Bennett Haselton

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Bennett Haselton (born November 20, 1978) is the founder of Circumventor.com and Peacefire.org, two US-based websites dedicated to combating Internet censorship. Peacefire.org is focused on documenting flaws in commercial Internet blocking programs. Circumventor.com is dedicated to distributing anti-censorship tools to users in countries such as China and Iran, and as of 2011 has over 3 million subscribers through distribution channels including email and Facebook pages. [1]

Contents

Haselton has appeared on CNN and The Montel Williams Show to discuss First Amendment issues and been quoted in The New York Times , The Washington Post , The Seattle Times , and The Village Voice . [2]

Haselton has testified before the US Child Online Protection Commission [3] and as an expert witness for the ACLU. [4]

He is the Guinness World Record holder for the most country capitals named in 60 seconds in response to a prompt of a random country name, achieving the first verified perfect score on December 12, 2015. [5] [6]

He listed in the Google Vulnerability Program Hall Of Fame for finding and fixing security holes in Google products. [7]

Early life and education

Haselton was born in Oklahoma. [8] Haselton's father is a geophysicist and his mother is a piano teacher. [2] Haselton lived in England and Denmark and graduated from Copenhagen International School. [9] At 15, Haselton became a member of the Danish National Math Team. [2]

Haselton's interest in censorship dates from when he was 10 years old and heard swear words for the first time. [2]

In 1995 Haselton returned to the United States for college. [8] Haselton earned a master's degree in mathematics from Vanderbilt University. [8] After graduation, Haselton worked on Visual Basic at Microsoft for seven months. [8] According to The New York Times, Haselton was fired from Microsoft, [10] however Haselton disputes this [11]

PeaceFire

Haselton delivering a presentation on internet censorship at Ignite Seattle 2011 Bennett Haselton 2011.jpg
Haselton delivering a presentation on internet censorship at Ignite Seattle 2011

Haselton started PeaceFire in August 1996 [12] to educate young people about the now-defunct 1996 Online Communications Decency Act. [2]

Peacefire first received national attention in December 1996 when CYBERsitter added PeaceFire to their list of "pornographic" Web sites. [12] CYBERsitter also sent a letter to PeaceFire's ISP [13] threatening to block all of their hosted sites if they continued to host PeaceFire. [12] [14] Two years later in October 1998 [12] PeaceFire started posting information about how to disable blocking programs. [8]

Haselton has come under criticism for starting PeaceFire by Marc Kanter, marketing director for the company that makes the blocking program, Cybersitter. [15]

In June 2006, reporters from the Los Angeles Times were blocked from accessing PeaceFire from their office. [16]

Blacklists

In 2003, Haselton found out that the PeaceFire.org domain had been placed on a blacklist by the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS) list because of complaints that his ISP, Media3 Technologies, refused to cut off service to companies suspected of "doing business with spammers." [17] It took Haselton over a year to get off the MAPS list. [17]

Other activities

Internet security

Haselton found a security hole in Netscape that allowed web sites to gather details from visitors' computers, including bookmarks and cache information. [18] Haselton earned a $15,000 bounty from Netscape in 2001 for uncovering holes in the company's browser software. [15]

Anti-spam activities

Haselton has won 10 small-claims cases and thousands of dollars in judgments against senders of unwanted e-mail. [15] Haselton has become one of the most well known anti-spam plaintiffs in the United States. [15]

For example, in March 2002, Haselton won a $1000 award at King County District Court in Bellevue, Washington in each of three cases against Red Moss Media, Paulann Allison, and Richard Schueler (for sending misleading, unsolicited, commercial emails to its webmaster bearing deceptive information such as a forged return e-mail address or a misleading subject line), in a test of Washington's tough anti-spamming laws. [19]

Testimony

At 21, Haselton testified before the commission mandated by the Child Online Protection Act, where he presented evidence that the error rate in most commercial blocking programs was much higher than commonly believed. [3] In 2007, he testified as an expert witness for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, in the ACLU's lawsuit against the North Central Regional Library District, where a filter was enforced on library computers for all patrons including adults. Haselton's tests showed that sites which the library filter had blocked as "pornography" included a church, an immigration rights group, and the Seattle Women's Jazz Orchestra, and overall that about one in four .org sites blocked by the library filter was blocked in error. [4]

Related Research Articles

An Internet filter is software that restricts or controls the content an Internet user is capable to access, especially when utilized to restrict material delivered over the Internet via the Web, Email, or other means. Content-control software determines what content will be available or be blocked.

