Web Censorship on the University Campus?

Censored Prof asks: "I teach at a private university in San Antonio, TX. Besides some horrendous bandwidth issues, we have lately been subjected to Lightspeed and/or Websense blocking. This means that suddenly, university students are unable to see content that the rest of the (free) world sees; and more importantly are often blocked from very legitimate information crucial to their area of study. Papers like Village Voice are blocked. Anatomy sites are blocked. Electronic Art sites are blocked. Anything with ".mp3" is blocked. Our CIO has assured us that this is not uncommon and that there are good reasons to do this on a university campus. It strikes me as odd that students must leave campus to learn, and smacks of censorship in horrible ways. So my question: Is this unique to our university? Who else at what other universities are subject to similar web-content blocking? Are we alone, or part of a disturbing trend?"

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[TubeSteak]

Even if your University is in the minority, it is part of a disturbing trend.

Most of those filters are designed for corporate or under-18 environments.

Universities have wildly different needs.

I know what school!

[Anonymous Coward]

OH! OH! I grew up in San Antonio. Lemme guess! Is this private school St. Mary's University, the school with a crucifix in every hallway? Gee, do you think they'd really censor your internet access? Gee....

Re:The good old days

[King_TJ]

Ugh... I just had a bit of a debate on this subject with a female friend who works in a university library in my city.

She maintained that schools teaching kids to "do research on the Internet" does them little good, and it's a farce that it's even called "research". She had an obvious bias towards printed books as superior media.

I maintain that the content is what's important ... not so much the form of distribution. Books used to be the least expensive way to distribute the content. Now, that's just not the case. It's far more space-efficient to convert most of it to digital media, and doing so gives huge advantages in search capabilities too.

With digital content, you can always duplicate onto printed media at will. With your original being a book, you have to do labor-intensive photocopying or scanning and printing to produce a duplicate. I'm not against the idea of paper or books, but especially for research purposes - digital is a vastly more flexible format.

censorship makes you liable

[TheMCP]

I was in charge of writing a policy for web usage and censorship at a small private university. The policy that was decided on was to charge each student a $20 annual internet usage fee, in exchange for which we provided uncensored internet access to them while on campus. We chose to be their "ISP" so we could wash our hands of responsibility for whatever they would choose to do with it.

It was our opinion that by choosing to actually censor internet access, a college could become responsible for the actions of its students on the net, because it shows that they are monitoring the students' behavior and choosing to intervene. Failure to "correctly" intervene could make a school liable. Establishing a policy that the school is an ISP and provides uncensored access to students who are responsible for their own actions could prevent liability for the school.

Not odd

[AnotherBlackHat]

It strikes me as odd that students must leave campus to learn,

Not at all, that's the way it's been for thousands of years.

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." -- Mark Twain

Re:Sounds Like...

[jdavidb]

That's why I went to UTA in Texas, where there was no football team at all. Of course, every year, some "involved" freshman would write editorials in the school paper about why we needed one, launch a campaign for "student government" (why should those people have control over me?), etc., trying to get a football program restarted, but they never found enough support to win, and I suppose eventually they always went on to a sports/party university like they wanted so the rest of us could stay and do what we came to do.

Re:The good old days

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

Uh yeah, you are totally right.

The world has moved forward. Information is coming to us in a new way. We need to embrace it or risk becoming inferior to those that do. When we are "Jacked In" ^TM to a network that uses our mind instead of a monitor / keyboard we will have the same arguement. The only diferance is that the InterWeb has been around for a very long time, and is now considered like a utility bill. It's something you don't want to live without, but could.

Imagine living without electricity. Back in my day if you wanted water, you had to grab a pail, and fetch it your self from the river 2 miles across the valley making it up hill BOTH ways!

While there may be a few small comunities in developed nations who still do this, and while no doubt we could live like that... Who would want to?

Seriously... Don't take "The Net" for granted, it's no casual thing.

