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US Supreme Court Upholds CIPA
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.
A huge problem with the law is that filters which don't tell you they're filtering are OK: if you're using a reasonably clever Google-filter, for example, you may never know that information has been filtered.
Additionally, many methods of filtering infringe the copyrights of the original authors, or may if the MPAA lawsuit against the DVD bowdlerizers succeeds.
Funny that we may have to hope for the MPAA to make filtering harder.
-- Brian T. Sniffen
And buy shares in anybody producing internet filters - they've just gotten the Golden Ticket!
First they've got a huge market that must, by law, use their product. Second, that product is painfully inadequate to perform the job it's asked to - hence a nice long development-release-fix cycle that should go on for years, fully funded via government mandate.
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What is upsetting is that there has already been serious opposition to this law from librarians themselves -- who have argued that the filters block too many useful sites (and I imagine that they have indeed produced lists in support of their claims).
It would be intersting to know who has been pushing for the ruling. Was it "concerned citizens" or companies that make filtering programmes?
Perhaps libraries could issue smart cards that have personalized filter settings built in so you can sit at the computer, plug in your card, and the settings would just work without having to ask a librarian for help.
Of course, you would have to assure users that their browsing wasn't being correlated with their id.
Lasers Controlled Games!
How about just setting up a "kids section," With filters on those computers?
:/
The computer lab should be "policed" by the librarians anyways. Wandering around, leaning over people shoulders. Making sure thomas q pervert isnt masturbating in the library. If he is, call the cops and have him dragged off.
I mean, its one thing to look at breast cancer treatment sites and another to look at big-tittied-lassies.com Wouldnt just seperating the sections be a perfectly fine solution? The kids could just ask the librarians for help if they reach a blocked site.
Normally I would rage against something like this. But if you read the article, the supreme court's decision was based on the fact that librarians can shut off the blocker on request. As long as they dont ask "why?" it should be okay.
Still.. It makes it difficult for people to do research on private topics
I am conflicted.
no
I'm not saying that the Supreme Court is wrong (I haven't read the opinion yet), but the whole idea of making the filters switchable seems unlikely to be implemented. The filters will be on 100% and that will be that.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Is it really such a BAD thing to put filters on a library computer accessible by kids? I hate them as much as the next guy, but doesn't a publicly funded institution have a responsibility to protect children from offensive and degrading material? Perhaps they should just have filters on the computers in the kids section and leave the others clean.
Odd, As a child, I always felt safe wandering around the library. So now when I have kids, I should have to follow them around to make certain some pervert going to goatse doesn't expose them to that horrific image. Filters at some level are a good thing. And a library should be a place where a child(8-16) should be able to go wherever and read whatever.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
> I'm for civil liberties as much as the next guy, and I agree that filters generally suck, but how hard is it really for an adult to ask another adult to turn off the filters?
Not at all. How hard is it for a minor in the library to ask for that? My tax dollars are paying to have sites on gay rights and censorship blocked.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
The supreme court overturns its decisions all the time. This is why anti-abortion people try to get them to hear another roe vs. wade type case all the time, to see if they'll overturn that decision.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Right. Mine too, and I don't support the law. But that doesn't make it unconstitutional. The question was whether this was an inappropriate limit to adults' First Amendment rights, and the court found that it was not. Though I think the law should be repealed (not that this is likely in Red States dominated America), I agree with the majority that it is constitutional.
sulli
RTFJ.
While I find the blocking software providers a secretive and sleazy bunch and the blocklist rather suspect, I'm not sure that this law will be all that bad.
The terminals I've seen at libraries require a card or login anyway. Since the law is aimed at kids, just issue adult/minor cards or IDs that are, by default, unrestricted or restricted. (I think that parents must sign for kids library cards anyway - minors can't sign legal documents promising to return the books - so determining who is a minor is just part of the process anyway.)
Since adult logins are never blocked there should be no issue of embarassment over requesting removal of the filter. If a kid "needs" unfiltered access he can bring his parent to log in. It's sort of like an R rated movie.
Sure, IDs or cards can be lost or stolen but they can also be deactivated. It seems that this would fulfill the requirement of the law in a nearly transparent way (of course I haven't read the actual law in detail so I could be wrong).
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
My main objection is with the companies producing the stupid-assed filters and closed/encrypted blocked sites lists. Is it feasible to think that there could be an open source blocking software? Who would maintain the list of blocked sites? Whose moral standards would such a list enforce? How would categorization be done such that, for example, you could allow non-explicit sexual content (ie, educational and health sites), and not explicit content?
In other words, is there a way to make this work somewhat well, now that the law passed the Supreme Court test?
Any librarian I ever worked with would have, in fact so long as the site was not pornographic I don't think they would object to unblocking ANY site. Most librarians are extremely learned and free to any intelligent viewpoint or outlook. Now you may run across mrs. kermudgens once in a while but I think they are in the vast minority.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Personally, I'd prefer that open source be mandated (say, squid and squidGuard), but I'd rather they be used on their merrits.
All this law does is keep these nanny software vendors alive and kicking. I'm sure they're laughing all the way to the bank.
Ideally, these filters wouldn't be required anyway. Welcome to the Nany State.
