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11
A Perspective on
Technology-Based Tools
There are a number of tools for protecting children from inappropri-
ate Internet material and experiences. Most common are filters that at-
tempt to block certain types of content, but tools for monitoring usage,
verifying age, and protecting intellectual property fall into this domain as
well. While each of these tools offers some degree of protection, there are
many factors that enter into choices about what technology, or technolo-
gies, should be used, or whether technology is appropriate at all.
11.1 TECHNOLOGY-BASED TOOLS
As in many other areas of life, the Internet is an arena in which many
adults (mostly parents) attempt to stay aware of their children's activities
and some young people, particularly adolescents, attempt to evade pa-
rental oversight. Technology-based tools for protecting children from
exposure to inappropriate Internet material and experiences promise
"hard" security against unknown threats and offer to compensate for
parental lack of knowledge about how to understand and control the
Internet usage of their children. Because they appear to promise such
security, it is easy to believe that all that must be done is to install the
technology and then one can forget about the problem.
To be fair, technology vendors rarely make such claims explicitly.
But the rhetoric of public discourse about technology solutions to "the
problem" most definitely has such a tone. Indeed, the advocacy of tech-
nology-based solutions has much of the same tone as commercials in
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A PERSPECTIVE ON TECHNOLOGY-BASED TOOLS
259
which cereal is seen to be "part of a balanced breakfast," a qualification of
approximately 1 second in a 30-second commercial extolling the virtues
and pleasures of the cereal.
Moreover, technology that helps to create a problem and technology
that helps to solve it are another instance of the familiar measure/coun-
termeasure game. In banks, better safes inspire bank robbers to develop
better methods for cracking safes, which in turn inspire still better safes.
When safes become too hard to crack, bank robbers can turn to high-tech
fraud as a way of draining money from banks, starting the cycle all over
again in a different domain. This implies that no technological solution is
durable.
The desire for simple, inexpensive, decisive technology-based solu-
tions is understandable. But as noted in Chapters 8 and 10, a strong
infrastructure of social and educational strategies that help children de-
velop an internal sense of appropriate behavior and response is founda-
tional for children's safety on the Internet. Technology-based tools can
serve useful roles in much the same way that "training wheels" have a
useful role in teaching children to ride bicycles. In addition, technology
can strengthen the positive effects of good parenting, and serve as a
backup for those instances in which parents are temporarily inattentive
(as all parents are from time to time).
For purposes of this report, tools are defined as information technol-
ogy devices or software that can help to reduce the exposure of children
to inappropriate material and experiences on the Internet. These devices
or software can be installed in any one of a number of locations. Material
on the Internet originates at a "source." It is then transmitted through a
variety of intermediate points and is finally displayed on the user's screen.
Inappropriate material can be identified at any point before the material
appears on the user's screen allowing some appropriate action to be
taken at any of these points. Box 11.1. describes in greater detail some of
the points of content identification and control.
It is also worth noting that there are technological and business pressures
that are likely to ameliorate the problem. These include the following:
· The development of most industries follows a pattern of innova-
t~on, copycat, and then shakeout. The wide proliferation of adult Web
sites suggests that the industry is in its copycat phase. If the industry
continues on the traditional trajectory, shakeout in the industry is likely to
occur in the future. If so, the remaining players are likely to demonstrate
more corporate responsibility in differentiating children from adults in
giving access to their products and services, although non-commercial
sources of sexually explicit material are likely to be unaffected by this
trend.
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YOUTH, PORNOGRAPHY, AND THE INTERNET
· Decentralization of the Internet (discussed in Section 2.1.2) is an
enabler for a variety of technology-based tools that can be deployed by
end users (e.g., individual families, schools, and libraries) to increase the
range of options available to help parents and other responsible adults
fulfill their responsibilities.
· Some technological developments, such as the trend away from
open chat rooms to closed instant message rings, will make it more diffi-
cult for spammers and molesters to find individual victims.
· As today's children become parents, the generational divide in
technical knowledge and sophistication may begin to close.
These comments should not in any sense be taken to mean that tech-
nology-based tools themselves are useless or unnecessary, and the re-
mainder of this chapter, as well as Chapters 12 and 13, describe how such
tools might be useful. Nevertheless, the statements immediately above
are collectively a message that not all technology or business trends bode
ill with respect to the exposure of children and youth to inappropriate
sexually explicit material and experiences on the Internet.
