Michael Sims
with
Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, James S. Tyre,
Jonathan Wallace, David Smith and Gabriel Wachob

The Censorware Project

http://censorware.net/

March 1999

Version 1.1

The Utah Education Network (www.uen.org) is an agency of the Utah state government charged with providing telecommunications services, including internet access, to public schools and libraries in Utah. UEN uses a commercial software package to censor the internet access of all of the 40 school districts and at least 8 of the 70 library districts in Utah.

An examination of the results of this censoring during the period September 10-October 10, 1998, found that many users were banned from accessing sites useful for educational and research purposes. Banned accesses made up less than 1% of overall accesses, most of which were banner ads presumed (by the software) to be sexually explicit. Very few people used the internet to access sexually explicit material, and students were the least likely to do so. It thus appears that the stated problem of minors accessing sexually explicit material (inadvertently or deliberately) is considerably less than some organizations would have the public and the Congress believe.

UEN censors a great many things that are not in any way illegitimate for Utah adults or students to view. Among the documents which UEN prevented citizens from viewing:

as well as many others, including safe-sex sites, sites discussing AIDS prevention, magazines available at any newsstand (Glamour, Seventeen), etc.

Statistics on the banning are presented, with a discussion of the results.

• Introduction
• Methodology, Background and Sample Population
• Discussion
  • Wrongful Bans
  • Overridden Bans
  • Previous Evaluations
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Charts
• Category Definitions
• Appendix
  • Criminal Skills
  • Hate Speech
  • Drugs
  • Gambling
  • Sex

continue: Introduction

back to overview of the Utah report

This document last updated on Thursday September 07 2000.