Chapter 3
BLOCKING AND FILTERING DEVICES
3.1 Apart from the explosion in the number of people accessing computer
on-line services [1] since the Committee's
last report on the subject, the other major area of change has been in
the development of software programs designed to block particular sites
and software designed to label or rate material in order to control minors'
access to the material in question. The rapid development of labelling
systems and of blocking software point to strong demand for such programs
from parents, professional groups such as teachers, and those charged
with providing care and supervision for children and minors.
3.2 Products are now available that allow parents or teachers to limit
the amount of time a child spends on-line, that exclude access to particular
services such as bulletin boards and that "audit" all on-line
activity, including listing all sites that have been accessed during a
given period. Some blocking software such as Net Nanny will also block
data of a confidential nature (including credit card numbers) from leaving
a computer. Obviously, not everyone will wish to "disable" their
PC in this way but the applications now available can be of help to parents,
teachers and other guardians of minors.
3.3 The ABA told the Committee that, "Filtering programs work in
three main ways:
- sites are blocked with reference to a list of known newsgroups, world
wide web sites, File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Gopher sites. Censoring
decisions may be made centrally by the software producer with sites
updated regularly, and/or by users instructing their system to block
a particular site(s);
- requests for, or receipt of, information which contains specified
keywords or phrases are blocked. The keywords or phrases can be specified
by the software manufacturer or by the end users who can manage the
blocking of web sites by entering keywords and phrases in accordance
with criteria they consider appropriate; and
- all sites are blocked except those which are specified by the supervisor
('blanket blocking'). These programs usually provide an original unblocked
list of known educational sites, and the supervisor is able to unblock
new sites through a password secured interface. [2]
3.4 There is a wealth of information on the Internet about blocking and
filtering devices and many organisations have home pages directed at educating
parents to assist their children, including Frequently Asked Questions
(FAQ). Various organisations ranging from parents' coalitions to the European
Commission have posted advice for parents and teachers on the Internet.
One of the first to do so was the US Voters Telecommunications Watch (VTW)
at http://www.vtw.org/parents/ which reviewed the software available and
posted the information on the Internet for the benefit of parents. Electronic
Frontiers Australia (EFA) has a guide for Australian parents and educators
based on the North American VTW at http://www.efa.org.au/Campaigns/aipcfaq.html
3.5 A list (by no means exhaustive) of blocking and filtering software
follows. The Internet addresses are also listed because all have useful
information about what their particular products offer at their web sites:
Cyber Patrol http://www.microsys.com/
NetNanny http://www.netnanny.com/home.html
SurfWatch http://www.surfwatch.com
Net Shepherd - daxHound http://www.shepherd.net
Cybersitter http://www.solidoak.com/
NewView http://www.newview.com/
InterGo Communications Inc http://www.intergo.com
CyberSnoop http;//www.pearlsw.com/csnoop/
Internet in a Box for Kids http:sprynet.com/about/products/kidbox~1.html
3.6 A number of the programs available for blocking and filtering sites
allow potential buyers a "free" trial for a number of days before
they make the decision whether to buy or not. Cyber Patrol for example
allows the downloading of a free Home Edition, which can be trialed for
seven days. Invariably, the promoters of the blocking devices claim that
their product successfully protects children and the principles of free
speech on the Internet.. However, parents need to be aware of the differences
between blocking programs before being able to choose the one that is
most suitable to their children's needs. As one witness told the Committee:
Some (software filters)show promise: some are better than others.
For example, Net Nanny and SurfWatch have regular updates available.
You have the ability to screen out, site by site. There are problems
with that: sites change names, they change address, they change content
and so forth. But those are pretty good. There are others which are
completely useless. They block sites according to the first two letters
of the name or they block sites according to criteria which Australians
just do not hold as being reasonable. [3]
3.7 For parents whose main aim is to block out material that they consider
inappropriate for their children, the packages provide step by step instructions
to guide them in their task. The task of setting up labels to block and
filter is not particularly difficult as long as those doing the rating
accept that they may be unintentionally blocking sites that might have
been appropriate. For those rating personally (for example, parents at
home or a teacher in a classroom) this is unlikely to be a major problem.
However, some submissions pointed to the complexities involved in rating.
[4] The Committee recognises that problems
associated with misrating can have costly consequences for content providers
and organisations using a third party to rate for them.
3.8 Submitters to the Committee pointed out that blocking and filtering
devices are blunt instruments which will often unjustifiably block access
to certain sites on the basis of a word even if the site does not contain
any material parents and other users might find objectionable. Thus while
the intention of parents and teachers may be to restrict or block access
to sites containing material of an explicit sexual nature, violent material
or material which incites to racial hatred, they may also find themselves
blocking useful information such as news reports, references to feminism
and scientific information about hiv/aids.
