Cyber Secrets 2001

The following is a transcript of a live presentation given at the Cyber Secrets Conference on Pornography at Brigham Young University on February 7, 2001.

Cyber Secrets: The Problem of Pornography:
How to Protect You and Your Family from Computer Pornography
Dr. Eric L. Denna
February 7, 2001

In addition to my university assignment, I'm a father of seven and serve as a stake president on BYU campus. I wanted to bring together technology, parenthood, and ecclesiastical perspectives on how to protect ourselves and our families from computer pornography. I want to accomplish a couple of things. First is to talk about the internet, a little bit of background and perspectives about it and then spend some time digging into where the technology is in terms of being able to provide protection. I will then conclude with some thoughts about personal responsibility on the net.

There is a quote that I find interesting about technology. I'm a student of technology innovation. I've always been intrigued by any change in technology and perspectives that people have about the technology. The first quote is "The world has got along perfectly well for 6,000 years without printing and has no need of change now. Printed books will never be the equivalent of handwritten codices. The simple reason is that by copying by hand involves more diligence in industry." We read quotes like this and just crack a smile or break out laughing altogether. We're in another technical innovation that is causing discomfort to a lot of people from a lot of different perspectives.

You can't talk about the internet without ever showing the proverbial slide about the adoption rate on the internet. It shows that for the first 60 million users of radio it took approximately 30 years for there to be that size of a penetration in terms of adoption of that technology versus the internet. Most people point to the commercialization or public adoption of the internet as occurring in 1995. We have kind of blown through the 60-million mark and actually have exceeded 120 million users in a five year period. That is a remarkable rate of adoption of a technology by any standard. In fact, there is probably nothing that compares in terms of the societal adoption of a technology. As a result, it creates some challenges.

At times there is an attempt either benign or otherwise to almost vilify the net and paint it as something quite evil to be contained and worried about day and night. Because of this, we ignore some of the blessings of the net. I want to point out a couple of blessings.

I was somewhat involved in the development of this particular effort on the net (www.lds.org) It is a blessing that individuals at any place in the world, at any time, can get diamond hard truth as long as they are interested and know where to find it. When we were going through the development of the proposal to launch this particular site, we presented slides. One of the slides was a picture of the Quorum of the Twelve and the First Presidency standing in front of the statue of Christ on one side of the piece of paper and a picture of a family on the other side of the picture of paper. The next slide showed those two coming together with this site being the connection piece. The attempt was to bring prophets and apostles with people directly. I view that as a tremendous blessing and something that frankly could not be attained with any other technology innovation. If that alone is the result of the internet, I think it is an incredible blessing.

Another blessing is e-mail. I mentioned that I was a father and I copied a note from my daughter that I read last night. "Thanks so much for getting my internet working." For those on my staff who don't think I really know how to do some of this stuff, I have at least one testimonial that I can get one computer working. We have a tradition in our home now that every Sunday all of our children write to their grandparents on e-mail. We have all of our parents wired now and most of our aunts and uncles. And it is incredible to me to watch the amount of communication that's occurring within our family with something as simple and trivial as e-mail.

There is a site that allows you to create a web site for your family and to host pictures. My family has some 300 pictures out on this web site of all kinds of things. We have information about important family events, dates, birthdays, anniversaries, so on and so forth. My wife and I were in Hawaii a couple weeks ago and we posted recently a bunch of pictures of our vacation. It is facilitating an incredible amount of communication by our family. We have never communicated so much. I've received more communication from my dad over e-mail than I did in the entire time I was in the mission field. My dad is not a letter writer so I consider that to be a great blessing.

The net also helps us collaborate and plan together; it enables us to be much more efficient and effective. An example is Route Y, on the BYU campus. At anytime, anywhere in the world students can get to this particular site and look at courses that they've taken, their transcript, and they can update personal information. They can enroll in classes during periods of enrollment, view registration holds that they may have, fines that are due, class schedules, and check their academic credit. They can get what is called an ABC report, Advisement By Computing, where it shows all of their interactions in terms of credit as well. We just recently made it possible for students to pay tuition over the web (or get mom and dad to pay tuition over the web.) This has saved an incredible amount of time for an enormous number of people across campus. For those of us who were students here in 1965, I don't think you registered this efficiently. If I remember right it was the Smith Field House and we essentially created a commodity pit over college credit hours and there was a fair amount of trading that would occur as people would go around brokering for a class.

