Friday, August 2, 2002

LOGGING IN WITH . . . Benjamin G. Edelman 'Politics of Control' Leads a Law Student to Challenge Digital-Copyright Act By ANDREA L. FOSTER Benjamin G. Edelman, a first-year student at Harvard University's law school, is the latest academic researcher to challenge the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing Mr. Edelman, last month filed a lawsuit against N2H2 Inc., a Seattle-based Internet filtering company, in U.S. District Court in Boston. The suit asks a judge to prevent N2H2 from suing Mr. Edelman under the digital-copyright law should he decide to bypass the company's encryption, which prevents him from discovering its complete list of blocked Web sites. (See an article from The Chronicle, July 26.) Q. How did you become interested in Internet filtering? A. I had been aware of it generally for some years. It's hard to say when it all started. But the ACLU contacted me two years ago as they were preparing to challenge a variety of state laws requiring the use of filtering software in libraries. Alaska, for example, had such a law, and there were some other states. ... These laws were unconstitutional and they were preparing to bring challenges to various state courts. Then the Children's Internet Protection Act was passed, mandating the use of such software nationally in all libraries and public schools receiving federal funding. And that became the ACLU's priority and mine. Q. How did the ACLU hear about you? A. I had done some expert work in at least one, maybe a few other cases prior to that time. I had been working at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society here at Harvard Law School, where I guess my name had gotten some exposure. Two years ago, of course, I was a sophomore in college. But nonetheless, I guess they called up and asked for me by name. Q. Were you already interested in computers before you came to Harvard? A. I had been interested in computers for about as long as I can remember. I had been doing some computer-related work in junior high school and high school, helping people choose computers, putting them together, designing databases and networks. And so I came to Harvard with a particular interest in that subject. Q. When the lawsuit was filed, you talked about how it concerned "technology and the politics of control." What did you mean by that? A. First, I should credit the phrase to Professor [Jonathan] Zittrain of the law school, who used it as a subtitle of his course, "Internet and Society: The Technologies and Politics of Control." And I think he would say it's his research interest, and it certainly is mine. The core idea is roughly as follows: The Internet has a certain appearance to it, when you first connect to it, when people were first learning about it. And I suppose in 1996, 1997, 1998, it seems like the Internet could be whatever you wanted it to be, that no one could particularly change what it was, and no one could stop you from doing what you wanted to do. If you wanted to put a death threat on the Internet about your neighbor or your enemy, you could do that, and no one could really get you. If you wanted to steal music using the Internet, you could do that, and no one could get you. ... The later idea -- my idea, and Zittrain's -- was that, in fact, there were a variety of forces that for economic gain, for political gain, for other reasons, might seek to restrict what people could and couldn't do on the Internet. In hindsight, it seems trivial -- of course that's true. Powerful forces remain powerful even when computers get hooked together in a particular way. But at the time, it was something of a key insight. And it still guides the things that I find interesting to study, to research, analyze, and write about. There are a few specific examples that make it all fit together. Certainly, this filtering is an example of control, someone getting between you and where you want to go. You want to read about breast cancer, N2H2 says that that's pornography, and so they won't let you. That's politics and technologies of control in my book, for example. Q. Why do you think it's so important for consumers to see a list of blocked Web sites? A. Well, when one makes a major purchase, when you buy a car, for example, it's always desirable to see if you're getting a good deal. With a car, you'd look under the hood, ... you'd read Consumer Reports. But you also might personally open up the hood of the car, look inside, see if the pieces seem to be put together properly, take it for a test drive. ... When we make purchases, especially large purchases, we generally find it advantageous to be able to examine whether or not we're getting our money's worth. With filtering software, though, the design of the software, as specifically intended by the software's creators, prevents users of the software, purchasers of the software, anyone else seeking to evaluate it -- the design prevents them from actually evaluating it. The list of what's blocked is secret. ... And of course with the government as purchaser, it becomes all the more important, and from a public-policy perspective, to see that our tax dollars are well spent. Q. What about the counterargument that if people were really upset about their inability to see the list of blocked sites, then they just wouldn't buy the filtering software? A. There are a few different problems with that argument. First is that the people who are buying the filtering are not, by and large, the people who are subject to the filtering. The person in a particular library who is buying the filter, for example, is likely the network administrator of the filter, probably a pretty savvy computer user who can figure out a way around the filter. If anyone can do it, it's the person who's in