Don't filter content

In December of 2000, Congress passed the Children's Internet Protection Act, requiring that schools and public libraries receiving federal funding purchase Internet filtering software designed to block access to pornography. Congress and the Justice Department choose to ignore the flaws of these filtering programs, which mistakingly block many Web sites that have nothing to do with pornography whatsoever. The law aroused much protest from groups such as the American Library Association, who want to protect the nation's libraries from the suppression of free speech.\nLast May, a U.S. District Court of Appeals agreed that the law was unconstitutional and overturned it. The judges wrote, "Given the crudeness of filtering technology, any technology protection measure mandated by CIPA will necessarily block access to a substantial amount of speech whose suppression serves no legitimate government interest."\nThe Justice Department argued that libraries should take the same caution in protecting children from inappropriate material online as they do with books and magazines, ignoring the fact that restricting books and magazines does not pose the same threat to free speech as do Internet filtering programs that block constitutionally-protected material. \nJust how flawed are these filtering programs? Ben Edelman, then a Harvard College senior, compiled a report that the American Civil Liberties Union used as evidence in the case that resulted in the May overturning. Edelman tested four filtering programs: Surf control Cyber Patrol 6, N2H2 Internet Filtering 2.0, Secure Computing Smart Filter 3.0 and Websense Enterprise 4.3. His research yielded 6,777 Web sites that were blocked by at least one of the programs. These sites were categorized according to Yahoo and Google categorizations. Edelman found that a significant portion of these sites did not contain inappropriate material. Some of the sites blocked, for example, were the homepage for Washington Square Park (www.washingsquarepark.org), the Asian Community AIDS Services homepage (www.acas.org) and the Web site for Southern Alberta Fly Fishing Outfitters (www.alberaflyfish.com). Edelman's report can be found at www.cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/mul-v-us/.\nThis is not the first time that the courts have ruled against anti-Internet-pornography laws. The Supreme Court declared the 1996 Communications Decency Act unconstitutional, and a U.S. Court of Appeals blocked the 1998 Child Online Protection Act from taking effect. The government insists on forcing the issue, though, seemingly blind to free speech concerns. The judges who ruled against CIPA suggest as alternatives to flawed filtering software either requiring parental consent for a minor to use a library computer, or requiring that a parent be present. Hopefully the government will begin to seek out other ways to protect children without infringing upon our right to free speech. \nThe Justice Department appealed the May overturning, and last Tuesday the Supreme Court said it would hear the case. Paul M. Smith, an attorney for the American Library Association, said the Children's Internet Protection Act "takes a meat ax approach to an area that requires far more sensitive tools." Smith said more than 14 million people use libraries for Internet access. CIPA barred millions of citizens from accessing information that they might otherwise have had no way to access. The Supreme Court should support the May overturning, and the government should invest in more appropriate protection measures for our schools and libraries.