Most censorship software was hurriedly developed in response to a perceived political need and market opportunity. Access control software was used to explain in courts and legislatures why more direct political limitations on the Internet’s content were unnecessary and unworkable. Because of the rush to market, most of the software was largely ad hoc, as demonstrated by the example of the blocked ISDN web pages. The Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) is an effort to develop an open Internet infrastructure for the exchange of information about web content and the creation of automated blocking software.
Although PICS was designed with the goal of enabling censorship software, PICS is a general-purpose system that can be used for other purposes as well.
PICS is an effort of the World Wide Web Consortium. Detailed information about PICS can be found on the Consortium’s web server at http://w3.org/PICS.
PICS is a general-purpose system for labeling the content of
documents that appear on the World Wide Web. PICS
labels
contain one or more
ratings that are issued by a rating
service.
For example, a PICS label might say that a particular web page contains pornographic images. A PICS label might say that a collection of pages on a web site deals with homosexuality. A PICS label might say that all of the pages at another web site are historically inaccurate.
Any document that has a URL can be labeled with PICS. The labels can be distributed directly with the labeled information. Alternatively, PICS labels can be distributed by third-party rating services. John can rate Jane’s web pages using PICS—with or without her knowledge or permission.
PICS labels can be generic, applying to a set of files on a site, an entire site, or a collection of sites. Alternatively, a PICS label can apply to a particular document or even a particular version of a particular document. PICS labels can be digitally signed for added confidence.
PICS labels can be ignored, giving the user full access to the Web’s content. Alternatively, labels can be used to block access to objectionable content. Labels can be interpreted by the user’s web browser or operating system. An entire organization or even a country could have a particular PICS-enabled policy enforced through the use of a blocking proxy server located on a firewall. Figure 17.1 depicts a typical PICS system in operation.
Software that implements PICS has a variety of technical advantages over simple blocking software:
PICS allows per-document blocking
PICS makes it possible to get blocking ratings from more than one source
Because PICS is a generic framework for rating web-based information, different users can have different access-control rules
PICS can be used for assigning many different kinds of labels to many different kinds of information:
PICS labels can specify the type or amount of sex, nudity, or profane language in a document.
PICS labels can specify the historical accuracy of a document.
PICS labels can specify whether a document is or is not hate speech.
PICS labels can specify the political leanings of a document or its author.
PICS labels can rate whether a photograph is overexposed or underexposed.
PICS labels can indicate the year in which a document was created. They can denote copyright status and any rights that are implicitly granted by the document’s copyright holder.
PICS labels can indicate whether a chat room is moderated or unmoderated.
PICS labels can apply to programs. For example, a label can specify whether or not a program has been tested and approved by a testing laboratory.
Clearly, PICS labels do not need to specify information that is factual. Instead, they are specifically designed to convey a particular person or labeling authority’s opinion of a document. Although PICS was developed for keeping kids from pornography, and thus blunting legislative efforts to regulate the Internet, PICS aren’t necessarily for kids.
The PICS specification is described in detail in Appendix D.
Is PICS censorship? In their article describing PICS in Communications of the ACM,[99] Paul Resnick and James Miller discuss at great length how PICS is an open standard that is a substitute for censorship. They give many examples in their articles and presentations on how voluntary ratings by publishers and third-party rating services can obviate the need for censoring the Internet as a whole.
The PICS anticensorship argument is quite straightforward. According to the argument, without a rating service such as PICS, parents who wish to shield their children from objectionable material have only a few crude options at their disposal:
Disallow access to the Internet entirely
Disallow access to any site thought to have the objectionable material
Supervise their children at all times while the children access the Internet
Seek legal solutions (such as the Communications Decency Act)
PICS gives parents another option. Web browsers can be configured so that documents on the Web with objectionable ratings are not displayed. Very intelligent web browsers might even prefetch the ratings for all hypertext links; links for documents with objectionable ratings might not even be displayed as such. Parents have the option of either allowing unrated documents to pass through, or restricting their browser software so that unrated documents cannot be displayed either.
Recognizing that different individuals have differing opinions of what is acceptable and what is not, PICS has provisions for multiple ratings services. PICS is an open standard, so practically any dimension that can be quantified can be rated. And realizing that it is impossible for any rating organization to rate all of the content on the World Wide Web, PICS has provisions for publishers to rate their own content. Parents then have the option of deciding whether or not to accept these self-assigned ratings.