Only blocking P2P and bandwidth limits

[businessnerd]

Having recently graduated from college, and having friends who have attended a multitude of other colleges, I have noticed that content blocking is very rare. The only blocking I have heard of with some schools, was to block file sharing programs. Not quite sure if they just blocked the sites to download them, or blocked the protocols, or what, but this was all roughly four years ago when Kazaa and the like were hitting peak usage. Schools were getting sued and campus networks were swamped with traffic. Another answer to the file share problem at one particular university was to implement bandwidth quotas. No individual could exceed xGb up or down within a given time frame. Recently, the girlfriends college started messing with AIM use on campus(not fully sure what they were doing), probably to prevent virus. I was lucky enough to have completely unfettered web access and am very greatful for it.
When it comes to blocking "questionable" content as seems to be the case with you, I have not heard of this practice, at least among most east coast colleges. I for one think it is a bad road for a higher education institution to walk down. Colleges and Universities are about education in all its forms. They are also for students that are usually legal adults and are mature enough to use their own discretion for what web sites they visit. Blocking P2P sites cause you don't want to get sued, or limiting bandwidth for the sake of keeping the network usable are perfectly legitimate practices in my book (as annoying as they may be). But colleges and universities should by no means censor web content and do not let them tell you that it is a common practice among the colleges and universities.

Re:Sounds Like...

[maetenloch]

Back when I was an undergraduate, I worked in the university's admissions office helping with paperwork and gathering statistics. One of the things they did was to survey incoming students (and students who chose not to attend) and find out what influenced their decision to apply and attend/not attend. Surprisingly the top factors were mostly non-academic. As I recall campus appearance and the social scene were the top two factors. Most had decided to apply based on the recommendations of friends and guidance counselors followed by the performance of the school's sports teams. This was at an upper middle-tier university and the applicants were all well qualified academically. For the two years I helped with this, the results were consistent. For me it was an eye opener to find that most people made a major life decision based on 'shallow' considerations rather than the 'socially correct' reasons that everyone states publicly. Later I realized this is actually more the norm - the real reasons we choose other people for dating/mating or hiring are often far different than what we tell others or even ourselves.

le porn

[Jett]

I once ran a small computer lab at a university. One night a girl came in and told me she needed to look at porn for a research project - I had her sit in a corner so other customers wouldn't be uncomfortable and she spent about an hour taking notes and printing stuff out. So scratch porn from the list of sites a university would legitimately want to block. I'm sure students and professors need to do research on piracy, viruses, and all the other badness on teh intarweb as well.

I'm an admin at a private university

[omega9]

university students are unable to see content that the rest of the (free) world sees

That's what filters do. That means they're working. The important piece that molds the context of this comment is how "content" is defined.

and more importantly are often blocked from very legitimate information crucial to their area of study

In almost every case I've been involved in, it broke down to exactly how crucial the information was. In my realm, if I think there's any educational value there whatsoever, I'll unblock it. I'm more concerned about proper student education then sensless content blocking. You place may be different.

Papers like Village Voice are blocked. Anatomy sites are blocked. Electronic Art sites are blocked. Anything with ".mp3" is blocked.

Village Voice and anatomy sites may be being blocked because of overzealous regex filters. I can't imagine why electronic art (how ambigious is that?!) sites are blocked unless you're refering to Electronic Arts [ea.com], in which case I might not see your case. As far as MP3s, I, too, block any MP3 downloads at my campuses, unless requested on an individual basis for a good reason. I have yet to find a good reason why unfettered MP3 downloading aides education. Do you have one?

It strikes me as odd that students must leave campus to learn, and smacks of censorship in horrible ways.

Now it's obvious you're biased, trolling, or just whining. Not to mention you just labeled yourself and your fellow faculty incapable of teaching without unfiltered internet access.

Are we alone, or part of a disturbing trend?

I don't know. Do you enjoy beating your wife?

Look, at my campuses I use a web proxy (Squid) for several reasons, and one of them is to block certain types of content. Most of the campuses have two multilinked T1s, which means right around 3Mb/s. I don't have enough bandwidth to support the world. First, the obvious stuff, like porn, goes into the blocklists. Then I do a little advert filtering. Anonymous web proxies are a no-no, as well as sites dedicated to any sort of large, streaming content. YouTube, Google Video, di.fm, and video portions of ESPN, CNN, and other are blocked, to name a few.

