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It's every school technology coordinator's bad dream: A young
student sits down in front of a networked classroom PC to do
some research for a class assignment about the presidency. Opening
a web browser to go to the White House web site, she types www.whitehouse.com,
unaware that the web site housed at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. exists
in the .gov -- not .com -- domain. The mistake
is minor, but what happens next isn't: This student's online
field trip to the Oval Office is about to be rudely hijacked
to a commercial pornography site featuring graphic photos of
sex acts on its front page.
The anecdote might be hypothetical, but the "White House"
porn site is real. Vendors of Internet filtering and blocking
software are fond of telling this story because it illustrates
how easily children can be inadvertently exposed to online pornography.
In declaring the Communications Decency Act unconstitutional
last June, the U.S. Supreme Court placed the onus on schools
to shield students from online indecency, and makers of so-called
censorware have been quick to respond.
Their solution is simple: Buy our software, and your students
will be safeguarded from exposure to pornography, hate speech,
violent imagery, and other inappropriate content on the Internet.
But vocal opponents of censorware see a different picture.
They see schools abdicating their supervisory role to software
companies that are ill-equipped to discern which sites are educationally
appropriate and -- in some cases -- are motivated by conservative
agendas to block students from liberal points of view. In addition
to blocking access to a great deal of educationally valuable
information, critics say, censorware products provide no guarantee
against porn or other truly objectionable material because the
vendors can't hope to keep tabs on a web that -- by some estimates
-- doubles in size every six months.
In the midst of the spirited debate over the use of censorware,
however, one consensus among school technology leaders emerges:
Schools should consider their goals and options carefully and
conduct hands-on evaluations of several competing products before
making a judgment about whether -- or how -- to filter Internet
access for students.
How filters work
Censorware products typically use a combination of several
filtering and blocking strategies, and school officials can often
choose which of these strategies to enable or disable. The most
unsophisticated weapon is keyword blocking, which compares the
text of web pages and other Internet content against a list of
undesirable words and then either removes the words or blocks
the offending page altogether.
The simplicity of the keyword blocking approach can easily
lead to cases of mistaken identity, though. On the lookout for
words such as "XXX," "sex," and "dykes,"
censorware products have blocked web pages such as those for
Superbowl XXX, Mars Explorer, and the University of Kansas Medical
Center's Archie R. Dykes Library, to name just three examples.
One product, CYBERsitter, yanks offending words from web pages
without providing a clue to the reader that the text has been
altered. The mangled text that results from this intervention
might change the meaning and intent of a sentence dramatically.
For example, because "homosexual" is in the list of
CYBERsitter's forbidden words, the sentence, "The Catholic
church is opposed to all homosexual marriages" appears to
the user as, "The Catholic church is opposed to all marriages."
(Brian Milburn, CEO of Solid Oak Software, the maker of CYBERsitter,
declined to talk to Electronic School for this story.)
A more sophisticated approach, used by many vendors, is to
block individual web pages by specific URLs. Typically, vendors
use automated web crawlers to search for suspicious pages. Human
reviewers then look at each page in turn and rate it accordingly.
For example, Cyber Patrol, a popular product that also licenses
its database to several other vendors, rates sites according
to the following categories: violence/profanity, partial nudity,
full nudity, sexual acts, gross depictions, intolerance, satanic
or cult, drugs and drug culture, militant/extremist, sex education,
questionable/illegal and gambling, and alcohol and tobacco.
Most vendors allow schools to pick and choose which categories
they wish to block, but none permit educators to view the full
list of blocked sites, which vendors encrypt to prevent misappropriation
by competitors or students. Schools have no way of knowing whether
a particular site is blocked -- or why -- without trying a site
and seeing what happens. This is an important limitation, many
educators say, because vendors often incorrectly categorize sites.
"We have about a dozen people looking for sites,"
says Susan Getgood of Microsystems Software, the maker of Cyber
Patrol. As is typical for the industry, Microsystems Software
does not require that its site raters have backgrounds in library
science, but they must be either a parent or a teacher, Getgood
says. With the aid of automated web crawlers, it's "highly
doable" for Cyber Patrol to keep track of bad sites, she
says. "But no site is added to the list unless it has been
viewed by a human being," Getgood adds.
Yet at the time this was written, Electronic School discovered
by simple trial and error that Cyber Patrol blocked access to
the "Educators' Home Page for Tobacco Use Prevention"
on a web site run by the Maryland Department of Health and Mental
Hygiene's Local and Family Health Administration. On the other
hand, Cyber Patrol allowed access to a web site called "How
to Tell Right From Wrong," featuring half a dozen graphic
photos of aborted fetuses -- presumably because the Cyber Patrol
reviewers were unaware of the page's existence.