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A PERSPECTIVE ON TECHNOLOGY-BASED TOOLS
26
11.2 CONTEXTUAL ISSUES FOR TECHNOLOGY-BASED TOOLS
All tools to protect someone from inappropriate content require judg-
ments about what content should be deemed inappropriate. While all
decisions about what is inappropriate are derived from human judgments,
the decision regarding any given content can be made by a computer
program that seeks to mimic these human judgments (and examines the
content itself as it is coming into the computer) or by people who examine
that specific content, generally in advance (and sometimes far in advance)
of an actual attempt to access this content.
Not all tools, or even a given type of tool, are equally adept at identi-
fying all kinds of inappropriate material. For example, for reasons de-
scribed in Chapter 2, the identification of certain types of inappropriate
sexually explicit material e.g., that which is found on adult Web sites-
is considerably easier from a technical standpoint than the identification
of other types of sexually explicit material or other types of content that
may be judged inappropriate (e.g., material on bomb making, hate speech,
religious cults).
Chapters 12 and 13 address several generic categories of tools. But
before turning to those tools, it is helpful to make a number of comments
that apply across most technological options for protection.
· The party that decides that a given tool is appropriate is almost
always the party that must manage its use. Management of a tool in-
cludes decisions about setting it up initially, maintaining it, and configur-
ing it so that it does the appropriate things in the particular environment.
It also entails decisions about the appropriate users (i.e., the children or
youth in question) and when and under what circumstances they are
subject to the restrictions imposed by the tool. Further, the decision-
making process for considering the use of a given tool must consider a
wide variety of factors that may include some emanating from external
sources (e.g., government).
· Technology solutions are brittle, in the sense that when they fail,
they tend to fail catastrophically. In general, the catastrophe is not that
they suddenly allow the child to access all possible kinds of inappropriate
material (though this can sometimes happen), but rather in the sudden
violation of expectation that the given technology would not fail. A child
who has not been educated about what to expect and how to deal with
problematic material found on the Internet, but has been "protected" by
technology alone, will not have the coping skills needed to deal with such
exposure.
· Ease of use is a major factor in implementation of any technical tool.
Tools do not provide effective protection if they are so difficult to use that
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
sexually explicit
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YOUTH, PORNOGRAPHY, AND THE INTERNET
they go unused, and the complexity of a tool's setup and ongoing mainte-
nance is a major factor in a tool's suitability. As a general rule, the "default"
settings of a tool are the ones that are most often used. And, there is a
distinct trade-off between simplicity of use and customizability to a user's
specific preferences. Customization may, for example, require a user to
specify preferences in many different domains partial frontal nudity is
acceptable while full frontal nudity is not (except in images of classical art);
violence is acceptable, while religious cults are not, and so on. But a user,
faced with such choices, often tends to opt for the simplest solution which
is likely to be "not OK" for all of the specified domains because of the
defaults built into the software by the vendor. Further, the wide variety of
computing environments often forces vendors into requiring a "setup" pro-
cedure to adapt the tool to the user's particular hardware/software con-
figuration. And, because of the constantly changing nature of the Internet,
the tools must constantly be updated in order to remain current and valid.
This puts the onus on the user to acquire a fair degree of technical know-
how. Unless this step can be made easy for the user, only the most skilled
or dedicated users will bother to use such a tool.
· As a general rule, most technology-based tools can be circum-
vented with sufficient effort. Furthermore, the history of information
technology suggests that a method of circumvention, once discovered, is
often proliferated widely.1 Not everyone is privy to such information, of
course, but those who care about the topic and about circumvention-
can usually find it with a relatively small effort. What technology can do
is to pose barriers that are sufficient to keep those who are not strongly
motivated from finding their way to inappropriate material or experi-
ences, and the fact that technology can be circumvented does not mean
that it will always be circumvented. For many people, circumvention will
not be worth the effort. For others, the circumvention techniques will not
always be available. Still others may not receive the word on circumven-
tion. Sometimes, circumvention may be illegal even if feasible. For such
reasons, technology-based tools have utility even though circumvention
techniques exist. Nevertheless, as most parents and teachers noted in
their comments to the committee, those who really want to have access to
Specifically, when the circumvention is based on a software technique (as it has usually
been to date), the circumvention can be easily broadcast at very low cost to many individu-
als. When changes to hardware are involved (as happens relatively rarely), proliferation of
such changes is more difficult. A number of high school students told the committee that
once one of them finds a circumvention of some sort, he or she shares it with other inter-
ested students almost immediately. For example, a high school student developed a way to
bypass his school district's filtering system, and publicized it by sending an e-mail to every
teacher and administrator in the district. See
A PERSPECTIVE ON TECHNOLOGY-BASED TOOLS
263
inappropriate sexually explicit materials will find a way to get them, and
technology is relatively ineffective in the long run against those who are
strongly motivated. From this point it follows that the real challenge is to
reduce the number of children who are strongly motivated to obtain inap-
propriate sexually explicit materials. This, of course, is one focus of the
social and educational strategies described in Chapter 10.
