Worst Censorware Blocks Cannot Be Fixed 420
The ACLU is threatening to sue a group of Tennessee School Districts for using blocking software that blocks sites categorized as "LGBT" — that is, sites themed around lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender issues that would not be classified as pornographic. Some of the blocked sites include the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the Human Rights Campaign.
Legally, the school districts' decision to block these sites seems fairly indefensible. The content being censored is political speech, not illegal to distribute to minors, and as the ACLU points out, by blocking these sites the school districts are engaging in "viewpoint discrimination," since the schools allow access to anti-gay sites like Americans for Truth Against Homosexuality (which, ironically, features a disclaimer saying its content is not suitable for children). But, you never can tell with judges. A judge in Utah once ruled in favor of a school that suspended a student for wearing a t-shirt with the word "Vegan." (Do you think the judge would have made the same ruling if the student's t-shirt had said "Christian"?)
However, while the ACLU would be right to bring this case, there may be another unintended side effect. By focusing on the fact that the "LGBT" category is enabled to be blocked in these districts, this sets up a contrast with districts that do not have the "LGBT" category enabled, which could lead people to think that such districts are not blocking LGBT sites. This is not the case.
When a school district buys blocking software, the software comes with an encrypted list of websites listed in different categories; categories like Pornography and Nudity are typically blocked, while categories like LGBT would usually not be. If a site falls into one or more of the blocked categories, then attempts to access that site will be blocked (at least until some reprobates help you get around the filter.) However, it's the blocking company that decides what to put on the list under each category. And even if only categories like "Pornography" are enabled, there are likely to be many non-pornographic sites categorized as "Pornography," and hence blocked wherever that category is turned on.
When the ACLU of Washington sued the North County Regional Library system for enabling blocking software for all patrons (including adults), they asked me to test the Fortinet Web filter that the library was using. I used a random sample of 100,000 .com and 100,000 .org domains and ran them through an automated script to find 536 .com domains and 207 .org domains that were blocked by Fortinet. Of those, about one out of every eight .com sites categorized as "Pornography" or "Adult Materials," and one of out of every four .org sites blocked in those categories, was a site with content that could not possibly be considered "adult" — some of the sites blocked in these categories included the Dabar Worship Center, the immigrant-rights group Families for Freedom, and the Seattle Women's Jazz Orchestra. Extrapolating these ratios to the set of all .com and .org domains in existence, one could conclude that there were about 71,000 non-pornographic .com sites and 5,800 non-pornographic .org sites blocked by FortiNet as "Pornography" or "Adult Materials" — a number almost certain to grow into six figures when you add in all the sites outside of .com and .org. Years earlier, I had run similar tests for Cyber Patrol and SurfWatch (products which have since been discontinued) and found that an absolute majority of sites blocked by each program were actually non-pornographic, which translated into an estimate of hundreds of thousands of .com and .org sites wrongly classified as "porn."
Only the blocking companies know for sure how such stupid mistakes end up on their lists, but the most widely accepted explanation is that they use machines to crawl the Web and guess which sites are pornographic, and add those sites to their blacklists without any human intervention. In their early years, the makers of SurfWatch and Cyber Patrol claimed that employees actually did review sites before adding them to their lists, but that claim became increasingly untenable as more and more reports came out of sites being blocked with no adult content on them.
Nobody has yet done a similar study for the ENA blocking program, but every blocking program that has ever been tested has had a non-trivial error rate that extrapolates to at least hundreds of thousands of non-pornographic websites being blocked under "Pornography" and similar categories. There is no reason to think that the ENA blocker is different; at the very least, if they claim that it is, then the burden of proof should be on them.
So, the ACLU will probably succeed in persuading the Tennessee Schools Cooperative to stop blocking the "LGBT" category, but that doesn't mean that LGBT sites — or any other category of non-pornographic sites — will no longer be blocked. A student who encounters a blocked LGBT site could request an override, but what if they don't want to "out" themselves as someone who was browsing an LGBT site? Is Tennessee the best place to be known as the "queer who wanted to get around the porn filter"? And there may not be an option of getting an override anyway. Some of the correspondents on Peacefire's mailing list for new proxy sites to get around blockers are teachers who aren't given a password to bypass the blocker on their school's computers.
