March 24, 2000 06:18pm
Cyber Patrol Sues Hackers
Source: News Wire
In the latest entanglement in the debate over filtering software and censorship, the company that makes Cyber Patrol software is trying to stop the distribution of a program that allows Cyber Patrol users to see the list of Web sites it blocks.
A judge in U.S. District Court in Boston will hold a hearing Monday in a lawsuit filed by Microsystems Software, the makers of Cyber Patrol, against two people who reverse engineered the software and posted a program to their Web sites allowing customers to see the list of blocked sites. The program also allows users to bypass the Cyber Patrol password that parents use to control the settings, said Sydney Rubin, a spokesman for The Learning Co., which owns Mattel, the parent company of Microsystems.
After the court issued a temporary restraining order last week, the defendants, Matthew Skall of Canada and Eddy Jansson of Sweden, removed the program from their Web sites. The lawsuit alleges that the defendants are in violation of copyright law because they "decompiled" the software to create their program, breaking the licensing agreement, Rubin said.
Microsystems filed a separate lawsuit against Skall in Canada this week. The company doesn't plan any legal measures against Jansson in Sweden, Rubin said, adding that she could not elaborate.
Cyber Patrol also served subpoenas this week to three people who posted the program on mirror sites to the original two Web sites: Waldo Jaquith of Virginia, Bennett Haselton of Washington and Lindsay Haisley of Texas, according to ACLU lawyer Chris Hansen, who is representing them. The three have taken down their mirror sites. Microsystems is seeking a preliminary injunction to keep the decoding program off any Web sites, including mirror sites.
"Publishing the list (of blocked sites) would be like publishing a list of dirty URLs for teenage boys. It runs counter to the product," says Rubin, who adds that the list of sites has been revealed before by people who were able to obtain it without reverse engineering the software.
But Hansen argues that a ban on the decoding program constitutes a prior restraint on speech in violation of the First Amendment.
Parents – and now governments considering using the software in public schools and libraries – need to know what Web sites the software blocks to make sure it prevents access to undesirable sites and allows access to legitimate sites. "How are we to be able to determine if Cyber Patrol is a good product or not without knowing what it blocks?" Hansen asked. "They try to keep it a secret from people who lawfully own the product."
Customers can find out if a particular Web site is blocked by searching by name for the site either in the software or on the company's Web site, Rubin points out.
Hansen complains that the lawsuit is unnecessary because Microsystems can easily block their customers from accessing any Web site on which the decoding program appears. The company has already blocked some of those sites, Rubin said.
These aren't the first attempts to expose Web sites blocked by filtering software, which critics complain often blocks legitimate sites. For instance, Haselton says he recently decrypted the lists of sites blocked by two other programs, I-Gear and X-Stop, and found that they had error rates as high as 76 percent for blocking pages in the .edu domain. Among the sites found to be blocked by X-Stop were the American Association of Women, a Quaker site and a map of Disney World, said the ACLU's Hansen.
Even Rubin acknowledges that Cyber Patrol blocks Planned Parenthood because some parents might find it objectionable for smaller children. Parents can add or delete sites to the list, she said. The list contains about 100,000 blocked sites.
The issue is a contentious one because there are movements by local governments and even members of Congress to require that schools and libraries use filtering software to keep students from accessing certain sites. However, such efforts are meeting resistance from courts and voters. Last month, voters in Michigan rejected a proposal to require filtering software in public libraries.
And in 1998, a federal judge ruled that requiring public libraries to use the software "offends the guarantee of free speech."
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