Anti-censorship vs anti-porn
2002-06-19 14:09
Washington - Internet activist Bennett Haselton has made a name for himself
by helping minors disable filtering programs designed to block websites that their parents deem offensive or pornographic.
His peacefire.org site offers free downloads and details methods
for circumventing filtering software that critics say also
inevitably blocks out a range of useful, even beneficial, internet
content.
While Haselton's crusade, launched six years ago while he was a
college student, has made him a hero among some web-savvy minors,
he's something of a supervillain to filtering advocates.
"He's being totally irresponsible," said Marc Kanter, marketing
director for Santa Barbara, California-based Solid Oak Software,
which makes the CYBERsitter program.
"When he started Peacefire, he was a kid himself," Kanter said.
"Basically he was enticing minors into his beliefs and activities,
which was to undermine parents' rights. As an adult now, he should
know better than that."
Haselton, a 23-year-old who simultaneously earned a bachelor's
and master's degree in mathematics from Vanderbilt University in
Nashville, Tennessee, says his objection to Net censorship is not
born so much of passion as logic.
The criteria used by filter program designers is too arbitrary,
he says.
Besides, children should be able to view whatever web page they
like, Haselton asserts: "I think intellectual development is one of
the fundamental human rights and it's also a right that people
under 18 have."
Haselton was heartened by a federal appeals court decision last
month that struck down the Children's Internet Protection Act,
ruling that public libraries cannot be forced to install filtering
software in order to receive federal funding.
But many who share Haselton's opposition to filtering consider
his position extreme.
"I'm not of the opinion that parents don't have any say where
children should go" on the internet, said Chris Hunter, a
University of Pennsylvania researcher who testified on behalf of
librarians at the trial.
Hunter worries that Haselton's line of thinking "that parents
shouldn't have a right to monitor their children's access lends
fuel to the other side saying that we're somehow uncaring about the
issue."
Haselton, who works from a cramped one-bedroom apartment in
Seattle's eastern suburbs, was raised as a US citizen in
Copenhagen, Denmark, where his mother taught music to diplomats'
children, among others.
After graduating from Vanderbilt at age 20, he went west to work
for Microsoft. But he left in January 2000, frustrated that he was
writing code rather than tracking bugs for the software giant.
In addition to running Peacefire, Haselton now does battle with
purveyors of internet spam and works to ferret out security flaws
on the internet.
He made about $15 000 in bounty from Netscape last year for
discovering flaws in the company's browser software. And last month
he gained notoriety for finding flaws with anonymizer.com, a
popular internet privacy service that lets web surfers visit sites
anonymously.
"That was pretty sophisticated," Anonymizer president Lance
Cottrell said. "The fact that he was able to find it is testimony
to what a clever fellow he is."
Haselton also has won 10 of 14 small-claims cases and thousands
of dollars in judgments against senders of e-mail spam - though he
has yet to collect a cent. Washington is one of about two dozen
states with anti-spam laws.
On a recent weekday, virtually every square foot of floor space
in Haselton's apartment was covered by stacks of programming books,
floppy disks, empty boxes, dirty clothes and an upended office
chair. Four computers dominated a corner table, where Haselton
probes for vulnerabilities in filtering programs.
Haselton says while he intends to keep sniffing out bugs
for bounty, he hopes to focus more of his energy on Peacefire's
crusade.
"This is something that practically nobody else is working on,
and only a couple of people in the world actually know as much
about the blocking software issue," he said. - Sapa/AP
- SAPA