Anti-censorship web service censors itself

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."