Critics argue that these twin drawbacks are inherent flaws
in censorware products: Some sites that should be accessible
get blocked, and some sites that should be blocked manage to
slip through. Vendors respond that schools can add to or delete
from the list of blocked sites as they see fit or as need arises.
But some educators wonder whether a student is likely to ask
a teacher to unblock a site that deals with a personally sensitive
issue such as teen pregnancy, abuse, homosexuality, or sexually
transmitted disease. Indeed, students might not realize that
such sites exist.
Rating systems
Ratings are another approach to blocking. The Platform for
Internet Content Selection (PICS) protocol, which has been adopted
by Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser and will likely
be adopted by Netscape Navigator as well, has enabled several
rating systems. The RSACi rating system (developed by the Recreational
Software Advisory Council) and the SafeSurf rating system depend
on Internet publishers to rate their own web pages, while the
Net Shepherd rating system is based on ratings by third parties.
PICS is unlikely to be a realistic solution for schools anytime
soon, though, as only a small proportion of web sites have been
rated so far. Critics say the self-rating systems lack incentive,
take too much time and effort, and are not applicable to many
sites. Even the White House, which promotes web ratings as a
means to protect children, had not rated their own site as this
article was written. The MSNBC news site recently abandoned an
attempt at self-rating as unworkable.
Third-party rating systems have problems, too, because any
system that depends on strangers to apply subjective ratings
to a vast universe of web pages runs the risk of being out of
touch with local community norms. When Electronic School performed
a sample search for the word "breast" using an online
demo of the Net Shepherd product, three of the hits were links
to photos of nude breasts.
"It would appear that the opinion of the person who reviewed
the site is that these images are not offensive to them,"
said Ron Warris, vice president of technology for Net Shepherd,
Inc., when told of this result. Warris added that he would have
the pages rerated.
"You have to settle for an approximate match" when
relying on a third-party rating system, says Paul Resnick, an
associate professor at the University of Michigan's School of
Information and the chairman of the PICS working group at the
World Wide Web Consortium, the MIT-based organization that authored
the PICS standard. "That is the nature of relying on someone
else's judgement about material."
Installing censorware
Censorware can be installed in several ways. Client-based
censorware is designed to be installed and configured on each
computer for which Internet access is to be restricted. Periodic
updates of the list of blocked sites must be downloaded manually
to each computer, which can quickly become a large administrative
task. (Some client-based products do allow updates to be performed
over a local-area network, however.)
For schools or districts with a large installed base of networked
computers, proxy server-based products can be a more manageable
and technically sophisticated solution. In this configuration,
the blocking takes place on a special server that is located
"upstream" from the classroom computers on the school
network and that updates itself automatically from the vendor's
online database of blocked sites. A proxy server also has the
added benefit of speeding up access times by storing frequently
accessed pages in a cache memory.
Using proxy-based filtering in combination with a network
operating system that assigns each user a logon ID and password,
such as Windows NT Server, schools can set up different filtering
criteria for different groups of students. This solution can
go a long way toward age-appropriate filtering, for example by
allowing only high school students to access sites that have
been placed by the filtering vendor in the "safe sex"
category.
But the proxy server solution has drawbacks, too: Each computer's
web browser must be manually configured to direct its requests
through the proxy server, a time-consuming task when there are
a large number of networked computers to set up. And wily students
might be able to route their browsers around the proxy server.
To prevent this, some school districts use a firewall in combination
with a proxy server. A firewall -- a hardware or software filter
that guards the intersection of the school's network and the
Internet -- can be configured to disallow any traffic that does
not pass through the proxy server. This solution also provides
the side benefit of protection against hacker intrusion from
the outside.
To block or not to block
How many school districts are using Internet filtering and
blocking software? Exact figures are hard to come by, but in
a recent poll of 295 teachers, technology directors, school board
members, and other educators attending the national Technology+Learning
conference, 51 percent said they were currently using censorware
for all or some students in their district.
Not surprisingly, educators are divided on the efficacy and
appropriateness of the use of Internet blocking and filtering
software in schools.
"Using a computer that had Surfwatch installed on it,
I was able to download information on how to build a bomb, how
to contact a satanic cult, how to sabotage various systems within
a building, read up on neo-Nazi propaganda, and learn how to
commit crimes using cellular telephones," says Bill Lowenburg,
a librarian and technology trainer in the Stroudsburg (Pa.) Area
School District. "On the other hand, I was not able to access
the English Server at Carnegie Mellon University, because it
apparently had 'objectionable' content on it."
Yet many school technology coordinators argue that the inexact
science of Internet filtering and blocking is a reasonable trade-off
for greater peace of mind. Given the political reality in many
school districts, they say, the choice often comes down to censorware
or no Internet access at all.
