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Passing Porn, Banning the BibleN2H2's Bess in public schoolsWhen you install a censorware product in your school district and turn on all the recommended categories, you expect that, at the very least, it will block hardcore sex. So why does Bess allow schoolchildren to see HardcoreSex.com?
The Censorware Project recently completed a real-world examination of sites blocked - and not blocked - by a censorware product called "Bess." Bess is made by N2H2, who also makes Searchopolis. Our analysis shows that not only does the software block a great many valuable webpages, but also allows through a startlingly large amount of pornography. In order to review this software, we regret that we must use strong language. There are also links to pornographic websites in this report. We gathered this information by testing thousands of URLs against Bess proxies in real-world use, 7/23-7/26. The ten proxies which we tested were configured similarly to each other and to the setup that Bess recommends. Seven of the ten are in use in schools today. The flaws reported here are not theoretical. N2H2's software is in use in public schools across Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, plus some schools in Maine, California, Ohio, Massachusetts, Washington, Florida, and New York. A deal has been signed between Infopro Technologies and Schoolsnet Australia for as many as 5000 State and Catholic schools around Australia. According to an N2H2 franchisee, "more than seven million students" are censored by Bess. We tested proxies in actual use in these public school systems, plus the configurations used by several internet service providers who sell filtered internet access to families. Note that the design of Bess' system does not permit any age discrimination in scholastic systems - kindergarten students playing with the internet will be censored from exactly the same sites as 12th grade, 18-year-old students. Obviously there are many, many sites which are appropriate for 18-year-olds which might not be for 12-year-olds, for example. Note that these represent Bess' absolute best efforts here. All of the porn categories in the software (as well as many others) are switched on in each case. Bess also provides several categories designed to prevent overblocking - they permit exceptions to their banning for material that has been classified as educational, designed for kids, medical in nature, of historical significance, moderated, or pure text. For instance, the various copies of the Starr Report scattered throughout the web have generally been given an exemption under the Historical category; they would be banned, unless that exemption category is switched on. These exception categories were turned on as well in most of the proxies. (Not all, though. The Oakland Unified School District, for example, doesn't care that they're banning Starr from their students, some of whom are old enough to vote.) In other words, this represents Bess with maximum protections and maximum protections against overblocking. Unfortunately, they had little success in either area. Valuable Speech BlockedAs free speech activists, we are seriously concerned about the perfectly ordinary webpages which are blocked by the software. To pick just one example, the very first site we found that was "overblocked" was Friends of Lulu. This is a website promoting the idea that girls read comic books too: it opposes sexism, stereotypes, and exploitation, and encourages female participation. It's witty, thoughtful, and should be seen by every child who's into comics. But all ten of the Bess proxies that we tested banned it. Sorry, Lulu. Why? We don't know. Maybe because of a tongue-in-cheek reference to "spandex-clad hunks and babes in never-ending fight scenes." Maybe because it has a section for retailers titled "How To Get Girls (Into Your Store)." Bess claims, of course, that "N2H2 uses people, not computers, to decide if a Web page contains objectionable content." Or, as N2H2 President Peter Nickerson told a Congressional hearing on May 20, 1999: "All sites are reviewed by N2H2 staff before being added to the block lists. ... [Perception of censorware as flawed or unusable is] naive and based largely on problems associated with early versions of client-based software that were admittedly crude and ineffective. ... Over 8 million web pages are contained in the block-site categories." Let's take a look at those claims. Did you want to...
