CYBERSPACE — Recent experimentation by regular Slashdot contributor and Peacefire.org webmaster Bennett Haselton demonstrates that over-blocking of web content is still a significant issue for Secure Computing’s “SmartFilter” product – the filter of choice for American corporate giants like Halliburton, American Express, and Fidelity, as well as many schools, libraries, and government offices across the country.As Haselton observes, the question of over-blocking by web filters entered into the courtroom portion of the debate over the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). The Supreme Court ultimately ruled in 2003 that the law, which requires that Web filters be installed by schools and libraries that receive federal funds, was constitutional, despite evidence presented indicating substantial over-blocking.
To see if the problem of over-blocking has been reduced in the years since the Supreme Court’s ruling on CIPA, Haselton recently conducted an experiment in which he submitted a wide variety of non-adult URLs to Secure Computing’s lookup tool (located at http://database.n2h2.com/) and checked the results of the lookup tool against an actual copy of the software, in order to make sure that the sites actually were blocked and not simply subject to false reporting from the N2H2 lookup tool.
A partial list of websites classified by SmartFilter as “pornographic” include the sites of for Austin chapter of the Electronic Freedom Foundation (www.eff-austin.org); the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence (http://www.ricadv.org); the Bay Rail Alliance, a group lobbying for construction of regional rail system for the San Francisco area (http://www.rail2000.org); a barbershop harmony vocal group (http://www.mainliners.org); and http://www.cemtach.org/ an abbreviation signifying “Computational ElectroMagnetics Theory-Algorithm-Code-Hardware.”
SmartFilter’s over-blocking of content has been reported previously, including a March 2006 article by Tom Zeller, Jr. of the New York Times. Zeller’s article examined SmartFilter’s screening of BoingBoing.net, which was reported by Halliburton engineer from Houston. When the engineer tried to access BoingBoing, he received instead an error message reading, in part, “Access denied by SmartFilter content category… The requested URL belongs to the following categories: Entertainment/Recreation/Hobbies, Nudity.”
BoingBoing.net reportedly did include some postings that contained nudity at the time when the Halliburton employee encountered the blockage; a representative of Secure Computing noted in an email to one of BoingBoing.net’s co-editors that a post from early January of 2006 on the photographic history of adult magazines included “pornographic” images and cited a separate image of “a woman nursing a cat.”
As noted by Zeller, looking at the posts in question “reveals that the January entry made reference to two new books from the graphic design imprint Taschen. Yes, the books are about adult magazines, but they are history books. And as for the thumbnail-size image that appeared alongside the original post, well, if you have to squint, is it really smut?”
“There is far too much content on the Internet for any one company to review manually,” Haselton observed at the time, “so they have to cut corners. And they’re going to fall further behind as the Web gets bigger.”
For many more examples of non-adult sites blocked as pornography documented by Haselton refer to the Slashdot posting located here: http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/02/21/1435212.shtml
Haselton also supplies blocking reports for a variety of filtering software on his website, www.peacefire.org