Oh, and Myspace, Friendster, and most of the other social sites are blocked. I challenge you to show me what educational value they have and then show me them being used that way .

And, yes, through a combo of mime-types and regex I block mp3, avi, wmv, mov, and just about every other audio and video type out there. You know what happens when I don't? People spend their time on apple.com waitching movie trailers or something equally unproductive. We got tired of wondering why our VPN or online applications were slow, only to discover people abusing the network. It is not my students right to download the latest game trailer for Whatever's Coming Out Next Month XII (omg!).

I'm betting you haven't:

• Thought, at length, about how the internet can both help and hurt your students, both during and away from class.
• Recorded specific examples of sites or resources you can't reach and why they would make a justifiable, positive impact on your class.
• Met with your local IT staff to discuss your specific examples and discover what can be done about providing access to them.

Academic freedom trumps all at this college

[Acheron]

I'm a system administrator at a college in Alberta, and at our institution, academic freedom is a very key consideration in any technology we bring on campus. We can encourage and suggest from the administrative side how the academic side should use technology, but the faculty do not have to use any given piece of technology unless their department requires it. Also, we could never implement something like websense style filtering, there are legitimate reasons to look at almost anything on the net from a research point of view sometimes.

There are rules about what you can surf for in the labs and library. Those are enforced by the lab monitors and library staff, and if necessary, via non-academic misconduct proceedings. In the case where a faculty member or student knows they will be viewing potentially offensive material, for example, research on pornography or hate speech, etc, there are protocols in place for how they can get what they need without subjecting others to having to see it on their screens. Additionally, when research type things might violate the terms of the Acceptable Computer Use Policy, there are systems in place for users to get specific pre-approval to violate the ACUP for research purposes.

Basically, here the academic freedom of students and especially faculty to investigate, learn about, research, and publish on any topic is more important than any other concern. It's our job as an institution. What we do have is bandwith shaping to prevent inappropriate uses or entertainment uses from eating so much bandwidth that they prevent others from using their freedom for academic uses.

We heavily restrict the web

[SlayerOfKings]

I work for one of the larger tertiary providers here in New Zealand, and we heavily restrict the surfing of staff and students. Our baseline policy could be described as "personal surfing is allowed within reason" but the reality is we barely tolerate it at all. Our policies basically ignore the students, its targetted at keeping the staff inline and the students just cop the side effects. We block all streaming media, pretty much every audio/video format, major archive formats (zip, ace, rar, etc), exe's, msi's, I could go on. Every week usage reports are compiled, and any non work/educational related sites in the top 100 are added to the banlist. This is all ontop of using commercial blocklists as a base. I suspect however that we are not the average tertiary provider, and that our blocking is positively draconian compared to many of the others.

Re:Shrug

[mooncrow]

Perhaps, but perhaps in an ideal world such network restrictions should be a factor weighed during the regular accreditation process. It is all political, of course, but it also reflects on the academic climate at the institution, etc.
Of course, national college ranking groups should also take this kind of network restriction into account, and penalize those colleges which block open access by issuing lower rankings.
Ranking groups should also publicize this lack of access for prospective students.
In an ideal world.

SSH + Firefox is even better

[Gopal.V]

If you can run ssh on a port 443 somewhere, you are as good as outside.

Get corkscrew [agroman.net] and use the following in your .ssh/config

host homebox
hostname "fubar.kicks-ass.org" # my old host
port 443
ProxyCommand "~/bin/corkscrew proxy.work.com 80 %h %p ~/.ssh/http_auth"

ssh -D 2080 homebox -v -N and you're all set to rock !. And if you're using firefox, turn on network.proxy.socks_remote_dns and use localhost:2080 as your SOCKS4 proxy (so that your office DNS doesn't get a "A on mail.yahoo.com").

Needless to say, I acquired an intimated knowledge of the network protocol layers and how the different mechanisms in each layer works. I would have never acquired such a clear understanding of DNS lookups & tunneling, if I had been given a wide open network. Now, my current office has only a simplified NAT with port 25 outbound blocked (thank you spamware). But I still need to use this when I go to some campus to talk about something & suddenly miss some image or something from my machine (nearly all campuses in India have strict proxies).

