Filters

[Steve]

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Yale Law Professor Is Main Architect of Global Filtering Plan

Carl S. Kaplan
NY Times 9/10/99


An ambitious proposal for a global system to rate and filter Internet
content, due to be released Friday at a conference in Munich,
Germany, has already been attacked by free speech advocates who say
it is a dangerous recipe for censorship. 

So it may come as a surprise that the man whose ideas about
filtering are at the heart of the proposal is a highly respected Yale
law professor who, by his own admission, reveres the First Amendment.

Jack M. Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First
Amendment at Yale Law School, is unapologetic about his role in the
debate over filtering. In a recent phone interview before he
departed for Munich, Balkin said that filtering will be an inevitable
feature of the Internet, given the glut of information available and
the need to protect children from potentially harmful content. 

Like it or not, "we are going to have filters," said Balkin, who
also directs the Information Society Project at the law school. "The
question then becomes, what is the best design for a filter so that
it preserves civil liberties?" 

The new proposal, which is the central focus of a three-day summit
on Internet self-regulation, is outlined in a lengthy memorandum
prepared by the Bertelsmann Foundation, a non-profit social policy
organization associated with the media giant Bertelsmann AG and the
host of the conference. 

The memorandum is the work of the foundation's staff, said Jens
Waltermann, deputy head of the group's media division. But he
acknowledged that Balkin's thinking "is behind a lot of what we
proposed with regard to rating and filtering." 

"We are immensely grateful to him as a free speech advocate to be
brave enough to think about empowering parents to make choices,
while protecting free speech to the maximum extent possible,"
Waltermann said. 

Balkin's filtering scheme is set out in detail in a 36-page paper he
co-authored with Beth Noveck and Kermit Roosevelt, who are also
members of the Yale Information Society Project. The paper, about
nine months in the making, was commissioned by the Bertelsmann
Foundation as part of a series of four "expert reports" by legal
scholars on ways to control harmful material online without
involving government regulation. During the drafting process, Balkin
and his colleagues held a series of meetings with a wide range of
filtering supporters and opponents in an attempt to hammer out the
details. 

The resulting plan resembles a three-layer cake, Balkin said. In the
first layer, Web site operators around the world would voluntarily
describe their content using a standard set of terms called
"descriptors." Balkin hopes that Web site operators in different
cultures will apply these descriptors in roughly the same fashion,
leading to a form of reliable self-rating. 

At the second level, groups would voluntarily create "templates"
that combine and rank combinations of the content descriptors,
producing a filter that reflects the group's ideology. There might be
templates from the Moral Majority, religious groups or the American
Civil Liberties Union. Internet users would choose a template, and
their browsers would use the descriptors and the templates to
determine which sites should be blocked. 

Balkin said the scheme preserves civil liberties because it would
produce many filters from a wide variety of groups. "The system is
set up to make a thousand flowers bloom," he said. If any government
or institution were to require that a particular filter be used on
computers within its jurisdiction, it would be apparent to all that
this would be an attempt at thought control, "because there is no
standard template," he said. 

Fine-tuning of the scheme happens at the third layer of the cake,
where groups could release so-called "white lists" of approved sites
that may have been crudely filtered in the second layer. For
example, news sites might identify themselves as including reports of
acts of violence, so a user interested in news might want a "white
list" of news sites to override a filter that blocks sites with
violent content. 

Balkin said that the filtering plan is more friendly to free speech
than any in existence. But many free speech advocates who have had
an advance peek at it are not convinced. Some worry that the plan,
far from staving off government regulation of Internet speech, will
have the opposite effect. 

"Once this system is established, it will be very easy for
governments to require every Web site within their jurisdiction to
self-rate," said John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation. It would then be a short step to
government-mandated filter use, he said. 

"I think Jack's creating a dangerous tool, with the best of
intentions," Barlow said. "Give government a tool and they will use
it." 

Other critics contend that universal self-rating and filtering will
chill unpopular speech and remake cyberspace into a homogenized realm
dominated by giant media companies. 

"Self-rating schemes will punish those sites who choose not to
self-rate," said Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the ACLU,
who is attending the Munich conference. "It creates a risk of
rendering a variety of speakers invisible." 

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy
Information Center, which recently published an anthology of essays
critical of filtering schemes, said Balkin's belief in the safeguard
provided by thousands of filters is misplaced. 

"A diversity of filters is not a diversity of viewpoints," he said.
"It is a collection of fears and prejudices. I'm very uneasy about an
architecture of the Internet that enables the widespread
dissemination of those prejudices."

For his part, Balkin maintained that the self-rating scheme and the
creation of templates would be simple enough to insure widespread,
voluntary compliance. 

While he said that he was fiercely opposed to any misuse of the
filtering system by unscrupulous governments, Balkin acknowledged
that it was possible that some regimes might make the rating of
content mandatory or even impose filtering at the level of the
Internet service provider or international gateways. 

But those risks and fears should not prevent the design of effective
filters for individual Internet users that protect freedom of speech,
Balkin argued. After all, repressive governments already censor the
press, and they may choose to use filters that are already on the
market. A fight against the misuse of filtering by governments is
"best carried out through political and legal pressure, rather than
by simply opposing technological development," he said. 

Balkin said that in the Internet age, a lawyer with civil liberties
at heart has to be interested in more than just laws. "You have got
to be interested in the architecture of software and the architecture
of the Internet, because the architecture of the Internet in our age
determines who speaks and who listens," he said. 

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company 




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