charge of putting it in. He's the expert in computers, after all. ... So the person who's making the decision is, oddly, not all that affected by the filter, as I think about it. Secondly, that person is facing a variety of pressures, pressure from any number of laws requiring him to install that software whether he likes it or not. For example, pressure from his boss who says, "Do something about the problem of pornography." So he does this, which seems to him -- well, at least it's something. He can tell his boss what he did. The many people -- thousands of people in a given library who attempt to read about breast cancer, or AIDS, or how to put on a condom, and are blocked -- each of them has only a very small complaint. "I tried to look at this one Web page this one time, and it wasn't accessible to me." And inevitably the answer is "So, what? One Web page, one time, what's the big deal? Like, find something else to get excited about." [N2H2], too, has the idea that this really isn't that important, and they're on to something. Any particular instance is hard to get all that worked up about as against the greater evils in the world -- hunger, poverty, and so forth. But collectively, the thousands, or hundreds of thousands, millions of over-blocks that happen in the course of, say, a year in the United States, that is a big deal. And of course, when it's your Web site that library patrons can't view, that, too, is a big deal. So I dispute the claim by some that this isn't an important problem. It's hard to measure, but that's not to say that it's not just as serious as any number of other problems relating to censorship, basically. Q. But if the judge sides with you, might not N2H2's business crumble? A. Well, it's an interesting question. Luckily we have some data to answer the question of what's going to happen. And here's the data that we have. A few years ago, a couple of programmers accessed the entire block list of a blocking program called CyberPatrol, and they wrote a program called CPHack. ... And with that, they extracted from the CyberPatrol program a full and complete list of all the Web pages blocked by CyberPatrol. And they published it on the Internet, along with the software that they used, and a description of their methods, of the sort that one might turn in to a computer-science class. ... The short of it is, though, that the company that makes CyberPatrol, they're called SurfControl, they still exist. I went to their office. ... They're still there. They're not bankrupt, and this happened years and years ago. So, cry me a river, so to speak. The fact is, this has happened before, and I'm sure it's unpleasant for the filtering company. They'd rather not have this happen. But to say we're going to go out of business -- well, I don't know. It seems like the last time this happened, the people that it happened to, they didn't go out of business. In fact, they got quite a lot of press coverage. The world was discussing whether their program was any good, how many porn sites it blocked, how many porn sites it didn't block, a lot of discussion of their product. It arguably was good for the company. And, in any case, it was certainly good, I'm confident, for the genre of software. It was good for consumers because consumers benefited from the resulting discussion of the mistakes made by the program and of what the program was doing right. And so libraries and public schools are better as a result of that case. Q. Did your interest in law stem from your interest in technology? A. My interest in the law, I suppose, stems in part from a family tradition, to be honest. Grandfather was a lawyer, parents, uncle is a law professor. ... But it also stems, of course, in large part from interesting experiences in and around the law, especially these past few years, absolutely. Q. What is your latest project at the Berkman center? A. Well, I've been studying filtering in a number of countries. I'm sure you're aware that China filters the Internet, which is to say that if you're in China, you can't get to the whole Internet, you can only get to those parts of it that the Chinese government has seen fit to allow. And with methods that I'm still working on, but more or less have in place, I can connect to the Chinese Internet and I can test what is and is not accessible there. I've already released the results of similar work on Saudi Arabia, where I've found that a large number of sites were inaccessible, including sites about women, women's history, women's suffrage, women's employment; sites about humor, pop culture, record companies, movie-production companies -- and not just dirty movies, either, to be clear. Warner Bros. Records, for example, was blocked. And the entire Warner Bros. Records [Web] site. That's pretty serious business. ... I'm still working on the China analysis. I know it's a much bigger deal. Everyone's so much more interested in China. It turns out to be much harder to do the project about China than about Saudi Arabia, just because of the way their network is set up. It's harder to get connected, given my abilities and methods, to date. But the Saudi Arabia work is released and others are in progress, and I've got quite a few countries in the works. Background article from The Chronicle: Law Student Sues Web-Filtering Company in a Challenge to Millennium Copyright Act (7/26/2002) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

UMass to begin collective bargaining with unionized resident assistants Adjuncts' complaint may delay settlement in Washington State class action Amid student rioting, head of U. of Dhaka heeds calls to step down New degrees, majors, or programs are announced by 14 institutions "Politics of control" leads a law student to challenge digital-copyright act