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Objection!
"On Friday, May 20th, 2002, the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia ruled against the Children's Internet Protection Act, which was approved in Congress in December 2000 and signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton" (Burns). The Circuit Court claimed that the law was in violation of the first amendment, the American citizens' right of free speech.
The law would have required all public libraries to install Internet filtering software on all computers with public access to prevent minors from viewing pornography in a public setting by July 1, 2002. Most people in society are not in favor of sexualizing children, nor do they want children having easy access to pornography. Control type of control must be exercised in order to prevent minors from having access to pornography, but the filtering software proposed by the Children's Internet Protection Act is not the effective solution to the problem.
The current problem with filtering software such as AOL Parental Control which is contained within AOL version 6.0, CyberSitter, Net Nanny, Web Sitter, and others is that they are currently still in their infancy as far as a viable technical solution to blocking pornography sites. The aforementioned software products are basically databases which either have known pornographic sites listed in them or perform their blocking functions by searching for particular words or phrases used in the pornography industry. If the computer users tries to view phonographic sites listed within the database, access will be denied so long as the software is turned on. Filtering software therefore is a simple, but effective solution.
At first glance, it would seem that such filtering software would be the definitive solution to preventing access to pornographic sites in public places. Computer trade magazines such as PC Magazine, CNET.com, PC World and a host of others periodically test filtering software as new versions are released. These magazines regularly report that this type of software does effectively block out some of the better known web sites such as Playboy, Penthouse, Club, Hustler, and Swank, just to mention a few, but they cannot block all pornography web sites as their tests prove. The reason for this is that on average 10,000 new web sites are created everyday, some of which are pornography sites. In a thirty-day period there are 30,000 new sites created. What we have here is exponential growth therefore, it is impossible for the developers of filtering software to keep up with the tracking of which sites are pornographic and which are not.
Some software companies have elected to use a different method of filtering by searching the sites for known pornographic terminology. Unfortunately, by using this method, the end result sites that contain legitimate information with sexual content are also filtered out preventing the computer user access to information that is not pornographic by any means. In addition the software violates citizens first amendment rights to the free exchange of information. As an example, when attempting to perform a search on the Internet for information pertaining to breast cancer, Net Nanny, the pornography filtering software, prevented access to such sites. In the Net Nanny's database, the word "breast" was listed as a pornographic word. If a search were performed on the word breastplate, referring to the chest armor of a medieval knight, again Net Nanny would prevent the search due to the word "breast."
"Another problem arises when black-listed words are contained inside other words-for instance a word filter with sex in it's black list may block documents containing the word "Middlesex." Attempting to overcome these problems, for example by blocking a page if it contains a certain number of trigger words, can partially overcome these problems, but it is not obvious how to decide on this number (Greenfield, Rickwood, and Tran). What if a student was writing a paper about the Amish, who are a religious group of people who do not believe in the use of any type of machines not powered by natural forces such as wind power, human power, and animal power. The largest known group currently lives in a town named, Intercourse, Pennsylvania. It the student attempts to do a search on the words Intercourse, Pennsylvania, again the filtering software will block the sites because the word "Intercourse" is contained in the black list of the filtering software.
Statistics from an independent study of the effectiveness of these types of software indicates that these types of software are only somewhat effective. As an example, AOL Parental Control (AOL version 6.0) when set for the age restriction of the 16-17 year old age group, in the category of Pornography/Erotica sites it only blocked 90% of these sites. In the category of Nudism it only restricted 27% of the sites. The Glamor/Lingerie sites at a glance may seem silly, but when one thinks a little deeper, some lingerie leaves little to the imagination, therefore I can see their view on denying access to all such sites. On the topic of Sexual Health, AOL Parental Control blocked approximately 15% of the sites. On the topic of Sex Education it blocked 17% of the sites. In the category of Swimsuit Models it blocked 37% of such content.
CyberSitter, in the category of Pornography/Erotica sites only blocked 90% of these sites. It did far better than AOL in the category of Nudism where it restricted 80% of the sites and in the category of Glamor/Lingerie sites it blocked 85% of the sites. On the topic of Sexual Health, CyberSitter blocked approximately 42% of the sites. On the topic of Sex Education it blocked 62% of the sites. This is quite fascinating; in the category of Swimsuit Models it blocked 76% of such content. Personally, I'd prefer minors viewing Swimsuit sites which still require the use of imagination when thinking about the naughty bits versus having access to nudity sites.
Web Sitter was not within the group tested therefore there are no statistics available for performance ratings at this time.
Having some experience with testing software I can vouch for the fact that filtering software does limit access to legitimate web sites containing sexual content. After testing several versions and different manufacturer software I have found them to be ineffective in filtering pornography. The creators of such sites are very clever and are constantly changing their terminology thereby making it difficult to keep up with the industry. In addition, the filtering software is complex by nature and difficult for the average casual computer user to operate. If the software was deployed in public libraries it sets up an embarrassing situation when the user has to ask a librarian to disable the software to conduct a legitimate web search on the topic of sex.
After reading the articles on testing filtering software and having beta tested the previously mentioned software products I am fully aware of the filtering software limitations in preventing the viewing of pornographic web sites. It is not proper that such software is accessible in public libraries, by adults or children, but current filtering software is not a solution for the time being. I am in favor of the court's ruling that the use of filtering software technology is clearly in violation of the first amendment and that the Children's Protection Act is also in violation of the first amendment.
Burns, Jim. "Internet Ruling Means 'Taxpayers Fund Smut,' Conservatives Say." CNSNews.com. Reprinted from NewsMax.com, Saturday, June 1, 2002. http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/5/31/131943.shtml
Greenfield, Paul, Rickwood, Peter, and Huu Cuong Tran. "Effectiveness of Internet Filtering Software Products." Mathematical and Information Sciences, September 2001. http://www.aba.gov.au/internet/research/filtering/firltereffectiveness.pdf
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