Blocked sites
One of the first blocking programs on the market, Cyber Patrol
was released in 1995 and has been the subject of controversy ever
since, beginning with a
November
1995 press release from GLAAD listing gay rights Web pages blocked
by Cyber Patrol. In May 2000, the controversy came full circle when
Peacefire anonymously created several "anti-gay" Web pages and submitted
them for review, and Cyber Patrol agreed to
block the pages as "hate speech", even though
each page consisted only of anti-gay quotes taken
from the Web site of
a prominent conservative group such as the
Family Research Council. (When we
revealed what we had done, Cyber Patrol
declined to block the sites that were
the sources of the quotes we used.)
But one statement which
Cyber Patrol has consistently made, is that sites are always
reviewed by employees before being blocked by Cyber Patrol, to
ensure that the sites meet their criteria:
This list of inappropriate sites, called the CyberNOT list, has been
compiled by a team of professional researchers which over the last
five years has reviewed more than
one million Web pages. The researchers look at every site, seeking to assure that the filtered material
meets the published criteria defining what content is unsuitable for kids.
- press release, October 26, 2000
Sites on the CyberNOT List are designated down to the file
directory. This means that appropriate material at an Internet
address need not be blocked simply because there is some
restricted material elsewhere at the address.
- http://www.cyberpatrol.com/cybernot/filter.htm
However, Peacefire has found numerous examples of sites which seem to contradict
that claim. Some of the sites blocked by Cyber Patrol are listed in two of
our reports,
Amnesty Intercepted
(about human rights groups whose
sites were blocked by blocking software)
and Blind Ballots (about
candidates in the 2000 elections whose sites were blocked).
Amnesty International Israel
and
"Lloyd Doggett for Congress"
were among the sites that we found blocked by Cyber Patrol.
We also tested the first 1,000 .com domains in an alphabetical
list, to see which domains were blocked by Cyber Patrol, and
found that
81% of the sites blocked
were errors. The errors were not borderline cases, such
as artistic nude photography sites; they were sites like
http://www.a-1radiatorservice.com/
that did not have anything conceivably offensive on them. If out of every 1,000 ".com" domains
on the Web, approximately 17 are incorrectly blocked by Cyber Patrol,
then with over 14,000,000 .com domains in existence, the total number of
incorrectly blocked domains would be about 230,000 in the ".com"
namespace alone (not even counting blocked sites in .org
or .net).
Cyber Patrol's Web page gives detailed descriptions of the
12 categories
used for classifying Web sites to be blocked, and the procedures by
which their
Oversight Committee
reviews sites. But in spite of these statements, in a cross-section of sites
blocked by Cyber Patrol, 81% of the sites still had no offensive content.
Double standards
Cyber Patrol gives the following criteria for blocking a site as
"hate speech":
Pictures or text advocating prejudice or discrimination
against any race, color, national origin, religion, disability or
handicap, gender, or sexual orientation. Any picture or
text that elevates one group over another. Also includes intolerant
jokes or slurs.
- http://www.cyberpatrol.com/cybernot/criteria.htm
In May 2000, Peacefire anonymously created several "anti-gay" Web pages on
free sites such as GeoCities, each site consisting entirely of quotes taken
from the Web site of a prominent conservative group such as
Focus on the Family. Using anonymous
HotMail accounts, we submitted each of these pages to Cyber Patrol for
review, and Cyber Patrol agreed to block each of these pages as "hate
speech".
We then told Cyber Patrol that four prominent right-wing Web
sites were the sources of all the anti-gay quotes on the four Web sites
that we created, and asked whether those sites would be blocked as well.
Cyber Patrol did not respond, and did not block the four conservative
groups' home pages.
The archives of our correspondence with Cyber Patrol during
this experiment, and the records of where we found the quotes used to
create the anti-gay "bait" pages, are online at
http://www.peacefire.org/BaitAndSwitch/.