Necessary Censorship: Web Filtering with Open Source

Source: Linux Journal

In some cases and for some audiences, relying on the human safeguard isn't facing reality. Here are some tools you can use in those cases.

You're the administrator of a cash-strapped school system and received a note saying you'll finally be able to get the school connected to the Net--as soon as you have a plan to comply with CIPA(1). Or you're out in Corporate America, and when the boss typo-ed a URL, she saw some very interesting pictures on her screen. Or you're simply Joe Penguinhead at home, having had the talk with the spousal unit, and you've decided it's time for Junior to have a computer of his very own. In short, you're now stuck with committing censorship.

In the course of doing research for this article, I ran across pieces from EFF and Peacefire (plus one e-mailed lecture) saying that all censorship is bad that we should simply educate our children and coworkers on responsible cyber-surfing, blah, blah, blah.... It's true, and in an ideal world, we could do that. Unfortunately, the world is not populated by only responsible adults and well-educated children. And everyone makes a typo once in a while. Thus, we are forced to do something about it.

The Children's Internet Protection Act mandates that a school or library must have an Internet safety policy, must hold a public review of that policy and must use a "technology protection measure" on all computers connected to the Internet. Whether and how that software can be disabled on certain computers is a local decision. It does not mandate that software be perfect; indeed, many web pages, both administrative and commercial, emphasized that filtering would not be perfect. More on that in a minute.

Corporate firewalls often are quite a bit more aggressive. One colleague I spoke to said his employer didn't block only the naughty bits, but sports, third-party e-mail providers, web comics, in short, almost everything anything that wasn't work-related.

Then, there are those of us stuck on slow links who simply would like to not have third parties like Doubleclick fouling our bandwidth. This group probably contains a lot more of us than people might think.