In the November, 2007 meeting of the LPS Filtering Committee met to discuss requests to modify the Internet filter settings.  The filter is deployed in compliance with the federal Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) and has full functionality to meet the requirements of the act.   The Filtering Committee is charged to evaluate changes to the current settings and make recommendations.  The November meeting resulted in the following recommendations:

o        www.twitter.com should remain in the filter list requiring a teacher override for access.

o        www.gsanetwork.org should be unblocked for the high school level.

o        Lifestyle category needs further investigation with 8e6 Technologies.

o        Block screen language should be changed to reflect options for access.

o        www.myspace.com should remain blocked for all levels to everyone except building administration and security.

o        Keyword filtration is inconsistent and should be disabled.

ITS Actions

1.    www.twitter.com: remain filtered with staff override enabled

2.    www.gsanetwork.org: allow at high schools only.

3.    Lifestyle category: remain filtered with staff override pending more research
8e6 technologies only provided three exemplars of sites that are categorized as Lifestyle.  All three were homosexual in nature and two were clearly dating sites.  If 8e6 is categorizing homosexual web sites as Lifestyle, we will need to unblock this category at the high school level.  However, because many of the Lifestyle categorized web sites are clearly dating sites, I am not comfortable opening this category at this time.  It may be that 8e6 needs to move the gay dating sites categorized in Lifestyle to the Dating category.   If we unblock Lifestyle, we may need to do extensive work to selectively filter the homosexual dating sites in that category for the same reasons we filter all other dating sites.

4.    Block screen: change language
Title: Change ACCESS DENIED to FACULTY SUPERVISION REQUIRED

Body: Change “Internet access to the requested website has been denied based…..” to “Internet access to the requested website requires faculty supervision.  Follow the ‘further options’ link below to verify supervision.  Please note that certain categories of websites cannot be accessed in LPS even with supervision.”

Insert a link if possible that reads: “Show me how” and link to the Intranet page with the podcast for the using staff overrides.

5.    www.myspace.com: remain filtered with only administrator and security override access

6.    Keyword filter: deactivate
The keyword filter is only one of the mechanisms that 8e6 uses to filter inappropriate materials and it is the most ineffective.  This component of the filtering system is easily defeated by student seeking to trick the program and produces many false positives for students whose choice of words may trip the program.  For example, death penalty searches are blocked on the term death.  Therefore, we shall deactivate the keyword filter which will not disable the primary filtering protocols of the 8e6 system.