Hard on the heels of appealing the Utah Education Network's refusal to share its filtering logs, the Censorware Project issued a report June 21 blasting WebSENSE for "blacklist[ing] numerous sites erroneously." A self-styled Internet watchdog group formed in late 1997, the Censorware Project states its mission as "battl[ing] the use of blocking software by public institutions."
Among the blocked sites listed in the report, called "Protecting Judges Against Liza Minnelli," is a Japanese sports site on which, the report's authors theorize, a software spider has misinterpreted a roman-alphabet character string.
Noting that WebSENSE is used by Orange County, Florida, and Fulton County, Indiana, libraries as well as in the federal courts of the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits (which serve 22 states and Guam), the report declares, "The use of WebSENSE in the court system and public libraries is clearly a violation of First Amendment rights of court employees and library users."
Posted June 29, 1998.