LangaList, April 4, 2002

The Evil Of Silent Censorship

The more I look into it, the worse it gets for us all. Consider this: Whether you know it or not content filters probably are blocking or discarding some of your outbound messages before they ever reach their destination, even if you've never written anything remotely racy or salacious in an email. Many times, you may never know that your mail wasn't delivered to your intended recipient.

Your inbound email probably is affected, too: If your business or ISP has installed a filter to "protect" you from inappropriate content, then odds are the filter is also preventing some nontrivial percentage of totally legitimate, 100% benign email messages from reaching you. Again, this may happen without your ever being aware that some of your mail is being intercepted and destroyed.

I certainly know my email is affected that way--- I've written about it several times--- but I'm only now realizing how pervasive this kind of silent censorship really is.

It's in home and business systems, for example, not only in overt filters you may know about , but in filters you may not even know about--- like the filter built into every copy of Outlook.

It's in many ISPs, too. For example, AOL was guilty of some outrageous filtering during the last U.S. presidential election: The AOL filters let users visit the home page of the Republican National Committee, but not the very similar Democratic National Committee site. Regardless of your politics, and no matter whether this was a programming error or deliberate choice; you have to admit that this kind of silent censorship is very, very wrong.

Content filtering is also emerging as a national legal issue in the U.S.: The "Children's Internet Protection Act (CHIPA)" is a new national law that sounds great at first blush (who doesn't want to protect kids?), but it actually will force public librarians and public schools to use these clumsy, inefficient and even harmful filters on all public-access computers. You may be surprised to learn than many librarians and teachers are dead-set against this law (for example, see this http://www.ftrf.org/internetfilteringmemo.html ), not because they don't love kids, but for sound technical reasons--- filters simply don't work. There are Constitutional issues, too, because what's offensive to me might seem fine to you, and vice versa: Who decides what's to be filtered, and for whom? In fact, as I write this, a suit brought by the American Library Association and others against CHIPA is in progress. ( http://www.eff.org/Legal/Cases/ALA_v_US/20020322_eff_aclu_cipa_pr.html)

Everyone wants to be safe from spam and unwanted p o r n, and all rational persons want to help keep kids safe. Businesses quite reasonably want to keep employees focused on business matters, and to avoid problems with sexual harassment. These are all good reasons to want to use filters.

But if we use the wrong technology--- or the wrong law--- we'll end up losing far more than we gain: We *won't* stop the bad stuff, but we *will* unintentionally stop a lot of good stuff.

This is an important topic that is probably affecting you *right now*, even if you don't know it, and even if you didn't ask for your site access and email to be filtered. And it's a topic that surely will affect us all in the near future. That's why I've made it the subject of an in-depth InformationWeek.Com column, running now at http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20020328S0008 . In it we'll cover:

real-life examples from your fellow readers of how their email and site acess was inappropriately blocked
links to sites to help you fight "censorware"
links to *good* filtering products your fellow readers have found to be worthwhile-- that actually work
and lots more

What's *your* experience with filters? Where do you weigh in on the subject? Do you use filters, and if so, which ones have you found good or bad? Do you use tools to circumvent filters? Please click to read the column ( http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20020328S0008 ) and then join in the discussion!