The value of the internet is a function of whether it is used for good or evil just like any other resource. Andy Grove, who is a fairly well known member of the technology community, refers to technology as steel. It is neither good nor bad. It depends on what you do with the steel. The steel can be used to create adult movie houses or temples of God. In and of itself it is neither good nor bad.

There is enormous growth in content on the net. The amount of information that's now available on the net exceeds what is available in the Library of Congress. That was a rather significant milestone that occurred about a year and a half ago. Literally, you can get more information over the net in terms of number of volumes, pages, or however you want to classify it then you can in the Library of Congress. Unfortunately, it is not nearly as well cataloged nor searchable nor reliable in many instances.

The net makes everyone a publisher. So oft times material on the net has not gone through the same editorial review as you would expect to see of some volumes sitting on the shelves of the Library of Congress behind the Capitol building. As near as we can tell, and this is a moving target, there is only about two percent of the sites of total content on the web that might be classified as inappropriate either as pornographic, hate, violence, so on and so forth.

There are several categories that we might use collectively as inappropriate. However, publishers are very aggressive and deceptive at times; this is a street warfare from their perspective. They will do just about anything to get eyeballs and are resorting to some very ingenious methods for trying to do this. This is a very rapidly growing phenomena although it is no just two percent. It is growing very quickly primarily because it's turned into big business. Again this is a hard number to nail down. But most estimates range right now from billion and a half to two billion dollars as the collective revenue of pornography and other inappropriate sites on the net. With that kind of growth, the unfortunate saying can apply "Follow the money and you can find out a lot". Such is true with the net at this point that you follow the money and you can expect that there will continue to be growth in this particular segment of the net.

Relatively speaking, there is a small market of protective services and technologies that are available on the net. People haven't been willing to pay for that and as with anything in a market economy, unless it is heavily subsidized by government, other nonprofit entities or philanthropy, there is really no growth in that market place. I would expect if there's one thing that would be a blessing coming out of addressing this issue is that there is a marketplace for responsible protection on the net that it is willing to pay. Unfortunately there is a culture in the net that says everything is free. There is a way around copyright oft times and it is just out right belligerent and if it can get to your hard disk somehow, it's okay. As a result, sometimes purely network-based products and services are very difficult to get a foothold at this particular time. There's a growing legislative pressure for content standards and regulation.

But it's important to remember that the very beginning of the net grew out of a defense department initiative to create a technology that was not centric to anything. It was to withstand some kind of nuclear attack on the United States, a communication infrastructure that would move around the destruction that might occur in some kind of a nuclear effort. So there isn't one thing, one lever, one body by which you control the net. In fact, if there's anything that's funnier than watching someone try to control the net I don't know what it is because it was by its nature built to be uncontrolled. It was designed to adapt to destructive efforts against the infrastructure which has created a very different world than what we had ten years ago.

It is also good to note that it's not just the net. We're talking about digital content that can be carried in a variety of forms. One that I think we're just beginning to see, that may be every bit as problematic in some ways, is that anyone will be able to author DVD, digital video discs. Within a very short number of months, these will be very economical to produce on a home machine. If you can imagine all of a sudden anyone can produce digital quality material at fractions of dollars. That's the kind of thing that we're heading toward where anyone can publish. We've only see the beginning. The internet is just a baby, seriously.

We are very constrained when we think about the capacity that we have coming to these client devices right now. It will grow by orders of magnitude over the coming years. Wait until we have high-speed internet in every home that is going to carry all three: voice, data and video. We will have a single communication connection to the outside world for all our communication needs. Obviously, that is going to create some challenges. To take it even further, in the next three to five years you'll begin to have pervasive internet connectivity. Anywhere in the world you will have the ability to bring a handheld device with high-definition TV quality content whether you're standing on the top of Mount Everest or the bowels of the canyons of New York City. It will be virtually indifferent to where or when you are anywhere on the globe.

I want to mention a couple of things that are occurring. First, we do have a law called the Children's On-line Privacy Protection Act. It essentially says that a web site cannot collect information about a child without parental consent. For example, if a child reveals themselves as someone of a minor age and wants an e-mail service, by law they are required to make sure that there is a parental consent of some sort. Typically, what they will ask for is a credit card number that can be tested, assuming that some someone has a credit card number must be an adult. They'll promise not to bill the number and legitimate e-mail houses are actually good about this. One reason that I point this out is because everybody, especially parents, should be concerned about protecting children and this is certainly an issue. This particular issue about gathering information about children is a very sensitive one. I would hope that you're involved in reporting any violations you see to local law enforcement authorities. This is something they take very seriously and follow up. I've heard of several instances where there has been a very prompt response by local law enforcement.