Too bad if you did, because Bess Can't Go There. Will anyone seriously believe that all these sites were blocked by "people, not computers"? Anti-censorship sites take it on the nose, too. Feminists Against Censorship gets censored. Time magazine's Netly News, which reported extensively on censoring software, gets the axe itself. Bernadette Taylor, an anti-censorship activist in Australia, gets her site banned as well. And the site of a public librarian fighting censorware in libraries gets the torch. When informed that Bess banned his site, he commented: "It's too bad that an educational resource, recognized and awarded by the Internet Scout Report, is being censored in a fruitless attempt to 'protect children.' This is exactly why I have been fighting censorware since it was first invented. I knew that sooner or later my dissenting views would be muzzled." Or how about some kids' sites? Students can't read about safety, or protecting refugees, or links for kids, or Catholics helping kids on the street, or even enter the Kids Korner. And what about a family mediation service in Australia? It's even approved by the Australian Federal Attorney-General, but not by Bess. All of these have been specifically banned by Bess. One interesting "feature" of Bess is its treatment of free homepage websites such as Geocities, Tripod, or Angelfire. These are some of the largest sites on the internet, with hundreds of thousands of people posting individual web pages about every topic under the sun. They all have prohibitions against sexually-explicit content, which doesn't mean that there aren't adult topics discussed, but putting up nudie pics gets your page summarily removed. Bess doesn't try to review these sites - they're simply too big. Bess customers are offered a single choice - ban all free homepage sites, or let them all through. If you ban them, as some schools do, you ban an incredible amount of totally inoffensive speech such as The Jefferson Bible, a selection of Biblical passages compiled by Thomas Jefferson, who called them "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man", or the Eustis Panthers, a high school baseball team. If you don't ban them, as some schools do, pages discussing adult content will be let through while Bess is napping. These free webpage sites represent possibly as much as 5% of the entire World Wide Web. Yet N2H2 has declared that they are simply too difficult to monitor, because their content changes often. Well, so do most pages on the web. If N2H2 can't cope with 5% of the web, what are they doing about the other 95%? Porn UnderblockedMore shocking than unfairly censored speech, however, is the sheer volume of accessible pornography. It defies description. At the risk of offending, we will simply present a list of some of the hundreds of websites we found. Every one of the ten Bess proxies we tested allowed access to every one of these sites: We did not go to extreme lengths to discover unblocked pornography; we did not have to. One of our techniques was to check to see whether sites listed as pornography on Yahoo were blocked by Bess. These sites have been around for a while - it can take months to get listed in Yahoo - so there seems to be little excuse for them not be blocked. We found 285 Yahoo sites (like collegepussy.com) that were allowed by at least some of the Bess proxies we tested. That includes 28 sites (like 100analsexpics.com) which were fully accessible through all seven of the K-12 school proxies. And porn sites listed on Yahoo are just the tip of the iceberg. If Bess cannot even keep up with what's posted to the net's most popular web index, how can it hope to keep up with the net as a whole? Checking through a few other pages of links to porn, we found thousands of unbanned porn sites, most of them accessible to all of the K-12 schools, though some were caught by Bess' keyword filtering. We've only listed a small portion of them above. Try It YourselfDon't take our word for it. Your favorite web browser has the ability to surf through any open HTTP proxy. Electronic Frontiers Australia recently asked Infopro Technologies (an Australian company that markets Bess under the name "iFilter") for a chance to test the Bess proxy server; Infopro refused to allow them to test it. We also asked, and after two weeks of fiddling around (and repeated visits to the Censorware Project site), N2H2 came through and provided access to their standard demonstration proxy server maintained at their corporate headquarters (which we didn't use for this report). In theory, this demo should be available until August 1st (more likely, until they read this report), but we invite you to use it if it's still accessible.
