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The examples are legion, from the early blocking by CYBERsitter of the word “homosexual” in the sentence “The Catholic Church opposes homosexual marriage”—thus leaving the viewer to read that “The Catholic Church opposes marriage” —to the blocking of Congressman Dick Armey’s website, the University of Kansas’s Archie R. Dykes Medical Library, and the phrase “at least 21” from a human rights site reporting that at least 21 people were killed or wounded in an incident in Indonesia (“at least 21” being a phrase that is often blocked because it is likely to appear on pornography sites).1
Some of the most dramatic evidence of absurd overblocking came to light in the course of the lawsuit brought by the American Library Association and other groups to challenge CIPA. A three-judge federal court that heard the evidence explained that initially, filters trawl the web much as search engines do, “harvesting” for possibly relevant sites by looking for key words and phrases. There follows a process of “winnowing,” which also relies largely on mechanical techniques. Although most filter companies also use some human review, their relatively small staffs (between eight and a few dozen people) can give at most a cursory review to a fraction of the sites that are harvested each day.
The three-judge court found that as a result of their operation, filters mistakenly block tens of thousands of valuable web pages. Focusing on the filters used most often in libraries, the judges gave dozens of examples, among them a Knights of Columbus site, misidentified by Cyber Patrol as “adult / sexually explicit”; a site on fly fishing, misidentified by Bess as “pornography”; a guide to allergies and a site opposing the death penalty, both blocked by Bess as “pornography”; a site for aspiring dentists, blocked by Cyber Patrol as “adult/sexually explicit”; and a site that sells religious wall hangings, blocked by WebSense as “sex.”
1 Citations for all facts and quotations in this Foreword can be found in Internet Filters: A Public Policy Report, www.fepproject.org/policyreports/filters2.pdf.