And all this information is provided free of cost, with no liabilities on you getting fired/expelled for using this :)

PS: and somebody should hack CGIProxy to send entity encoded content & accept base64 encoded URLs ;)

Trinity University in San Antonio

[cgtaylor]

I don't know is this is the school mentioned, but if so, by the looks of their web page regarding network access, Trinity has a horrible set of computer access rules. Trinities rules would be more than sufficient reason to live off campus if one were compelled through some misfortune of life to be forced to attend such a school.
http://www.trinity.edu/its/policies/tigernetusage. asp [trinity.edu]

Ridiculous

[porcupine8]

I've had computer access at five universities in the past two years, and none do anything like this. Each in a different state, three private, two public, all in the top 50 (USN&WR), all but one in the top 20. Maybe it's common, but not at good schools. Which schools does your CIO really want to emulate?

We have one

[Sh!fty]

Im from México and our school does have an Internet filter to a lot of things. Sometimes critical information. It first started about 10 years ago with the excuse of cutting unnecessary use of bandwidth by taking away all ports but the ones needed for web surfing and opening basic ones for REGISTERED and justified IPs. Once they had that controled, they added a filter for web content, the filter is called N2H2 and blocks anything that has things related to games, nudity and whatever other not-academic content. If you want to access a website that is mistakenly blocked you cant go to the university network people, you have to contact the company that makes the filter...

Scotland and Denmark

[Warg! The Orcs!!]

I have recently returned to my native land (that's Scotland, that is) from Denmark having attended University both there and here. The Scottish network policy seems to be to ram the Computer Misuse Act down people's throats and then set up filters so that they can't break it anyway. That and the constant threat of expulsion for minor transgressions. Technically I cannot access anything that is not directly related to my studies as to do so counts as misuse. This includes checking private email and using *MY* print credits to print out non-academic material. The Danish attitude is that "you are an adult so behave like one" and they leave the network unrestricted. As long as you do not break Danish law then you will not be bothered by the University or anyone else.

Re:It strikes me as odd...

[StikyPad]

...that anyone would presume that any single institution could provide all of the information and references on any given topic. Aside from such thinking being the the characteristic trait of pompousness, it's also dangerously fallacious. We're not talking about elementary school here, where no amount of additional information will help someone learn 2+2. Tertiary education is all about moving beyond the basics and exploring the limits, and those limits are constantly being expanded by different people in geographically seperated locations all over the world. Sure, we could probably make the information available in hardcopy to every school, everywhere, but we've already developed a more efficient infrastructure for transferring information, and it's called the internet.

The internet is so successful because it virtually (no pun intended) removes the limits of any one individual or institution, and removing limits is just another way of saying that it extends capabilities. Realistically, no single institution can provide all existing resources. At the very least, this helps to minimize redundancies. Want to find out if a fly's brain could control a plane? A quick Google search will tell you it's already been done [discovery.com].

Is learning impossible without internet access? Of course not. But the capacity for education that it presents is the very reason there are significant efforts to make cheap laptops available in third world countries. It could be argued that the internet was the most important tool in revitalizing India, Russia, and possibly China.

Sure, people will spend a lot of time browsing MySpace or Facebook or whatever new hip site the kids are looking at these days, but the plethora of information available online -- even just including freely available resources -- dwarfs just about any single institution, almost by definition since the net is a collective. And by using information which is available online, institutions are able to free up money to be spent on other things, which only enhances the experience for their students.

Moreover, learning is "make[ing] network connections to outside sources" by definition. Learning, in an institutional setting, is an efficient way of discovering more about the world around you than you could possibly do on your own in a reasonable period of time, which is why people pay thousands of dollars for the experience.

Re:Does your university censor /. too?

[Ant P.]

I tried to read one of the articles on censorship in college today, and got blocked. Not sure what sets off that filter crap, but it stops a lot of people getting any real work done here.

