SCN: Filters - excellent article

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

========================

The Internet Filter Farce  

(Geoffrey Nunberg, The American Prospect)---"What if the baseball 
could repair the window?" reads the headline of a recent ad for 
myCIO.com. The copy continues: "The Internet caused the problem. 
It's only fitting it should also provide the solution." 

As it happens, the advertiser is offering remote management of 
network security. But the slogan would serve just as well for dozens 
of other electronic products and services that promise to address 
the manifold anxieties that the Internet gives rise to - anxieties 
about hackers, threats to privacy, spam, rumors, commercialism, 
pornography, fraud, lost work time, or simply the difficulty of finding 
your way around cyberspace. For every article raising the alarm 
about one or another of these problems, there's a clutch of software 
engineers sitting in a loft somewhere trying to turn the concern into 
a market opportunity.  

It's an understandable response, given the remarkable 
achievements of the technology and the hype that accompanies 
every new innovation. But it can also lead to misguided or even 
irresponsible decisions, as people naively trust the technology to 
right its own wrongs. It's one of the more dangerous guiding 
principles of the new economy: The remedy for the abuse of digital 
technology is more digital technology.  

The problem is nowhere more evident than in the frenzy to equip 
homes, schools, libraries, and workplaces with blocking technology -
 the programs described as "content filtering software" by their 
makers and as "censorware" by their critics. They go by suggestive 
names like CYBERsitter, SafeClick, Cyber Patrol, NetNanny, 
SurfWatch, and I-Gear. 

It's a good business to be in right now. A recent report by the 
research firm IDC estimates that the content filtering market exceeds 
$150 million a year right now and will reach $1.3 billion by 2003. 
Parents have been buying the software to protect their children, and 
search engines and Internet service providers (ISPs) have been 
offering blocking as a subscriber option. Corporations have been 
using the software to block employees' access to pornography 
(often citing the threat of sexual harassment charges) or, more 
generally, to restrict access to any non-work-related Web sites. 
Schools and libraries have been installing the software, sometimes 
reluctantly, in response to state and local laws that require its use, 
and federal legislation mandating filters is in the offing.  

One reason for the enthusiasm about filters is that they can be seen 
as a benign alternative to legislative restrictions on speech or 
access. Such laws generally prove to be unconstitutional - like the 
Communications Decency Act, which was overturned in 1997. In fact, 
when the Third Circuit Court suspended enforcement of the 1998 
Child Online Protection Act in February 1999, it cited filters as a less 
restrictive alternative. 

Advocates of filters argue that since the software is a commercial 
product that people adopt voluntarily, questions of censorship can't 
arise. As the director of one service provider that uses the software 
put it, "The First Amendment is not concerned with the capricious 
acts of individuals but rather with ... the danger posed by the 
enormous power wielded by the federal government."  

Even so, filters have their critics, particularly among civil 
libertarians and librarians. They argue that requiring filters in 
schools or libraries can itself be a form of censorship, even if the 
lists of sites they block are compiled by private companies - a view 
that was supported in 1998 by a federal district court in Virginia. 

Filtering advocates have responded that First Amendment concerns 
don't override the custodial responsibilities of the school or library. 
In the words of South Carolina Attorney General Charlie Condon, "A 
public library can constitutionally filter filth from the eyes of 
children." But "filth" is in the eye of the beholder, and all filters go 
well beyond blocking hard-core porn, both inadvertently and by 
design.  

Of course, First Amendment considerations aren't relevant when 
individuals or private organizations use filters. But there are other 
reasons why filters might make us uneasy. 

In corporate settings, the use of filters is part of a growing tendency 
to restrict employee privacy, along with e-mail monitoring and other 
forms of electronic surveillance. These steps may be legal if 
workers are appropriately notified in advance, but they're a poor 
substitute for more direct evaluations of employees' productivity. 
And they can intensify workers' disaffection and alienation, an effect 
that's exacerbated by the heavy-handed condescension with which 
employers often try to sweeten the pill. 

Take the Dilbertesque explanation that one Fortune 500 company 
offered its employees when it began filtering their Web use a while 
ago: "Imagine yourself surfing the Web and you come across a link 
that says, 'Click here for cool stuff.' You click on the link and are 
suddenly presented with a site that has less than suitable pictures 
for a business environment. If this has ever happened to you, we 
have good news."  

