Censorware, "filtering", and the imperatives of control

[Seth Finkelstein]

Lori Bowen Ayre wrote:
> There are enough people out there who are using filters, that it
> would be useful for people to share ideas about how to configure
> them as unintrusively as possible, rather than keeping the
> conversation ONLY at the "Filters Bad, Filters Good" level. This
> report demonstrates that some Internet filters can be configured in
> such a way that they offer some benefit without having to pay a
> horribly high cost.

	Well, one censorware aspect the report does not discuss, is that
in order for control to be effective, sites such as language-translators,
privacy sites, anonymity protections, the GOOGLE CACHE, the Wayback
Internet archives, etc tend to be banned. Otherwise, such sites act
as a "LOOPHOLE" (to use N2H2's terminology) for the control of
censorware. This is a structural, architectural, issue. Whether or
not you consider this bad, good, or not a horribly high cost, it's
factually a deep problem of censorware which is not going to go away
from configuration. Take a look at my (sadly under-publicized) work, e.g.

BESS's Secret LOOPHOLE:  (censorware vs. privacy & anonymity) - a
secret category of BESS (N2H2), and more about why censorware must
blacklist privacy, anonymity, and translators
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/bess/loophole.php
 
BESS vs The Google Search Engine (Cache, Groups, Images) -
BESS bans cached web pages, passes porn in groups, and considers all
image searching to be pornography.
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/bess/google.php
 
The Pre-Slipped Slope - censorware vs the Wayback Machine web archive -
The logic of censorware programs suppressing an enormous digital library.
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/general/slip.php

	Very broadly, the Kaiser study found that the more blacklists
that are used, the more inaccurate bans there are. Viewed basically in
terms of what censorware *is* - a bunch of blacklists - this should be
clear.

	That is, fundamentally, a censorware program is a collection of
blacklists. Each blacklist has some accurate entries, and some wildly
ridiculous inaccurate entries. If you use several blacklists, you get
the accurate entries, and then *all* the wildly ridiculous inaccurate
entries contained in all those several blacklists. Simple.

	From this point of view, it's not a surprise that several
blacklists, have in combination, a much higher number of wildly
ridiculous inaccurate entries, than a few blacklists. Roughly, having
more blacklists means more silliness, and fewer blacklists means fewer
silliness. No special magic to "configuration" there. The less of the
censorware you use, the less of the baleful effects you have.

	And Kaiser didn't find that censorware bans all the porn sites
either! At heart, it's not difficult to get a big list of porn sites. It's
really not. But what "benefit", other than the political, is there in
just making the outright porn-searchers work a little harder, while
randomly denying some people the information they need, and denying
*everyone* such tools as language-translators, google caches, etc?

	I don't think this is a simplistic "Filtering bad". But it is
saying there is no magic - there's not going to be any configuration
that makes all the naughty stuff go away, while having only nice
remaining. Or even most of the way there. The best PR the censorware
companies ever did, was to have the word "filtering" attached to their
blacklists. Because that channels all the discussion into a focus on
the supposedly worthless material, and far away from all the
imperatives involved in controlling what people are forbidden to read.

-- 
Seth Finkelstein  Consulting Programmer  sethf at sethf.com  http://sethf.com
Anticensorware Investigations - http://sethf.com/anticensorware/
Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog - http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/
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