Censorship High

A 17-year-old takes a stand against a school Web-filtering system that screens out Planned Parenthood but not the Christian Coalition.

By Daniel Silverman

Jun 14, 2001 | I was the first student to surf the Web from Foothill High School's new T-1 line. The school's high-speed Internet link had been installed over the summer and I came to school two weeks early to test it out. At that time there was no formalized Internet use policy, no disabled services, no blocked sites, no censorship. And no, I didn't use it to check out a porn site; the first Web site visited by a student in the Tustin Unified School District was CNN.

For the first few months of the new school year we were free. The nerds in the technology classes used the high-speed network for downloading files and gathering information, checking their e-mail and messaging their friends. We were in heaven, and we knew it wouldn't last.

Tustin Unified School District, in Orange County roughly midway between Anaheim and Irvine, is your typical middle-class suburban school system. Like all public school systems, TUSD is working hard to deliver on the vision of the wired classroom. To further this goal, the district applied for and received a technology grant from the federal government. I was on the Digital High School planning committee, and I was the first to bring up the issue of ensuring fair and equitable access for students to online information. Not much was made of it at the time.

As time went on and classrooms were brought online, the district oversight became more strict. Using a security tool called a firewall, the district restricted students' access to Internet services like instant messaging, streaming video and online games. One of our students set up a Linux computer, but was quickly told to remove it from the network. No specific reason was given, but we assumed that it was another issue of control. If you don't understand it, ban it.

Our acceptable-use policy explicitly prohibits posting messages on chat rooms, message boards or mailing lists. We can't do anything on our school computers that might cause us any material gain. Stock trading is out, as are online auctions, job searches and product price comparisons. In practice, these rules were rarely followed, as teachers turned a blind eye to blatant violations of the overbroad district policy.

But the administrators' cautiousness extended to other technologies too. They blocked Telnet, a text communications system for dialing in to other computers. Now I could no longer log in to my home system. They blocked FTP, so we could no longer transfer files to and from school. We had expected this to some degree; bureaucrats are overly cautious, and with all the talk about viruses and hackers, we couldn't really blame them for being scared. Nonetheless, we quickly found ways around their obstacles, and we were content -- until they ramped up the filter.

"E-rate" legislation has forced public schools receiving federal funds to shield minors from "objectionable material," although no one really knows what that means. Because the idea of objectionable content is so ill-defined and so variable, no one on the school or district level wants to take responsibility for what is and is not blocked. This problem is not confined to TUSD; school districts across the country do the same thing to shield themselves from the hassle and responsibility: They hire outside firms.

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