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Librarians To Sue Over Mandatory Censoring
JasonMaggini writes: "ZDNet reports the American Library Association is
planning to sue over the new federal law that is putting Web filters on public school and library computers. Great article title, too: 'Filter THIS!'"
Sure, you can argue all day long about infringing rights, etc, and a lot of people will just figure you want to see porn.
But show Joe Sixpack that he can't get any information on Superbowl XXX at his local library when this goes into effect, and you might get some grass roots support.
The evening news might pick stuff like that up - they won't give a rat's ass about cyber-rights.
Sad, but true, I think.
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Because they want to protect freedom of speech. They didn't become librarians because they wanted to hit people with rulers. Librarians probably mostly love knowledge and freedom of thought. Not because they wanted to sit behind desks and peer over their half-rims.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
If filtering actually worked, I wouldn't mind it. If filtering banned what a majority of people called smut. But allowed anything that was gray to go through, then I wouldn't mind it so much.
Stuff which is obviously smut with no value. (pictures, stories, etc) doesn't have a place in libraries.. But, say, an educational site on masturbation (with pictures) is not something I'd call smut and should be allowed to go through. Now, some people feel that anything touching on sex should be blocked, and they would use filtering as an excuse for these excessive blocks.
The problem is that the filtering is ineffective. Automatic filtering cannot and does not make the above distinction. Human-based filtering suffers from a lack of manpower (of about 5 orders of magnitude). Thus, there is no way to do the ideal. There's no way to even approach the ideal.
As peacefire showed, a noticable fraction of the yahoo porn listings were let through by these 'filters'. Similarily, every few seconds, a child is blocked from a legitimate site.
So, in independent tests, filtering let's half of the outright porn through, and bans a lot of legitimate material.. To me, this is like indiscriminate shooting. Let's go into a bad neighborhood and shoot people at random. We might hit some guilty people by chance, but we'll hurt a lot of innocents.
If you can't see the peacefire web site, try turning off of your filters. Most filtering programs have the site classified as everything from porn, to nazi's, to military, to gambling.
If an only if you can show me filtering that does it's job, will I ever accept it. Blocking 90% of the million porn sites leaves 100,000 left; why bother? Using filtering as a way to censor knowledge from your children is bad. (Masturbation, alternate religions) And no filtering program must be allowed to block any educational site, whether that site deals with sexuality, learning about hate-groups, military strategy, guns. For the gains, 100,000 porn sites instead of a whole million, the cost is too much.
Since such a program cannot and does not exist, the most the libraries can do is to put the responsibility on the parent. No one under 18 is allowed internet access. A parent can permit access by their children and can choose among the options:
1. No access allowed.
2. Access allowed only if with an adult. Parent can later review visited websites.
3. Access allowed, parent has the ability to review visited websites. (With an optional time-limit for number of hours)
4. Access allowed, parent does not have the ability to review visited websites. (with an optional time-limit for number of hours)
All access is full access. If a child is with a parent, they get access through their parent's card. No one is allowed to sit in front of the computers without a card. (So a stranger cannot offer a a child access unsupervised.) The parent gets the flexibility for what level of monitoring, if any, their children get. It's also open; the child knows whether or not what they visit will be reviewed by their parents.
Heh.. With some GUI-ified TCL scripts and a squid proxy, this kind of system would be pretty trivial to set up.
I think we should just have a huge government database, freely accessible to all, that contains and catalogues all the porn on the internet. That way we can go there and check to see if what we're seeing on the internet is porn or not. Then we'd have a government approved seal stating that "This Image is Pornography." That way I could browse the database and know how to identify porn when I unwittingly stumble across it while surfing. I can arm myself in advance, lest I be taken unawares. I imagine I would check this database every day, just to see if any new porn has gotten on to the net, so I would be prepared with the most up-to-date information.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
At my highschool we have a filter. The thing that I like about it is that it tries to clean up the pages. For instance, if a page has "sheit" on it (like many posts on /.) it would place ---- instead and let the page go through. And it has blocked nasty pages (we teens are very nasty) that I even don't like. More times than not the proxy has not got in the way of research. If I couldn't do it from school, then I'll do it from home. As long as there is a way of getting non-filtered material.
The library in the town my family lives in has an internet policy something like this:
Kids under 12 must be accompanied by a parent/guardian or relative over 18.
Kids 12-18 must either be accompanied or have a form on file signed by a parent/guardian stating that the parent understands that there may be material on the internet that they do not approve of, and that the child has permission to use the internet alone.
Everyone 18+ must have a signed form on file stating that they understand that viewing of pornography is against library policy, punishable by revoking of internet privileges.
Having a policy like this (and enforcing it) has pretty much killed any talk of filtering there.
"This message is composed of 100% recycled electrons."
I mean come on, which are you going to fear more, filtering software that gives you a nice, pretty "That page is unviewable" message, or a pissed off teacher yelling "Billy! What are you looking at! Go to the principal's office..."?
MyopicProwls
MyopicProwls
My homepage
You heard me right.
I am definitely for government addressing inequities in resource distribution, opportunity, and the restrictions of democratic rights. I am not for a government using its federal funds to control workplace activity to the point where the first amendment is either broached completely, or the interpretation of the first amendment is put into the hands of commercial surf-protection software concerns.
The only hope here is resistance by anyone who has a principled stand on freedom of speech, i.e. the people. The librarians here are of course an example of such resistance. They are using the judicial system to challenge a (constitutionally) unfair regulatory infringement on their civil rights.
However, the government will eventually push this far enough that it is better to seek funding from alternative sources. Eventually, the government will not be a viable source of funding for the best artists and social programs- the ones that are decidedly politically incorrect.
This can lead to a degradation of those agencies that receive such funding, but I hope that private and charitable sources can step in, without restricting the freedoms of those who they presume to help.
Goat sex free since 2001