facebook, and it's not blocking all web sites equally, it's selectively blocking political speech that the institution is disagreeing with.
And _public_ institutions are barred from doing that kind of thing.
That's not the problem. If they were censoring based on usage, or even arbitrarily, there wouldn't be an issue.
Yes, there would, albeit a different issue, at least when it comes to access in people's rooms. Whether legal or not, landlords should not be filtering their tenants Internet access like that, and it doesn't matter if the landlord is a private landlord, a government entity, a University or a charity. It's not an acceptable commercial practice. And it's most especially unacceptable if the landlord ensures they are a monopoly supplier of fixed-line access to that person (no idea if they are, but I can imagine the reaction had I asked my college for a phone line and ADSL/cable).
This does not refute my point. Yes, you _can_ block e-mail without blocking web traffic. No, it wasn't a spam bot. But network administrators do not generally waste a lot of time investigating the sources of things that look like spam. They just drop in a total block on the IP address and forget about it.
If a network administrator doesn't know (or care) about the the difference between inbound port 25 traffic and outbound port 80 traffic he doesn't belong in that job!
You don't fix things with a mallet... you'll break things like that, usually more than you intended or expected.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Oddly enough the word 'soundbit' is itself neither a bit nor a byte but qualifies as an eight-byte word.
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
To paraphrase you... "the world still wouldn't be perfect, therefore you must be both wrong and disingenuous."
Where I come from, we call that horse manure.
...the part that says that full, free, unfettered, and unlimited access to the Internet is some kind of student right. It's not.
Nobody is saying that the university is required to provide internet access. They are saying that as a government entity they may not restrict free speech. In particular, they may not selectively block speech they disagree with.
The students are provided the Internet subject to the discretion of ASU. If ASU doesn't want them to see playboy.com, it has the right to not allow them to see it on its network, passing through its servers, on its campus, etc. ASU is not a general-purpose ISP.
True, because there is a perceived value in blocking "objectionable" material that is not compatible with their educational mission.They would have to at least attempt to block all such sites uniformly; if they were to block playboy but allow a competitor then it would not be legal at all. Remember, they are a government entity, not a general-purpose private ISP.
Additionally, the University has responsibilities via the in loco parentis doctrine, though they may not apply in this case.
In loco parentis does not normally apply these days to universities... and by "these days" we're talking, since the 1961 US Supreme Court smackdown.
let's not bleat about student rights because in this case, they have none.
Students don't have rights? What are you smoking?
This does not refute my point. Yes, you _can_ block e-mail without blocking web traffic. No, it wasn't a spam bot. But network administrators do not generally waste a lot of time investigating the sources of things that look like spam. They just drop in a total block on the IP address and forget about it.
If a network administrator doesn't know (or care) about the the difference between inbound port 25 traffic and outbound port 80 traffic he doesn't belong in that job!
You don't fix things with a mallet... you'll break things like that, usually more than you intended or expected.
Perhaps, but beside the point. I have seen system administrators do this. That is why I consider the assumption that most of the posters make that the university administration deliberately blocked the website to be dubious at best. This is a case of "never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by incompetence."
Maybe you’re not aware of this, but almost every school, university, public library filters their Internet. They have been doing this for years and never had any legal action against it. You may not like it, but that's the way it works. They regulate the usage of computers, and well practically the whole facility. Just because a place is publically funded, doesn't mean you have the right to do whatever you want. I also haven't seen any evidence that this website was blocked intentionally. If you want free rein on the Internet, get your own connection, but even then, most ISP's now block torrents and some content. So good luck getting unfettered Internet access.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
It's the job and responsibility of IT to make sure all systems are working smoothly, and if something is going wrong they have to remedy the situation as quickly as possible, even if that means a site gets blocked for whatever reason. These places are not an ISP, they are an institution which shares the same bandwidth to conduct their business, and house their network, and so they have the right to Firewall or Block anything that's causing an issue. With that said, I do think they could have resolved this much sooner, instead of waiting two months.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Just as a preface, I am a current ASU student. In my experience with the network at ASU they do not block ANYTHING that I know of. Video game sites, download sites, even porn sites are all free game in an effort to NOT limit students access to information. The fact that this website was blocked means they specifically targeted it to be filtered.
That's a valid point, but it is, as you say, a different one. That doesn't constitute censorship in a normal meaning of the word. Abusive monopoly, perhaps.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
At TAMU, several child "modeling" websites were blocked; it made me so sad that I had to rent a 3$/month VPS and run a proxy from it.