A Domain Name System blocklist, Domain Name System-based blackhole list, Domain Name System blacklist (DNSBL) or real-time blackhole list (RBL) is a service for operation of mail servers to perform a check via a Domain Name System (DNS) query whether a sending host's IP address is blacklisted for email spam. Most mail server software can be configured to check such lists, typically rejecting or flagging messages from such sites.

Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam.

The Great Firewall is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People's Republic of China to regulate the Internet domestically. Its role in internet censorship in China is to block access to selected foreign websites and to slow down cross-border internet traffic. The Great Firewall operates by checking transmission control protocol (TCP) packets for keywords or sensitive words. If the keywords or sensitive words appear in the TCP packets, access will be closed. If one link is closed, more links from the same machine will be blocked by the Great Firewall. The effect includes: limiting access to foreign information sources, blocking foreign internet tools and mobile apps, and requiring foreign companies to adapt to domestic regulations.

Internet censorship in Tunisia significantly decreased in January 2011, following the ouster of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, as the new acting government removed filters on social networking sites such as YouTube.

Peacefire is a U.S.-based website, with a registered address in Bellevue, Washington, dedicated to "preserving First Amendment rights for Internet users, particularly those younger than 18". It was founded in August 1996 by Bennett Haselton, who still runs it. The site's motto is, "You'll understand when you're younger."

The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) was a joint project whose goal was to monitor and report on internet filtering and surveillance practices by nations. The project employed a number of technical means, as well as an international network of investigators, to determine the extent and nature of government-run internet filtering programs. Participating academic institutions included the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto; Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School; the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at University of Oxford; and, The SecDev Group, which took over from the Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Programme, University of Cambridge.

In networking, a black hole, also known as a block hole, refers to a place in the network where incoming or outgoing traffic is silently discarded, without informing the source that the data did not reach its intended recipient.

Multiple forms of media including books, newspapers, magazines, films, television, and content published on the Internet are censored in Saudi Arabia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet censorship</span> Legal control of the internet

Internet censorship is the legal control or suppression of what can be accessed, published, or viewed on the Internet. Censorship is most often applied to specific internet domains but exceptionally may extend to all Internet resources located outside the jurisdiction of the censoring state. Internet censorship may also put restrictions on what information can be made internet accessible. Organizations providing internet access – such as schools and libraries – may choose to preclude access to material that they consider undesirable, offensive, age-inappropriate or even illegal, and regard this as ethical behaviour rather than censorship. Individuals and organizations may engage in self-censorship of material they publish, for moral, religious, or business reasons, to conform to societal norms, political views, due to intimidation, or out of fear of legal or other consequences.

In the United States, internet censorship is the suppression of information published or viewed on the Internet in the United States. The First Amendment of the United States Constitution protects freedom of speech and expression against federal, state, and local government censorship.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Netscape Mail & Newsgroups</span>

Netscape Mail and Newsgroups, commonly known as just Netscape Mail, was an email and news client produced by Netscape Communications Corporation as part of the Netscape series of suites between versions 2.0 to 7.2. In the 2.x and 3.x series, it was bundled with the web browser. In the 4.x series, it was rewritten as two separate programs known as Netscape Messenger and Netscape Collabra.

Censorship in Denmark has been prohibited since 1849 by the Constitution:

§ 77: Any person shall be at liberty to publish his ideas in print, in writing, and in speech, subject to his being held responsible in a court of law. Censorship and other preventive measures shall never again be introduced.

SurfWatch, Inc. was a Los Altos, CA-based company which pioneered the first widely available filtering software that allowed users to block explicit content on the Internet. By disallowing computers from accessing specified sites and by screening for newsgroups likely to contain sexually explicit material, SurfWatch was able to aid parents, educators and employers in preventing access to offensive material from a specific computer. The Apple Macintosh version of SurfWatch 1.0 was developed starting in 1994, first shipped to the public in May 1995, and was followed by the Microsoft version in July of the same year.

