Supreme Court to Hear CIPA Case

Ruger writes "The Supreme Court of the United States will "decide if public libraries can be forced to install software blocking sexually explicit Web sites," according to this article from the Associated Press. US lawmakers have passed three laws to 'protect' children from Internet pornography, but the Court struck down the first and blocked the second from taking effect. 'A three-judge federal panel ruled the Children's Internet Protection Act violates the First Amendment because the filtering programs also block sites on politics, health, science and other non-pornographic topics.'" Our previous story on this ongoing case will bring you up to speed on the issues.

Comments

They will keep trying

[WCMI92]

Those who's interest it is in finding ANY chink in the 1st amendment to allow them to censor the Internet will keep trying. This is their third attempt...

They are now down to "we must protect the children". Will the court buy it? Hopefully not. Legislation should NOT be used to do the work of respobsible parents.

As an adult, I should have unfettered access. A child's protection is not sufficient cause to violate MY 1st amendment rights. It is the parent's responsibility to filter for the child, not society's.

Re:They will keep trying

[GMontag]

you know what? schools and libraries dont carry "Jugs" magazine, so why should they allow porno to be displayed on the machines?

No federal law is preventing them from carrying any magazine they like.

This federal law is mandating they restrict content from the web wheather they like it or not.

There is a serious difference between the two.

Re:They will keep trying

[Gorm the DBA]

The problem isn't with "You shouldn't access Jugs Magazine on this computer." It's with "You must install software that will filter the internet on a series of arbitrarily described terms.

Add in the fact that most filtering programs these days would not only filter out "Jugs the Magazine", but also "Jugs the water carrying vessels", and it gets worse.

Filter on the word "Breast" and you filter out Breast Cancer, or the Bible for that matter (it's in there, frequently).

Trusting businesses to maintain "Black hole" lists doesn't work either, because it either becomes government supported censorship (who's paying for the filters...right...your taxes), or it becomes an easy way for political adgendas to be advanced (See the ACLU site blocked because they defend the Free Speech rights of the unpopular).

The Government shouldn't be in the business of telling me what I can see. Libraries are a function of the Government. Therefore Libraries shouldn't be in the business of telling me what I can see...Q.E.D.

Re:They will keep trying

[Saige]

When a Library chooses not to carry "Jugs" magazine, it doesn't mean they are forced to also leave out, say, books on breast cancer, magazines dealing with health issues that include sexual health, and such.

If there was a filter out there that ONLY blocked pornography, then it would be a different story.

But there isn't one. Requiring a library to install a filter that also blocks information on medical issues, religious minorities, sexuality issues, and discussions of problems with filters is clearly wrong.

Let's make this clear - NOBODY is in favor of adding pornography to the libraries. The people challenging this law just feel that all the non-pornography that has to be blocked in the process because of the poor state of filtering is reason not to allow the law.

Re:They will keep trying

[GMontag]

Judging by your opinons i'd say you dont have children.

I can not speak for him, but I share his opinion and have raised a quite sucessful child. He heven spells better than me ;-)

As a responsible parent, I gave him rules, even for the web, monitored his activity and disciplined him accordingly. Taking my parenting responsibilities seriously, I wanted to keep the "village" out of my decisions for his upbringing as much as possible.

In my opinion, the people that need a "nanny state" are the ones that raise little vandal brats, then run back to the government asking for even more nannying to obfuscate their own lack of attentiveness, shirking even more of their own responsibility.

Re:They will keep trying

[Zathrus]

Sorry, the library is not an alternative to child care.

I've worked at a library, and except for specifically designed children's programs, it's not someplace you should just drop your kid off anymore than you'd just drop them off at the mall without supervision.

Furthermore, the library is not just for your child. It's for the community as a whole. And as such it should serve the community as a whole. No, I don't want someone to be surfing for porn from the library, but I do want someone to be able to do research on breast or testicular cancer while at a public library. Currently the two are mutually exclusive - there is no way to block only the porn sites.

Re:They will keep trying

[Lendrick]

If there was a filter out there that ONLY blocked pornography, then it would be a different story.

No it wouldn't.

The problem with all these arguments is that they miss the point of the First Amendment, which protects any speech, not just speech that national moral standards deem worthwhile.

People don't like to talk about this openly, but the fact is that most of us like porn, at least in some form. Admittedly, the vast majority of porn has no redeeming social value, but that's not enough to make it against national law. The only reason the laws are as strict as they are is that a rich, highly vocal minority are imposing their religious moral standards upon the rest of the country--standards which are technically unconstitutional because they violate the doctrine of separation of church and state.

Diverting federal funds because of religious issues, while not technically making it against the law for libraries to allow unfettered internet access, is still mingling church and state.

