Nazis and Pottery: You're Being Blocked

In the halls and classrooms of Jamesville-DeWitt High School, teachers' walls have posters with slogans like, "Patriotism is dissent," and "Censorship is blindness - Read!" The school newspaper, the RamPage, has received extensive student interest and a multitude of awards for articles on topics as controversial as teen pregnancy and student drug use. This makes J-DHS seem like a haven for freedom of speech and information. So why are things like the search term "nazi" blocked? Why can't we access conspiracy sites, any video posted on YouTube or our personal email, regardless of the fact that our intentions are often actually to gain more information? Also"”why is the search term "tobacco" blocked, but not the Philip Morris site? Why is it that Erowid is blocked but not the Drug Enforcement Agency, though both provide drug education? All of these inaccessible terms and sites could increase our education but they are blocked. The reasons for this are actually quite complex. Because of government required Internet censorship in schools and libraries all over the United States, schools like J-DHS cannot and will not be intellectually free. Our potential is stilted, as it must be, or else the school would endure a highly injurious cut of funds for technology from the government.

The classrooms at J-DHS, like over a million others around the country, have restricted access to the Internet. This is something students and staff have mostly gotten used to, though it actually might be not just inconvenient, but unconstitutional. But the government actually requires such filtering. In the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), passed in December 2000, schools and libraries are required to use a "technology protection measure" to ensure that our fragile minds aren't exposed to anything that is obscene, qualifies as child pornography, or is "harmful to minors" at schools or libraries. However, everyone is subject to these "protection measures." Teachers and students who aren't minors are still blocked by this act that's supposed to "protect" minors.

Interestingly, the legislation defines "harmful to minors" as anything sexual or anything that, "taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value as to minors." According to these legislators, schools now have the authority to decide what qualifies as having artistic or literary value. If your perspectives happen to clash, well, hopefully you have Internet access at home. In fact, because some blocked resources are only available to those who have internet at home, it puts those who cannot afford the Internet at home at a disadvantage.

The worst part of this is that E-Rate funding is contingent upon such censorship, and equal Internet access is the whole point of E-Rate. E-Rate is a section of legislation that sets away a fund for schools in need so that they can afford technology resources. It is written in CIPA that the school must have some kind of block in order to receive E-Rate funds. Schools have to apply for the funds and once they receive them they can use them for their technology-related purchases. The E-Rate program is in effect because of a small section of legislation on the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which, according to a report celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the program, has since 1998, "provided nearly $19 billion in discounted telecommunication services, Internet access and internal networking to tens of thousands of eligible schools, libraries and consortia." The E-Rate fund system, says the authors of the document, "truly does stand for education, equity and equality for everyone." But CIPA takes some of the truth out of that statement.

Technology Coordinator Philip Luckette says that the funding from E-Rate to our school's technology program is significant and without it we'd have trouble with funding our school budget, our general school fund, and our technology purposes. The E-Rate funding that our school receives for complying with the CIPA isn't a mere triviality"”it's a major financial support that's at stake.

Mr. Luckette says he feels that, "the district has the right to not allow (some content)," which because of CIPA is legally true. He hesitated when I asked him if this was censorship. "Yes," he said reluctantly, and offered another reason for the blockage. In some ways, having the blocks ensures "quality of service," because the school has limited bandwidth and high traffic at sites like fantasy football leagues means that people using the Internet productively don't have as good of a connection. Because of this, blocking sites like the football leagues, which Luckette says the school does sometimes only temporarily, will ensure that more bandwidth is reserved for educational uses.

J-DHS Principal Paul Gasparini agrees that the school actually does need to limit student Internet access.

"We need to minimize distraction for kids in school," he says, because as a school, "we're not here to provide a wide range of entertainment, that's not our job. If we open it up we are in some way, shape, or form condoning the use of that material." He compares the Internet to a library, where the school, because of space confinements, has to limit what books and resources are available to students.

Ironically, the American Library Association has already stated its disapproval of Internet censorship in schools and libraries. The organization finds CIPA unconstitutional because, "The filtering mandate imposed by Congress imposes restrictions on access to constitutionally protected speech on the patrons served by libraries," as it says on its website. "Restrictions on access to speech in the library are antithetical to the mission of the library to provide patrons with unfettered access to all available and constitutionally protected speech."

Quite unsurprisingly, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has shown similar sentiments in its reaction to CIPA. On their website, they say that the act was passed despite the fact that their commissioned panel advised against blocks because they feared that they would be used incorrectly. The ACLU also says that those who do have Internet access at home would gain an advantage over those who don't, thus creating an economic "digital divide." This is the kind of effect E-Rate, as a technology fund set up by the government to assist schools in affording technology related resources, was supposed to eliminate.

In fact, the CIPA legislation requiring blocks is only the first half of the problem. The act gives administrators the power to block or unblock whatever they want, but in reality it's not even that simple. Though Mr. Luckette says, "we block the minimum required by CIPA," and Mr. Gasparini says he feels that the school "shouldn't block access to information that would be useful for any subject," both were surprised to hear the search term "nazi" is blocked--a word that would, in fact, be useful for some subjects. The word, Mr. Luckette says, probably turned up as a "false negative" in the school's blocking system.

