SCN: Filters

Thu Apr 19 23:49:54 PDT 2001

x-no-archive: yes

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Filters face free-speech test

(Lisa M. Bowman, ZDNet News)---The San Francisco Public Library, 
a large gray edifice that stands across from the city's sparkling City 
Hall, hardly seems like ground zero for a constitutional war over 
Web content.  

But inside the library, where backpack-toting students can slip in to 
study and homeless people can duck the rain and surf the Web, a 
battle is brewing over what people--children and adults--can view on 
public, Internet-connected computers.  

As a result of a new federal law, the San Francisco Public Library 
and thousands of other libraries across the country are facing a 
conundrum: filter Internet content against their will or risk losing 
federal funds.  

The law, called the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), forces 
schools and libraries that receive government money to block Web 
images deemed harmful to minors.  

San Francisco, long a bastion of free love and free speech, is taking 
a stand against what officials there see as censorship by refusing to 
filter content.  

"Putting filters on the Internet sometimes blocks constitutionally 
protected speech," said Marcia Schneider, public affairs director of 
the San Francisco Public Library system. "Many librarians feel that 
filters don't protect children from porn, that they lead to a false 
sense of security."  

The filtering law--which is facing legal challenges from groups 
including the America Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the American 
Library Association (ALA) and an organization of California libraries 
that includes San Francisco--is the latest in a long line of attempts to 
regulate Web content. Although the founders of the Web envisioned 
a freewheeling community where people of all persuasions could 
communicate without the legal constraints of the real world, the self-
appointed moral keepers of society have had a different idea.  

Fearing that easy access to a flurry of pornographic and violent 
content could taint Net users in general and children in particular, 
some groups have set out to restrict what people can see and read 
on the Web. The results so far have been largely unsuccessful: Two 
major federal legislative attempts have been tossed out because of 
First Amendment violations. And most efforts at the state level have 
failed as well.  

However, proponents of a content crackdown are learning from their 
experiences and tailoring successive rounds of legislation more 
narrowly in efforts to avoid the constitutional blunders of the past.  

The major tool for filtering is software that resides either on a client 
computer or a local server. Such software was designed to help 
parents protect their children from smut, and filtering advocates are 
hoping that libraries and schools will install it in response to CIPA.  

The local method of filtering has been the preferred approach in the 
United States and differs from steps taken in more oppressive 
countries, where governments have tried to use state-run Internet 
service providers and other methods to block content.  

Of course, the debate over censorship is as old as the written word. 
But the Web has opened a new chapter of the debate by providing 
access to a world of content larger than any library could ever 
house, a world where sites catering to people's most-primal 
fantasies are just a mouse click away.  

In some ways, peddlers of porn and other vices have become more 
insidious. After all, Web pages catering to fetishes of all stripes can 
be found at sites containing seemingly innocuous words such as 
"whitehouse," "Barbie" or "childrensbiblestories." What's more, 
once people stumble onto such a site--either unwittingly or 
intentionally--they often are trapped there by countless technological 
tricks including misleading metatags and a disabled back button.  

It is this phenomenon of porn on demand--available anytime to 
people of all ages--that's alarmed individuals such as Donna Rice 
Hughes, an Internet safety advocate and former leader of the anti-
porn group Enough is Enough. For years, Hughes, the Gary Hart 
love interest turned born-again Christian, has been on a crusade to 
combat the seedy side of the Net through regulation, a battle that 
has culminated with the latest filtering bill.  

Hughes promotes government intervention because, she said, 
"parents...can't be expected to shoulder the entire burden."  

Her targets these days are those she calls "pornapreneurs": 
businesspeople looking to make a buck by capitalizing on the 
underbelly of the Web.  

Hughes began her battle in the mid-1990s, helping to craft 
legislation that eventually became the Communications Decency Act 
(CDA). The act was a wide-ranging attempt to clean up Internet smut, 
making it a felony to deliver indecent material to minors via the Net. 
Congress passed the measure as part of a massive telecom reform 
bill in 1996, but the ACLU, ALA and others challenged it on free-
speech grounds. In 1997, in its first Web-related case, the U.S. 
Supreme Court overturned major portions of it.  