"It would be politically disastrous for us not to filter,"
says Joe Hill, supervisor of math and technology at the Rockingham
County (Va.) Public Schools. "All the good network infrastructure
we've installed would come down with the first instance of an
elementary school student accessing some of the absolutely raunchy
sites out there. Parents trust that schools are safe sites for
their children in all ways, and that includes the Internet. It
is much better to err on the side of caution in blocking sites."
Kerry Day, technology specialist for the North Sanpete School
District in Mount Pleasant, Utah, agrees.
"A conservative group called the Eagle Forum recently
tried to persuade the state legislature to cut off all Internet
access to public schools," Day says. Although that effort
was not successful, he says, "it wouldn't take too many
incidents for them to have enough ammunition to succeed."
Politics aside, schools and communities need to carefully
consider all their options when making decisions about implementing
censorware, says Karen Schneider, a government librarian and
library-press columnist. Last year, Schneider headed up The Internet
Filter Assessment Project (TIFAP), a six-month-long evaluation
of more than a dozen censorware products by a group of librarians
scattered across the Internet. The TIFAP study -- which provided
the basis for Schneider's newly released book, A Practical Guide
to Internet Filters -- concluded that filters hamper legitimate
information gathering unless administrators disable keyword blocking
and all blocking categories except for those that cover pornographic
sites.
"I try to tell people, 'Slow down and think carefully
about the impact of what you're doing," Schneider says.
"Give these tools as much scrutiny as you would any other
purchase, because they do affect what information is available.
And if you're looking for guarantees -- there are none."
Whose agenda?
The concept of local control of curriculum through the process
of neighborhood citizens serving on school boards is a long-standing
and cherished tradition in American public education. But many
argue that with censorware in place, school districts give up
ultimate control of what students can and can't see.
"The problem with filtering is that you let one group
or organization set your agenda," says Carol Simpson, a
library technology administrator in the Mesquite, Texas, public
schools. "When filters block animal-rights sites because
of 'gross depictions' but not antiabortion sites for the same
reason, we're not dealing with a pornography filter, we're dealing
with a political filter. I tell people, 'Do you want some software
company in San Francisco deciding what your kids can see?'"
The program that has come under the most fire from free-speech
advocates over the past year is CYBERsitter, which blocks the
sites for the National Organization for Women as well as the
Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. Until recently,
the program also blocked the web site of a teen anticensorship
group called Peacefire, which is critical of CYBERsitter's blocking
policies.
Peacefire's webmaster, Benjamin Jenkins, is a 17-year-old
senior at Community High School in Ann Arbor, Mich. The school
is involved in a project with the University of Michigan to develop
"a new way of teaching science, which includes computer
technology highly integrated into the curriculum," Jenkins
says. As a sophomore, Jenkins was hired by the university to
maintain the computers and network involved in the program. Internet
use at the school has successfully relied on education and enforcement
of an Acceptable Use Policy, Jenkins says: "Students are
informed of the tentative nature of our connection to the Internet--they
respect that, and behave responsibly online.
"We have always felt that filtering software is not only
ineffective, but also a violation of the trust between students
and staff," Jenkins adds. "Unfortunately, most of the
censorware companies block anything controversial, not just pornography.
I find it very discouraging that this includes information like
suicide prevention, safe sex, and gay youth resources."
Indeed, it is at the high school level that the most serious
free-speech issues arise over the use of censorware, says Ann
Beeson, a national staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties
Union. As counsel for plaintiffs in ACLU v. Reno, Beeson was
a primary architect of the landmark case in which the Supreme
Court last year declared the federal Communications Decency Act
unconstitutional.
"The basic problem is that the filters aren't perfect
and they tend to overblock," Beeson says. Although the extent
to which students have First Amendment rights is not clear, Beeson
says, older minors have a more clearly defined need for information
on topics such as safer sex, AIDS, and gay and lesbian issues.
And even if the use of censorware doesn't put a school in a worse
position legally, Beeson says, it does create a false sense of
security.
"As a practical matter, schools are not worse off for
trying to screen," agrees Jonathan D. Wallace, a New York-based
attorney and software executive and author of the book Sex, Laws
and Cyberspace. "But the single most important thing is
that filtering software is a placebo. These issues can be handled
perfectly by a teacher standing in the classroom, seeing what's
on the screen. It's complete self-deception to think we can make
a software program that can make these kinds of decisions for
us."
And as for the hypothetical case of the student who mistakenly
ends up at the "White House" porn site? Carol Simpson
puts it this way: "That's what the 'Back' button on the
web browser is for."
Lars
Kongshem is an associate editor and
webmaster of Electronic School and The American School Board Journal.
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