Method of processing duck feet
Basically you're saying that its ok that filter companies are underhanded losers, since after all, everyone knows every useful site in existance and can generate a list of them on demand for inclusion into the white list.
Oh wait, they dont. Thats why whitelists don't work!
I don't suppose its too much to ask of my tax dollars for government-mandated technology to not possess a bias? I fail to see how this cannot be a first amendment conflict, but I guess all the justices thought about was "wow, these filters must just block porn, so its OK, because porn isn't a free speech issue" while ignoring the fact that the filters fail at that task.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I understand that some sites get blocked that aren't pornographic, but so what.
So what? Let's say that some young woman believes her boyfriend has given her an STD. She is poor and cannot afford a computer at home, so she goes to research female sexual health online in the library. Unfortunately such a pornographic site as this is blocked, the young woman would have to go and ask the librarian to remove filtering so she can research her "problem". Doubly unfortunate is that the stigma of having an STD is so great, she is too embarrassed to ask because she doesn't want to direct any attention towards herself (she feels bad enough already). Thus she doesn't do the research, and it turns out she has syphillis. By the time the disease is caught, serious heart complications she will live with for the rest of her life have set in.
A simple course of antibiotics could have killed the bacteria long before this, of course... but she didn't know that because there were filters on the computers, and those filters could not distinguish between a picture of a woman trying to arouse men by exhibiting her vagina, and a picture of a woman with chancres on her vagina.
*This* is the constitutionally protected speech the filters block that we are worried about. I'd rather have 100 perverts view pictures of vile pornography than have 1 young woman end up sterile or worse because she did not have access to information on reproductive health. That is why I am opposed to filters.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Children must understand what happens when they break the rules! If you deny them this freedom, then they will instead grow up seeking ways not to break the rules, but to change them altogether and perhaps even to overthrow the system.
I'm not paranoid or anything, it's just that I was once one of those kids, and luckily I was smart enough to find ways to change the rules without working behind the backs of the supposed authorities. Those with fewer opportunities and poorer guides, however, need to be shown the difference between right and wrong -- not shielded from wrong.
Shielding them from the atrocities of life, no matter how light they may be, only makes them incapable of handling it when they inevitably confront it at some later time.
You are assuming that these libraries and schools will be using comercial filtering software. That's the wrong way to go about it.
The law is extraordinarly lax in what it requires the institutions to install (IANAL but I have read most of CIPA.) It basically sais you must have filtering software that blocks stuff. Not all stuff, not some percentage of stuff, it just has to block stuff. SquidGuard and derivitives like Dans' Guardian are great options for these institutions. They are open, not just in the source but in the blocklists. They offer full control over the block lists, they are plain text so you can read them, edit them etc. There are places that serve out updated block lists that you can auto-update from. You have the ability to put in local files that override what comes from these servers (explicit allows and denys). It's really great and FREE in both sences of the word which is important for things like Schools and Libraries.
Comercial filters are wrong for Schools and Libraries. They absolutely shouldn't use them and it should probably be illegal for them to use anything where the block list isn't examineable. How do you know if they are filtering ideas that it is illegal to filter unless you can see what they are filtering?
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
"YOU DON'T HAVE TO USE THE DEFAULT BLOCK LIST!"
In the real world, yes you do. This is simply because the goal is not to block these sites, it's not to save children from the Internet Pedophile, etc. The purpose is to show a "good faith effort" that you have tried to do that. If some good christian mommy complains to the library that their darling was exposed to witchcraft and demonology (a Harry Potter site say) and threatens to sue the library - they will be safe as long as a court decides that they made that good faith effort (the library was not negligent).
You just point to the blocking software company and tell the mommies to send the URL to them. Once you are no longer using the default block list - you are taking that respponsibility onto yourself. The library is now much more vulnerable to suits.
Same goes for corporations and their block software. They are more likely to get hit with a sexual harrasment suit (creating a hostile work environment), but the rationale is the same - don't change the default block list
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
This is tricky, because "mental harm" is ill-defined. It basically comes down to "anything that opposes the groupthink POV," for various definitions of "groupthink." For example: a site on Wicca is harmless, unless your ideas about religion dictate that *any* exposure to such religions will destroy Little Timmy's soul in a satanic conflagration.
Do you have numbers to support this?
I used to work for one of these filtering companies, and although the false positive and false negative rates were (IMO) pretty impressive, they weren't zero. And, if there are about a billion web sites out there (a conservative estimate), then a (strictly hypothetical) 0.01% false positive rate means that one million or so appropriate, acceptible web sites are being filtered. Most, if not all, web filters perform much worse than this, with false positive rates that are larger by one or two orders of magnatude.
I also know from personal experience that some of the filtered sites were embarrassing. For example: at least one U. S. Senator had their web site blocked for violent content. They mentioned gun control and assault rifles on their site, and the software decided that that made it a match.
Fair enough, but I've seen the content on the (for example) NAMBLA web page, and it isn't necessarily objectionable. I don't agree with them so much as one iota, but that's beside the point.
All this having been said, I don't trust most filters to work properly. Most of them are badly designed, poorly maintained, come with a built-in cultural agenda. (The place where I worked did its best to fix all three, which is one reason why I enjoyed working there. Sadly, it's fallen on hard times. Oh well.)
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