The second thing I want to mention in terms of legal issues or legislative efforts is the Children's Internet Protection Act that was passed by congress in December 2000; it's referred to as CIPA. This law essentially requires that public schools and public libraries filter obscene visual material and child pornography. That's the language used in this particular act and noncompliance results in the loss of federal funding for either the school or library. There are some significant challenges to implementing this, beginning with the definition of obscenity. There is always debate over the exact criteria and it is difficult to write a definition in a library that is defensible in court.

One of the primary reasons there is growing contention within the library industry and others is that there are legitimate professional bodies that have concerns about responsibly protecting and balancing the protection of children, accessibility to information, the censorship, filtering, and protection. Much of this is generated by what we called false positives and that is that you screen something that is actually a legitimate site. Those tend to fuel librarians and others who are very concerned about free speech and freedom of information and those kinds of things. With this, I would suggest that you report violations. Understand that this is going to take time to implement. I am unable to report the actual language as to the implementation time frame. However, I can tell you that I sit on the technology board at my children's high school and this is causing no small stir or division amongst the people as to how you pay for this, how to actually implement it, and who manages it. This is not a service that you can just go out and immediately buy, implement, and manage.

There are many types of protection that are available on the net that are not mutually exclusive. One particular protection approach is often referred to as keyword blocking. It is a technology that watches both the query requests that are entered into a computer and the text that comes back from the site that is being queried. It watches for offensive materials, such as bad language, and blocks a site that presents those kinds of materials. Another type of protection is site blocking. It is either done by what is called white listing, meaning someone says this is the only set of network destinations that you can access or this is the set that you can't access. But, white listing does not have much technology behind it. At this point a more pervasive approach is to identify or develop a data base of offensive sites and then try to block the ones that are offensive rather than to restrict only to a certain number of sites that might be on a white list. One of the reasons that white lists have been somewhat problematic is that the growth of content on the net is exponential in its increase. To update in common repository of what's good and bad in real time is quite infeasible right now.

Protocol blocking is another one. That is where over the internet you can do a variety of things. You can enter chat rooms, you can do instant messaging and those kinds of things. Some protection services will block certain kinds of protocols and not allow you to go into a chat room. Another kind of protection is time blocking. For example, maybe at a business, since no employees tend to be at the place of business from 10:00 p.m. To 6:00 a.m., They essentially stop any kind of internet access during that period of time. Client blocking is another one where a particular computer, a desktop, or laptop could be identified as one that does not have access privileges to the net or restrictive privileges in some way. Lastly is user blocking where you identify yourself through some kind of a form in a network so it knows who you are and can block you. These are the types of protections that are currently being implemented on the internet.

I would say, for you budding computer scientists, that this is a growth industry. The economic numbers don't support it right now, but I've been impressed over just the last two years at the growth in the amount of interest in the market place on having some form of protection. There are arguments over what is defined as protection but there are some user defined means of modeling a protective environment in the internet. I think these are fast becoming a growth market out of a sense of people just don't wanting to mess with all of that. People have made the decision that they don't want to deal with things that they find offensive. It is wonderful that there is a technology that actually helps in that effort.

I suggest that the biggest exposure on the net -- it is important to note that there are other damaging issues besides this - is searching. This happens when you're either doing a paper or you're curious and you want to do something productive but you're not sure exactly what you're looking for and you begin to "surf the net". You put your surf board out and you find out which way the tide's moving and how big the waves are and away you go. This is when it gets really risky.

Impact of search engines, some of which implement some kind of protective services, can be vital. Yahoo, which does not have protective services, is probably one of the biggest internet sites and search engines available on the net. There is a variety of search engines, I'm not trying to plug Yahoo. Last night I experimented on the internet in preparation for today's conference. I got on Yahoo and typed in "bikini." Let me tell you what happened. It offers you first the shopping side. It is a growth industry with 4100 sites lifting bikini as some form of a product. There is "auctions" for over 200 bikini listings, but then, refreshingly, the first thing is the "bikini atoll." I took some comfort in this.

As I strolled further, it started getting sour in a hurry. The next one was a bikini kill under the genre of entertainment, music, artist, genre, rock and pop, punk and hard core. So all of a sudden I could see that it is a very short distance from the library to the adult bookstore or some offensive content. Those of you that have been in Europe know what that's like at times.