Parental restrictions on children's access to information are clearly 
in a different category. As Al Gore frequently puts it, "Blocking your 
own child's access to offensive speech is not censorship - it's 
parenting." The problem is that parents who buy a commercial 
filtering program have no way of knowing exactly what speech it 
blocks, and the software companies are doing all they can to keep 
their customers in ignorance. 

The lists of sites blocked by most of the filters are kept encrypted, 
as are the keyword algorithms they use to block additional sites. 
And when free-speech advocates have hacked the filters and posted 
lists of the sites they block, the companies have gotten the courts to 
suppress the postings on the grounds that they violate provisions of 
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (Those provisions were relaxed 
last October to allow some circumvention of encryption mechanisms 
for purposes of finding out what sites filters are blocking.) 

All of this has put the censorware companies in a position that would 
delight any other business: Not only does government mandate the 
use of their products, it also enforces their right to conceal from the 
public what exactly those products do.  

The software companies justify their secrecy by citing the need to 
protect their intellectual property and by arguing that publication of 
the lists of blocked sites would enable children to bypass the filters 
and access inappropriate materials. But neither argument is very 
plausible. Other companies manage to protect their rights to the 
databases they compile without keeping them secret, and it would 
be easy enough to make the lists publicly available without making 
them accessible to every schoolchild. 

The real danger for the software companies in making the lists 
public is that people would rapidly see just how inadequate their 
software is. That's the real scandal of the filtering controversy: The 
technology doesn't - and can't - work as promised.  

Why Filters Fail

Filters come in different forms. Some are implemented "upstream," 
at the level of proxy servers that control access for whole schools, 
libraries, or businesses; others are implemented "downstream" at 
individual workstations or PCs. 

But they all accomplish their filtering in pretty much the same way. 
The software companies start by compiling "control lists" of the 
addresses of unacceptable sites. Then, since these lists inevitably 
miss large numbers of offensive sites, they add automatic keyword 
filters to block additional sites that contain certain words and 
phrases. 

Most of them permit customers to specify the categories of sites 
they want to block - for example, "sex acts," "perversions," "hate 
speech," and "drug advocacy," not to mention additional categories 
like "job search," "games," and "dating," for the benefit of 
employers. (SmartFilter even adds a category of "worthless sites" 
that includes things like pages full of cat stories.) And most keep 
logs of use and make provision for automatic notification of parents 
or supervisors or system administrators when someone tries to 
access an excluded site.  

The inadequacies of the systems are implicit in this basic 
architecture. In compiling their control lists, software makers have a 
natural interest in drawing the circle very broadly, so as to block 
sites that might be objectionable to one or another segment of their 
market, even if they wouldn't be considered pornographic or 
offensive by any reasonable standard. 

Take safe-sex information. SurfWatch has blocked safe-sex 
information pages at Washington University, the University of 
Illinois Health Center, and the Allegheny University Hospitals, and 
Cyber Patrol has blocked the HIV/AIDS information page of the 
Journal of the American Medical Association and the site of Planned 
Parenthood. SmartFilter blocks the safe-sex page of the Johns 
Hopkins Medical School research group on sexually transmitted 
diseases. 

The filters have also blocked numerous sites associated with 
feminism or gay and lesbian rights. Both I-Gear and CYBERsitter 
have blocked the site of the National Organization for Women 
(CYBERsitter cites the "lesbian bias" of the group). I-Gear has 
blocked the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus, BESS has blocked 
the Gay and Lesbian Prisoner Project, and NetNanny has blocked 
Internet discussion groups on AIDS and feminism.  

There's more: Many filters block Web privacy sites and sites that 
facilitate anonymous Web access. And filter makers routinely use 
their control lists to block sites critical of their products. SafeSurf 
has blocked the site of the Wisconsin chapter of the American Civil 
Liberties Union. I-Gear has blocked the site of the Electronic Privacy 
Information Center, and SafeClick has blocked some of the 
testimony at hearings on filters held by the congressionally 
appointed Commission on Online Child Protection. That must be the 
dream of every corporate publicist - to be able to prevent your 
customers from reading any negative comments about your 
products.  

When we pass from control lists to keyword filters, we go from the 
outrageous to the ridiculous. Sites have been blocked simply 
because they contain the words witch, pussycat, or button. 

A government physics archive was blocked because its URL began 
with the letters XXX. Keyword filters have blocked the sites of 
Congressman Dick Armey and Beaver College in Pennsylvania. 

What these anecdotes don't show, though, is just how extensive the 
overblocking of keywords is. The censorware companies like to 
claim that their accuracy is extremely high, citing library studies 
showing that inappropriate blocks constitute a tiny proportion of all 
Web accesses. 