3.9 A number of submitters gave examples of sites unjustifiably blocked
by CyberPatrol on the grounds of inappropriateness. They include the Telstra
site and the Hunter Valley Tourism home page at: http://www.telstra.com.au
and http://mulga.hunterlink.net.au respectively. EFA, which had referred
to some examples of inappropriate blocking in its submission, explained
that:
CyberPatrol has a design problem caused by the fact that only
the first two characters of a user directory name are stored on their
blacklist database. On large ISPs this has the effect of blocking huge
numbers of sites that should not be blocked at all but have the misfortune
of sharing a name that begins with the same characters as an "objectionable"
site. [5]
3.10 There are now search engines available on-line (including one recently
developed by CyberPatrol) that assists users in finding out whether a
site is blocked. Another recently developed censorware, The Netly News
allows users to check not only sites blocked by CyberPatrol but also those
blocked by Cybersitter, Netnanny, Surfwatch and The Internet Filter as
well.
3.11 Another option available to parents is to allow their children access
only to sites (known as "proprietary environments") that have
been checked and cleared of material that might be unsuitable for children.
The Committee was told that the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
(RMIT) is currently conducting a study, "which involves not using
the Internet at all but acquiring material from the Internet and placing
it on CD-Rom so that there is control over the material". [6]
For some parents that last approach may prove to be the only acceptable
one.
3.12 Some groups and individuals, including submitters to the inquiry,
[7] are very critical of much of the
blocking and filtering software that is currently available and of their
failure to identify the context in which words and phrases are used as
well as their failure to make fine distinctions. They argue that the only
"safe" approach is for parents to supervise their children's
netsurfing.
3.13 Parents must indeed exercise their responsibilities in this area
but it must be recognised that children have more hours of leisure than
their parents and that constant supervision is not a realistic possibility.
Other methods must be used even if they offer a less than perfect solution.
It seems to be the case that much of the software available could result
in children and adolescents being denied access to useful and important
material that has no objectionable content whatsoever. While this is regrettable,
it must be balanced against the possibility of children and teenagers
being exposed to illegal material on the Internet.
3.14 Most parents and teachers of minors would accept the limitations
of currently available blocking software (which deny total freedom of
access to some worthwhile information to their young charges) in order
to safeguard their children's right to a childhood free from images that
they themselves might find degrading and demeaning to the person.
3.15 Those parents who need blocking at different levels for children
of different ages need to turn to programs that offer them a range of
options and greater flexibility. It is clearly more helpful if a program
allows users to view the lists of keywords used for blocking and the lists
of sites blocked. It is even better when the opportunity exists for parents
to alter the original blocking decisions made by the program providers.
However, parents need to be reminded that there is no such thing as a
totally "safe" blocking software. This is particularly important
since most of the blocking software only allows blocking of World Wide
Web sites and parents may have more concern with material found through
other on-line services.
3.16 Educating parents is extremely important since as one witness told
the Committee, there are "wildly divergent levels of parental awareness".
In spite of the limitations of blocking and filtering software canvassed
above, those software packages that have been more carefully developed
offer parents and those responsible for minors the best opportunities
to date of providing a "safer" on-line environment for young
people. It is therefore extremely important for parents and educators
to be made aware of their availability (as well as of their limitations).
3.17 The ABA told the Committee that it thought that:
There should be a coordinated campaign to provide information
to parents and users who may be adults who do not wish to see material
that they may find offensive or unpleasant or whatever. Perhaps at the
time you buy your modem, service providers should as we have said, under
the codes of practice give out information about filter products and
other methods of managing children's access. [8]
The Committee is strongly supportive of such an approach:
The Committee recommends that federal legislation requiring the development
of codes of practice for the on-line industry (as per recommendation 3)
should also require retailers and service providers to provide information
to customers on blocking and filtering devices and any other method that
are or become available to manage children's access and block out material
they may not wish to access. (Recommendation 11)
The Committee recommends that any community education campaign that
is conducted to encourage the responsible use of on-line services should
have as one of its aims to make parents and those responsible for children,
aware of the pros and cons of the various devices available on the market
for blocking access to material considered by some to be unsuitable.