Digital signatures allow labels created by one rating service to be cached or even distributed by the rated web site while minimizing the possibility that the labels will be modified by those distributing them. This would allow, for example, a site that receives millions of hits a day to distribute the ratings of underfunded militant religious organizations that might not have the financial resources to deploy a high-power Internet server capable of servicing millions of label lookups every day.
Unlike blocking software, which operates at the TCP/IP protocol level to block access to an entire site, PICS can label and therefore control access to content on a document-by-document basis. (The PICS “generic” labels can also be used to label an entire site, should an organization wish to do so.) This is the great advantage of PICS, making the system ideally suited to electronic libraries. With PICS, children can be given access to J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey without giving them access to The Catcher in the Rye. Alternatively, an online library could rate each chapter of The Catcher in the Rye, giving children access to some chapters but not to others. In fact, PICS makes it possible to restrict access to specific documents in electronic libraries in ways that have never been possible in physical libraries.
Having created such a framework for ratings, Miller and Resnick show how it can be extended to other venues. Businesses, for example, might configure their networks so that recreational sites cannot be accessed during the business day. There have also been discussions as to how PICS can be extended for other purposes, such as rating software quality.
Miller and Resnick say that PICS isn’t censorship, but we think they must have a different definition for the word “censorship” from the one we do. The sole purpose of PICS appears to be facilitating the creation of software that blocks access to particular documents on the World Wide Web on the basis of their content. For a 15-year-old student in Alabama trying to get information about sexual orientation, censorship is censorship, no matter whether the blocking is at the behest of the student’s parents, teachers, ministers, or elected officials.
Resnick says that there is an important distinction to be made between official censorship of information at its source by government and “access control,” which he defines as the blocking of what gets received. He argues that confusing “censorship” with “access controls” benefits no one.[100]
It is true that PICS is a technology designed to facilitate access controls. It is a powerful, well thought out, and extensible system. Its support for third-party ratings, digital signatures, real-time queries, and labeling of all kinds of documents all but guarantees that it will be a technology of choice for totalitarian regimes that seek to limit their citizens’ access to unapproved information and ideas. Its scalability assures that it will be up to the task. And the support of PICS by the computer industry virtually guarantees that these regimes will have the power of PICS at their disposal in the years to come.
Whatever the claims of its authors, PICS is a technology designed for building censorship software.
Although PICS was designed for blocking software implemented on the user’s own machine, it’s likely that PICS technology will increasingly be used to censor the content of the network itself.
The biggest problem with implementing blocking technology on the user’s computer is that it is easily defeated. Software that runs on unprotected operating systems is vulnerable. It is unreasonable to assume that an inquisitive 10-year-old child is not going to be able to disable software that is running on an unsecure desktop computer running the Windows or Macintosh operating system. (Considering what some 10-year-old children do on computers now when unattended, disabling blocking software is . . . child’s play.)
The only way to make blocking software work in practice is to run it upstream from the end user’s computer. This is why America Online’s “parental controls” feature works: it’s run on the AOL servers, rather than the home computer. Children are given their own logins with their own passwords. Unless they know their parents’ passwords, they can’t change the settings on their own accounts.
To guarantee that PICS-enabled blocking software cannot be bypassed, parents, educators, and businesses will in all likelihood turn to PICS-enabled blocking proxy servers. Governments in locales such as China and Singapore may also require that high-speed Internet connections entering their countries have similar blocking or filtering capabilities.
Thanks to technologies such as PICS, censorship will increasingly be a way of life in the business world as well. Not only do employers wish to keep their employees from wasting time on recreational sites, but employers are also increasingly wary of possible workplace sexual harassment suits that could result from allowing employees to display sexually explicit images on their computer screens.
On October 29, 1996, Spyglass, the company that owns SurfWatch, announced that it had built a filter to deploy on top of the Microsoft Proxy Server. “The benefits of deploying filtering at the server level are enormous for organizations seeking to enforce a uniform Internet access policy; SurfWatch for Microsoft Proxy Server makes this possible,” said Jay Friedland, Vice President of Strategic Marketing for Spyglass. Another product manufactured by Spyglass, the SurfWatch ProServer, “keeps a log of requests that are blocked.” This can be useful for punishing those who attempt to violate an organization’s content control policies.
[99] See “PICS: Internet Access Controls Without Censorship,” October 1996, p. 87. The paper also appears at http://w3.org/PICSA/tacacv2.html.
[100] Personal communication, March 20, 1997