[Publib] Why filters don't work.

[M. Brian Palmer]

People:

Lately the issue of filtering has been much on my mind. This thorny 
issue has fallen right into the hands of libraries and librarians and I 
am thankful for that, for in this realm the notion of 'thinking 
critically' may be seen to be making a last stand. While many recognize 
that it is preferable not to censor, we also recognize that public 
outcry (however misguided, misinformed, and manipulated it might be) 
often demands that something be done to 'protect' people from 
'unpleasantness'. To my mind unpleasantness is an immitigable fact of 
life that we ceaselessly create for ourselves in our minds, and it is 
only through open access to uncensored information from both sides of 
any debate that individuals and the collective can move forwards with 
tolerance and compassion for the widest possible expression of the 
potential of  human experience (and not the arbitrary assignment of 
values from one static rule-based 'culture' or another that is 
inevitably, and particularly in today's world almost immediately 
fractured from the ever-evolving physical and spiritual reality that is 
the universe).

The central tent of critical thinking must be that before we speak on 
any subject where we are striving to change what others do or think we 
should be seen to have done our homework, and investigate both sides of 
the argument, before we are granted a soapbox . The recent case where a 
person wanted the Harry Potter books banned, but couldn't even be 
bothered to read the books is exactly the kind of case where 
consideration of this person's concerns should be rejected out of hand 
(I suppose for this person, Jesus walking on water is an acceptable form 
of magic, err miracle?). But I digress.

That bit of verbosity being spun out I'll get to the bottom line:

Filters will never work in the way intended and here's one big reason why:

http://www.peacefire.org/circumventor/

The guy who wrote this is (apparently, I haven't done my homework) a 
programmer from Microsoft and he (apparently) wrote this for high school 
students specifically so they could get around school computer filters 
(read: library computer filters). I for one applaud him.

I'd be interested to know just how many patrons are using services like 
this on your library computers to circumvent filters *right now*. It's 
easy as pie to do, and there is no way to stop it that isn't even more 
onerous than the drawbacks associated with the use of current filtering 
technology. When spam is stopped, filters will work! It is essentially 
the same problem. The Internet was (very successfully) designed to 
nonjudgmentally deliver strings of ones and zeros as reliably and 
fault-tolerantly as possible. Everything else was an afterthought!

FYI.

Brian

-- 
***************
M. Brian Palmer
A Fly on the Wall with opinionms that are not necessarily those of his employer. Yoiks!

"it is always better to understand the truths 
of the world as metaphors ingrained with implicit 
contradiction, rather than simple facts"
	eM, the unknown philosopher