NYT Profile of Cyberian Seth Finkelstein
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/19/technology/circuits/19HACK.html
July 19, 2001
Cracking the Code Of Online Censorship
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
EVERY year the Electronic Frontier Foundation hands out its Pioneer
Awards to people who have played crucial roles in the history of
technology. Recipients have included visionaries like Ivan Sutherland,
creator of some of the first computer graphics programs; Douglas C.
Engelbart, an inventor of the mouse; and Linus Torvalds, inventor of the
popular Linux operating system.
This year one of the three winners was Seth Finkelstein, an activist who
decrypts filtering programs, the software used by private companies,
libraries and schools to block out undesirable sites. As a founder of the
Censorware Project, an anti-filtering advocacy group, Mr. Finkelstein has
influenced public debate and legal decisions, including a First Amendment
case on filtering policy at a public library in Virginia.
But most people have probably never heard of him, and until recently that
is the way Mr. Finkelstein, a reclusive 36-year-old computer programmer,
wanted it. Over the last six years he has spent hundreds of hours
decrypting the blacklists of popular Web filtering programs like Cyber
Patrol and X-Gear.
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James S. Tyre mailto:jstyre@jstyre.com
Law Offices of James S. Tyre 310-839-4114/310-839-4602(fax)
10736 Jefferson Blvd., #512 Culver City, CA 90230-4969
Co-founder, The Censorware Project http://censorware.net
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