Flawed filters annoy teens

Lana Hyatt was surfing the Web on the computers at Lee Mathson Middle School in San Jose, searching for pictures of her favorite music group, B2K, when she clicked on the forbidden link to MTV.com.

"This site has been blocked," the message read.

It's a typical response on computers connected to public networks - in libraries, on school campuses and even businesses. Some teens, who say there's nothing offensive about the sites they're visiting, are becoming irked by the restrictions placed upon them.

But the Internet filters put in place to keep hate sites, pornography sites and other offensive material away from their eyes aren't likely to disappear anytime soon.

Lana, 14, thinks the filters are flawed.

"They blocked many sites that didn't deserve a block and they missed a lot of sites," she said. "When I found that MTV.com was blocked, I just used Google" to find the images.

But what was so offensive on the MTV.com Web site?

It's hard to say. The rules and guidelines for blocking offensive content are decided, for the most part, by trial and error.

"We know almost nothing about how they select restricted sites," said Ann Beeson, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union in New York. "It's very dangerous because decisions can be made based on ideological factors, such as religious or personal factors."

For public schools, installing Internet filters on computer networks wasn't something school officials had much say about. The Children's Internet Protection Act, which was signed into law by President Clinton in 2000, requires all public schools and libraries that receive government funding to install filters.

Quang To, who worked as a volunteer in Oakland High School's administration office in Oakland, said the filter there has done a good job of keeping students out of pornography Web sites or those that allow illegal downloads of commercial software.

But that doesn't mean the system hasn't had its share of problems. A few pornography sites have slipped through, and other sites that should have been free to access were locked out, he said.

Most filtering programs work by searching for a specific list of words or phrases found in a Web site's address or on any page within that site. Mostly, those lists are monitored by a computer, which might not know that a site about breast cancer education isn't necessarily offensive. That's where people intervene, updating the lists and marking some sites as safe or unsafe.

David Miller, vice president of the Citizens for Community Values group in Cincinnati, said the government has set standards for filtering and that the filters have done a good job so far.

"Sometimes students are doing research and have to go to a site that's been labeled questionable," Miller said. "But I think, by and large, that the filters are objective because offensive things can be easily defined."

However, on the Internet, there's always a way around restrictions.

There are programs, such as the circumventor software found at www.peacefire.org, that will connect a blocked computer to an unblocked remote computer to access the Web site in question. The filtering system thinks that the user is accessing a safe site, when the user is actually viewing something that should have been blocked.