Uncovering Censorship in Our Own Backyard: Herdict

This article is about a new website called Herdict, which was produced by The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. The website was launched in March of 2009, and its goal is to provide real-time information of subtle Internet censorship and filtering by governments and commercial firms. It is reliant on "crowd-sourcing," which means Internet users to report sites that are blocked or running slow. Heredict then plots this information using a map, thereby showing online censorship in real-time.

The website's creator, Jonathan Zittrain, believes Herdict can show subtle censorship occuring in the West. It is not only government censorship, but commercial, as well, that Herdict can spot. Zittrain points out that Internet service providers and websites make decisions about what appears on the Internet and what does not, with and without public knowledge. Many worry this type of monitoring could lead to abuse, and they hope Herdict can help.

Herdict may also be able to pinpoint when service providers are violating "Net neutrality" by restricting or slowing down access to sites the providers are not doing business with. Herdict can also show cases of service providers using geolocational filtering, which means they block content relevant to a specific government or country, for whatever reason. It is hoped that Herdict will allow people to see how subtle Internet censorship may be happening right now.

I think this a great, creative idea! To be able to track this sort of thing in real-time is amazing. And it allows researchers to go back over the data and look into instances to see if there may be a tie to censorship or something else. The article points out that it is not always censorship that Herdict detects. In once instance, a website was down for maintenance, but the site had been on a list of censored sites, and the user information allowed people to investigate it to determine if it was censorship. Censorship can be subtle, and hopefully this type of thing will open peoples' eyes to it.

Article:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/197907

Tennessee School Districts Censor GLBT Websites

In April, I read about a Tennessee school librarian and two Tennessee high school students who had contacted the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) for help regarding Internet filters that two Tennessee school districts were using which restricted students from accessing any website that included GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender) information and resources. The ACLU wrote a letter to each school district and gave them until April 29 to reply.

Two days ago, I read that one of the school districts did not respond to the ACLU's letter, and while the other district did respond, the response did not show enough "good faith" regarding the issue. Therefore, school media specialist Karyn Stort-Brinks and two students, along with the ACLU of Tennessee, decided to sue the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools and Knox County Schools. They claim that censorship of GLBT sites infringes on the students' First Amendment rights and denies them access to vital information, resources, and organizations regarding GLBT. They also state that the filters deny students access to both sides of the issue by filtering GLBT information but not sites related to the other side of the argument.

I 100 percent agree with the lawsuit and commend the librarian and the students for standing against such practices. I cannot believe schools would even think about using this type of filtering software. The April article states that Tennessee schools must use filters to protect students from harmful and obscene sites, but this filtering software, provided by Educational Networks of America, is set to automatically filter the term GLBT. I think this is ridiculous. There is a large amount of educational information that students cannot access because of these filters. The scary thing is that 105 other districts in the state use filtering software provided by ENA. Can you imagine how many students are being restricted from accessing these sites? This seems absurd to me, and I hope this sort of discrimination is ended quickly in Tennessee and anywhere else this software or similar filtering systems are being used.

Article: http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6659561.html