lambda 4.01
April 2, 1998
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> SPECIAL REPORT
A comparative report in France and in the US about filter systems for public Internet access
>> In the U. S.: First in local counties, then in Congress (McCain bill). All began in Gilroy, CA. We asked witnesses and report studies explaining the flaws of filtering tools for use in public spaces like libraries |
Paris. May 30, 1998. -- This is the story of how American morale meets French culture. Culture ministry, that is.
This influential body is proud to have been the first French institution, in 1993, opening a gateway to the internet. Then the next step came to offer agents and cabinet members their own connection to the net. Along to facilitate this, a proxy server was installed to rationalize bandwidth, a tool that helps today to save around 30% of the traffic. Nice, but as it is common in public or private companies to filter telephone use by blocking expensive Minitel services, it was proposed to filter WWW access (porn content essentially). Nice again, but the filter software chosen for this highly sensitive job was an American-made program, Webtrack. The joke is that some employees complained that some freely available websites couldn't be accessed from their computers at work. It was found that the black list of the filter program rated as "nude" the contents of Elle Magazine Online... Networking staff have been urged to install and update a "white list" patch in order to avoid another 'faute de gout'.
Fortunately, the story is already not a policy trend. The French governement this year launched a FFr15 billion plan ($2,5bn) to connect schools to the worldwide web, but no one knows how educators, officials and parents may deal regarding content regulation and access control procedures. The question is also on hold in public librairies (funded either by the state, the city or the university). The cyber rights group IRIS, member of the Global Internet Liberty Campaign, recently wrote a study on labeling and filtering technology, and said no satisfactory solution was acceptable right now. "It asks more questions than it resolves", it said.
IRIS joined the GILC in a communique to oppose W3C's PICS Rules 1.1, the international code to filter labelled
content. GILC fears "the Platform for Internet Content Selections (PICS)
debate has lost sight of human rights, civil liberties and personal freedom.
... If these PICS rules are adopted and implemented, whole masses of people
could be quarantined from information and news without even knowing they
were being cut off."
The temptation to control content stays alive in some parts of the French administration. Lambda has learned that another proxy controversy emerged last autumn in French universites. Linked to the Internet through Renater <http://www.renater.fr>, the public network for education and research, the French academic community delivers full time access for students, but this open policy has been breached in some universities which had to block usenet forums with an explicit topic such as child pornography and racial discrimination. But that's not the point. Last summer, a team of network engineers proposed to build a national cache server to "rationalize" IP traffic of Renater. Later some officials from the technology directorate at the Education ministry began to express motives to forbid all Internet content that would have no real "academic values". "Campus may not become giant cybercafes", the proponents said. The cache server project could be configurated for that purpose, they added.
Stupid, unfeasible and politically risky, the engineers responded. Stupid because you can't argue that you are rationalizing data traffic while trying to block particular hosts; unfeasible because filtering content nationally would be of course a tremendous task; and politically, it would have been be a bad sign for the government's projects to wire public schools and promote easy-to-use and citizens-friendly services on the net. It would also be a threat to universality and pluralism principles of academic education.
Today, the cache server project involves research laboratories of the CNRS, the public research center, and its associated laboratories in universities. Engineers insists that there is only one goal: to give some data "priorities" over others, but not to forbid any data at all.
Apart from this national project, every university can build its own system to filter traffic and content. Lambda obtained witnesses at the University of Franche-Comte (Besancon) where the proxy server, installed as a traffic sharing tool, was going to be used to block "pornographic" stuff. Local engineers said, "we known which person or account who had accessed to porn material". Teachers and researchers protested, and the Board decided to delay the filtering menace. Delay, not ban.
French Public libraries are just beginning to open the doors of the cyberspace. Today only a few hundreds of them offer a free or low-cost access to the internet. According to Lambda inquiries and witnesses recorded by the professional mailing-list Biblio.fr, no global policy has been in place to filter data with censorware tools and the like. Says a spokeswoman from the brand new national library, the BNF, "proximity between our 15 computers means someone can easilly look at what you're are doing on the screen. It is often sufficient to discourage malicious users to consult prejudiciable material". Librarians prefer to secure their computers from floppy virus by desabling FTP or Telnet functions and a lot of them don't consider Usenet as a valuable resource (except in university libraries, where students are often urged to sign a code of conduct).
The Bibliotheque publique d'information, located in the Beaubourg cultural center in Paris, reflects this pragmatism. The BPI decided last year to test the Internet Explorer Administration Kit, a customized version of Microsoft's IE, as a tool to block specific designated web sites on all machines of the local networks. At the end, the BPI didn't initiates the scheme : this possible 'customised censorship', where the selection could be manipulated by governement officials according to politics ups and downs, have definitely killed the project.
"The fact is, this is not our philosophy," say Philippe Guillerme, networking agent at the BPI, who bought the licence from Archimed, an information systems company based in Lille, in the North of France. Archimed say that around 40 libraries in France obtained the software. A librarian from the tiny city of Gravelines (North) explained in Biblio.fr that he had builded two different menus on the only connected machine: one full access, one "under 14", where kids are confined in a secure area of hand-selected sites.
