Airport spokesman Chuck Cannon told the Denver Post that the airport's telecom office decided to use a filtering system when the airport went from a paid service to free public Wi-Fi in November. According to Cannon, officials preferred to deal with infrequent blocking complaints rather than angry parents whose children walked by a screen displaying adult material.
Cannon also said that the filtering software appears to be blocking less than one percent of 1.7 million web page requests a day, and the airport has received only two formal blocking complaints so far on more than 4,000 Wi-Fi connections daily.
Among the blocked sites are gossip site PerezHilton.com, boingboing.net, Vanity Fair and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.
The Denver Post found that the airport system's controls block anything displaying partial nudity or even provocative underwear ads, but allows users to access Wikipedia's illustrated entries for "pornography" or "erotica" and the uninhibited language of satire site The Onion.
The situation was publicized by musician David Byrne in his online journal last month. He was pleased at the free Internet service, but reported that he could not access the Boing Boing site and, reading the block information page, wrote, "I’m not totally shocked that alleged nudity might be blocked ... but I’m perplexed by the implication that all blogs and wiki sites are suspect."
Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin was displeased at the Denver Airport's filtering.
"This gets to the heart of what the Internet is all about and whose responsibility it is," Jardin said. "This manner of policing the Internet has been proven time and time again to be easily circumventable by any number of means. So what it does is just block traffic to legitimate sites. Like the locks on your suitcase only keep the nice guys out."
To illustrate its opposition to the practice, the Boing Boing site has posted a guide to defeating censorware.