I then went to a site called Yahooligans. One might think when they first read that, that's all I need as a hooligan on the web. This is actually a child site. It is provided by Yahoo, and it is actually not a bad site in terms of starting to protect things. I typed in "bikini" again. I noticed the first thing that comes up: "shark week at bikini atoll" and I could click on that and it takes you to "death and life at the bikini atoll" where the nuclear device was exploded. Obviously some very good content if a child were doing some kind of report on the bikini atoll. Now some may say there is probably some other things that are out there about bikini that might be non-offensive but this is a site that allows you to be a little safer. However, after I tested it a couple of ways it started to break down.

There is another search engine called Searchopolis that is produced by a company called N2H2. It has the same filtering service that the church uses in LDSWorld.com. When one looks on the LDSWorld.com site there is a "Safe Search" button that is provided on that site. It takes you to a link that will take you to Searchopolis. N2H2 is one of several technologies that are involved in building a fairly extensive database of offensive web sites. And what happens is when you type in again something like "bikini" it will go out and do a search and bring back again: welcome to the bikini atoll, assessing radiological conditions at the bikini atoll, Encarta encyclopedia article entitled bikini, the bikini atoll, operation cross roads, nuclear test at bikini so on and so forth. I found that this particular site Searchopolis is really a fairly reliable site. I tried to get my children to use this one was much as possible rather than using a lot of the other search tools that do not do any kind of filtering whatsoever. It also has an elementary, middle, and high school tab to it.

There are quite a few resources that Searchopolis pulls together for you as well as providing that basic search protection that I think is the biggest exposure we face on the web. All of these are what are called server-based filters. These are much harder to find loop holes around in terms of being able to disable. In that all you do is access the facility through the network. There isn't anything that you have to put on your client machine, no software to install. You simply use what is available on the net. There is no new software needed.

There are other resources that I thought would be important to point out that I have found useful. One is an organization called World Village that I find quite interesting. There is a lot of information about responsible use on the net and they highlight a bunch of family friendly sites each month. Another one is Family Friendly search. This is another tool that provides both information about the net as well as providing a safer search tool. My quick review of it in the past few days is it that I'm not quite as comfortable with it as I am with Searchopolis, but it is an attempt to provide a safer environment. Another one is what is called FamilyFriendlyLibraries.org. It is a site that provides a large number of resources in terms of trying to provide some safer environments for utilizing the web both in content and search mechanisms. It is not one of the more professional looking sites, but I thought it had some interesting material on it.

One of the other interesting things I found recently was an internet content summit in Europe which tends sometimes to be one of the melting pots for quite a bit of inappropriate material. There is a growing awareness of the dangers as you've been hearing about in terms of pornography and other material so there is an effort there to begin to develop some kind of information or technology to help with this problem. There is also an article that's coming out in next month's issue (March, 2001) of Consumer Reports. They attempted to review all the products that they could find that provided some kind of filtering service or protection over the net. They found well over a dozen. There are actually probably two or three dozen of these kinds of products. I've installed probably a dozen different client-based filtering solutions and very soon ended up disabling every one of them because of the problems that it caused in the machine. Consumer Reports was able to install and test six. Interestingly, they rated AOL's young teen parental control as the best they've found. Some will likely argue with that but it also implies that you're an AOL customer so you actually are installing some software there.

I would like to suggest a couple of things for those in the BYU community. When you do see something that isn't inappropriate in terms of network use, we have two sources that I would refer you to. First the Honor Code Office and then there is appropriate times to call police particularly when child pornography is involved. Since it is a criminal offense, it is punishable under the law. Lastly, anyone can give suggestions, complaints, or recommendations to me.

I would like to share a final few tips that I have gathered from a couple of different sources. There was an interesting article last week in the LDS Church News that some of these are drawn from and I have learned from other friends. The first thing I would suggest is to place computers in an open access area. We have three computers in our home that are in what is called our library, and it is right next to the kitchen. It is a place where there is always activity. I'm to the point of taking the entrance doors off altogether, but sometimes we get a little rowdy in the kitchen. In the interest of study, we are going to leave the doors on. The important thing is that they are in a place where you can't just turn the monitors to yourself in the corner and surf away.