This list of Internet censorship and surveillance by country provides information on the types and levels of Internet censorship and surveillance that is occurring in countries around the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ultrasurf</span>

UltraSurf is a freeware Internet censorship circumvention product created by UltraReach Internet Corporation. The software bypasses Internet censorship and firewalls using an HTTP proxy server, and employs encryption protocols for privacy.

Internet censorship circumvention, also referred to as going over the wall or scientific browsing in China, is the use of various methods and tools to bypass internet censorship.

SmartScreen is a cloud-based anti-phishing and anti-malware component included in several Microsoft products, including operating systems Windows 8 and later, the applications Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge. SmartScreen intelligence is also used in the backend of Microsoft's online services such as the web app Outlook.com and Microsoft Bing search engine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet censorship in Russia</span>

In Russia, internet censorship is enforced on the basis of several laws and through several mechanisms. Since 2012, Russia maintains a centralized internet blacklist maintained by the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor).

The precise number of websites blocked in the United Kingdom is unknown. Blocking techniques vary from one Internet service provider (ISP) to another with some sites or specific URLs blocked by some ISPs and not others. Websites and services are blocked using a combination of data feeds from private content-control technology companies, government agencies, NGOs, court orders in conjunction with the service administrators who may or may not have the power to unblock, additionally block, appeal or recategorise blocked content.

References

  1. ↑ "Circumventor.com".
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 the Stranger. "Regular Genius: Bennett Haselton Attacks Censorship So We Can Say Fuck" by Pat Hearney. November 29, 2000. Archived March 8, 2016, at the Wayback Machine
  3. 1 2 "ALA: Select Testimonies to the Child Online Protection Act Commission". American Library Association. Archived from the original on 2013-02-23.
  4. 1 2 "Bradburn v. NCRL Decision". Municipal Research and Services Center of Washington. Archived from the original on 2013-04-15.
  5. ↑ "Bellevue man clobbers capital quiz, sets Guinness Record". Bellevue Reporter. 24 December 2016. Retrieved 12 April 2016.
  6. ↑ "Most capital cities named in one minute". GuinnessWorldRecords.com. 12 December 2015. Archived from the original on 11 January 2016. Retrieved 12 April 2016.
  7. ↑ "Vulnerability Reward Program" . Retrieved January 9, 2018.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 CNET. "Newsmaker: Cracking the great firewall of China" by Paul Festa. May 20, 2003.
  9. ↑ Copenhagen International School. "Dear Fellow CIS'ers (no "former" CIS'ers – it's a lifetime designation)" by Bennett Haselton. Archived November 20, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  10. ↑ New York Times. "Ex-Microsoft Employee Publicizes a Potential Security Flaw" by Michael Brick. May 15, 2000. Archived March 7, 2016, at the Wayback Machine
  11. ↑ PublicEditorMyAss.com. "My experience trying to get the New York Times to correct an online article" by Bennett Haselton. Archived April 16, 2016, at the Wayback Machine
  12. 1 2 3 4 PeaceFire.org "About Peacefire.org" Archived November 15, 2016, at the Wayback Machine
  13. ↑ http://www.peacefire.org/archives/SOS.letters/bm.2.media3.12.6.96.txt
  14. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20000620211209/https://www.wired.com/news/politics/0%2C1283%2C901%2C00.html
  15. 1 2 3 4 Seattle Post Intelligencer. "'Supergeek' fights spam" by Luis Cabrera. June 3, 2002.
  16. ↑ New York Times. "Some Sites Off Limits, Even in a Newsroom" by Sara Ivry. June 19, 2006. Archived November 19, 2016, at the Wayback Machine
  17. 1 2 Washington Post. "Blacklists vs. Spam" by David McGuire. May 14, 2003. [ dead link ]
  18. ↑ Information World Review. "Security hole found in Netscape" by John Geralds. April 21, 2000. [ permanent dead link ]
  19. ↑ Mariano, Gwendolyn (March 25, 2002). "Spammers lose in small-claims court". CNet News. Retrieved December 14, 2014.
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