Of course, there's the other side:

Would I myself walk into a library, sit down at a computer, and bring up a porn site? Absolutely not. It's rude and inconsiderate to other patrons, and any library ought to have a rule against it. But here's the clincher: It's the libaray's business what rules they decide to make and how they decide to enforce them, not the federal government's.

I ask Congress something they've been asked many times before, and will likely be asked many times again: What part of shall make no law don't you understand?

There's only one question...

[Reality Master 101]

Will the librarian turn off the controls at the legitimate request of an adult or child. If so, there's no debate and no abridgement of free access.

Otherwise, I see absolutely no harm in having tools that slow down teenagers from leaving goatse.cx sitting on library computers as a "joke" that my 5 year old daughter has to walk through.

Re:There's only one question...

[Kamel Jockey]

I see absolutely no harm in having tools that slow down teenagers from leaving goatse.cx sitting on library computers as a "joke" that my 5 year old daughter has to walk through.

How about a compromise solution? I'm sure anyone who is all for unfiltered access can certainly agree that there is content that is completely inappropriate for a child to view under any circumstances. So... how about setting up separate banks of computers in the library instead? One could be completely unfiltered, and accessible only to adults, and the other could be in the children's section, with filtered access, and hopefully a requirement that parents actively supervise their children's web-surfing.

Re:There's only one question...

[Irvu]

Actually that provision exists in the CIPA. The Justices noted it but still considered the law a problem because

1. although the librarians were required to turn it off they may not want to.
2. this would force everyone to get clearence from a librarian and basically announce to the world at large what they are looking at before they do so, opening them up to censure.
3. Many systems block sites "invisibly" or in ways that will prevent legitimate adults from ever knowing that they exist and thus being unable to ask for the provision to be turned off.

To which I would add two more reasons why that is an issue:

1. If it can be turned off all the time, it can be accidentally left off, hacked or spoofed thus making the system even less effective in the face of determined teenagers.
2. In the face of recent USA Patriot rulings on librarians being forced to divulge recently secret information this is one more thing that librarians can be forced to log and then divulge.

One other problem with the act that has been noted by many groups including the federal government is that the CIPA imposes the same standards on Teenagers as it does on your five-year old. While on the surface that seems (legally) reasonable it falls down in the face of teenagers doing school reports on breast cancer, etc. The rules for Teenagers really should be different. If I have to do a report on HIV in Health class it makes no sense for me to be banned from seeing the materials. Moreover, how are teenagers supposed to learn to deal with this stuff if they never see it until they turn 18?

I agree with you that children need to be protected from harmful materials online, just as they need to be protected from harmful people on the street, and from playing with handguns. However I beleive that the federally mandated systems in the CIPA and others will do more harm than good for the reasons above and because no software can make the kinds of appropriate decisions that parents can.

You might also see the American Library Association's page on the issue and the report of the COPA committee (a congressional task force) here. Note I do not necessarily agree with all of what they say however.

Re:There's only one question...

[aussersterne]

Um, how about we do away with the censorship and just ask libraries to use the second half of your suggestion instead:

a requirement that parents actively supervise their children's web-surfing

If libraries used this rule uniformly, there would no need to censor anything at all, parents could decide for themselves what they want their children to see, and libraries would not have to stretch their already woefully tiny budgets in order to pay for twice the number of computers and filtering software for half of them.

By the way, in no way am I suggesting that even this should be codified. If certain parents don't agree with what the library is doing (whether refusing to filter or requiring that a parent attend a child at the Web machines), perhaps such parents should take care to ensure that their child just stays home where everything is safe and they can spend time reading the Bible and the constitutional handgun magazines instead of the dangerous material at the public library...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

So, what DO we do?

[pknoll]

There's a legitamate problem to be solved here. I don't like their solution, but I will refrain from critisizing it until I come up with one of my own.

It's not just a question of parenting and observation of your child's activities anymore; adult content isn't something you have to go looking for anymore. It lands in my inbox every day, thanks to spammers. Must I forbid my children from using the computer at all? That's not a good solution either.

I, for one, would rather see them focusing efforts on keeping the adult sites from using "push" marketing tactics and pass enforcable laws against the spammers.

beware any cause...

[venomkid]

...that tries to convince you it's "for the children."

It seems to be a convenient way to suppretitiously legislate morality-based attacks on personal liberty.

The Library of Congress might

[burgburgburg]

It keeps bound editions of Hustler and Playboy. It stores them in the Rare Book Collection to prevent them from being stolen, defaced or mutilated, according to this letter from Christian Heritage Tours (Google takes you to the oddest places sometimes).

Define pornograpy first.

