Take back your politicians,
            Take back your snoops and moles.
            Take back your superstitions.
            Take back the Cyber Patrol.
                         --- paraphrased from Tom Petty's
                         "Yer Jammin' Me"

Hey, buddy, did you know I'm a militant extremist? Cyber Patrol, the Net filtering software designed to protect your children from cyberfilth, says so. Toss me in with those who sleep with a copy of "The Turner Diaries" under their pillows and those who file nuisance liens against officials of the IRS. Seems my Web site is dangerous viewing.

Crypt discovered he was a putative militant extremist while reading a story on Net censorship posted on Bennett Haselton's PeaceFire Web site. Haselton is strongly critical of Net filtering software and he's had his share of dustups with vendors like Cyber Patrol, who intermittently ban his site for having the temerity to be a naysayer.

Haselton's page included some links so readers could determine what other Web pages were banned by various Net filters. On a lark, I typed in the URL of the Crypt Newsletter. Much to my surprise, I had been banned by Cyber Patrol. The charge? Militant extremism. Cyber Patrol also has its own facility for checking if a site is banned, called the CyberNOT list. Just to be sure, I double-checked. Sure enough, I was a CyberNOT.

Now you can call me Ray or you can call me Joe, but don't ever call me a militant extremist! I've never even seen one black helicopter transporting U.N. troops to annex a national park.

However, nothing is ever quite as it seems on the Web and before I went into high dudgeon over political censorship--the Crypt Newsletter has been accused of being "leftist" for exposing various government, academic, and software industry charlatans--I told some of my readership. Some of them wrote polite--well, almost polite--letters to Debra Greaves, Cyber Patrol's head of Internet research. And Greaves wrote back almost immediately, indicating it had all been a mistake.

Crypt News Web site was blocked as a byproduct of a ban on another page on the same server. "We do have a [blocked] site off of that server with a similar directory. I have modified the site on our list to be more unique so as to not affect [your site] any longer," she wrote.

Perhaps I should have been reassured that Cyber Patrol wasn't banning sites for simply ridiculing authority figures, a favorite American past time. But if anything, I was even more astonished to discover the company's scattershot approach to blocking. It doesn't include precise URLs in its database. Instead, it prefers incomplete addresses that block everything near the offending page. The one that struck down Crypt News was "soci.niu.edu/~cr," a truncated version of my complete URL. In other words: Any page on the machine that fell under "~cr" was toast.

Jim Thomas, a sociology professor at Northern Illinois University, runs this particular server, and it was hard to imagine what would be militantly extreme on it. Nevertheless, I ran the news by Jim. It turns out that the official home page of the American Society of Criminology's Critical Criminology Division, an academic resource, was the target. It features articles from a scholarly criminology journal and has the hubris to be on record as opposing the death penalty but didn't appear to have anything that would link it with bomb-throwing anarchists, pedophiles, and pornographers.

There was, however, a copy of the Unabomber Manifesto on the page.

I told Jim I was willing to bet $1,000 cash money that Ted Kaczynski's rant was at the root of Cyber Patrol's block. Thomas confirmed it, but I can't tell you his exact words. It might get this page blocked, too. Actually, he said it twice.

What this boils down to is that Cyber Patrol is banning writing on the Web that's been previously published in a daily newspaper: The Washington Post. It can also be said the Unabomber Manifesto already has been delivered to every corner of American society.

If the ludicrous quality of this situation isn't glaring enough, consider that one of Cyber Patrol's partners, CompuServe, promoted the acquisition of electronic copies of the Unabomber Manifesto after it published by the Post. And these copies weren't subject to any restrictions that would hinder children from reading them. In fact, I've never met anyone from middle-class America who said, "Darn those irresponsible fiends at the Post! Now my children will be inspired to retreat to the woods, write cryptic essays attacking techno-society, and send exploding parcels to complete strangers."

Have you?

So, will somebody explain to me how banning the Unabomber Manifesto, the ASC's Critical Criminology home page, and Crypt Newsletter protects children from smut and indecency? Sotto voce: That's a rhetorical question.

Cyber Patrol is strongly marketed to public libraries, and has been acquired by some, in the name of protecting children from Net depravity.

Funny, Crypt thought -- no, Crypt News knows -- a public library would be one of the places you'd be more likely to find a copy of the Unabomber Manifesto.

George Smith is the author of The Virus Creation Labs, a book about computer virus writers and the antivirus industry. This essay first appeared in C|Net's Perspectives/Soapbox Editorial Page.

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