The short memory of Web filtering companies

Here’s a disturbing story from Canada, which illustrates how the proliferation of website filtering  – fueled mostly by demands of authoritarian states – makes like difficult for those who live in countries that supposedly respect free speech and don’t practice censorship of political speech. I suspect that some filtering companies – Websense in this case – are simply too lazy to properly configure their filtering packages to the needs of their clients, selling them the standard Chinese package instead…

Web-filtering technology left Eastern-Canada City of Mississauga computers filtering the Internet in a way similar to one of the world’s most repressive regimes, one Chinese library user has discovered.

Mississauga resident Long Tu stumbled on the problem several weeks ago when he tried to visit Chinese websites that covered topics the Chinese communist regime considers sensitive, including the repression of Tibetans, controversies during the 2008 Olympics, and Falun Gong.

Tu said he understands the library needs to have some sites blocked but he was startled that websites like China21.org, which covers the repression of Christians in China, were being filtered

…He told the library manager about the problem and that manager alerted the city’s IT department. Some websites were soon unblocked but others have remained inaccessible.

"The manager just tries their best to tell the IT guys to fix it," said Tu, adding that he was told there were not enough complaints about the blockage to make fixing them a high priority.

This bit is even more interesting:

Steve Praggett is head of technical support and security for the City of Mississauga. It falls on him to review websites that may be blocked incorrectly and open them up to library patrons. The same filters at the Mississauga library are applied to all other city computers.

Spraggett said he would need a full-time employee to review all the blocked websites people complain about and it is especially difficult to review and open up websites published in Chinese.

“We go to these sites and they are all in Chinese and we don’t know what the content is. If I can go to a site that I can get a translation from and I can read it and it’s all good, I’ll open it.”

When he can’t read the website, Spraggett said he has to rely on a filtering company that classified the site or get translation which adds extra difficulty.

Mississauga gets its filtering software from Surf Control, a company known to sell its technology to repressive regimes with heavy censorship like China and Iran. In 2007, SurfControl was bought out by competitor Websense.

I wonder how many other cities and libraries are facing similar issues because Surf Control never bothered to customize their lists for non-Chinese clients…