Black marks appearing for commercial internet filters?

"We found five or six instances where these are using U.S. and in fact California made products to take care of their filtering and that includes Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain United Arab Emirates and Qatar," stated Associate Professor Ron Deibert, a political scientist at the University of Toronto.

"What they have done here is broaden the market to cater to nondemocratic regimes that essentially violate human rights. And in some cases the products are being sold to regimes that are either on some kind of export restriction list, as in the case of Iran or countries that the U.S. has an adversarial relationship with, like Burma, for example.

Deibert suggested that the major vendors in the specialized field of Internet filtering such as Secure Computing and Websense receive far less attention than do the big IT players like Yahoo, which has been widely criticized for its tailoring of its business activity in China to suit the demands of the regime there.

He pointed to Tunisia, where the SmartFilter product of California-based Secure Computing is currently being used by its government to block citizens' access to news and opposition Web sites.

The professor has received international attention for his work in the collaborative development of Psiphon, one of a number of software tools that help citizens living in countries with restricted Web access to circumvent Internet censorship.

"We citizens don't have access to the block lists [of prohibited Web sites] that are put together by these companies because that is considered proprietary. Even researchers like myself can't explore the filtering technology that is being sold and used by governments around the world."

Co-founder and principal investigator for OpenNet Initiative, a research and advocacy projects that states it examines Web censorship and surveillance worldwide, Deibert described the different methods that some governments in Asia use to censor Web content.

China, for one, he stated, has its own internally developed filtering technology to weed out what it deems as politically subversive Web sites; while in Burma the military government simply cut off all Internet links for its entire population in the face of nation-wide unrest.

Then, Deibert continued, are the crude efforts to implement filtering by bodies like the Pakistan telecommunications authority that ordered the blocking of 17 internal Pakistani sites during the recent expansion of military power.

"The way it was implemented by the ISPs was very crude, resulting in collateral filtering of millions of unrelated Web sites including all of the blogs. It angered a lot of people because they couldn't get to the blog services. Blogging culture is very active in Pakistan."

In the beginning of the Internet, governments of all stripes around the world took a hand off approach to encourage the development in that area until some of them began to see the unintended negative consequences, stated Deibert.

"Whether it is concerns about terrorism, or child pornography, or in the context of nondemocratic regimes legitimate opposition movements, threatening their regimes' stability. And so over the last five years, there has been a sea change."

Meanwhile blogger David Burt, whose blog FilteringFacts.org covers the field, counters that the U.S. based security vendors are primarily helping various religiously inclined countries in places like the Middle East to filter out socially unacceptable content like pornography.

He explained that commercial filtering applications much like anti-virus software always have to be upgraded in face of people who have managed to break Websites made out bounds

Also, commercial filtering is largely untouched by the larger security IT vendors like Symantec and McAfee because of the complexity involving in the technology, added Burt.

"Filtering is a very specialized industry. It takes a pretty big ramp up to build a good filtering database," he said. "A good filtering database has 70 to 80 [prohibited] categories that have millions of entries. It takes a lot of effort to do that and there is a fairly steep learning curve, in terms of how to go out and identify the content. How do you build a classification system around it and how do you hire enough people to review it?"

At Secure Computing, a spokesperson denied the assertions made by Prof. Deibert about his company.

"We fully abide by all U.S. laws in what countries we can and cannot sell to," stated Tim Roddy, director of product marketing at Secure.