Cyber-Patrols Threaten Internet Liberties

Arbitrary censorship? Hostility to vulnerable racial and social minorities? Lack of public redress? These words call up images of authoritarian regimes. Yet, according to expert opinion, cyber-patrols are policing the information highway, blocking public awareness of multi-cultural issues, and thereby threatening the democratic base of the Internet.

First to raise the alarm in Britain was the Cyber-Rights and Cyber-Liberties organisation founded in 1997 by Leeds University researcher, Yaman Akdeniz. The rights group cited the dangers of Internet rating systems and filtering tools designed by industry for the home and school markets. Intended to fit the preferences of parents and headmasters, these "family-friendly" tools are in effect, robot cyber patrols, searching for and sifting out unwanted ideas.

Filtering tools can be harmful
Cyber-patrols and their effects were first noted in the USA in late 1997. The Electronic Privacy Information Center found that "family friendly" software programs blocked and filtered out 90-99% of Internet messages broadcast by minority groups, among them the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the United Jewish Appeal. This suggests that "would be family friendly technologies can be very hostile and result in censorship of socially acceptable and legal content" , says Akdeniz, a PhD student at the Leeds CyberLaw Research Unit.

The use of filtering tools comes dangerously close to suppressing freedom of speech on the Internet, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The well-known US civil rights group claims that government and industry attempts to rate content on the Internet could put a torch to free speech online. In a trailblazing controversial report "Is Cyberspace Burning", the ACLU says, "in the physical world, people censor the printed word by burning books. But in the virtual world, you can just as easily censor controversial speech by banishing it to the farthest corners of cyberspace with blocking and rating schemes".

Unrepresentative
Cyber patrols and censoring devices now proliferate on the Internet, but, asks Akdeniz, "Who watches the watchmen". The so-called "family friendly" systems do not represent the multi-textured cultural network of the Internet. Akdeniz says "The software is over-inclusive and limits access to or censors inconvenient web sites". Furthermore, the "censorware" companies allow no appeal system to banned content providers and this subverts the free exchange of information that is the hallmark of the Internet community, he says.

Conference
Filtering is a regulatory nightmare in Europe also, according to participants at a conference held at the European Centre in London of the Freedom Forum, a premier US-based free speech organisation. "Online regulation is becoming a crazy quilt in Europe" said the convenor Adam C. Powell III in a February 1998 review article. Richard Swetenham, head of the media law advisory board for the European Commission, spoke of "countries struggling with online content filters and policies." Dave Banishar of the Electronic Privacy Information Center agreed, and termed some filters as "crude, arbitrary and others as merely moronic".

Black and ethnic minority rights to freely broadcast and be received formed part of a June 1998 conference on filters and the First Amendment at the Forum's home base in Arlington, Va. Kim Weidman reports that panelists drawn from press spokesmen, media managers and free speech activists, agreed "Government and private companies increasingly are trying to police the Internet, but those efforts are misguided."

Wider debate on the way "family-friendly" technologies and the companies providing them limit minority freedoms is needed. The 11th and 12th September "InfoCity" conference organised by Mike Jempson of PressWise, a media activist group, could offer a first opportunity. Sponsored by the Bristol City Council and the Brussels-based Information Society, delegates will examine how and why democratic participation in information technology should be enhanced.

Major issue
Clearly, the impact of software filters on the open exchange of information on the Internet is a major issue in western multi-racial and multi-cultural societies. Filtering based on popular prejudices distorts how vulnerable blacks in the US, Africans in France or Germany, and Afro-Caribbeans in Britain are viewed by their peers in schools and in communities. Filtering bars the information broadcast by their support groups from reaching their friends and educating their neighbours. On a wider level, filtering systems make a mockery of the vaunted promise of the Internet -- that the voices of many different peoples can be heard in a freely interactive expression of views and experiences.