CensorWear Chronicles, Chap 4:
Chronos Editorial

By: The Sceptic | 15Dec2000

ABSO(lutely) SAFE ARE VISUAL CENSORING GLASSES VALUABLE, OR HARBINGERS OF THE THOUGHT POLICE? By Mike Kravitz Chronos Magazine Online AUGUST 08, 2002 Attempting to 'protect' fellow citizens from real-world depravities ranging from criminal behavior to rap music and illicit substances, from Harry Potter to Howard Stern, many Americans haven't always been able to resist trying to circumvent the First Amendment. The streets and neighborhoods of today, with all of those uncomfortably non-Christian churches and pro-gay alliances includes more (ahem) freedom of expression in need of protection than most people want to acknowledge. As fear of nonconformity rises in reaction to more and more people realizing that they don't need to conform, AbsoSafe has risen up like a great mother hen and volunteered to allay conformists' fears. The AbsoSafe consortium was formed late last year by manufacturers of personal tear gas dispensers, tazers, and home and cellular alarm systems for the sole purpose of producing and marketing one product: a pair of goggles. (AbsoSafe calls them glasses). At first glance, these goggles would seem to be every parent's dream gadget. For US$39.95, mommy or daddy can lock one of these devices onto their kid's face (or their own face) and -- according to AbsoSafe -- they'll never have to look at an objectionable thing again. Assuming that the goggles work as advertised (which "ain't necessarily so"), the question that must be begged is: what is objectionable? AbsoSafe's own advertisements claim that the goggles filter "unacceptable political or religious opinions" along with porn, crime and hate groups. Assuming (for the sake of discussion) that it's good to not expose children to those who think Adolph Hitler was cool, what else is too far out of the mainstream that we shouldn't let children notice and trust them to make up their own minds? How about Libertarians and human right groups? How about Wiccans? How about gay and lesbian organizations? Are all these people 'objectionable'? Apparently so, to AbsoSafe. And therein lies the problem. What one person calls guardianship of the public good, another will label interference. Exactly what is considered inappropriate is a messy issue. Like beauty and art, obscenity is in the eye of the beholder. Shortly after these devices hit the market, whole families could be seen strolling about, wearing these reality-inhibiting rose-colored glasses, blithely believing in a world that doesn't actually exist. Thankfully, our society is big enough (and free enough) to include people who are other than mainstream, Democrat or Republican and Christian. But not if you wear AbsoSafe Glasses. AbsoSafe Glasses are a technological wonder. The CleanLens system is in constant microwave communication with the goggles via leased Iridium bandwidth. It reviews imagery coming into the goggles and performs several tasks on it before passing the revised view onto the person wearing it. First, it does a comparative search, to see if any images resemble anything flagged in the database as undesirable. (The levels of undesirability for different categories of objects can be set with the user's computer.) Next, it analyses the image to see if any other content should be removed, based on thousands of models of bad or criminal behavior and dangerous situations stored in the AbsoSafe database. After filtering the view, the system fills in blanks by way of a sophisticated 'best guess' of what was likely behind the removed object or person, before passing a new image to the person wearing them. AbsoSafe maintains an immense data center deep in the heart of the Bible Belt in Alabama, with backup power generators that rival Alabama's own electrical grid. The database itself is supposed to contain imagery of every known person with a criminal record, every controlled substance, and known or suspected meeting places of criminal organizations. In an admittedly unscientific survey I took among people I know who are owners of AbsoSafe Glasses, I found out that almost nobody realized exactly what is included in AbsoSafe's "unacceptable political or religious opinions". They didn't know that the AbsoSafe database contains information on gay, lesbian and women's rights organizations, minority religions, minority political parties and human rights groups. Nor did they understand that all of these are filtered at the device's highest (default) setting. Yet, when I asked AbsoSafe about it, at first they denied it. (The contents of the database is a trade secret.) When I presented them with evidence, they claimed they aren't passing judgement on legal activities such as those mentioned above, but -- since some parents would prefer that such scenes were not available to their children -- they are filtered as an option. If conservative parents want safety goggles that censor any scene that would make Pat Robertson uncomfortable, that's fine. But customers looking for an ideology-free filter ought to know exactly what they're missing. Will the next generation grow up in a world where everybody is like them, where being different and having alternative opinions is cause enough to be completely blocked out of the view of others? If AbsoSafe has their way, that's precisely the world in which we may live.