[Note from Matthew Gaylor:  Peacefire.org is a civil rights 
organization formed to represent the interests of young people on the 
Internet and to aid their freedom of speech.  Bennett Haselton is the 
founder of the organization and webmaster. CyberPatrol is a popular 
Internet filtering software application, owned by the toy maker 
Mattel.  Many pro-freedom Internet activists, including myself, refer 
to such software as censorware.  Programs like CyberPatrol are 
advertised to block pornography, hate sites, sites that promote 
violence, etc.  Many public schools and libraries are mandating 
either by policy or by law that "censorware" filtering software be 
used.  I'm hard pressed to find anything more Orwellian than to allow 
the state to "filter" what may or may not be seen or read.]


Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2000 23:26:55 -0800
From: Bennett Haselton <bennett@peacefire.org>
Subject: ACLU defends Peacefire against Cyber Patrol lawyers



(Happy Oscar night!)

A lot has happened lately -- most recently, Peacefire has been threatened
with legal action by Cyber Patrol after mirroring a copy of a program that
two computer experts wrote which decrypts Cyber Patrol's list of blocked
sites.  On Monday the ACLU will be in court defending Peacefire against
lawyers from Mattel (the company that now owns Cyber Patrol).

The program is called "cphack.exe" and was written by Eddy L O Jansson from
Sweden and Matthew Skala from Canada.  If you run it on a computer that has
Cyber Patrol installed, it will locate the encrypted list of blocked sites,
decrypt the list, and print out the decoded list for you.  Naturally many
people viewed this as a good thing -- on the grounds that Cyber Patrol
customers have a right to know what the program blocks -- but Cyber Patrol
has obtained a restrainingorder against the original authors of the
program to prevent them from distributing it.  A network of mirror sites
has sprung up in response, and you can still download CPHack.exe -- along
with an essay explaining how it was written and what it does -- from one of
the mirror sites at:

 http://www.openpgp.net/censorship/

 Note that it will *not* work with the very latest version of 
Cyber Patrol
which can be downloaded from Cyber Patrol's Web site -- in the latest
version, Cyber Patrol has changed the encryption, so that CPHack.exe no
longer works.  (It will only work if you have an old copy of Cyber Patrol
lying around.)

(Cyber Patrol has been trying to spin this to the press by saying that
cphack.exe disables Cyber Patrol, and the real reason they're suing is to
stop kids from getting around the program.  CPHack.exe does reveal the
Cyber Patrol password, but this is nothing new -- we've had programs on our
site for almost 2 years that do this, and Cyber Patrol never sued us.  Most
everyone involved in the issue knows that Cyber Patrol is suing to block
distribution of the codebreaker because it shows parents and teachers what
Cyber Patrol blocks -- but naturally it sounds better for Cyber Patrol to
say that they are suing to stop kids from being able to hack the program.
Cyber Patrol is not above a little press manipulation in the sense that the
bottom of the Pacific Ocean is not above the outer stratosphere.)

The ACLU's press release on the case, dated Friday, is at:

 http://www.aclu.org/news/2000/n032400a.html

We will be sending out updates on the ACLU's work as the case progresses.
When it comes to Internet censorship, they're the best -- please visit
their Web site and join if you like what they're doing :)



Also in the last few weeks, Peacefire has released two programs that can
decrypt the lists of sites blocked by two other blocking software packages,
X-Stop and I-Gear.  In both cases, after we had decrypted the list, we
extracted the first 50 working URL's from the lists in the ".edu" domain,
to analyze their error rate for blocking student home pages.  For .edu
sites, X-Stop had an error rate of 68% and I-Gear had an error rate of 76%
-- pretty bad for companies which have actually tried to get patents on
their "artificial intelligence" software.

And by "error", we mean pages that there really is no excuse for blocking
-- for example, on the I-Gear list, we found, among other things, (1) a
diagram of a milk pasteurization system written in Portuguese, (2) a page
with 75 K of Latin, (3) two PowerPoint slides about network setup, and (4)
volumes 4 and 6 of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", but not
volumes 1, 2, 3 or 5, which were linked from the same page (apparently
volumes 4 and 6 had all the "good parts").

The reports, including the lists of 50 sites that we analyzed, are at:

 http://peacefire.org/censorware/X-Stop/xsdecode/
 http://peacefire.org/censorware/I-Gear/igdecode/

X-Stop never threatened legal action (although they did take some steps to
stop our codebreaker from orking).  And Symantec, the company that owns
I-Gear but is much better-known for other products, did threaten legal
action but did not follow through.  This means Cyber Patrol is still the
only company that has ever actually gone to court to stop people from
decrypting their list and finding out what their program blocks.

(We also discovered that when you install I-Gear, it extracts your "name"
and "company name" from your computer and uploads this information back to
Symantec's servers.  Secretly retrieving the names of people who install
your software is considered one of the worst kinds of privacy violations by
a software company, especially a company as large and well-known as Symantec.)

------

So, keep tabs on our site for more information about the blocking software
court cases.  More and more information is coming out about what blocking
software companies are blocking, the steps they've taken to keep people
from finding out, and the less-than-honest statements that the companies
have been giving to the media -- now here's hoping that the ACLU will keep
it legal for us to distribute the tools which people can use to find out
the truth for themselves.  (Breaking codes on encrypted blocked-site lists
is not illegal, but if Cyber Patrol succeeds in making it illegal, then any
time someone criticizes blocking software, they could run the risk of
getting sued!)

It's been great to have a chance to contribute our research.  As usual, we
can't afford our own lawyers and lobbyists or even our own long-distance
phone calls, but if we can produce research and information that helps big
groups like the ACLU and EFF.org to defend the Internet free speech rights
of people under 18, then it's worth it.

 -Bennett

------

Some recent articles on the I-Gear codebreaker:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,34842,00.html
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-1567022.html
http://www.computerworld.com/home/print.nsf/CWFlash/000314F75A
http://slashdot.org/yro/00/03/09/133243.shtml

Some recent articles on the Cyber Patrol lawsuit:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,35038,00.html
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/jk032000.htm
http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/03/21/cyberpatrol.decoder/
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-1582945.html
http://www.politechbot.com/cyberpatrol/ap.032400.txt
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/085/business/ACLU_enters_legal_battl 
e_over_Web_filtering_software+.shtml

bennett@peacefire.org     http://www.peacefire.org
(425) 649 9024


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