Department of Justice Says Censorware Doesn't Work

[For "amusement", I present here an excerpt of the "Child Online Protection Act" (COPA) Internet Censorship trial (10/23), where in an opening statement, as part of their strategy, government lawyer Eric Beane argues vigorously that censorware does not work. My snark in brackets]

The evidence will show that a shocking amount of pornography slips through these filters and into the hands of children. The evidence will show that the patchwork of status quo solutions is not working well enough.

[Shocking. Censorware doesn't work. Later he really gets into this:]

We provided pictures to you that got through filters tested by plaintiffs' own expert. Each of those pages had gotten through a filter. And you are also going to hear testimony from our experts, Paul Mewett and Philip Stark, describing their comprehensive study of the effectiveness of the filters.

[They can prove it. It's science.]

The results of the study confirm what the public already knows. Filters don't solve the problems.

One filter failed to block over 60 percent of the sexually explicit web pages it was tested against, over 60 percent. We refer to this problem as underblocking.

Many other filters missed more than 25 percent of those sexually explicit websites.

Even the filter that underblocked the least sexually explicit pages still allowed 8.6 percent of the sexually explicit pages through. Don't let a small percentage fool you. This percentage translates to hundreds of millions of sexually explicit pages.

[Porn pornn pornnn, it's everywhere ...]

If a water source was mixed with a sewer system, and you had a filter that screened out but 6.6 percent of it, would that be a solution to the problem? Would that cure the problem of the drinking water? I think that analogy works here with kids. It's the fact that there are still all of these images there, there were speeches that can be done directed at the source that can address that problem where filters will never be able to.

[Trying to bail the ocean with a spoon doesn't work. But, I must say, neither does commanding the waves.]

A low underblocking rate also comes at a cost. The filters that are most successful at blocking out sexually explicit pages also block out many other pages that contain no sexual content at all. 23.6 percent of the pages that were blocked had no sexual explicit content.

[You heard him! Censorware doesn't work!]

For example, one filter even blocked a website promoting a marathon to raise funds for breast cancer research. Part of the CIA's World fact Book was blocked. And a page with an ACLU calendar. In fact each of the plaintiffs websites in this case was blocked by at least one filter, and the united states has consistently taken the position that none of the plaintiffs' websites are covered by COPA.

[The "breast" issue isn't obsolete, it's still a problem!]

So in the absence of the solution offered by COPA, parents are left with a very difficult choice of allowing their children to be exposed to sexually explicit material or of cutting off their children's access to a significant portion of other materials on the worldwide web, materials that in many cases are necessary for a child to complete his homework.

[Wow - Censorware interferes with children's ability to do homework. The government wouldn't say it if it weren't true, right?]

As you might imagine the task of keeping an up-to-date black list is mammoth. It is simply impossible to catalog the entire worldwide web. So the overall effectiveness of a filter will always depend on the performance of automated classification software or dynamic filtering.

On this point you will hear from Dr. Stephen Neale who is a nationally renowned expert in linguistics. He will explain that image filtering does not work and that robot filters that operate by sorting language and text will never be able to stop pornographic images from reaching children.

[It's an impossible task - you have word of the US Department Of Justice on it]
[Of course this is posturing - but the quotes might be useful for anyone dealing with a censorware-maker]

Seth Finkelstein's Infothought blog (Wikipedia, Google, censorware, and an inside view of net-politics) - Syndicate site (subscribe, RSS)