What are YOU looking at?
What websites is it appropriate for children to have access to on school computers? I think all reasonable people would agree that accessing sites that contain material that it’d be illegal for them to buy - that is, pornography, r-rated material, etc. - should be blocked from computers. But what about the websites from organisations that some people (even most?) would find distasteful. What about the Ku Klux Klan, or similar hate groups? What about anarchist groups? What about fringe anti-abortion groups who advocate physically threatening doctors who perform abortions?
These aren’t hypothetical questions. They’re ones that are being asked by students at schools up and down the country. The issue took on a political dimension when Trevor Mallard announced last August that the Government was spending $9.5 million to help schools provide a safe cyberspace environment for their students. Some of this money was given to a company called Watchdog (described as a “Christian-principled organisation” by its Managing Director Peter Mancer) to provide “content filtering to prevent access to inappropriate websites”.
It’s unclear what the Government considers inappropriate. The Watchdog website indicates that its software’s “standard blocking categories” are: anarchy, criminal skills, drugs, gambling, hate groups, obscene & tasteless, pornography, R-rated. It would be interesting to discover how broadly these categories reach.
For example, what does the “drugs” category cover? Sites that tell you how to get hold of and take drugs? Sites that provide medical advice about the side-effects of taking certain drugs? Sites that advocate banning all drugs? What about the “anarchist” category? Sites that tell you how to conduct a terrorist attack on Parliament? Or all sites where anarchism is discussed - where anarchists meet, swap news, and discuss their belief that humanity shouldn’t have any form of state, coercive political authority, or coercive social hierarchy?
Again, these aren’t hypothetical questions. A student at Takapuna Grammar claims in an article on Indymedia he was blocked by Watchdog from accessing infoshop.org, which says of itself:
We provide a wealth of alternative news and information that often can’t be found elsewhere on the Internet.
If this story is true, then the software appears to be overreaching. Material that is controversial shouldn’t be banned from school computers. The way to encourage critical thinking in children is not to say “we don’t trust you to see all this stuff”. Rather, critical thinking comes from being allowed develop analytical skills by being presented with all kinds of information (on the Internet and elsewhere) and learning to discriminate the good from the bad. You don’t fit prejudice by blocking access to the Ku Klux Klan website. You fight prejudice by allowing students to do projects on the KKK and talking about its ideas in class.
At around the time of Mallard’s announcement, Nandor released a statement urging the Government to use open source software because:
An Open Source product implemented locally would allow educational institutions to not only decide for themselves which sites they will allow their students and staff access to, but also track internet usage… If schools are able to keep tabs on which sites are being visited, they can tailor their media lessons for whole classes to how students are using the net and head off dangerous behaviour and encourage positive lines of inquiry.
With proprietary filtering software [such as Watchdog], students’ access to information that is considered controversial elsewhere but is acceptable here, or vice versa, is outside the control of their schools. For instance, some of our secondary schools may consider it appropriate for older students to have access to women’s health info, but such websites may be blocked by proprietary software because of conservative religious opinions in the US.
It’s unclear whether schools or the Ministry of Education have a clear understanding of what kinds of websites are banned by Watchdog software and what kinds are not. Nandor will be chasing this up through appropriate channels. If websites that students should be able to access for educational purposes are being blocked, then we should all be worried. The free flow of information is a vital part of both the democratic process and young people’s ability to learn and think critically. This doesn’t mean that there should always be “open slather” - but we should be worried if a well-meaning government project is getting in the way of our young people’s ability to explore the world of ideas…
May 17th, 2005 at 2:40 pm
I share the concern over Watchdog. Most filters have a degree of unreliability, but this one seems quite bad.
May 17th, 2005 at 4:37 pm
Personally I reckon that the software that maintains a “ban list” is so bad (i.e. it will never manage to include all the websites that shouldn’t be shown and as frog says it will include sites that should be shown), that I think that schools should instead use software that maintains an “allow list”. So all websites in the world are banned, unless a teacher has specifically allowed the students to access that website.
Ideally this would be very quick and easy to do. The teachers would assemble a list of standard media and reference sites and add to it all the subject-specfic sites that they are talking about in that lesson, and then if a student searches on google and finds a site that they would like to visit, they can ask the teacher to add it to the allow list. The teacher would check it out and if it is OK then they can add it, and if it isn’t OK then they wouldn’t. This approach (allow rather than ban) also means that sites that have no objectionable content, but are “time wasters” (e.g. idolblog, virtual super12, trademe etc) would not be allowed.
Finally, the allow list should also be able to have fine-grained permissions, so that certain classes or age groups would have access to sites that other classes do not.
May 17th, 2005 at 4:40 pm
In addition, I would like to point out, that, so long as your not behind a national firewall, the Internet routinely views censorship as “damage” and routes around it - a number of proxy websites have been developed solely to get around these over-protective filters.
There is no way to filter the internet without some degree of problems. Machines net false positives and miss some sites, while human censorship presents it’s own controversial problems. The best solution is simply to not let kids of a young age go onto the internet unsupervised.
Filtering software might work as an “opt in” or “safe-sites only,” method for the littlest of kids, but trying to filter the internet in schools is amazingly short-sighted.
May 17th, 2005 at 5:55 pm
Excellent press release from the “NZ Association of Rationalists and Humanists”:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC0505/S00043.htm
May 19th, 2005 at 12:27 pm
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20050518023403702
Education Minister Trevor Mallard should withdraw approval of software that a North Shore high school pulled from its computers today following student protests, says Nandor Tanczos, the Greens’ IT and Youth Issues Spokesperson.
From Aotearoa/New Zealand after students cry no fair over censorship of infoshop.
May 26th, 2005 at 9:15 am
I would be interested to know just how much money has passed to Watchdog, particularly as they are using open source software for filtering/proxying (squid), which has cost them nothing. Any school could very easily run their own caching proxy on an old PC for practically nothing, and could make their own choices about what to provide access to.