(Recommendation 12)
SCHOOL'S USE OF BLOCKING AND FILTERING SOFTWARE
3.18 In view of the Commonwealth government commitment to link all schools
around Australia through Education Network Australia (EdNA) to other providers
of education and information both in Australia and overseas, the Committee
sought to establish whether EdNA provided its clients with access to the
Internet. The Committee was told that, "EdNA does not provide Internet
services to schools... Blocking is an issue for people who are directly
accessing the material" and that each State and Territory school
system had their own approaches to the supervision of Internet access:
New South Wales has adopted a strategy whereby they have established
essentially a state-wide intranet where they have one Internet service
provider which provides a connection to all New South Wales government
schools. All material for those schools goes through a proxy server
and there is filtering on that proxy server level. Other States, Victoria
and Queensland for example have not chosen to go that route. [9]
3.19 The National Board of Employment, Education and Training (NBEET)
Schools Council commissioned the Centre for International Research on
Communication and Information (CIRCIT) to carry out a project to explore
the issue of schools' students access to controversial material on the
Internet. The NBEET report, published in April 1996 suggested that schools
generally used both organisational controls and "a variety of technical
controls, most of which could be described as censoring techniques."
to control access. [10] Organisational
controls included teachers always being on hand while their students accessed
on-line services and using selected students as Internet "monitors"
to supervise their peers.
3.20 The report found that most states' Education Departments sponsored
selected service providers. South Australia, for example, sponsors Nexus.
Victoria encourages the use of SOF Web which provides a directory of appropriate
educational materials and sites. Some service providers such as SchoolsNET
use 'access management tools' which allow teachers to control students'
access by filling out a password-protected World Wide Web form. Many schools
also use contracts and Acceptable Use Policies, often requiring the signatures
of both students and parents, setting out the rules for use of the Internet
and the consequences of breaching the rules. Withdrawing access to the
system for a period is the most common sanction.
3.21 The report found that few schools were planning to use filtering
software, citing the likelihood that too much 'good" material would
be lost in the process. The Committee notes, however that the project
was conducted in 1995 and early 1996 at a time when both blocking and
filtering software was less well developed than is currently the case.
Regardless of the path to Internet access chosen by different education
systems, schools are recognising that there is a need to educate students
as well as parents on the important role played by on-line services in
education and on the even greater role it is likely to play in the future.
The Committee heard, during its inquiry that teachers often do not feel
equipped to deal with this new environment:
My experience is that parents are turning to the teachers because
they perceive them to be expert educators. The teachers are turning
to the one member of staff who knows what they may be doing when they
access the Internet. [11]
The Committee understands that most States are increasing their expenditure
on professional development for teachers in the area of information technology
and access to computer on-line services. [12]
The evidence suggests that at present, much remains to be done in this
area.
PLATFORM FOR INTERNET SELECTION (PICS)
3.22 A greater flexibility of approach has been made possible in the
last eighteen months with the development by the World-Wide Web Consortium
of the PICS labelling infrastructure for the Internet. PICS allows individual
web pages to be rated. According to one expert, it enables:
- the creation of labels (by any of a range of people, using
any of a range of compliant rating schemes that nominate which content-rating
scheme is being used, who is doing the rating and what rating applies
to the page);
- the distribution of labels (via any of several channels); and
- blocking of the display of pages depending on the relationship
between the page's rating and the particular user's profile (which may
be performed at any of several levels). [13]
3.23 The labels themselves can be created by users or by the authors
of the documents placed on-line. Third-party labelling services are also
being offered. PICS allows rating to be done by the person using the software
according to the rating system chosen by that party. As a result, a site
or document could have many labels depending on who the user is. The software
also has the capacity to permit access at some times but not at others.
It enables parents to allow their 15 year old to access material which
they block to their 8 year old. It is even possible for a teacher to allow
access to material that is being taught during a particular lesson while
blocking everything else.
3.24 PICS was initially well received throughout the on-line industry:
within months of its release, Microsoft, Netscape, SurfWatch and CyberPatrol
announced that they had PICS-compatible software available. In July 1996,
CompuServe announced that it would label all web content it produces using
PICS-formatted RSACi (Recreational Software Advisory Council) labels.
SafeSurf and Cyberpatrol also have popular PICS-compatible rating schemes.
NetShepherd in Canada recently announced that it had rated 97 per cent
of English language sites on the Web.
