There haven’t been any reports in a while, put out by anybody, about what kind of sites get blocked by blocking software. Probably this is due to the Supreme Court ruling in 2003 which said, basically, that schools and libraries could be required to use blocking software regardless of how many mistakes it made, so complaining about errors would therefore be moot. However, just because there are fewer reports these days, should not be taken to mean that the software is getting better.

Slashdot just ran an article I wrote about sites that were currently blocked by Bess, one of the most popular school blocking programs, still used to filter Internet access for millions of students and now supported by a company called Secure Computing (which also makes the blocking program SmartFilter). The article included screen captures showing that the sites were listed on the Secure Computing site as being categorized under “pornography” (I also verified that the sites were in fact blocked by Bess, and it wasn’t just a fluke of the site lookup form). Some of the sites were:

• The Austin chapter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• The Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence
• The Boys & Girls Club of Metropolitan Phoenix

The rest of the example sites are in the article here.

A long-standing point of contention while earlier reports about Bess were coming out was whether every site on its blacklist had been reviewed by a human before being blocked. In 1998, the CEO testified before Congress that “All sites that are blocked are reviewed by N2H2 staff before being added to the block lists.”

However, in its 2002 annual report, the company finally admitted that not all sites were reviewed before being blocked: “Through automated categorization or human review, Web sites are identified as fitting into one or more of our categories.” At one point, an N2H2 employee also told me that when one site is blocked, they will often block all sites hosted on that machine or at that IP - which of course means that those sites are also not reviewed before being blocked.

[Bennett Haselton of peacefire.org]

[tags]Bess, censor, peacefire, bennett haselton, block[/tags]