I think we've all heard of the Exon-Coates amendment by now, but to recap, it was an amendment to the Telecommunications Reform act in the Senate that would have provided ruinous damages for trafficking in pornography and other material on the Internet. Those damages would have been applied not only against the trafficker, but also the Internet provider. The Exon-Coates amendment has been largely defeated, but the story is far from over.
One of the responses by the Internet business community, which has a pretty obvious stake in freedom of expression on Internet, has been to create software that allows parents to lock out certain WWW sites, newsgroups, and other services as offensive. The argument is that with these new technologies in place, government won't need to censor the Internet. People who want adult materials can get them, and concerned parents can keep such stuff out of the hands of their children. Everyone's happy and the guiding hand of the free market makes it happen: an American dream indeed.
I've found the reality differs.
I am paranoid, not only of the government, but of pretty much any bunch of people who claim to have my best interests at heart. As such, I greeted Cyber Patrol's pitches with some skepticism. An inducement was offered to the company I worked for, where we could get a commission on sales made by allowing a small ad on our home web page. (I work for Southwest Cyberport, a local Internet access provider. I'm the Director of Tech. Support, but since it's a small company, basically I field lots of things that my boss either doesn't want to deal with or simply doesn't have the time for.) I downloaded their software and installed it.
On the positive side, I like Cyber Patrol's interface. One can set hours of the day that Internet and other applications may be used, the number of hours per day, and number of hours total for a week. For a parent who's worried that Internet will simply eat their kid's brain, porn aside, this is a nice set of features. A "Headquarters" password allows the parent or responsible party to change settings or close the application (which comes up automatically when one starts Windows, even if it's taken out of StartUp). A "Deputy" password allows a trusted user to bypass restrictions, but not change them. Downloading an updated CyberNOT list is achieved at the click of a button. Banned sites, newsgroups, etc. are put into a several categories, which are configurable by checkboxes. So, a parent who considers partial nudity acceptable, but not genital display, can customize what the child is allowed access to.
I've tried hacking at the thing to see if its possible to alter the CyberNOT list, or indeed even to find it, and have been unsuccessful. A smart 12-year old might be able to do it; I don't know. Suffice to say, the security features of the program are nontrivial.
But onward, to how and why I got my own home page added to the list of banned sites maintained by Cyber Patrol.
I first checked out the features mentioned above. Then I immediately went hunting for Forbidden Things, to see if Cyber Patrol knew to stop me. One immediate and obvious problem is that CP can't check up on what a user does with Telnet. So, a child savvy in the old-fashioned ways of Unix can browse textual nastiness with abandon. (It would be easy enough, though, to set it so that Telnet is completely forbidden.) This isn't a severe flaw, though, as shell-based applications are quietly and quickly going the way of the dinosaur. On the other hand, parents who don't know what Telnet even is should know about this. I digress again.
The obvious stuff--the Penthouse Magazine page, a body-piercing page, alt.sex.*, and so on, were all restricted. No surprises there. alt.satanism was verboten, too. Since I'm bisexual and uppity about it, I checked soc.bi--yep, banned.
Then, with a sigh and a hollow feeling, I checked soc.support.youth.gay-lesbian-bi. This group is a support group, as the name implies. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and some transgendered kids post here to talk about their lives, which are obviously influenced by their different sexualities. This is a truly heart-wrenching, and often inspiring channel to read. You hear, anonymously, from kids whose fundamentalist parents would kick them out of their homes if they knew about their children's orientations. You read about suicide attempts, depression, rejection by people who were once friends, and so on. And you also get to read about the triumph of coming out, of kids who stand up for themselves and learn, somehow, to live life on their own terms. The group is moderated, since hate knows no borders either, and to keep out spurious junk like spam and inappropriate personals.
Accessing ssyglb is Restricted by Cyber Patrol. On grounds of "Profanity/Violence" and "Sexual Acts/Text". The Profanity criteria (and I don't imagine the group is blocked for violence) state that profanity must be contained in one of fifty of the postings in a newsgroup to qualify it for banning. I don't believe ssyglb meets these criteria. The Sexual Acts/Text criterion is quoted here in full:
Pictures or text exposing anyone or anything involved in explicit sexual acts and lewd and lascivious behavior. Material must be explicit or strongly imply a sexual act.I don't believe ssyglb meets these criteria either. Nor, I believe, does soc.bi. Soc.motss, a gay newsgroup, also banned, may, since it occasionally includes explicit sexual advice. I don't read soc.motss very often though, so I'm not sure.
The point of this damnably long ramble ("If I had had the time, I would have written a shorter letter") is to demonstrate that CP has a lousy research arm. They ban every web page with occult content I tried to reach, yet I can read alt.magick, alt.pagan, and so on. Even alt.magick.chaos, which sometimes has pretty hairy content.
To try to get a clearer idea of the unspoken standards without so much effort, I wrote to Bruce Kane at CP and asked for a cleartext copy of the NOTlist. I got this reply:
No, we do not publish the Cyber Patrol CyberNOT list. Thank you for your interest in our products.A bit curt, I thought. Were they on to me? You see, just the previous day, I had used the convenient feature in CP that allowed me to submit my very own web page for scrutiny. I said that it had occult content, and a lot of stuff about bisexuality.
And now, if you want to look at my page and you have CP installed, you'll get
on your screen.
Cyber Patrol does lousy research. Closed-minded twits may find things to be offended by in my pages, and there may even be a profanity in there somewhere, but I don't think it really meets the spirit of the criteria outlined by CP. I suspect they didn't look at it at all--they just trusted that their user base knows what the hell it's talking about. Relying on a fink network exclusively quickly makes the whole net blind. I further note that there is no easy way to submit a site for re-examination. I was not informed in any way that my site was banned--no appeal. It's particularly impressive that no higher level of review was triggered by seeing that a user was submitting his own site for banning! Wasn't it an obvious jake? It only took a couple of days to go through. I had thought it would never happen.
So why do I care? I care because most users, in their foolish, trusting hearts, think that software is put together carefully and conscientiously. Of course, most also wake up pretty quickly to the fact that it just ain't so. Nevertheless, a large number of us prefer to trust authority. All that unpublished ban lists do is replace authority of law with authority of the listmakers. If I can't see the list, how do I know I can trust its keepers? Who watches the watchmen?
The damage parents thought to preserve their children from is matched or exceeded by the stunting of the freedom of thought.