In Netscape, open your Preferences, select
Advanced > Proxies, and choose Manual
configuration. In the window that appears, enter your HTTP Proxy
as In Microsoft Internet Explorer, you can set your browser to use a
proxy server under Tools > Internet
Options > Connections > LAN
Options > Advanced. Set it to the same settings as
above:
You may want to then quit and restart your browser. After you do, you will be surfing the web with a Bess demonstration proxy. Start on this page and feel free to visit the links on it. The configuration of the demo server is almost identical to those we report on in this report. N2H2 will probably take action to correct some of the deficiencies in their product as soon as they read this report, and thus if you're reading this shortly after its release, the info above may be out of date. But reacting to criticism after the fact is not the same as producing a product which actually bans porn while leaving good information intact. Why Bess Can't SucceedOne may wonder why N2H2 misses so many porn sites. The answer is twofold: size, and rate of growth. The Web currently contains over one billion pages. That's 20,000,000,000,000 characters of text. And it's adding new material at a tremendous rate - over two million pages day, or roughly 25 new pages every second of every day. If you can read and rate an entire web page in 30 seconds, you would only need another 749 people just like you to keep up with the new information being added to the web. Of course, you'd have to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week... N2H2 employs 15 full time and 58 part time employees to scan websites, according to their recent IPO filing. They're losing ground massively unless they classify huge chunks of the web at once (or skip chunks, such as Geocities and the other free webpage sites). And remember, this is just for a one-time classification. Web pages change, constantly. If you never rescan them, your classifications quickly becomes outdated - but this would take many more employees. And this assumes that you could even find all the new information. The internet search engines such as Altavista and Hotbot do their best. They have millions of dollars worth of computer hardware, being manned by highly-paid professionals and connected to the internet via ultra-fast (and ultra-expensive) data lines. But they don't do a very good job. In a recent study in Nature magazine, a scientific journal, two computer scientists studied search engines and concluded that the best of them covered only 16% of the web - they simply can't find all the data out there. Hotbot had a coverage of only 11.3%. Why is this important? N2H2 has a contract with Inktomi, the company that runs the Hotbot search engine, to find sites for Bess to block. If you submit your site to Hotbot, N2H2's computer program will also review your site and determine whether it should be banned. But Hotbot only covers 11.3% of the web! So even if N2H2 was absolutely 100% perfect in their banning (let's suppose), still they have never even seen 89% of the World Wide Web, and thus haven't had a chance to block it. The vast majority of sites one views on the web have never been seen by N2H2, no matter how hard they try. It can't be done. In ConclusionN2H2 actively markets their censoring software to libraries, schools and governments. They rent proxy servers to organizations at a cost of more than $10,000 per year. They are now moving into the corporate sector, apparently feeling that software designed for kids will also work well on adults. None of this is atypical for the dozen or two companies who make money selling censorware. However, N2H2 is also now planning a stock offering scheduled for the end of July, 1999, the first such company to do so. One thing that distinguishes Bess from other products is their censored search engine, Searchopolis. Searchopolis operates through a combination of banned site listings and keyword removal - for instance, a search on "atom bomb" would return sites about atoms. One study a few months ago showed some of the keywords banned by the engine. Since that list came out, N2H2 has made changes to reduce the number of banned keywords. However, Searchopolis still ignores words it doesn't like. Searching on "testicle cancer", for instance, returns the same hits as searching on "cancer", because "testicle" is edited out of all searches. Keyword-based blocking is alive and well today, both for Bess and Searchopolis, despite President Nickerson's criticism of it to Congress. However, the most interesting aspect of N2H2 is their plan for making money. They actually plan to offer their Bess censoring service for very little or even for free, in exchange for advertising on student workstations and making Searchopolis the default search engine for the school in question. In effect, they plan to create a censored intranet of public schools across the U.S., where the only access to the rest of the internet is to sites approved by N2H2 and funneled through their search engine, and charge advertisers for the privilege of reaching those students during classtime. "The internet" in such schools will resemble Channel 1 (an advertiser-driven "educational" television channel in use at some public schools) rather than the wide-ranging source of information that one might expect. Unfortunately, this plan will cause N2H2 to lose all impetus to eliminate over-blocking in their software. After all, every time a user is blocked from a site, they are presented with multiple highly-prominent links that will take them to N2H2's Searchopolis site, increasing their advertising revenues, a "feature" they brag about in their IPO prospectus. N2H2's natural tendency will be to curtail any effort directed toward eliminating overblocking - it's profitable. For More InformationN2H2's IPO filings Another individual's problems with Bess Bess categories Bess Press Releases Keywords banned by the Searchopolis engine Stories about censorship in Tennessee schools:
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