[From The Boston Globe, January 20, 1997. Copyright 1997 Simson Garfinkel. Posted with the explicit permission of the author. Reposting requests should be directed to Simson Garfinkel.]
It's hard to imagine that Mayor Menino would walk into the research room of the Boston Public Library, grab a copy of Playboy from the shelf, and start ripping it into pieces. It's harder still to imagine that Menino would close his eyes, grab wildly for a few more magazines, and rip them up too for good measure. But the Mayor's decision to install "anti-porn" blocking software on the city's computers will have essentially the same result.
Last week, Menino announced that the city would install software that will restrict children's access to pornographic sites on the Internet. Michael Hernon, the city's chief information officer, says that the city will purchase a program called Cyber Patrol and install it on every computer that can be used by children in the city's libraries, schools and community centers.
The Trustees of Boston Public Library have voted to go along with the Mayor's dictates, although the new incoming library president has asked for an extension until March 10th to evaluate the Cyber Patrol software that the Hernon has chosen. "I didn't even know that software like this existed until last week," says Arthur Dunfey, the library's spokesman.
Boston is in a difficult position, says Hernon. The city wants to let kids access the Internet's World Wide Web, but it doesn't want to be in the business of supplying pornography to those same children. Hernon is also worried about the problem of mistaken identities---pornographic web sites that children might stumble upon by accident, when they were looking for something else.
Apparently there is some reason to be alarmed. Consider two sites that Hernon pointed me at, BAMBI.COM and FAO.COM. The first site isn't about the deer, its the "1st AAA rated ADULT XXX WEB site EROTICA ON-LINE." The second isn't a web site for the well-known toystore FAO Schwartz, it's FURY's Adults Only Index, with the motto "your inner child isn't the only one with adult desires."
"What was happening was that little Johnny was accessing a site and he was calling over other children and forcing this on them," said Hernon. "Nine out of 10 kids might behave themselves, but it's that one kid who is going to throw it into somebody's face." The censorship software is supposed to solve both accidental and intentional access to these sites by blocking any attempt to download their pages.
At the heart of Cyber Patrol is the "CyberNOT" list of web sites that contain objectionable material. The CyberNOT list is allegedly created by a team of adults who examine sites for a variety of material that Microsystems Inc. of Framingham finds objectionable. On the blacklist is pornography, information bout sex, hate speech, sites that promote alcohol and drug use, and online gambling.
Unfortunately, its not possible for parents, educators, or even city officials to see a list of the sites that Microsystems finds offense. That's because the Cyber Patrol database is secret. "The CyberNOT list is a list of inappropriate material," says Susan Getgood, Microsystems' Director of Marketing. "If we published such a list, we would be contributing to the problem that Cyber Patrol is trying to help people solve."
Declan McCullagh, a columnist for The Netly News and the moderator of the Internet's "Fight-censorship" mailing list, sees things differently: "It is basically a hidden blacklist of sites. There is really no parallel for this sort of secret blacklist of banned books or banned websites in the physical world, in the history of libraries, as far as I can tell."
It's hard to keep a secret when that secret is built into a program that's distributed for free over the Internet. And indeed, last summer some computer hacker decoded Microsystems' list of naughty sites and gave McCullagh a copy.
McCullagh learned that Cyber Patrol was blocking access to many sites that didn't violate any of the company's guidelines. Some of the sites on this list included web sites devoted to animal rights, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's censorship archives, The University of Newcastle computer science department, and a web site devoted to Christian dating. Cyber Patrol even blocked the web site operated by the League for Programming Freedom, a Cambridge-based organization opposed to software patents.
Getgood says that McCullagh's information is out of date, and that Cyber Patrol no longer blocks many of those sites. She says that the company has an "appeals process" that blocked sites can use to try to get off the company's list.
I'm opposed to computer-aided censorship because it sends fundamentally the wrong message to our children. It says that we don't trust them to act responsibility. It says that quick technological fixes are appropriate answers to social problems. It says that adults are too busy to supervise our kids, so we're building computers to do the job for us. And it says that censorship is an appropriate decision for our elected leaders to make.
I think that libraries should have policies against having any patron viewing pornography in a public place. But I don't think that those policies should be enforced by software.
Mayor Menino has painted himself into a corner. There is no way that he can back down without being accused of delivering pornography to our children. I'll take my solace in the fact that the blocking software isn't perfect---our city's kids are sure to find ways to defeat it. The Mayor may think that he's taken pornography out of the schools and libraries, but he's really just created a new high-tech game for kids to play.
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p.s. Playboy in fact is in the Boston Public Library's reference room.