The Federal Government: Moral Guardian of the Internet

Humanist, Nov, 2000 by Barbara Dority

Your local public library or school may need your help. Already, many educators and librarians are alarmed and working to defeat federal legislation that would require the installation of filtering software on all school and library computers connected to the Internet.

Lawmakers in both the Senate and the House of Representatives approved a final version of the legislation this past August, agreeing on a compromise approach containing elements of separate plans passed in the two chambers earlier this year. This legislation would require all schools and libraries to install filtering software that would regulate the content available on any computers purchased with federal money and block "child pornography," "obscenity," and "materials deemed harmful to minors." Public schools and libraries would also be required to develop use policies that address minors' online access to "inappropriate" materials.

This proposed federal legislation would increase liability for schools and libraries and give local politicians and religious proselytizers a significant new weapon to ban access in public institutions to material they consider offensive or inappropriate.

Representatives are already lining up to lengthen the list of sites and subjects to be automatically considered "inappropriate." Senator John McCain (Republican--Arizona) is pushing his own filtering provision in the Senate, where an amendment by Senator Rick Santorum (Republican--Pennsylvania) has added the further requirement that communities be able to provide input about blocking other "inappropriate" websites that mention bomb-making, drugs, or other topics they consider improper.

Even if not voted on, or if defeated this year, this legislation will assuredly be back next year, regardless of the outcome of the November national elections. The concept of federal legislation mandating filtering software on computer terminals in public schools and libraries is an appalling thought. But it becomes ludicrous when one considers that blocking and filtering programs themselves are arbitrary and highly ineffective. While savvy users can easily bypass them, these filters hide from most users a vast amount of legitimate information along with so-called offensive content.

The controversy over blocking software isn't limited to chicken breast recipes, breast cancer information, Anne Sexton, or "Superbowl XXX." These sites are accidentally censored by software programs that scan pages for certain keywords, as almost all of them do. But it gets much worse when sites are blocked deliberately. These are URLs that come pre-included on the list of sites to be blocked by the program, regardless of the content of the pages themselves. Some examples of such preset blocks are:

* CYBERsitter prevents access to Time as a result of an article in that magazine criticizing CYBERsitter's blocking policies. (Time then published a follow-up article about its site getting blocked.)

* Cyber Patrol prevents access to the Envirolink animal rights website because the manufacturer determined that Envirolink's descriptions of animal testing in laboratories were inappropriate for children.

* Cyber Patrol was discovered to be blocking the Ontario Center for Religious Tolerance at one point. A report from the nonprofit Censor ware Project lists dozens of additional sites that are obstructed by Cyber Patrol.

* An American Civil Liberties Union 1998 position paper reports that BESS, which controls Internet access used by about three million students in the United States, blocks the antiracist HateWatch website and the Marijuana Policy Project, a page that advocates the medicinal use of marijuana.

* The X-Stop Files, published in October 1997 by attorney Jonathan Wallace, names some of the sites that were hard-coded on X-Stop's list of blocked URLs, including the AIDS quilt and the official homepage of the Quakers. Wallace was later called to testify on his findings in a First Amendment lawsuit filed by People for the American Way against a library using X-Stop.

What a combination: commercial manufacturers of filtering software and the federal government!

Clearly, the passage of a federal law mandating filters would be a license for all political interest groups to keep subjects they don't like out of local public libraries and schools. And, of course, the victims would be young people who have nowhere to attain Internet access except in libraries and public schools.

Instead of tying the hands of educators and librarians, the government should be doing everything possible to ensure that as many kids as possible have free access to the Internet and the Worldwide Web. It is vital to their future social, educational, and economic opportunities. Laws like those proposed demonstrate how profoundly and dangerously ignorant of technology most of our elected leaders are and how vulnerable the new technologies are to the ignorance of policymakers.

The National Education Association is vigorously opposing this still-nameless legislation (currently attached to legislation funding the Labor, Health, and Human Services and Education Departments). The American Library Association has also joined the fight, since public libraries would be required to follow the same access policies as public schools, although it would be virtually impossible to implement them.