The BPI is a national institution, but the vast majority of libraries, as in the US, are under control of city councils. Claudine Bellayche, a librarian in Angers and president of the Association Francaise des Bibliothecaires, says the librarians have been under pressure recently by far-right elected mayors to ban political books while introducing unknown nationalists and revisionist authors. One could imagine what their policy could be when dealing with internet content. In recent regional elections, the National Front won a new respectability and is ready to take over the culture commission of the regional council of Languedoc, in southern France.
The moderator of Biblio.fr, Herve Le Crosnier, librarian and lecturer,
University of Caen, argues: "To prevent the unlikely incident that
a child will encounter a nude photograph in front of a libray's computer,
some people wants to block information and limit the internet's impact on
publishing content. ... The promotion of useful cultural and social documents
will marginalize unsane ones naturaly."
See also the Peacefire vs Cybersitter soap, reported in lambda 2.13, 12/96.
"Filtering programs often censor sites with redeeming social value", said groups such as ACLU and the American Library Association, regarding the Senator McCain bill, The Internet School Filtering Act, approved by the Senate Commerce Committee on March 12 (along with another bill, S. 1482, dubbed "CDA II" because it would criminalize distribution on websites of "harmful to minors" material).
The McCain legislation would require schools and libraries receiving federal Internet subsidies to install systems "to filter or block matter deemed to be inappropriate for minors." Subsidies would drop if the law is not enforced. Dangerous, claimed recently EPIC in a report, especially for schemes "that have been shown to be clumsy, ineffective and destructive of the Internet's educational potential".
For Libraries, the McCain bill is the last chapter of a long soap-opera which began last summer in Gilroy (Santa Clara County, Ca) where a group of concerned parents calling itself K.I.D.S. (Keep the Internet Decent and Safe) urged the County's libraries to install filtering software on its Internet public access computers.
Lambda has learned that "the group ... has the support of an evangelical church, and has gathered the signatures of about 1200 people in Gilroy. ... K.I.D.S. group have invaded the privacy of patrons using the Internet at the library by observing and writing down what individuals are doing. ... With political and media saavy, they have launched letter-writing campaigns in the local press and have tried to encourage the Gilroy city council to pull the Gilroy Library out of the Santa Clara County Library system. This has been going on for more than one year." But on Oct. 23, the Joint Powers Authority, the Library's governing board, opted for free choice and dropped the filter option, while still "investigate a way to address the concerns of the public and to protect constitutional freedoms". In March 1998, "we are STILL involved in the controversy", the source added.
In October, Kern County Library, San Bruno Library (Ca), along with the Orlando Public Library (Fl), installed filtering systems like Websense. Others in Ohio installed Library Channel in an attempt to avoid state legislators from passing a law requiring filters. In November, Loudoun County (VA) declared its libraries' computers filter-proof, with no provision to turn it off for adults. Cases in Boston and New York were reported.
The ACLU with civil rights allies threatened to sue Kern County's decision to filter. Kern is a large agricultural community with a network of 50 computers. In January, the ACLU gave the County a 10-day ultimatum. On Jan. 28, Kern County Counsel Bernard C. Barmann reversed the new policy: the libraries will provide "a choice of an unfiltered or a filtered computer to both adult and minor patrons; no parental consent will be required for minors to access unfiltered computers." "Kern County backed off. It's great", claimed ACLU attorney Ann Beeson. "We would not have backed down if the minors' rights issue had not been resolved. Hopefully, other libraries will follow their example." On Feb. 6 the ACLU sued the Loudoun County in Virginia in order to preserve the right of people "from communicating constitutionally protected information".
LIBRARIAN JARGON: 'FILTER IS BAD'
"A democracy is built on free choice," said Lani Yoshimura, Community Librarian, Gilroy Public Library, in an interview. "Libraries offer choice to people through the variety of viewpoints and information they have in their collections. You might say libraries can serve as catalysts to change lives and communities".
"Blocking software is designed for home use where a parent can tailor its use to the maturity level of his/her minor child and the values of their family. What level would a public library use with its diverse clientele? Do you want the government telling you what you may or may not use on the Internet? Or worse yet, do you want a third party, in the case of filters, to tell you what they believe you or your family should access on the Internet?
"Libraries empower people by equalizing access to information. In many communities, large numbers of people still do not have access to computers at home, work or school. Those who cannot afford the new technology, the homeless, the poor, the person who is afraid of the new technology, can have access through the public library to information and to the Internet.
"As new formats are introduced, people need to learn how to use them. Not too long ago, people had great concerns about those new formats called audiocassettes and videocassettes. Today, after a "period of adjustment," people have learned to appreciate and use these formats. The Internet is no different, but it changes how we access information, how we play and how we communicate. The Internet's vast resources and lack of central control has evoked fear and uncertainty in some."
>> Read the report made by the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University, that helped the Santa Clara County Library to make its choice: "Access, Internet and Public Libraries"
In September 1997, Karen Schneider, former librarian at the University of Illinois / Urbana Champaign, released The Internet Filter Assessment Project, a printed review of filtering software for the librarian community. Here are some of her thoughts.
And
now
why don't you take a look at someone who's favoring filters in libraries?
>>>> DEFENSE D'ENTRER
Agence France Presse (98/2/28), announcing the brand new Defense Ministry's web site. Anyone at 2600 who is ready to crack it?
>>>> PLEASE BELIEVE ME...
Abstract from "PRIVACY AS CENSORSHIP: A Skeptical View of Proposals to Regulate Privacy in the Private Sector", by Solveig Singleton, director of information studies at the Cato Institute.