· Tools can and do improve over time as more effort is put into
research and development. Some improvements are possible with better
design and implementation of known technologies. Other improvements
await advances in the underlying technologies and may eventually be
incorporated into technology-based tools. However, almost by defini-
tion, technological improvements are likely to be evolutionary rather than
revolutionary, and so it is unwise to base any approach to protecting
children and youth from inappropriate Internet materials and experiences
on the hope of revolutionary technological breakthroughs.
· Tools such as filters that are implemented on the local client ma-
chine (i.e., at the receiver's point of interaction) tend to be easier to cir-
cumvent than those elsewhere (e.g., those embedded in the network or in
the enterprise that provides service). The reason is that tools co-located
with the receiver are more readily accessible to the potential circumventer,
and thus more subject to inspection, manipulation, and unauthorized or
improper alteration or disabling. Moreover, tools that run on the client
machine add an additional layer of complexity that can make a computer
less reliable and more prone to lockups and system crashes.
· Because currently deployed technologies do not yet support access
policies to be associated with an individual rather than a workstation, a
simple change of venue (i.e., a movement of the child or youth to another
place where the Web can be accessed) is often all that is necessary to defeat
the most effective technological tools for protection. A change of venue
may be a deliberate attempt to avoid technologically imposed restrictions,
as in the case of students using home computers with Internet access to
bypass filtered access at schools. Alternatively, it may be entirely acciden-
tal, in the sense that a venue that the minor uses for reasons of convenience
on some occasions, for example, may not offer the same technological tools
in its computing environment as the ones that he usually uses.
· One of the principles underlying the architecture of the Internet is
that to the extent possible, functionality resides at the end points of a
communication, rather than in the middle. Thus, to the extent that end-
to-end encryption is used, on-the-fly content identification by the content
carrier (e.g., the Internet service provider (ISP)) is impossible, and there-
fore interdiction based on such identification is impossible. (In practice,
this fact gives the interdictor of content only two choices: to allow all
unknown traffic to pass, or to block all unknown traffic. Allowing all
264
YOUTH, PORNOGRAPHY, AND THE INTERNET
unknown traffic to pass is likely to permit some inappropriate content
through, while blocking all unknown traffic is likely to block some appro-
priate content.)
· As with social and educational strategies, informed decisions about
the use of technology-based tools (whether to use them and if so, which
onets)) must take into account the developmental stage of the children for
whose benefit they would be deployed. Some tools are most appropriate
for younger children, who are presumably more impressionable, less ex-
perienced in the ways of the world, and less skilled in the use of informa-
tion technology, and for whom the consequences of exposure to inappro-
priate material of any sort might be considerable. Other tools, perhaps
allowing more discretion on the part of the user, might be more appropri-
ate for older youth that are more experienced and mature.
· Improvements in technology can be rapidly deployed compared to
the time scale on which social and educational strategies change. That is,
communities may be involved in the decision to use technology-based
tools, but do not generally get involved in the technical design or imple-
mentation of those tools, which are usually within the discretionary pur-
view of the tool designer and vendor. By contrast, social and educational
strategies for a community (though usually not for individual families)
are often extensively debated, and once debated, an extensive training
effort is then needed to promulgate a new approach.
· The deployment of technological tools entails some financial cost,
both initially and in ongoing costs. Thus, one potential social inequity is
that those lacking in resources will be denied the benefits of various
tools a "digital divide" issue.2 Advocates of using tools might argue
2For example, in 2000, 54 percent of public schools with access to the Internet reported that
computers with access to the Internet were available to students outside of regular school
hours, and secondary schools were more likely than elementary schools to make the Internet
available to students outside of regular school hours (80 percent compared with 46 percent).
Large schools (1,000 or more students) were more likely than medium-sized and small schools
to make the Internet accessible to students outside of regular school hours (79 percent com-
pared with 53 and 49 percent, respectively). In addition, schools with the highest minority
enrollment reported Internet availability outside of regular school hours more frequently
than schools with the lowest minority enrollment (61 percent compared with 46 percent).