Then of course — you know what's coming — there is the other "larger sense" in which unblocking the LGBT category doesn't "fix the problem," which is that there would be no "problem" if we didn't think of teenagers as children instead of adults. You've probably already decided which side you're on in that debate, but consider it as a scientific question instead of a moral one. Do you think there is any objective evidence that teenagers, if they were given the opportunity to have the same rights and responsibilities as adults, would behave differently from adults to a large degree — more differently than, say, men and women behave from each other? The trouble with the "evidence" that we gather from personal interactions is that it's not truly objective — if someone believes that teenagers are immature and adults are not, they're likely to see and remember only the pieces of evidence that confirm that belief. A true double-blind experiment might involve talking to someone through a computer terminal and rating the other person's "maturity" just based on their responses. That's a start, but the trouble with that experiment is that adults tend to know a larger set of words, so a participant might rate the other person as more "mature" because of their large vocabulary, even though having a large vocabulary is completely different from having mature thoughts or logical reasoning skills. A fairer test might be to take a non-native-English-speaking adult and a native-English-speaking young teenager who scored about the same on a test of English vocabulary, and see if participants could tell the difference in maturity between those two test subjects while talking to them through a computer terminal. I am not aware of any experiment along these lines that has been done, but this is the sort of evidence of differences between adults and minors, that would be truly objective.
Most of the evidence in favor of the innate "adulthood" of teenagers is also anecdotal and not scientific, but it is compelling. As psychologist Robert Epstein has pointed out in The Case Against Adolescence, for thousands of years humans in their early teens were giving birth and raising children of their own. That obviously does not mean that that is a good idea in today's society, it just means that somewhere along the way, we must have lost sight of the level of responsibility that human teenagers are biologically capable of handling. If one of our Stone Age forebears could be brought back to life, he might eventually get used to the Web, but he'd probably always be amused by the idea of Web blockers for teenagers who are older than he was when he was raising his first child.
8960 May Refer to... (Score:5, Informative)
What does this have to do with anything? I don't know. I'm just typing furiously away at the keyboard to make my boss think I am actually working (while alt-tabbing to wikipedia and google images).
Enjoy :D
Re:Fight...for your right.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fight...for your right.... (Score:5, Informative)
"Transgender" doesn't necessarily mean people who "cut off their genitalia." From what I understand, it can refer to people who do not psychologically identify exactly with the bipolar genders of male/female.
It can also refer to intersexual people, i.e., people with sexual characteristics of both genders. This is more common than most people realize, but often newborns undergo "corrective" surgery to assign them to one gender category or another.
Re:Fight...for your right.... (Score:1, Informative)
Probably because 1: Many of the points of discrimination they want to fight apply to both equally, or at least bleed over between the categories, and 2: They recognize that a larger block is more powerful, and therefore more likely to get changes made. Since the people in the group have very little problem with having them in the group, it only strengthens their positions to have more numbers. (And, from some perspective, you can say that transgenders are just another class of people who have different-than-normal sexuality: They don't accept the physical sexuality they were born with as correct.)
And yes, you are too hung up on the extreme. A transgender is likely to consider a surgical procedure to correct what they consider to be a mistake in their biology: They were born the wrong gender. They go to a doctor, explain what the problem is, and have what amounts to a minor piece of plastic surgery performed. You are likely to have a more intensive operation, if you live long enough.
Re:One topic at a time please (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, Bennett Haselton is famous for being verbose and embedding extraneous arguments within a larger debate (sometimes diluting his original point).