3.25 The European Commission also endorsed the PICS concept but recommended
the development of a European rating system rather than use North American
influenced ratings such as RSACi. Likewise, the UK Internet Watch Foundation
has formed a group whose aim is to develop a rating system suitable for
the UK. In its 1996 report, the ABA stated that it: "strongly supports
the PICS initiative as it offers the only feasible means of applying an
Australian labelling system to on-line material". [14]
The ABA favoured the development of a "single on-line classification/rating
scheme for use by Australian content providers and consumers" and
recommended that the ABA should convene an On-Line Labelling Task Force
which would include OFLC and industry representation "to design a
purpose-built scheme for labelling on-line content". [15]
3.26 There was strong criticism of the ABA's endorsement of PICS by Electronic
Frontiers Australia (EFA) which claimed that the ABA (like groups in the
UK) was "now considering mandatory rating, thus enforcing a private
censorship system under the threat of government intervention". EFA
also argued in criticising PICS that "rating systems are complex,
potentially costly to use, often depend on value systems of other cultures,
and can have inherent deficiencies in content category definitions."
It is not clear whether EFA meant this criticism to apply to the RSACi
rating system rather than to PICS. [16]
3.27 The RSACi rating system was also strongly criticised in another
submission to the Committee for lack of independence (it is sponsored
by Software Publishers Association and Microsoft). The submissions argued
that it uses definitions that are not always "objective", does
not cover issues outside its limited selection of nudity, sex violence
and language and it imposes various requirements (including entering a
legal contract arrangement with RSACi) that a user may consider onerous.
[17]However, as other ratings systems
are developed (including a much needed Australian system) there may not
be a need to rely exclusively on RSACi's rating.
3.28 In spite of the many criticisms of the software packages currently
available for blocking and filtering and of the mixed reaction from some
quarters to the development of PICS, the Committee is greatly encouraged
by the progress that has been made in this area in less than 2 years since
it last reported on those matters. In particular, the issue of a labelling
system that is both relevant to the Australian context and compatible
with other similar systems overseas must be urgently addressed. This is
important also because, as one witness told the Committee:
PICS tends to work through self-labelling and policing by the
ratings bureaus, particularly RSACi. Under that sort of model, it is
difficult to have too many rating regimes. In practice, while it is
possible for everybody to have their own rating regime, under self-labelling
there are some technical difficulties because each individual Internet
document—if it is a Web document—will become burdened down
with labelling information. So I think...that while self-labelling is
the model, there is going to be a lot of pressure on countries for collaboration
to make sure that there is a degree of harmonisation. [18]
3.29 Both the Department of Communications and the Arts (DoCA) and the
ABA told the Committee that no progress had been made in the area of an
On-Line Labelling Taskforce because the relevant legislation had not been
passed in Parliament. [19] Now that
the relevant amendment to the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 has been
passed, the Committee believes that this question should be addressed
as a matter of urgency.
The Committee recommends that the Minister for Communications
and the Arts request (under Section 171 of the Broadcasting
Services Act 1992) that the Australian Broadcasting Authority
convene an On-Line labelling Task Force (to include representatives of
the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) and representatives
of the on-line services industry) to design a scheme for labelling on-line
content that takes into account Australian cultural values and the principles
that govern the existing classification scheme. (Recommendation 13)
Footnotes
[1] In response to a question from Senator Harradine,
Telstra told the Committee that in its estimates, "there are approximately
1.5 million Internet users in Australia" and "the market is
growing at around 12 % per cent per month.
[2] Submission No 45 (Australian Broadcasting
Authority)
[3] Evidence, p.288 (Mr Heitman)
[4] Submission No 7, (Ms Graham)
[5] Submission No 6, (Electronic Frontiers Australia)
[6] Evidence, p. 225 (Mr Taylor)
[7] Submission Nos 6 & 7, (EFA and Ms Graham)
[8] Evidence, p.312 (Ms Koomen)
[9] Evidence, p.292 (Dr Arthur).
[10] National Board of Employment, Education
and Training, Management of Student Access to Controversial
Material on the Internet, (NBEET Report No.48) Canberra AGPS, April
1996, p. 35
[11] Evidence, pp. 203 & 200 (Dr Newlands)
[12] Victoria and New South Wales for example,
have submitted to the Senate Committee on Employment, Education and Training
Inquiry into the Status of Teachers that in the next three to four years,
they are spending $56 and 177 million respectively in this area. Western
Australia will spend $20 million over three years. Like NSW, this figure
includes hardware and software. (Submission No 64, p.85, Hansard, 14 Feb
1997, p.662 and Sub. No 47, p.211 Senate EET Ctte)
[13] Roger Clarke "How do you cope with
Censorship? An Analysis for It Services Executives" http:www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/CensCope.htm
[14] ABA, July 1996 p.158
[15] ABA, July 1996, pp 91 & .93
[16] Submission No 6, p.7 (EFA)
[17] Submission No. 7 (Ms Graham)
[18] Evidence, p.262 (Mr Stewart)
[19] Evidence, p.260 (Mr Stewart) and p.300
(Ms Koomen)