Bennett Haselton can be contacted by e-mail at bennett@peacefire.org.
For more research material:









Resources for journalists writing serious articles

We have a list of the 2 most common mistakes when writing about blocking software. The rest of our resources are organized according to how much time you have left.

My deadline is:
A few days away An hour ago

Deadline was an hour ago
If you need a quick statement, try calling us or one of these people:

        
(E-mail address and personal phone numbers have only been listed with the person's permission.)

Lawyers and policy experts opposing Internet censorship

Ann Beeson, American Civil Liberties Union beeson@aclu.org (212) 549-2500
Ann Beeson is the lawyer with the national office of the ACLU who argued successfully against the Communications Decency Act in 1996. She also co-ordinated ACLU efforts against blocking software in libraries in Kern County, CA and Loudoun County, VA.

Jonathan Wallace, Censorware Project jw@bway.net (718) 797-9808
Jonathan Wallace is an attorney and software executive in Brooklyn. In 1997 he wrote "Purchase of Blocking Software by Public Libraries is Unconstitutional, the first online paper about the legality of Internet censorship in libraries. In October 1997 he published The X-Stop Files, an analysis of X-Stop and some of the sites that the program blocked. Mr. Wallace later testified in Mainstream Loudoun v. Board of Trustees, the court case which resulted in a ruling by a federal judge that use of X-Stop blocking software in a Virginia library was a violation of the First Amendment. Mr. Wallace's own Web site, The Ethical Spectacle, was blocked at different times by X-Stop, BESS, CYBERsitter and Cyber Patrol.

Jim Tyre, Censorware Project jstyre@jstyre.com (310) 839-4114
Jim Tyre is a volunteer lawyer for, and founding member of, the Censorware Project. He also defended Peacefire pro bono against CYBERsitter's threats of a lawsuit against us for publishing a program that decrypted CYBERsitter's list of blocked sites.

Jon Katz, http://katzjustice.com jon@katzjustice.com (301) 495-7755
Jon Katz represented the Free Speech Coalition on an obscenity law panel held by the National Association of Sciences committee. In June 2001 he was elected president of the Free Speech Coalition of the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia. He is also a member of the First Amendment Lawyers Association and the Libel Defense Resource Center. More information on his law firm's activities can be found at
http://katzjustice.com
(No relation to Jon Katz, the HotWired and Slashdot writer.)

Lawyers and policy experts supporting Internet censorship

Bruce Taylor, National Law Center for Children and Families east@nationallawcenter.org (703) 691-4626
Bruce Taylor helped author sections of the Communications Deceny Act of 1996 and has written a long memorandum supporting the use of blocking software in libraries.

Ken Bass, Venable Attorneys At Law kbass@venable.com (202) 962-4890
Ken Bass argued a court case in favor of the public library policy in Loudoun County, VA, which required all users to use X-Stop blocking software.

Michael Millen, Pacific Justice Institute MikeMillen@aol.com (408) 871-0777
Michael Millen argued a lawsuit on behalf of a mother who sued the Livermore, CA public library for not installing blocking software, claiming in the lawsuit that people looking at pornography before they are 18 can result in "damage to their nervous systems".

David Burt, Filtering Facts webmaster@filteringfacts.org
David Burt runs the Filtering Facts Web site, advocating the use of blocking software in libraries.

People whose Web sites have been blocked

(Peacefire's Web site is blocked, of course, so you could also call us.)

Jonathan Wallace, The Ethical Spectacle jw@bway.net (718) 797-9808
Jonathan Wallace is an attorney and software executive in Brooklyn. In 1997 he wrote "Purchase of Blocking Software by Public Libraries is Unconstitutional, the first online paper about the legality of Internet censorship in libraries. In October 1997 he published The X-Stop Files, an analysis of X-Stop and some of the sites that the program blocked. Mr. Wallace later testified in Mainstream Loudoun v. Board of Trustees, the court case which resulted in a ruling by a federal judge that use of X-Stop blocking software in a Virginia library was a violation of the First Amendment. Mr. Wallace's own Web site, The Ethical Spectacle, was blocked at different times by X-Stop, BESS, CYBERsitter and Cyber Patrol.