In this case, his point about scientifically judging the maturity of teenagers is that it would entirely obviate, using rigorous evidence, the need for these web-blockers at all (at least for people above a certain age). That would certainly be progress (rather than debating about how much to block, wouldn't be nice if we had a good metric by which to say "we don't need to worry about censoring at all for this class of people").
We have arbitrary social rules about when someone is "old enough" to do certain things (drive a car, drink alcohol, buy porn). These standards vary wildly from culture to culture (in some cultures, even adults are not allowed those things), and are never based on evidence. Just "gut feelings" about maturity. So he proposes that some standard be established, and that standard tested against average adults, teenagers, children, etc. If it can be shown that a 15-year old is statistically indistinguishable from a 28-year old in terms of how they are able to reason logically, and how they react to, say, pornography; then it doesn't make sense to block the 15-year old from porn sites.
I agree with Haselton on this point. It's ridiculous that in this day and age we are still basing most of our legal rulings on untested "gut feelings" about how people behave, and how they are affected by external events/forces. We can do better.
Re:So, basically the parents are screwed? (Score:4, Informative)
intersexed (Score:3, Informative)
It can also refer to intersexual people, i.e., people with sexual characteristics of both genders. This is more common than most people realize, but often newborns undergo "corrective" surgery to assign them to one gender category or another.
Corrective surgery can only correct the physique.
If you are lucky, your brain is as "all male" or "all female" as your average guy or gal and the doctor guessed right when he did the "corrective surgery." At this point, you are no longer intersexual.
Although the term "intersexual" usually means having ambiguous genitalia and other obvious physical characteristics, it should really mean "between genders" whether in the genitals or in the mind/brain. By this definition, people who are "trapped in the wrong body" or who are psychologically neither "masculine-normal" nor "feminine-normal" would be described as intersexual, even if their body outside their brain was completely male or female.
Note I said "masculine/feminine-normal" not "completely male/female" - if you survey all the people who self-identify as "completely male" and give them thorough physical and psychological tests, the vast majority will have very few if any distinctly feminine female characteristics, but a sizable minority will have dominant psychological characteristics that are normally considered feminine. The opposite will be true for those that self-identify as completely female.
Re:tl;dr (Score:2, Informative)
anon: for the mod!
Re:Fight...for your right.... (Score:1, Informative)
I'm fine... my point being that "normal" people can't wrap their head around transgenderism. 50 years ago, "normal" people couldn't wrap their heads around homosexuality either. Both question gender issues, usually different issues, but gender issues nevertheless.
How many times are gay males portrayed as Betty Crocker effeminate or lesbians as butch guy wannabes? There's lots of stigma over sexual orientation, gender roles, etc. That's where the transgenders fit in with the LBG community. I'm sure some gays would be happy if they didn't have to defend us (in fact, there are a number that loathe and hate us), but it all comes down to a difference between what society says gender should be and how individuals actually feel.
Re:Bias goes both ways. (Score:3, Informative)
Roberts vs Madigan: Teacher who silently read the Bible while students took a test was banned from doing that. In addition, the two Christian books out of 240 books in a classroom library were banned.
I just happened to remember this one. I don't care enough to see if there are more :)
Re:Fight...for your right.... (Score:1, Informative)
The blocking company is categorizing the people as LGBT, according to the post, it's not self-identification.
The first act of Gosh would be to have those lists manually scrutinized. The second act of Gosh would be to have the school districts (etc.) know what they're running on their servers.
Around here people, including teachers, have to do any legitimate research at home because the school system blocks so many sites. It's hard to present both sides of an argument when one side is made completely unavailable.
Vegan shirt ban (Score:3, Informative)
While I think I disagree with the judges ruling, the incident occurred because of a "gang" problem. It's less about banning the word vegan and more closely related to banning gang symbols. There's a group in Salt Lake City (and other places as well) called the Straight Edge movement. They encourage the vegan lifestyle among other things but at least in that area they were using violence to promote their ethical stand.