Re:Limits on Bandwidth, not Content

[l0cust]

The admins at my college started a Nightmare edtition of bandwidth throttling technique you mentioned . When I first started with my undergrad program there was no censorship or bandwidth restrictions whatsoever(the systems at labs didn't even ask for authentications). Ofcourse the major traffic was going to porn sites so the admins came up with an authentication system to deter the students from 'misusing' the facilities. That didn't work ofcourse as almost everyone inevitably found out ways to surf annonymously although it did reduce the porn traffic because most of the people who surfed porn religiously were not the type to put in even that much effort.

After about 2 years the restrictions started coming. Porn sites were being blocked, webproxy sites recursively blocked, mp3, mpg, mpeg, avi, asf, wmv, mov extensions were blocked (they either did not know about .vob and .ogg or they just did not care!) But then we found out that you can download all of these files by just adding ?c=1 and similar tags at the end of URLs but people who knew about 'tricks' started keeping them away from the 'masses' so that the rampant use won't kill this too. The p2p ports were blocked and the CONNECT support was withdrawn too. Ofcourse there were ways to bypass most of them by using socks and tunnelling but most of the students were not aware of it back then (which is surprising when I think about it now).

Coming back to the bandwidth limitation issue, every student was given a max limit of 350 MBs per month! which effectively killed legit downloading for god-fearing students. But then professors had unlimited bandwidths and John.the.Ripper was our friend. Exceptions were made for special cases but it continued for a long time before they extended it to 1GB (which was still horrible but atleast let you surf the net and occasionally download important files legitimately).

But contrary to the normal perception, a lot of professors (specially the ones who have been teaching there for a long time) were vehemently opposed to putting any restrictions on the net usage. I remember one senate meeting in which one stupid ass professor proposed denying web access to students in their rooms so that the only way they can surf is via the systems in the labs. The head of the CS department (also one of the most respected and loved teachers in the institute) stood up and said "So you have finally lost your mind. I will quit the day something as stupid as this was made a institute policy". Ofcourse that never happened.

So yeah some form of censorship happens in a lot of colleges (if not all of them) but not all of them are the same type. The restrictions at my college were mainly due to bandwidth concerns and political sites or controversial topics (except outright porn sites) were never banned. Although some nut cases who joined later did try to sneak in their own personal agendas but as far as I know they never succeeded.

Re:I'm an admin at a private university

[Allador]

Wow, that is one of the most surreal things I've read recently.

Why is a sysadmin playing moral cop on content? Isnt that a little bit outside of your job description?

If the goal is to truly manage bandwidth to non-critical content, then why not just manage bandwidth to non-critical content (ie, traffic shaping)?

Blocking what the sysadmin considers inappropriate content may not even help you reach your goal, not to mention the question of why a sysadmin is making moral judgements as to what's appropriate. Wouldnt that be more in line with a Faculty, or a Dean of Students or similar? Just really strikes me as the tail wagging the dog.

Traffic shaping is what every University I've been involved with does (not that the number is a huge number, but its very consistent).

There are much, much better ways to control bandwidth usage and maintain quality of service to critical content (which is a reasonable goal), without destroying all notion of academic freedom. Just throttle back the offending traffic when there's contention.

Lastly, as word gets out that you do this sort of thing, students will tend to not want to come to your school. Quality of IT infrastructure (wireless coverage, ethernet in the dorms, speed of connection to commodity internet, i2 connectivity, etc) is a big deciding factor for academically oriented students.

I'm not privy to your business plan, being a private university (all of my experience is with large public), but I think this sort of thing may do you more harm than good.

Re:I'm an admin at a private university

[mgblst]

You are treating everyone like children, in that they need to come and ask you for some specific access. Who are you to decide what is ok? Just because you can restrict access, does not mean that you should - these are important decisions, too important for them to be made by a Systems Admin - sorry, you are abusing your power. Why should I have to prove the merit of something to you?? Do you not see this as ridiculous?

The best thing students can do is make a lot of noise. Write to your local papers, your local news, student unions, everybody you can. Create a webpage about the problem with your University - this is the only way to get things done. Talking to people like above, who have serious power issues, will get you nowhere.