Jamie McCarthy, formerly with the Nizkor Project jamie@mccarthy.vg
Jamie McCarthy is the former webmaster of Nizkor.org, a Holocaust research project site which has been blocked by SmartFilter, I-Gear and Cyber Patrol. He is a founding member of the Censorware Project and wrote Blacklisted by Cyber Patrol, the Censorware Project's first report on sites blocked by Cyber Patrol.

Josh Knauer, of Envirolink josh@envirolink.org (412) 420-6400
Josh Knauer founded Envirolink in 1991 when he was a college freshman. Cyber Patrol has been blocking the Envirolink Animal Rights Resource Site since 1996, because of the pictures of animal testing in the archive.

Nels Henderson nelsh@rain.org
Nels Henderson is the co-webmaster of the Stop AIDS Project, which has been blocked by X-Stop and I-Gear.

Monnica Terwilliger, maintainer of Epigee help@epigee.org
Monnica is the author of the Epigee Birth Control Guide, which was classified as a pornography site by BESS blocking software.

James J. O'Donnell, Professor of Classical Studies and Chief Information Officer for the University of Pennsylvania jod@isc.upenn.edu (215) 898-1787
Professor O'Donnell's Internet seminar on the works of St. Augustine attracted 500 participants in 1994. His web site, which includes Augustine's home page, includes the censored file, Aureli Augustini Confessionum liber decimus -- the full Latin text of the 10th book of Augustine's famous Confessions. As best can be determined, this text was blocked because of the high frequency of the word cum, Latin for "with" or "when".

Blocking software companies

SurfWatch 800-458-6600
Cyber Patrol Susan Getgood, 617-494-5674
CYBERsitter (800) 388-2761
X-Stop (Log On Data) (714) 282-6111
Net Nanny (604)662-8522
Bess (N2H2) (800) 971-2622
SmartFilter (Secure Computing Ltd.) (408) 918-6100
WebSENSE (NetPartners) (800) 723-1166
I-Gear (URL Inc.) 757-865-0810

Politicians who support Internet censorship

Senator James Exon (D-NE), author of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, and Senator Dan Coats (R-OK), author of the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 ("CDA II"), have retired.

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) John_McCain@McCain.senate.gov (202) 224-2235
Senator McCain introduced a bill in February 1998, the "Internet School Filtering Act", that would require all public schools and libraries to install blocking software, on pain of losing all federal financial support. The bill passed the Senate but was not included in the final 1998 spending bill.

Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) senator_murray@murray.senate.gov (202) 224-2621
Senator Murray was a co-sponsor of the "Internet School Filtering Act" of 1998. She also proposed legislation in 1997 that would have made it a crime to rate a site incorrectly.

Representative Ernest J. Istook (R-OZ) istook@mail.house.gov (202) 224-2621
Representative Istook sponsored the Child Protection Act of 1998, the House equivalent of Senator McCain's Internet School Filtering Act. Istook's bill passed the House but was not included in the final 1998 spending bill.

Deadline a few days from now
Everything above, and then some:

Web sites about blocking software:

Policy papers written by different organizations analyzing blocking software:

Another long list of useful links can be found at the Internet Free Expression Alliance Web site.

Resources for journalists writing sensationalist articles

We have sensationalist quotes available for sale according to the following price sheet. If you need a quote to add to your story for dramatic effect, about the dangers of the Internet and the threat that it poses to parents' rights, you can purchase one or more of these quotes and attribute them to "Peacefire" or to a Peacefire representative willing to have themselves quoted.

Story lead Suggested quote Price
An activist group wants the local library to be prosecuted for not censoring children's Internet access, claiming that exposure to sexual materials promotes rape and other sex crimes. "Many other first-world democracies have much less stringent censorship laws, and their sex-crime rates are vastly lower than in the U.S." $50
Father discovers that his daughter has figured out how to use encryption to stop him from reading her e-mail; demands that the authors of the encryption program tell him how to break the encryption, even though this is mathematically impossible. "The laws of mathematics don't change just because parents want them to change." $75
Parents are furious to discover that their child signed up with a HotMail account in order to send and receive private e-mail; they demand that HotMail set up an age-verification scheme and obtain parental permission before setting up e-mail accounts for minors. "You can't expect HotMail to spend millions of dollars overhauling their system just to accomodate a few parents who don't want their kids to have any privacy." $125