Next came the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which was 
attached to a budget bill in 1998 and dubbed the "son of CDA." 
Though less restrictive than its predecessor--the law targeted only 
commercial sites, preventing them from purveying sexually explicit 
material to children--a federal appeals court again tossed out major 
parts of it on First Amendment grounds. However, the Justice 
Department recently filed an appeal in an attempt to revive COPA.  

What's more, a commission was impaneled in fall 1999 to submit 
recommendations to Congress on dealing with Web material that's 
harmful to minors. In a report released in October, the commission 
recommended parental education and self-regulation for the porn 
industry, but it refused to promote filters.  

Despite that, CIPA, the law that mandates filtering, passed in 
December. Introduced by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., it represents a 
more tailored attempt at regulating content. Unlike the two previous 
acts, it restricts only visual depictions, affects only schools and 
libraries, and ties restrictions to federal funds.  

"What we learned is that we had to try to find a way to extend the 
protections children have in the real world, to find a way to siphon 
off the material from kids without impeding on the rights of adults," 
said Hughes, who's also a COPA commissioner and a consultant to 
FamilyClick.com. "You need a targeted approach. You can't do 
everything all at once."  

The major federal attempts to regulate content have had many 
similarities: All were more narrowly tailored than their predecessors; 
all were attached to sweeping bills in an effort to avoid public debate 
over the matter; and all have been challenged in court.  

In the latest round of the cultural war over Internet content, the ACLU 
and ALA sued on grounds that the latest filtering bill violates the 
First Amendment by restricting content in libraries. What's more, the 
groups argue that the bill further accelerates the digital divide by 
forcing people who don't have computers at home to surf a filtered 
Web.  

The filtering bill also presents technical challenges, partly because 
it requires the blocking only of visual depictions.  

"The problem is just blocking out the illegal stuff," said Nika Herford, 
a spokesman for filtering company Net Nanny Software 
International. For example, how will a computer program distinguish 
between the nude, reclining figure in Jean-Auguste-Dominique 
Ingres' "La Grand Odalisque" and a porn star poised for prurience?  

"They think they are going to win because they've made the law so 
narrow, but the technology maybe can't deliver that," Herford 
warned.  

To complicate matters, the U.S. Supreme Court has just agreed to 
hear arguments regarding the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 
1996, a law that makes it illegal to possess digital images of sexual 
acts featuring people who "appear to be" minors, even if they aren't. 
A federal appeals court in California has struck down that portion of 
the law, but three other district courts have upheld it, despite 
warnings from free-speech groups that it could make owning a 
digital copy of movies such as "Lolita" or "Romeo and Juliet" 
punishable by years in prison.  

In addition to the federal attempts, several states have tried to 
clamp down on Internet porn. However, most have not succeeded.  

Then there are court battles in Virginia and California regarding 
specific libraries and their filtering habits, or lack thereof. Courts in 
both states have ruled in favor of free-speech advocates. A Virginia 
court has ordered a Loudoun County library to stop filtering, and a 
California court has sided with a library that refused to filter.  

So far, librarians are cheering their court victories.  

"We continue to prevail in court, and we expect to do so again," said 
Susan Gallinger, director of the Livermore Library in California, 
which so far has fended off a court challenge by a mother who wants 
the library to filter. "It's the typical practice of trying to impose their 
values on everybody else. Librarians don't want to be put in that 
role."  

Whatever the outcome of the filtering challenges, one thing is 
certain. The debate over Web content regulation will rage for years 
to come. When overturning parts of the CDA, Judge Stewart Dalzell 
called the Internet a "never-ending worldwide conversation" that 
should be protected from government intervention.  

Still, James Schmidt, a San Jose State University professor and 
COPA commissioner at the opposite end of the spectrum from 
Hughes, predicted filtering proponents won't back off anytime soon, 
even if their latest bill doesn't pass constitutional muster.  

"Until and unless that school of thought is satisfied that appropriate 
government regulation is being taken to protect kids, this debate will 
go on and on and on," he said.  

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