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US Supreme Court Upholds CIPA

Posted by Hemos on from the and-filtering-for-all dept.

TheMatt writes "The US Supreme Court today has upheld CIPA, the law that required public schools and libraries to put internet filters on computers or lose federal funding. Quote: 'The court in a 5-4 decision ruled that the Children's Internet Protection Act does not violate the First Amendment, but that filters sometimes, do block informational Web sites.'" The decision will be posted on the US Supreme Court website later today. The case is United States v. American Library Association, 02-361. We had covered this story before.

4 of 585 comments (clear)

  1. Decisions on non slashdotted site by Dan+Berlin · · Score: 5, Informative

    Plurality opinion here.
    Dissents are here and here.
    Concurrences are here and here.

  2. Re:How do you know you're filtered? by aborchers · · Score: 5, Informative
    A huge problem with the law is that filters which don't tell you they're filtering are OK

    I would expect that in most cases you will be able to rely on the librarians to tell you when filters are enabled. The American Library Association has already denounced the decision and, unlike the PATRIOT act, I don't believe CIPA puts librarians under a gag order with respect to disclosing the existence of filters.

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  3. American Library Association's opinion by madape · · Score: 5, Informative

    Read the ALA's opinion...

  4. From the inside by 99bottles · · Score: 5, Informative
    I'm the IT Manager of a fairly large public library, and I've seen every aspect of the filter battle. For several years we've offered an optional filter, which the user has the ability to turn on or off for their browsing. We only block two "categories" of content: sexually explicit and extreme/obscene


    We actually turn down about $50K of funding due to CIPA, but in the past 3 years I can count on one hand the number of complaints we've had about the filter. We run it from a proxy server and there's no quick trick for someone to circumvent it.


    The suggestion of publishing the logs of what gets filtered. Bad idea! You wouldn't believe what people will surf for. We process about 2GB of patron Inet traffic a day, and have between 100-500 blocks on average. Nearly all of them very legitimate.


    I hate big brother dangling the carrot as much as the next guy, but blameing the filter isn't the right approach.