SCN: Filters

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

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


Censorship High: A 17-year-old takes a stand against a school Web-
filtering system that screens out Planned Parenthood but not the 
Christian Coalition.  


(Daniel Silverman, Salon.com)---TUSTIN, CA---I was the first student 
to surf the Web from Foothill High School's new T-1 line. The 
school's high-speed Internet link had been installed over the 
summer and I came to school two weeks early to test it out. At that 
time there was no formalized Internet use policy, no disabled 
services, no blocked sites, no censorship. And no, I didn't use it to 
check out a porn site; the first Web site visited by a student in the 
Tustin Unified School District was CNN.  

For the first few months of the new school year we were free. The 
nerds in the technology classes used the high-speed network for 
downloading files and gathering information, checking their e-mail 
and messaging their friends. We were in heaven, and we knew it 
wouldn't last.  

Tustin Unified School District, in Orange County roughly midway 
between Anaheim and Irvine, is your typical middle-class suburban 
school system. Like all public school systems, TUSD is working 
hard to deliver on the vision of the wired classroom. To further this 
goal, the district applied for and received a technology grant from 
the federal government. I was on the Digital High School planning 
committee, and I was the first to bring up the issue of ensuring fair 
and equitable access for students to online information. Not much 
was made of it at the time.  

As time went on and classrooms were brought online, the district 
oversight became more strict. Using a security tool called a firewall, 
the district restricted students' access to Internet services like 
instant messaging, streaming video and online games. One of our 
students set up a Linux computer, but was quickly told to remove it 
from the network. No specific reason was given, but we assumed 
that it was another issue of control. If you don't understand it, ban it.  

Our acceptable-use policy explicitly prohibits posting messages on 
chat rooms, message boards or mailing lists. We can't do anything 
on our school computers that might cause us any material gain. 
Stock trading is out, as are online auctions, job searches and 
product price comparisons. In practice, these rules were rarely 
followed, as teachers turned a blind eye to blatant violations of the 
overbroad district policy.  

But the administrators' cautiousness extended to other technologies 
too. They blocked Telnet, a text communications system for dialing 
in to other computers. Now I could no longer log in to my home 
system. They blocked FTP, so we could no longer transfer files to 
and from school. We had expected this to some degree; bureaucrats 
are overly cautious, and with all the talk about viruses and hackers, 
we couldn't really blame them for being scared. Nonetheless, we 
quickly found ways around their obstacles, and we were content -- 
until they ramped up the filter.  

"E-rate" legislation has forced public schools receiving federal 
funds to shield minors from "objectionable material," although no 
one really knows what that means. Because the idea of 
objectionable content is so ill-defined and so variable, no one on the 
school or district level wants to take responsibility for what is and is 
not blocked. This problem is not confined to TUSD; school districts 
across the country do the same thing to shield themselves from the 
hassle and responsibility: They hire outside firms.  

Our system is called InterGate, and it is a big black box sitting on a 
rack in the school district's communications office. Before any 
request for information can go onto the general Internet, it goes 
through InterGate. While inside InterGate, our Web browsing 
requests are individually logged by user name and computer 
address so that the school can keep track of every site each student 
visits. Next, the request is sent to a proxy server called Squid. A 
proxy server acts as a buffer between the Internet and a private 
network like our school's. Squid requests Web sites and serves 
them up to users inside a network. It's useful because its caching 
features make frequently visited Web sites load more quickly for 
local users in the school. Our version of Squid, however, is 
"enhanced" with a block list of objectionable sites. This list is 
distributed by the company that sells InterGate, and is updated 
automatically every night from a subscription service.  

The block list is what we all hate. It is the bane of every student and 
teacher at Foothill High School. We curse it, we shout at it, we bang 
on our keyboards, but there is really nothing we can do about it. 
Whenever we click a site that is on the block list, a funny face 
appears on our screen along with a message informing us that the 
site we requested has been blocked because it contains 
objectionable material. There are those words again, "objectionable 
material." They're used to make parents feel safe, to make 
lawmakers feel secure, to make society feel good. But they have no 
real meaning.  

Try making a list of a hundred randomly selected Web sites and see 
how many are blocked by filtering systems like Squid. The anti-
censorship organization Peacefire does it all the time, and the 
results are predictable. Huge swaths of the Internet containing 
unobjectionable content are blocked because one page on that 
domain or host may have at one time contained one objectionable 
word or picture. At the same time, thousands of porn sites and hate 
sites and terrorism sites are left accessible.  

This is inevitable; it is only a question of numbers. The idea that a 
handful of employees at InterGate have been able to read through 
millions upon millions of Web sites and determine what is 
"objectionable" is laughable. Content-filtering companies that claim 
all sites are reviewed by human beings are lying outright: It is 
simply impossible to review that many sites by hand, let alone keep 
the list up-to-date as sites change.  

Without the thousands of human beings and millions of dollars 
required to filter even a substantial chunk of the Internet, filtering 
companies rely on spider programs. Spiders crawl the Web, 
searching pages for keywords like "sex" and "revolution." These 
programs are terribly inaccurate. I have found sites such as Stop 
Prisoner Rape blocked, in addition to sites promoting atheism and, 
of course, free-speech sites like Peacefire.  

