At the Focus on Children Internet Summit earlier this month, government officials, big business, and concerned parents alike came away lauding filtering software as the post-CDA solution to a smut-filled Net. But a newly released report is depicting the Cyber Patrol filtering software in less roseate hues. "Blacklisted by Cyber Patrol" takes a close look at the sites that others won't be seeing in the hopes of educating the public why critics term such programs "censorware."
"Everyone says, 'The Net is bad, children are in danger, and what are we going to do about it?' Censorware is happy to jump into that vacuum," says Jamie McCarthy, one of the authors of the report. "Unfortunately, with the topic being so big ... the automatic knee-jerk response is to go to this software whether it does its job or not. I think there needs to be more discussion."
The six members of the Censorware Project - McCarthy, Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Michael Sims, James Tyre, and Jonathan Wallace - are all online activists, lawyers, or computer programmers who met on Declan McCullagh's Fight Censorship mailing list. Several are longtime critics of filtering software: Vanderbilt University student Haselton is famous for posting Cybersitter's list of blocked sites on his Peacefire site. Wallace of the Ethical Spectacle has published short but damning reports on The Learning Company's Cyber Patrol and the porn-filtering software X-Stop.
After one of the six received an anonymous copy of a portion of the Cyber Patrol blacklist, the six email pals decided to pool their efforts into research and reports that would further the debate about the programs. The members spent about 70 hours going through the 5,000 to 6,000 domain names on the Cyber Patrol "CyberNOT" list and came up with a list of 200 examples that seemed inappropriately labeled and blocked.
Sites labeled as "FullNude SexActs" include a Nike ad, the The National Academy of Clinical Biochemistry, the MIT Project on Mathematics and Computation, and the Web site WorldPlay, the game provider for America Online. Other blocks include all of GeoCities' Sunset Strip and West Hollywood communities (which include more than 23,000 user sites, some of which include gay and lesbian content) and the 1.4 million pages housed at members.tripod.com.
The report suggest that many of the inappropriately blocked sites are blacked out because the software developers employ spider programs that label objectionable all sites containing certain potentially sensitive terms. Thus, sites that mention breasts - whether the content is focused on oncology, cuisine, or Cindy Crawford - all wind up blocked.
"It's admirable that someone is taking the time to make the Net a safer place, but it's unfortunate that they would let a machine - or a not-so-intelligent artificial intelligence - make these decisions," says Dan Ross, manager of online services at family-friendly WorldPlay. "It's very inappropriate. I don't know how we got on that list.... I think a report is very necessary."
While Cyber Patrol spokeswoman Susan Getgood confirmed that automated search tools are used at the beginning of the process of site filtering to "narrow down" the procedure, she added that all sites are supposed to go through human reviewers before going on the "CyberNOT" list. However, she couldn't explain why sites that had nothing to do with sex or nudity had ended up on the CyberNOT list with those labels. As the Censorware report points out, it would take millennia to go through all the pages now on the Web individually.
The Learning Company wouldn't comment directly on the report's findings, but released a statement saying, "Neither The Learning Company, nor any other experienced filter maker, has claimed that filtering products are 100 percent effective; few things in life are 100 guaranteed. The Learning Company also does not market Cyber Patrol as a replacement for parents. However, we believe we make a highly effective, very useful tool for assisting parents who are attempting to guide their children in a new medium that offers both good, child-appropriate content, as well as violent, hateful, pornographic, and dangerous sites."
