School Porn Filter Defeated by Third Grade Students

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Net filtering has been brought up a lot in recent months. But how effective are different kinds of filtering technology? As one school found out the hard way, such technology can be surprisingly easy to defeat.

If you've been following some of the copyright debate, you might have come across a few articles discussing the idea of filtering technology to stop copyright infringement. Recently, there was a an opinion by Advocate General Cruz Villalón in Europe who said that ISPs shouldn't be forced by national courts to filter the internet. In the US, there is a similar debate with the more recent news commenting on how the US is decrying other countries over net filters while trying to implement their own – namely the Combating Online Infringement & Counterfeits Act (COICA).

Multi-national corporations such as top members of the RIAA and MPAA might argue that content filtering at, say, the ISP level, might be an option to supposedly stop copyright infringement. COICA is a bill which demands ISPs implement a blacklist filter which, among other things, sets out to block domain names at the request of rights holders. A lot of arguments have flown over the years over such technology be it an infringement on civil rights, false positives, protecting jobs, etc. One point that sometimes crops up is whether or not such technology is even effective at all. Most who are familiar with technology, outside of people selling such technology, would likely say that filtering technology is not all that effective at deterring whatever said filters set out to block all of the time.

That's certainly what made a recent news story surrounding a school and its porn filter all the more interesting. A school porn filter differs from a nation-wide porn filter in several ways. From a security standpoint, it's a smaller audience on a smaller network which, conventional wisdom would suggest, would be easier to manage. How did the filter fare? Not so well evidently.

According to the New York Daily News a group of third grade students from a Queens elementary school were caught and suspended for looking up elicit material on school computers. The students were suspended, City technicians were then called in. They wiped the computers and installed filtering technology on the computers. When the students returned, the filter was easily bi-passed when they Googled "Hot girls". What ensued wasn't all that surprising:

"The concern here is that a Department of Education filter shouldn't fail the [test of] 'Are you smarter than a third-grader?'" said City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (D-Astoria), who is looking into the matter.

"As a parent, I hope that something like this never happens again," he added.

PS 85 Principal Ann Gordon-Chang said it was an "isolated" incident.

Since then, new filtering technology was installed.

The case is eerily similar to the infamous case in Australia that no doubt continually haunts pro-filtering advocates. In 2007, a 16 year old Australian cracked a government mandated country-wide $84 million porn filter in 30 minutes.

This does raise some interesting questions. Are younger kids becoming more tech savvy? Is filtering technology flawed? More importantly, if filtering technology can't keep a handful of third grade students from surfing for porn on school computers, how can filtering technology be used to stop a whole nation of people from committing acts of copyright infringement?

I think that the idea of filtering for the purpose of stopping copyright infringement, even in this day and age, is a deeply flawed concept. Rights holders will not gain what they hope to gain and a lot of people stand to lose a lot when it comes to basic things such as free speech. This story alone is just another example of why the former part of this argument is true.

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