Even worse than these spider programs are the sites that are 
blocked when politics come into play. Filtering companies are more 
conservative than other organizations and often cater to right-wing 
groups. Not surprisingly, these companies will, consciously or not, 
block more liberal speech on the Internet than conservative speech. 
Thus Planned Parenthood is blocked, while the Christian Coalition is 
not. Some sites calling for the destruction of gays are allowed, while 
others that promote gay rights, like GLAAD, are disallowed. These 
are just a few examples of a huge trend toward repressing speech 
that is taking place in our schools.  

The Constitution does not give minors the right to full constitutional 
and legal protection. However, children under 18 still have the same 
civil liberties as everyone else, liberties that no one -- not even the 
government -- should take away.  

On May 30, I took a stand. I sent an e-mail to every single teacher 
and administrator in the TUSD, outlining a way to bypass the 
filtering system. Basically, I set up a second proxy system to direct 
Web requests. Students and teachers could send Web requests 
through my proxy server instead of the regular one, thus eluding the 
InterGate filters and gaining access to an uncensored Internet. I 
pointed out my reasons for these actions, quoting Supreme Court 
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: "Restriction of free thought and free 
speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-
American act that could most easily defeat us."  

I stated that in my position as a computer troubleshooter for the 
school I had received many complaints from teachers about the 
overbroad restrictions of the filter. I had been asked many times by 
individual teachers and students to provide a way to bypass the 
system. Stating that the most effective guard against the visiting of 
"inappropriate" Web sites is teacher supervision in the classroom, I 
revealed my method of bypassing the censorware software. I 
solicited feedback from teachers, promising that all communications 
would remain confidential. I asked for opinions both for and against 
my view, as I wished to encourage a dialogue in the school and 
community. Responses were immediate.  

"I think your actions are deplorable," wrote one teacher. "What 
service does this serve!!" Others worried about district backlash, 
telling me to "be careful" and wishing me the best on graduation. 
Most of the e-mails were supportive. "I hope you always have the 
courage and strength of character to stand up for what you believe to 
be important," wrote one elementary school teacher. "It's important 
to be a thinking person, rather than a go-along sheep." Another 
teacher wrote that she appreciated the bypass because "there are 
so many cool sites about art and literature that my students cannot 
get to when we research. I hope this works for the best."  

Another of my teachers wrote: "It is very true that censorship is alive 
and well in society ... here in the micro-community of [Foothill High 
School] and in the macro-community of the US government. I have 
many opinions on this subject, especially where there are agendas 
out there that allow some groups to say whatever they want while 
preventing a response from another group that may have a different 
or opposing view." However, added other teachers, school staff are 
discouraged from speaking up about this problem because they are 
afraid of being labeled porn advocates or being reprimanded by 
school and district administrators. They supported me, but quietly.  

I was pleasantly surprised to receive two letters from members of 
the school board pledging to look into the issue of censorship. 
Sadly, other members of the district were less open-minded about 
what I had done.  

I received a summons at school the next day. I went to the 
principal's office, where my father was already waiting. The school 
district assumed I had somehow "hacked" into its system, that I may 
have compromised its security and that I had invaded its network. 
Afraid that students and teachers would be able to get around the 
filter, it pulled the plug on the InterGate server, taking down the 
entire district's Internet access. I explained that I had done nothing 
to the computers, that I had used no school systems for my letter 
and that the district's network was perfectly safe. The distict officials 
threatened me with suspension and prosecution, promised to bill me 
for their time and insinuated that I might not be able to attend 
graduation. I told them that I had broken no school rules and they 
had no case.  

School staff berated me with questions as I walked through the halls 
that day: Why did I do it? What was I thinking? Did I want to 
graduate? Did I expect that I would go unpunished for my blatant 
mocking of school authority? Did I really think they would stand 
around while something as awful as what I had done took place? 
"Stop with the censorship bullshit," they said. "Didn't you really do 
this just to draw attention to yourself?"  

At the same time, students patted me on the back and gave me high-
fives. I didn't want to discuss it with any of them. I had made my 
case, my e-mail spoke for itself and I was ready for the 
consequences. But punishment never came.  

Sure, they blocked my bypass site, they removed my administrator 
account on the school computer system and they banned me 
permanently from school computers. This was an issue of trust, and 
the school didn't trust me on its system anymore. I understand this, 
even if I don't agree with it. However, they were not able to find 
anything with which to charge me -- no ground for suspension, no 
civil or criminal charges.  

I may be one of the first high school students to stand up against the 
Child Internet Protection Act, or the Child Online Protection Act, or the 
Communication Decency Act, or whatever it is being called today, 
but I am in no way the last. It is only the beginning of a fight that we 
will win, if not in the courts, if not in Congress, then on the technical 
battleground that is the network: We know the computers, and, in the 
words of Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, "on the 
Internet, the code is the law."  

This fall I head to Brandeis University, an innovative institution that 
is offering me a chance to minor in a new program, Internet Studies. 
I hope that this censorship battle ends long before I leave college, 
but, expecting that it will not, I plan to study law so that one day I 
can defend the rights of others in court. Meanwhile, I support 
organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Peacefire, 
and I pray for a day when we are all free to have our own opinions 
without fear of persecution, and that we as a society are better for it. 
America is one of the most free places on earth, and I intend to help 
keep it that way.  


Copyright 2001 Salon.com  





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