[Unknown Poltroon]

You gonna allow Lolita? How bout What is it, fanny hill? Romance novels? Sex ed books? The karma sutra? The joy of sex? Our bodies Our selves?

Frankly, i have no problem with them adding pornography to the libraries, because I am unwilling to draw that line for someone else.

WTF?

[GuyMannDude]

I agree that it's my duty to filter what my child sees. However the one place that should be a safe place to drop the kid off is the library.

What the hell? Your second sentence is completely at odds with your first one! First you accept responsiblity for filtering the data your child gets. Then you follow that up with a claim that you should be able to shirk your responsibilities by dropping the little tyke off at the library.

Do we really want to discourage children spending time at a place where they can learn?

There is so much wrong with that sentence ... where to start. No one is talking about discouraging children from going to the library. Hell, if kids think they can look at nude pictures, they'll probably beg to go to the library. So the problem isn't on their end, it's with you. You're choosing to discourage them because of your personal beliefs. Second, they will be learning at the library it's just that you're afraid of them having access to material that you don't like. It sounds kind of funny but when a child sees some dirty picture, they are learning that such material exists. Filters or no filters, they will continue to learn at the library.

Parents have little enough time - forcing them to spend what they have watching what their kids see at a place that should be a safe haven is going to discourage discovery and learning on the behalf of the kids.

Hey, the library is not a babysitting service. You're going to have to make a choice here. What's more important: monitoring what your children see or your free time. Don't give us this "safe haven" crap. A library is full of information. If you don't want you kids to have access to certain kinds of information, then be prepared to take the responsibility yourself.

GMD

parents are getting lazier by the day

[MadBurner]

"Parents should not be afraid to send their children to the library, either because they might be exposed to such materials or because the library's free, filterless computers might attract people with a propensity to victimize children," wrote Texas Attorney General John Cornyn, who was elected to the U.S. Senate last week.
when my child is on the internet I monitor what she surfs. why should this be different at the library. maybe the issue is parents want to "send their children" instead of taking a part in it.
We need to focus on raising our children not finding others to do it. Porn stopping software stops all sorts of things other then porn. and who is who to tell me what is acceptable and what is not? I'll raise my kid thank you very much. and in doing so I want her to have access to as much information as she needs to fullfill her life. the focus should not be on what our kids see but how we teach them to deal with it. This is the real world people. there are uncomfortable situations everywhere. I don't believe we should stick goat sex up on a wide screen or anything like that. but let me be responcible for my own child.

Wrong

[Keebler71]

This debate is very misunderstood. This is not a federal law forcing libraries to restrict porn web content. It simply denies federal funding to libraries who are content with letting children browse porn using monies given to libraries for computer upgrades from federal tax dollars. This just requires that if these libraries want the computer money, they have to place safeguards.

I can stil understand peoples' arguements against such legislation, but in this context do not see it as a free-speach issue, just a funding issue. The libraries do not have the right to demand new computers at any cost.

Re:Wrong

[arkanes]

The federal government likes to use the funding lever to get it's way in areas where it doesn't have any legal authority - ref the 55 mph speed limit. This worked for a while, but recently the courts have looked down on it, ruling that de facto administrative power should be as limited as de jure administrative power, which makes sense to me. While it's certainly true libaries don't have some magical right to new computers, the Fed doesn't have the power to force censorship, either. That is, when there are requirements for federal funding, those requirements cannot be unconstitutional. Another example would be denying funding to schools that admitted black and female students.

Re:Wrong

[Gorm the DBA]

Denying Federal funding has been the U.S. Government's preferred method of enacting local change for many years now.

See Mandatory Seatbelt laws or the 21 Year old drinking age, or the 55 MPH speed limit (later changed to 65, later junked).

And it's not about browsing porn (I'll bet dollars to donuts anybody who was browsing hardcore porn on a library computer would quickly find his access to said computer cut off), it's about being forced to install software that arbitrarily removes the access for *ADULTS* to web pages based on metrics which are completely out of control of the local librarian, and for that matter generally inaccurate.

Re:Wrong

[sandbenders]

but in this context do not see it as a free-speach issue, just a funding issue

I would argue that it's a free speech issue thinly disguised as a funding issue. Does anyone remember when the Federal Gov't made the drinking age into a 'Funding Issue'? It said that it would only give highway money to states which had a drinking age of 21. Now all 50 states have a drinking age of 21 now, and have for decades, even though every state has the 'right' to determine its own drinking age. Funding is the government's traditional tool for overriding the states' rights and other constitutional guarantees, until and unless the supreme court comes along and whacks its nose with a rolled-up newspaper. Until the libraries have the ability to exist without this money, and many don't, it is effectively a law requiring filtering software.