The Censorware Project

The New York Times has a good profile of former Censorware Project member Seth Finkelstein:

EVERY year the Electronic Frontier Foundation hands out its Pioneer Awards to people who have played crucial roles in the history of technology. Recipients have included visionaries like Ivan Sutherland, creator of some of the first computer graphics programs; Douglas C. Engelbart, an inventor of the mouse; and Linus Torvalds, inventor of the popular Linux operating system.

This year one of the three winners was Seth Finkelstein, an activist who decrypts filtering programs, the software used by private companies, libraries and schools to block out undesirable sites. As a founder of the Censorware Project, an anti-filtering advocacy group, Mr. Finkelstein has influenced public debate and legal decisions, including a First Amendment case on filtering policy at a public library in Virginia.

But most people have probably never heard of him, and until recently that is the way Mr. Finkelstein, a reclusive 36-year-old computer programmer, wanted it. Over the last six years he has spent hundreds of hours decrypting the blacklists of popular Web filtering programs like Cyber Patrol and X-Gear.

[....]