A web-proxy service set up by the US government's International Broadcasting Bureau to enable websurfers in Iran to evade censorship is itself massively censoring what they can see.

"This simply looks at the domain name", says Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School, a coauthor of the report, and filters out any that contain words on a banned list.

One banned word is "ass", which blocks some pornography sites but also blocks the sites "usembassy.state.gov" and "www.grass-roots.org", says the report. Other words include "breast", "bush", "gay", "hot", "my", "old", "pic", "soft", "teen", "trans" and "tv". "They might as well filter every fifth website," says Zittrain.

Lance Cottrell of Anonymizer estimates that dropping the filter entirely would around double the amount of traffic from Iran, increasing costs. "The reason it was put in wasn't a prudish impulse but directly to manage costs," he says.

But Zittrain is unconvinced by these arguments. "It should be a service that grants access as if one were sitting in the US," he says. "That's giving them a taste of America."

We've written before about how civil liberties groups are suing the attorney general for a law that forces ISPs to block access to sites they decide have child pornography on them. Today, the case began, and a fairly compelling argument was made. The problem with this case is that people hear "child porn" and immediately decide that anything that stops it is good. Stopping child porn obviously is a good and noble goal - but this law doesn't do that and has a ridiculous amount of collateral damage. What the law should be, is that if a site is discovered with child porn, the site itself should be taken offline and those responsible should be tried for breaking the law. Instead, what this law does is force ISPs in Pennsylvania to block access to those sites. In other words, the sites remain online - but people using certain ISPs are blocked from accessing those sites. In cases where the site is on a shared server, every other site on that server are also blocked - even if they have nothing to do with the child porn.