Another important thing is talking to your children about the internet. This is not an evil thing, it is really our responsibility to make it a good thing. I believe this is a technology inspired of God, and it is an opportunity for us to make it a blessing in our children's lives. If you have any kind of a bit head friend, I refer to these people affectionately as "bit heads." They can show you how to look in the internet browser to look up the history of what's been accessed on the internet as well as cookies. Cookies are little footprints that are left often times by web sites that are visited on the internet. They'll leave a little thumbprint, so to speak, on your machine. Those that are inappropriate are fairly descriptive you don't have to wonder what they might be about.

It is also important to invite your children to talk to you when they find something objectionable. We actually had this experience recently. I have a son that just entered the mission field and had an experience where he came upon something that was objectionable and fairly aggressive. He, essentially, had to turn the computer off to get it off the screen. My wife was sitting there next to him and he said, "Mom, what do I do here? Look at this." He wasn't embarrassed and did not try to run away and hide it, but created an opportunity for my wife to be involved in a teaching moment to reinforce something that he knew was wrong. I think keeping that dialog open with your children is very critical.

Also, know the parents of your child's friends. We try to know who allows what in their home, such as television shows. We all do that. The same thing applies to the internet, do they have filters? Talk to them about it, share with them what your experience is. I would ask questions of your internet service provider about their filtering approach. What responsibility are they taking? Share your learning with others and ask from others what they've learned about it.

The bottom line is there is no fool proof filtering technology. I know that all of you were thinking I was going to walk or ride in here on my white horse and save the day but there is no such thing. It requires our own internal filters. So let me just borrow from the blessing we have of living prophets. First, President Faust: "In its simplest terms, self-mastery is doing those things we should do and not doing those things we should not do. It requires strength, willpower, and honesty. As the traffic on the communications highway becomes a parking lot we must depend more and more on our own moral filters to separate the good from the bad."

Second, Elder Maxwell. He talks about the time when we have the chance to make a choice with the comfort of thinking through it, we should do those beforehand. We should think through, what if? What if I were to happen upon an inappropriate site on the internet what would I do? And consciously think through that exercise our agency to go through that. "If, for example, one determines that he will keep the seventh commandment then his applying this fixed principle will result in temptations either being deliberately or avoided in the first place or being quickly deflected. All of this can be achieved without great thought, risk, or needless anxiety. If we are truly attached to immortal principles some decisions need to be made only once really and then righteous reflexes."

I want to end with this quote, though it is a fairly long quote. I want to return to what I began with and that is the blessing of technology, that we can make it a blessing when in fact others are actively using it for ill purposes. I want to take you back to the advent of the railroad in Utah. In a comment made by George Q. Cannon regarding that technological innovation. Immediately after the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Point, George Q. Cannon wrote:

"The great railroad by which the Atlantic and Pacific oceans are married by iron bands is finished. A person can now step into the railroad cars in Ogden and be whirled to San Francisco on the Pacific or to New York on the Atlantic in a few days." Imagine what he would have thought with airplanes! "In traveling last week from Brigham City to Ogden, we saw two trains of passenger cars one going east and the other west. It was a strange site to see the iron horse dragging his load with fiery speed," probably 25, 30 miles an hour, "through our valleys. How different this to traveling with ox teams. The passenger train generally travels more miles an hour than ox teams go in a day. Then the locomotive does not have to lie still at night like the oxen. My ox teams months were required for people to come from Missouri River to this city. Now it only needs the same number of days to come by rail and we do it in hours, now. Many wicked men," President Cannon was writing for the children, "thought that the building of this railroad would destroy the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They would like to see us driven from these valleys so they might get our homes and rule this land. They have been delighted therefore at the idea that the railroad would soon be completed. But though it is done, we are not destroyed and what is better we shall not be. Such people have always been disappointed about us and the reason is this, remember this brothers and sisters they always leave God out of the question. Now this is God's work and when they leave him out they deceive themselves and are always disappointed. The railroad will not injure us."

I'll say that with the internet as well. It will benefit us. It already has. And we've only just begun. If it brings in bad men, it also carries them away again. And it can very easily carry off apostates and all those who will not obey the laws of God and then how quickly the Elders can go to and return from distant lands to preach the gospel and how easily the saints can be brought from Babylon to dwell in Zion. God is working in a wonderful manner among men to bring about his purposes. He over rules all of their acts and controls all of their improvements for his glory. He watches over his saints and he turns the wrath of their enemies into their benefits.

I appreciate this opportunity to share with you some thoughts about protecting yourself and your family on the internet. I hope this has been helpful. I add my testimony to what has been shared by Brother Cannon that this will prove to be a blessing, collectively. It is our choice to decide whether it is individually. Thank you.