For example, Secure Computing, the manufacturer of SmartFilter, 
claims that a Utah study showed that blocking of miscategorized 
pages by its program constituted only .0006 percent of all Web 
access attempts - a figure cited by Arizona Senator John McCain in 
support of a mandatory-filtering proposal he is sponsoring. But 
that's a highly misleading way of measuring overblocking: Even if a 
filter blocked every single site on the Web that mentioned safe sex 
or breast cancer, the total number of incorrectly blocked accesses 
would be tiny relative to the huge number of accesses to sites like 
Amazon.com and Yahoo! By analogy, imagine a police force that 
arrests every Arab American in town on an antiterrorism sweep, then 
claims that its false arrest rate is under 1 percent, since 99 percent 
of the total population was not detained.  

The only appropriate way to evaluate the filters is to ask what 
proportion of the sites they block as pornographic or offensive are in 
fact correctly categorized. And by this standard, the filters fare very 
poorly. 

In one recent study, 1,000 randomly chosen addresses in the dot-
com domain were submitted to the SurfWatch filter. Of the sites it 
blocked as "sexually explicit," more than four out of five were 
misclassified - for example, the sites of an antiques dealer in 
Wales, a Maryland limo service, and a storage company in 
California. 

In another recent study, the free-speech advocate who runs 
Peacefire.org hacked the Symantec Corporation's I-Gear filter and 
published the list of the first 50 blocked URLs in the dot-edu domain. 
Fully 76 percent of these pages were errors or misclassifications, 
most of them completely devoid of sexual content of any kind. The 
program blocked a diagram of a milk pasteurization system with 
accompanying text entirely in Portuguese and two long sections of 
Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It also 
blocked a tract by the seventeenth-century theologian John Owen 
entitled "Justification of Faith through the Righteousness of Christ" 
and a page that contained nothing but a passage in Latin from Saint 
Augustine's Confessions. (Intriguingly, it is a passage in which the 
bishop chastises himself for his impure thoughts - but the filter was 
doubtless triggered simply by the presence of the Latin preposition 
cum.)  

This overblocking is an inevitable consequence of the keyword 
approach. The fact is, it's impossible to single out porn sites 
reliably simply by the words they use. 

Go to Disney's Go.com, turn on the GoGuardian filter, and do a 
search on sex; you will get no hits at all. Then turn it off and 
discover what you were missing: not just porn pages, but the text of 
the Scientific American article "Bonobo Sex and Society," the pages 
on sex discrimination of the Australian Equal Opportunity 
Commission, and the Michigan Sex Offender Registry. 

It's true that filters can fare a bit better by looking for combinations 
of keywords and by doing some statistical analysis of content. But 
few of them appear to use sophisticated techniques, probably 
because any effort to reduce the number of false alarms will 
inevitably reduce the number of genuine porn or hate sites that they 
block as well.  

Filtering advocates have argued that blocked Web pages on Saint 
Augustine or Gibbon are simply regrettable collateral casualties in 
the war against online porn and racism: Better, after all, to block 
some inoffensive sites than to allow some offensive ones to get 
through. As a field director of the profilter American Family 
Association puts it: "Filters are workable. We'd rather err on the side 
of caution instead of being too liberal." 

And there's no question that the software companies have 
deliberately kept their filters overly broad. It isn't just that they use 
overinclusive keywords like sex to screen out pages; they have 
also blocked whole servers or even whole ISPs when any one of 
their pages is flagged for objectionable content. Cyber Patrol 
blocked the entire Deja News (now Deja.com) site, which archives 
thousands of discussion groups on everything from commercial 
mortgages to archaeology, and all of the 1.4 million pages on the 
Web-hosting service Tripod.com. 

And a number of filters block pages containing banner ads that 
appear to contain links to inappropriate sites. The software makers 
reason, probably correctly, that their average customer is more 
likely to be concerned about porn sites that slip through the screen 
than about the blocking of useful sites - particularly since customers 
are usually ignorant about how frequently the latter occurs.  

Yet even with the most overly restrictive filtering mechanisms, the 
programs don't do an adequate job of blocking porn and other 
offensive materials. You wouldn't know this from the claims of the 
software makers. CYBERsitter guarantees that its software blocks 
"more than 97 percent of all objectionable content" (though it doesn't 
define "unobjectionable"), and SurfWatch claims that it can "shield 
users from 90-95% of the explicit material on the 'net." But neither 
company says how it came up with these figures, and independent 
tests suggest that they are wildly exaggerated. 

