Internet Filters: A Public Policy Report (Second edition; fully revised and updated)

No sooner was the Internet upon us than anxiety arose over the ease of accessing pornography and other controversial content. In response, entrepreneurs soon developed filtering products. By the end of the decade, a new industry had emerged to create and market Internet filters....Yet filters were highly imprecise from the beginning. The sheer size of the Internet meant that identifying potentially offensive content had to be done mechanically, by matching "key" words and phrases; hence, the blocking of Web sites for "Middlesex County," or words such as "magna cum laude". Internet filters are crude and error-prone because they categorize expression without regard to its context, meaning, and value. Yet these sweeping censorship tools are now widely used in companies, homes, schools, and libraries. Internet filters remain a pressing public policy issue to all those concerned about free expression, education, culture, and democracy. This fully revised and updated report surveys tests and studies of Internet filtering products from the mid-1990s through 2006. It provides an essential resource for the ongoing debate

Pornography, panopticism and the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008

This is the accepted version of the following article: Petley, J. (2009), Pornography, Panopticism and the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. Sociology Compass, 3: 417–432, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1751- 9020.2009.00212.x/abstract.In May 2008, the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act was passed in the United Kingdom. Among other things, this made it an offence even to possess what it describes as an ‘extreme pornographic image’. This paper analyses the particular factors which gave rise to this measure, support for it amongst the police and politicians, and the problems which are likely to arise from attempts to enforce it. In particular, the paper argues that the measure is so ill-conceived that it is likely to criminalise the possession of a far wider range of images than was originally intended. More generally, the paper examines the Act in the context of (a) the increasing tendency on the part of governments both democratic and non-democratic to attempt to regulate the Internet and its users; (b) the development of the ‘surveillance society’; and (c) New Labour's marked tendency to legislate for private and personal realms traditionally regarded as out-of-bounds in a democratic polity. The paper concludes that the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act is a disturbing symptom of the development of the United Kingdom as not simply a surveillance society but also a post-social democratic state

A Novel Scheme for Intelligent Recognition of Pornographic Images

Harmful contents are rising in internet day by day and this motivates the essence of more research in fast and reliable obscene and immoral material filtering. Pornographic image recognition is an important component in each filtering system. In this paper, a new approach for detecting pornographic images is introduced. In this approach, two new features are suggested. These two features in combination with other simple traditional features provide decent difference between porn and non-porn images. In addition, we applied fuzzy integral based information fusion to combine MLP (Multi-Layer Perceptron) and NF (Neuro-Fuzzy) outputs. To test the proposed method, performance of system was evaluated over 18354 download images from internet. The attained precision was 93% in TP and 8% in FP on training dataset, and 87% and 5.5% on test dataset. Achieved results verify the performance of proposed system versus other related works

Code wars: steganography, signals intelligence, and terrorism

This paper describes and discusses the process of secret communication known as steganography. The argument advanced here is that terrorists are unlikely to be employing digital steganography to facilitate secret intra-group communication as has been claimed. This is because terrorist use of digital steganography is both technically and operationally implausible. The position adopted in this paper is that terrorists are likely to employ low-tech steganography such as semagrams and null ciphers instead