It turns out that a lot of what is blocked is not decided by protective administrators' careful decisions but the algorithms of the blocking system our school uses, a program made by a company called 8e6 Technologies. They explain how the filter works on their website. New or frequently visited websites are searched by the program's "crawlers." The site is then analyzed and it may be placed into one of over 90 categories and subcategories. Clients can choose to add to or take away sites or categories from the categories provided.

The school blocks many categories like "alcohol," "criminal skills," and "games," but allows some like "paranormal," "R-rated," and "travel," showing that though the constitutionality and though adherence to CIPA is debatable, they are lenient in some respects.

This all sounds really effective except that just as the Congress panel suspected, sites or terms which shouldn't be blocked sometimes are blocked anyway. Those are the false negatives, and the instances in which actual productive research becomes more difficult for those who only have access from schools or libraries.

J-DHS Art teacher Steve Pilcher agrees that the blocking has adverse effects, especially in his ceramics classes. His site, on which he displays mugs and bowls created by himself and his wife, has been blocked by the school's filters. This blockage plus the lack of access to YouTube frustrates him.

"Why limit us to one perspective when at our fingers there are multitudes of varying perspectives?" he asks. He says that he wishes he could use YouTube videos to teach hand building and throwing techniques in ceramics classes when he's busy with one student and another needs a different way to learn.

"My classes are large and I often have to ask a student to wait," he says. "(YouTube provides) individually based learning." He does concede, however, that students do use the computer as a distraction and says that the computer should only be used with supervision. And though the school tells teachers that if they want to show videos, they can do so by downloading them beforehand, Pilcher says this method isn't as useful.

"I would like to use it as an ongoing tool, not a presentation," he says.

Pilcher's personal site is blocked by the school's filtering system, and though he requested that it be released, he was told it could not be done.

"I would like the opportunity to share what it means to be a practicing artist," he says. This is a major problem with the 8e6 software; CIPA says that sites should be unblocked when teachers present a "bona fide" purpose. Being unable to control the fact that some terms or sites are wrongfully blocked shows a major flaw with this software. If it can't unblock where CIPA allows unblocking, that makes it a faulty program. So in addition to producing false negatives, even powers that are granted by CIPA aren't allowed to schools because of the restrictions of the school's program. The school chose this program to filter our Internet as required by CIPA, but it doesn't give us even the rights CIPA does allow, which further hurts students and teachers.

Several of the school's blocks are ultimately detrimental to our education. It's ironic, biased and limiting that as I mentioned earlier, while the word "tobacco" is blocked and we can't get information on drugs from Erowid, the Philip Morris site goes unblocked, along with drug information from the Drug Enforcement Agency. This could be the nature of the 8e6 block categories but it gives students doing research a limited perspective.

Another dangerous block is lack of access to supremacy and conspiracy sites. The main message of these sites is to encourage skeptical people to believe what they haven't been told elsewhere. Having laws enable the blockage of government conspiracy sites gives them even more power to tell young, curious minds that things are being hidden from them. Instead of enabling such mind tricks, and in general, we should consider a completely different approach to blockage.

The main reasons cited for requiring blocks on the Internet are ensuring student protection and productivity. What if this is done not by programs, but by people? CIPA requires a censoring program but since that has many obvious flaws, maybe it should be people, not technology, doing the job.

J-DHS Library Media Specialist Mary Panek says that this is possible, even necessary.
"If students can't learn how to identify websites as being reliable resources, we're doing them a disservice." Finding sketchy sites "should be a teachable moment," she says. Because we are not consistently teaching Internet responsibility, she says, "students tend not to think about what they're using for information...they don't take the time to think about the information, or who posts it."

The schools decision to block some of the categories they've chosen ought to be questioned. Instead of blocking sites which are unreliable or biased, we should inform students when they are researching of what to look out for and how to only take reliable sites seriously. Thus, conspiracy sites, used as example, would become not a secret but an important example.

As for students using the internet purely for entertainment and using up too much bandwidth, perhaps the Internet regulation should be in the hands of the teachers who are having their classes use the Internet. CIPA and 8e6 take the power away from teachers to use sites to teach their classes, and takes resources away from both teachers and students. Perhaps instead of using an overall block, teachers should be empowered with the ability to change blocks. They could block more sites when students should be only on one website, and the freedom to browse the web as needed when trying to do an open-ended research project where they may need to look up blocked topics like sex, violence or drugs. Though, as Luckette said in response to such an idea, this would require a lot of teacher training, at least the students and teachers would have the opportunity to converse and work on a reasonable system of being both productive and constitutional as the situation calls for it.

Blocking on a case-by-case basis isn't possible with the restrictive 8e6 program the school is currently using. We need to find or request the development of a program which presents a compromise. It should let students use as little or as much of the Internet in school as they need along with learning about Internet responsibility. This would prove a more beneficial and more constitutional solution to the censorship that is currently pervasive at an otherwise lenient school.