A few years ago Consumer Reports tested the four most common 
filtering programs against a list of sites that its investigators judged 
clearly unsuitable for young children. SurfWatch blocked 82 percent 
of the sites, the highest score of the group, and CYBERsitter blocked 
only 63 percent (both programs performed much better than 
NetNanny, which blocked none at all). Another study showed that the 
filter BESS failed to screen out more than 275 of the sites identified 
as pornographic on Yahoo! - a singularly easy group to block, since 
they've already been located and labeled.  

A study at the Annenberg School of Communications suggests that 
filters are even worse at identifying violent content than they are at 
catching pornography. That result is not surprising. Porn sites often 
give themselves away with genre-specific keywords like XXX or 
cum, and this makes for relatively efficient filtering. But the only way 
to block a large number of violent sites would be to use very general 
keywords that inevitably lead to the overblocking of thousands of 
useful or informative sites in the process. 

Do a Web search on "torture+domination," for example, and you will 
find a number of disturbingly lurid sites; but you will also find a 
report from the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture, the summary 
of a human rights conference at the University of Chicago, and 
several pages documenting the horrors of the Holocaust.  

What's more, these studies almost certainly underestimate just how 
leaky the filters are; and the proportion of offensive content that the 
filters miss will inevitably grow as the Web swells. For one thing, 
the filters simply can't keep up with the size of the Web and the vast 
amount of objectionable material it contains. 

In a 1999 article in Nature, Steve Lawrence and C. Lee Giles found 
that 1.5 percent of indexable Web servers contained pornographic 
material, a proportion that would translate to around 80,000 servers 
at the present size of the Web. Since a single server can host a 
number of sites, a highly conservative estimate would be 150,000 to 
200,000 sites that contain pornographic material. 

These sites wink on and off and change addresses frequently: The 
archiving service Alexa.com estimates that the average Web site 
has a life of 75 days. To locate and flag all this content, a filtering 
service would have to do periodic sweeps of the entire publicly 
accessible Web, which as of late 2000 contained in the 
neighborhood of 1.5 billion pages. That's more than anyone could 
possibly track: Even with the extensive resources that search 
engines like AltaVista and Inktomi have at their disposal, none of 
them indexes more than 15 percent of the total, and all of them taken 
together index less than half of it. 

And even if you could find all the Web pages, a filtering company 
would require a full-time staff of more than 2,000 people just to 
check out the two million new pages that are added every day.  
Figures like these make a mockery of the filter makers' claims that 
their control lists can offer anything like comprehensive coverage of 
the Web. 

The only possible way to get at most of the objectionable content is 
through keyword filtering. But however broadly it's applied, that 
technique misses the large number of porn sites that don't contain 
explicit terms that will tip off the filter. 

And sites that do want to include sexually explicit text can choose 
among a number of simple ways to circumvent the screens. They 
can represent the text as an image rather than as a string of 
characters, for example - a technique that's used by many people 
who don't want their Web page content to be picked up by the 
"spiders" that crawl the Web compiling the indexes of the search 
engines. Or they can encode the text in a Java script so it will 
bypass the filters unnoticed - and do so in such a way that will still 
allow people to seek them out. 

At this point, it isn't clear how much the porn site proprietors have 
been using expedients like these. But if the use of filters becomes 
widespread enough to cut significantly into the pornographers' 
profits, there is no question that sexual-content providers will 
become as resourceful at foiling the software as they have already 
been in gaming the Web search engines so that their sites come up 
in the first batch of hits.  

Alternatives to keyword identification are even less effective. In 
1999 Exotrope, a company in Elmira, New York, introduced a 
system called BAIR (Basic Artificial Intelligence Routine), which it 
billed as capable of recognizing pornographic images with 99 
percent accuracy, thanks to its use of artificial intelligence and 
"active information matrices." The launch was held at a Schenectady 
middle school and was attended by New York Governor George 
Pataki, who hailed the company as one of the fruits of his 
administration's efforts to create new high-tech industry in the 
Empire State and applauded the product's usefulness: "You'll be 
able to have a computer in any classroom unsupervised, a 
computer at home where your nine-year-old or 10-year-old 
disappears hours on end, and we can know and be confident that the 
information they are accessing is appropriate for someone of their 
age level." 

