Web `Watchdogs' Work To Block Sex, Violence From Eyes Of Young Surfers

They sit in a room on the 15th floor of a Seattle skyscraper, with a view of the city below, but their attention is focused on computer monitors showing pornography, violence, and instructions for hacking into phone lines and making bombs.

Their job: Eyeballing Web sites pulled down by a specially tuned search engine that picks out key words: "group sex," "hard core," "hot girls" and "hot guys," among others.

Such sites are the easy ones for these Internet scouts, who decide what sites to block so that students at libraries and schools can't see them. Other sites don't fit neatly into the categories - nudity, adult content, violence, drugs and bad language - these workers have been trained to scout out.

When that happens, they talk among themselves. If they can't reach consensus, they turn to a supervisor such as Jessica Lyman, whose guiding principle is, "It's better to be safe than sorry."

Lyman and her "blockers" work for N2H2 Inc., a leading Internet-filtering service based in Seattle that sells its flagship product, Bess, to schools and libraries across the country. It also sells the service to individuals in Western Washington.

Filtering the Internet has become a hot political and legal issue, with some arguing that it verges on censorship. Despite those concerns, protecting youth from indecent material on the Net is becoming a growth industry, with many software and service solutions coming to market. At N2H2, for example, the number of blockers has more than doubled in the past year.

Peter Nickerson, a former economics professor at Seattle University, and his wife, Holly Hill, a civil-rights attorney, formed the company in 1995. They named the service Bess after their Chesapeake Bay retriever - an apt symbol for Web browsers commonly used to roam around Internet sites.

The service now has more than 300 customers in 45 states, including school districts whose combined enrollments exceed 3 million. The Seattle School District and King County Library (children's sections only) are clients of the company, whose rates work out to about a dollar a year per student.

Nickerson is quick to admit that the three dozen or so reviewers/blockers who work for him are venturing into uncharted waters, especially when it comes to "fuzzy" sites that could go either way - naughty or nice. "It's not a hard science by any stretch of the imagination," he says.

The task is daunting: With who knows how many Web sites in existence (millions is a safe guess), three crews of reviewers, each generally working four-hour shifts, wade through roughly 10,000 sites a day. So far they have blocked about a third of an estimated 600,000 reviewed sites.

Sites are reviewed if they appear a good bet to contain offensive content. Those that haven't been reviewed may be accessed. Complicating the mission, reviewers are instructed not to block an entire site if only certain areas are deemed off limits.

At Bess headquarters in the Rainier Tower, some blockers are not much older than the students they are filtering for.

Ragen Mendenhall, 19, of Port Orchard, became a reviewer about a month ago. "It's not what I want to do with my life, but it pays the rent," she says of the $7 an hour job she heard about from a friend. "Since I'm new here, there's lots of stuff I haven't learned completely."

She was unsure, for example, whether to block a satanic site; she didn't want to discriminate against it as an alternative form of worship. After checking with a supervisor, it turned out that blocking was called for, she recounts, based "on a lot of violence and bad language."

Likewise, Latasha Patton, 18, of Seattle, was temporarily stuck regarding a sitedisplaying images of professional wrestling. Patton, who has been on the job since mid-October, was confused. Although the sites showed violent acts, she also knew the matches were staged and considered them corny. She checked with her superiors, and the call was made to block the site.

Another blocker, Jerry Remington, 32, a veteran of nearly five months, says that most of the time the decision is fairly easy. Under Bess guidelines, for instance, all chat rooms are blocked. Many parents and teachers are terrified by them because they tend to be unmoderated, and seemingly innocent chats can quickly take strange turns, or involve foul language.At times, reviewers have to dig around to check out sites. The other day, for example, Remington was reviewing a feminist site with an "art gallery" link.

"You don't know what someone's idea of `art' is," says Remington, a Seattle Art Institute student. "I'll just bounce around and see what's in there." The content passed that day.

Blockers generally don't last longer than four or five months, says supevisor Melisa Lepinski. "It just emotionally taxes your brain and stuff," she said, "having to look at not only all the porn and the really bizarre people, fetish stuff that tends to warp your mind, but just having to make those decisions for eight hours a day. I think it's really hard on people."

To get hired as reviewer, N2H2 requires that they be "Internet and computer savvy, have a solid resume with good work experience, and that they be over 18 years of age," according to Kerri Karvetski, the firm's director of communications. They must also pass an interview.

Those hired are tutored on the company's "filtering philosophy" and handed a four-page document with technical instructions on how to rate Web sites as "naughty" or "nice."

When Bess subscribers come upon a blocked page, they see a picture of Bess the retriever and the words, "Sorry, Bess can't retrieve from the website you requested."

There are three ways to override the block: Make an e-mail request, citing reasons for allowing access; enable the override feature (requiring a special password); or have a local system administrator permit access.

With every override, Bess sends an alerting e-mail to the customer, just in case the special password was improperly "liberated."

The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year struck down the federal Communications Decency Act as unconstitutionally broad. But some lawmakers haven't given up on legislation to protect children. Nickerson says he believes it is "virtually impossible to write legislation that will get past the Supreme Court," and that the marketplace will continue to drive software and filtering companies like his to developever-more sophisticated solutions to satisfy schools, libraries, businesses and parents.

Bess differs from other filtering programs in that the work is done on the "server" side instead of the client side. That means that rather than buying software to install and configure on your computer, Bess customers are buying a service to make those decisions at the network level, before Web sites arrive on the user's computer.

Les Foltos, director of instructional technology for the Seattle School District, says the district is generally satisfied with Bess' service. A more heavy-handed policy - one that blocks all sites with the word breast for example - might eliminate educationally valuable sites, such as those that tell about breast cancer, he says.

Still, the system has flaws.

Earlier this fall, parents complained to the school district about an unblocked site that displayed "naked people obviously engaged in group sex," according to complaining parents. The site hadn't yet been reviewed.

Also, some Web sites are recycled under different names, meaning different reviewers might unknowingly give them different ratings.

And sometimes, the problem is human, not technical.

"Sometimes when we're blocking,simultaneously sites will come up on different screens, so different people will be doing those at the same time, and they will have a different hit on what they think," says Bonnie Tarses, who at 55 is the oldest of Bess' part-time blockers.

"Each person, being human, would say `Oh, This doesn't look acceptable' and then somebody else would say `This is fine.' "

That's when the technology stops, and the talking starts.