School administrators went overboard but I don't think it's fair to compare banning a particular vegan sweatshirt to banning a tshirt that says Christian. If the local community was having a gang problem that used a particular cross symbol on their sweatshirts I'm not sure that same community wouldn't have tried to ban that sweatshirt. (I still think they'd be going about fighting the problem the wrong way and that they'd be in the wrong, but I wouldn't outright dismiss the possibility of them acting that way as absurd).
It's not like they were just going around banning shirts that support causes they disagree with. If they had a list of banned items that included "Vegan", "Environmentalism", "Obama", etc. I'd be much more in agreement with the rhetorical question used.
Re:Sorry, but Schools DO have Totalitarian control (Score:5, Informative)
The case of interest here would be Tinker Vs. Des Moines. Decided by the Supreme Court in 1969, It held that while the school had a compelling interest in curtailing certain rights that would otherwise be unacceptable violations of certain civil liberties, (in this case the first amendment, though the decision seems to apply to others) speech that was non-disruptive to the school environment could not be denied.
It's a complicated decision, and there has been MUCH discussion on exactly how Tinker does and does not apply, but it would seem to blow several of your arguments out of the water. One, that school districts arn't bound by the Constitution, not being "Federal government agencies". They are (Bound, that is, not federal). They get have special dispensation due to the fact that there is a compelling government interest in educating children, and that interest can justify curtailing certain civil liberties, at least as held by this case. But that shows clearly that school districts are held to constitutional tests, and are clearly NOT outside the jurisdictional bounds of the constitution or the federal court system.
Now, just what contributes to disruptive speech, acceptable curtailing of rights, and other issues has been argued fiercely, often in other SCOTUS cases. However, schools are NOT private entities, and cannot censor at will without substantial cause.
Re:Fight...for your right.... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm asking this in the full knowledge that someone will mod me down and call me names - but I'm ignorant on the topic:
Why do lesbians, gays, and bisexuals allow themselves to be lumped together with transgenders. To me, the layman, they seem like VERY different things. The first three are people who like to have relationships and sex in ways that aren't historically accepted. Fair enough, and I can get behind efforts to stop discriminating against these people.
The latter, at the extreme, cut off their genitalia. This is a group I have a little more trouble viewing as "normal". Or am I just too hung up on the extreme?
You are too hung up. You have a problem with it, so what do you think would the laws of a muslim country like Iran say about it? You'll be surprised: If someone wants to change their gender in Iran, they are considered to be ill. It is a medical health problem. As an ill person, you can expect that the state will help you. And that is what they do. And since nobody knows how to change a person's mind about these things, and it is known how to change a person's body, the body has to be changed. Which is interestingly exactly the same thing that happens in Germany, for the same reasons.
Re:Fight...for your right.... (Score:2, Informative)
I think the reason is because "we" (and I'm doing a generalization here, that may not be necessarily true) are in this together. It is not that being gay is the same as being a lesbian, or that being transvestite is the same as being bisexual. It is that we have similar concerns, and thus we join to fight a cause.
While there are gays who have problems with transgendered people, there are also gay people who think bisexuality is wrong... You know, people will be people, gay or not, we are all guilty of intolerance. But the ones who are out there, fighting the fight, are more enlightened about this issues, and understood that we are all human, and we are all fighting for similar rights.
Maybe you seem "cutting off their genitalia" as extreme because of the very same wording you are using. You should try using a more clinical phrase like "corrective procedure". :) It sounds like a joke, but it is different. Cutting off your genitalia sounds like a very violent and desperate thing to do, while a clinical operation is something different. Transgenedered people go through extensive preparation before doing the 'chop'. This people feels like they have the wrong gender, and that's why in a way it is not "their genitalia".
If it was for me, I would like to be associated with any person who is victim of hatred and needs to make a stand for his human and civil rights. But I don't think other people would allow themselves to be lumped together with a fag like me :)
Teenagers as adults? (Score:3, Informative)
(They can be given responsibilities in doses, to help them grow; that's necessary, good, but clear proof that they are still in the process of maturation.)