But parents who install the BAIR system would be well advised to 
check in on their kids from time to time. When the software was 
independently tested, it correctly labeled only two-thirds of a set of 
pornographic images - and mislabeled as pornographic exactly the 
same proportion of a set of ordinary portrait photos downloaded 
from AOL personal ads. In the end, BAIR is just a system that can 
identify flesh tones with less than 70 percent accuracy--about par for 
the present state of image recognition, and miles short of a system 
that could reliably tell the difference between stills from Deep Throat 
and from My Dinner with Andre.  

In a way, though, all of this is beside the point. Even if the filters 
were capable of achieving the fanciful levels of accuracy their 
advocates like to claim, it isn't as if there would be anything like a 
corresponding reduction in the diffusion of pornography. 

If for argument's sake we estimate that there are 150,000 porn sites 
on the Web, a filter that could screen them out with an accuracy rate 
of 95 percent would still leave 7,500 available, which is more than 
enough to satisfy the most assiduous pornophile. Bear in mind that 
an Internet porn site isn't like a handgun or a gram of cocaine - or, 
for that matter, like a brick-and-mortar pornographic bookstore - 
since a single site can serve an indefinitely large number of users 
from wherever they log in.  

All of this has a familiar ring to linguists who have been working for 
years to develop tools that can deal with human language in a 
naturalistic way. Every few years, a new flurry of hype touts a 
system that has "cracked" this or that aspect of the problem - 
automatic translation, for example, or realistic question-answering. 
But when they're put to the test, the systems never come remotely 
close to human language capabilities; that goal is not likely to be 
achieved for decades. It is much easier to reproduce the 
competence of a chess grandmaster than to reproduce the behavior 
of the kibitzers around the table.  

Filtering software is basically just another system of the same type - 
except that the techniques it uses are much more primitive than 
those used by modern translation systems and the like. And the task 
of filters is far more demanding. While translating a simple 
sentence or understanding a straight-forward question are tasks that 
are well within the linguistic capacities of a 10-year-old, 
distinguishing pornography and hate sites from serious discussions 
of sex or race requires not just adult linguistic competence but adult 
judgment. 

It may be that we know obscene material when we see it, as Justice 
Potter Stewart said, but it is a daunting matter to teach a machine to 
make such discriminations - or even the much more blatant 
distinctions that 10-year-olds delight in grasping.  

Language analysis software can be useful, so long as we make 
allowances for its shortcomings. Automatic translation systems do a 
wretched job by human standards. But sometimes even a very bad 
translation can be useful - if you're simply trying to determine 
whether a hotel in Paris accepts Visa cards, for example, or whether 
a scientific paper in Japanese is relevant enough to merit a proper 
human translation. 

Software that analyzes language content is fine for making a first 
pass at sorting incoming corporate e-mail, so long as employees 
are on hand to clear up its errors. And we can tolerate a fairly low 
accuracy rate from a natural-language query system like Ask 
Jeeves; the misunderstood questions and irrelevant responses may 
be a bother, but they don't do any real damage.  

When it comes to protecting children from offensive content, 
however, our tolerance for error is much lower. Politicians and 
administrators may find it convenient to believe in the efficacy of 
filters so they can reassure parents that the technology allows us to 
leave children alone in front of computers and, as Governor Pataki 
put it, "be confident that the information they are accessing is 
appropriate for someone of their age level." 

In the current climate, it's important to be seen as doing something 
about the problem of offensive content on the Web. But trusting 
filters to protect schoolchildren from objectionable content is simply 
irresponsible: It's like entrusting airport security to a metal detector 
that misses 40 percent of the concealed handguns and beeps at a 
third of the metal hangers in passengers' suitcases.  

A Place for Filters?  

Filter usage will get a big boost if Congress adopts Senator 
McCain's proposed legislation making filters obligatory in 
institutions that receive the "e-rate" subsidies established by the 
Telecommunications Act of 1996 - just one of several proposals 
along these lines. It's clearly an issue with wide appeal: In a 2000 
survey sponsored by the Ford Foundation, 92 percent of 
respondents favored having schools use filters to block 
pornography, and 79 percent favored their use to block hate speech.

People are right to be troubled by the vast amount of offensive and 
harmful content on the Web. But there's reason to be troubled, too, 
by most of the approaches proposed thus far to deal with it, whether 
technological, legal, or political. 

Legislative restrictions on the distribution of obscene or indecent 
content have generally proved to be unconstitutional and, in any 
case, are extremely difficult to enforce. The Web is not a place that 
lends itself to police sweeps: Sites change their addresses 
frequently, and the people responsible for them are hard to find and 
identify. 