Such statistics suggest that schools do provide a considerable amount of out-of-class Internet
access for many students and it is likely that many of these students do not have Internet
access at home. (Statistics are taken from A. Cattagni and E. Farris, 2001, Internet Access in
U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994-2000, NCES 2001-071, Office of Educational Research
and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C. A Kaiser Family Foun-
dation/NPR poll taken in 2001 found that schools are playing an important role in equalizing
access to computers for kids. Specifically, African American children and children from
lower-income households are considerably less likely to use a computer at home than are
white kids or kids from higher-income families, whereas virtually the same percentage of
all kids have used a computer at school. See
A PERSPECTIVE ON TECHNOLOGY-BASED TOOLS
265
that it would be desirable for all people, rich and poor, to enjoy the protec-
tion benefits that such tools confer, but if economics make such equity
impossible, better for some to enjoy such benefits than for none to do so.
On the other hand, detractors of tools, especially of tools whose use is
made mandatory, can argue that laws such as CIPA which make the use
of filters mandatory in exchange for e-rate funding force the problems
of filters on the poor.
11.3 THE QUESTIONS TO BE ASKED OF EACH TOOL
Chapters 12 and 13 discuss seven major types of technology that can
be used to protect or limit children's exposure to inappropriate sexually
explicit material on the Internet. These include filtering, adoption of spe-
cialized domain names, surveillance and monitoring, age verification tech-
nologies, instant help, tools for controlling spam, and tools for protecting
intellectual property. To provide the basis for a systematic understand-
ing of each of these tools, the committee found the following set of ques-
tions useful.
· What is it? The answer to this question provides a clear description
of the tool and a discussion of its variants. While the need for a clear
description may be obvious, the public debate has often been hampered
by a lack of common understanding about exactly what option is being
discussed.
· How well does it work? What are the benefits that the product is
intended to offer? As noted in Chapter 8, "protection" is a term with
multiple possible meanings, and not all options provide the same kind of
protection. Only after the nature of the protection offered has been
established is it meaningful to ask about the tool's effectiveness. Note
that effectiveness is a multidimensional concept, and efforts to reduce a
tool's effectiveness to a single metric are generally not useful.
· Who decides what is inappropriate? All options presume some defini-
tion of inappropriate material, and such definitions reflect the values held
by the decision-making party involved. Indeed, as indicated in Chapter
5, there are few universally held and objective standards for defining or
recognizing inappropriate material. An understanding of the locus of
definitional control is thus important, because who "should" be respon-
sible for decisions about what is inappropriate for a child is at the center
of much controversy. Advocates can be heard for the responsible party
being the child, the child's parents, the child's teacher, a representative of
the school, the city council, the state legislature, the U.S. Congress, the
Supreme Court, local juries, and so on.
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YOUTH, PORNOGRAPHY, AND THE INTERNET
· Howilexible and usable is it? It is rare that a given implementation of
an option is perfectly matched to the needs of its user, and the details of
implementation may make a given product unsuitable for a user, even if,
in general, the philosophy underlying the product is consistent with a
user's needs. (An example is the ease with which user-enabled "over-
rides" of product settings is possible.) A product may also have other
features that enhance or detract from its usability. Note also that people
are usually of two minds about the flexibility of a product. On the one
hand, they generally believe that a product with greater flexibility can be
customized to their needs to a greater extent. On the other hand, they
find the actual exploitation of a product's flexibility to be a chore that they
tend to avoid. As a result, the most common use of any technology tool is
in its default "out of the box" configuration. (Thus, for practical pur-
poses, it is fair that any assessment of a tool place great weight on what
the tool does out of the box.)
· What are the costs entailed and infrastructure required to use it? Pro-
tection against inappropriate material does not exist in a vacuum, and in
general, an infrastructure is necessary to support the long-term use of a
tool that provides maximum protection consistent with the user's other
functional requirements. Costs should be understood broadly, and they
include financial costs, ease of implementation, ease of use, false posi-
tives and false negatives, interference with the functions being served in
the chosen environment, and lack of transparency about the option in
operation.
· What are the implications of using it? It is rare that the adoption of an
option will have no side effects, and understanding the possible unin-
tended consequences (which may be desirable or undesirable) may affect
judgments about a tool's desirability.
· What is its future? Some technologies whose effectiveness is lim-
ited today may increase in effectiveness tomorrow as research progresses.
Or, the technology necessary for a certain type of a tool might exist but
not be implemented in any product now on the market. And, different
environmental circumstances may lead to different levels of effective-
ness which is especially true of tools or strategies whose effectiveness
increases as others make use of them.