Then, too, a large proportion of offensive and pornographic sites are 
located at servers outside U.S. jurisdictions; setting up a Web site 
in Thailand is even easier than opening a bank account in the 
Bahamas. So it's unrealistic to expect too much from efforts at 
supply-side controls.  

The other solutions that have been proposed also have their 
limitations. Self-rating policies for Web sites raise issues of 
practicality and enforcement. "Whitelist" or "greenspace" domains 
restricted to prescreened age-appropriate material may be useful for 
younger children, but they inevitably exclude huge amounts of 
valuable information.  

There are limits, too, to what we can expect from adult supervisors. 
"Tap on the shoulder" policies put librarians in the dubious position 
of having to police their patrons' Web use. What's more, monitoring 
policies are likely to inhibit young people from using the Web to find 
answers to their questions about topics like safe sex, suicide, 
homosexuality, or other areas of concern that they might have 
reasons for concealing from parents, teachers, or librarians.  

Filters raise even more problems than most of these other solutions 
do, but in the current political climate, it isn't likely that they will go 
away. Still, before we allow anyone to install filters in public 
institutions, we can ask that the programs be improved and made 
more selective, and that their makers be held accountable to 
reasonable standards of public disclosure. 

For starters, the filter companies should be required to list publicly 
the names of all identifiable organizations, publications, and sites 
included on their control lists, along with a brief description of the 
offending content. This is simply a matter of truth in advertising: If a 
filter is blocking a large number of gay and lesbian sites or safe-sex 
sites, people have a right to know this in advance. Indeed, it's hard 
to see how the use of filters in libraries could be constitutionally 
defended if the librarians have no way of knowing what point-of-view 
biases they might incorporate.  

Second, the blocking of sites by filters used in public institutions 
should be subject to judicial or administrative review. At present, 
sites can be unblocked only by individual customers. The filter 
companies claim that this policy leaves the ultimate discretion over 
blocking with libraries and local users. But the users of filtering 
software don't generally know in advance which sites it blocks, and 
even if they did, they wouldn't have the resources to examine and 
unblock thousands of URLs one by one. As a result, someone 
whose site is unreasonably blocked to hundreds of thousands of 
users - usually unbeknownst to them - has no recourse other than to 
appeal to the filtering company. The determination that a site is 
obscene or harmful to minors ultimately belongs with the courts or 
administrators (or, in the home, with parents) rather than with 
software makers who have an interest in drawing the circle as 
widely as they can.  

Third, we should require that the makers of filtering software submit 
their products for independent testing before they are installed in 
public institutions, and that the results of such tests be made public. 
This is a simple matter of consumer protection: If a piece of software 
fails to block 40 percent of a random sample of pornographic sites, 
parents have a right to know that before they entrust their children to 
it for protection. And software makers ought to be held accountable 
for the claims they make about their products' efficacy, just as the 
makers of tires and cough syrup are.  

Steps like these might encourage the makers of filtering software to 
be more discriminating in compiling their control lists and to try to 
improve the accuracy of their blocking algorithms. Indeed, one 
reason why filters perform so badly is that the software makers' 
ability to keep their performance a secret has up to now exempted 
them from the competitive pressures that would ordinarily force 
them to bring their products up to the level of other kinds of 
language software.  

But even with these improvements, no one should be under the 
illusion that filters are going to enable us to make the Internet 100 
percent child-safe or that we can return to an age when the library 
was a haven protected from unsavory content. That apparently can 
be a hard point to grasp, to listen to how filtering advocates evoke 
the traditional role of the library when arguing for restrictions on 
content. "Libraries don't have copies of Hustler or Deep Throat on 
their shelves," they say, "so why shouldn't they block the same sort 
of material when they occur on the Net?" 

But once we open up access to the Internet, no one is in a position 
to control the kinds of material that people can find there. Tearing 
down the walls of the library cuts two ways: It opens up a new world 
of knowledge, but it also allows the street people to come and camp 
out in the reading room. On the whole, it's a favorable bargain, but 
parents and teachers will have to help children deal with the pitfalls 
of Web surfing, the way they've had to come to terms with the 
pullulation of violence and disturbing content in other media. This 
isn't to say that we shouldn't try to protect kids as best we can. But 
once the window is broken, there is nothing the baseball can do to 
keep out the draft.

Copyright 2001 by The American Prospect, Inc.





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