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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.
Make sure everybody knows what is being blocked. Talk to the media. Once there is a enough support, try to get the law repealed.
Note that I am Canadian, and I have no idea what goes into repealing laws in the USA. It may be that, because it has already been to the supreme court, it's too late to repeal. But challenge it anyway. Knowing the way laws work, someone can probably write a counter-law that will override it, and attach it as a rider to another bill.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
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? They are known to block all sorts of legit sites, so it's not as if you're really asking to look at pr0n.
The folks who get screwed here are the teenagers, but unfortunately that seems to be the way of the world these days. But what would youth be without breaking a few laws? If everything were legal, what would be the fun of being underage?
sulli
RTFJ.
Unless the effectiveness of the filter is legislated, I suppose all one would have to do is redirect sex.com, porn.com, and some obvious pr0n sites to a warning page and you'll have met the letter of the law without accidentally blocking National Geographic. Or artistic movies about gay cowboys eating pudding.
Everyone gets screwed here. All the Supreme COurt has demonstrated is that none of them has actually used an internet computer at a public library.
Do you really want to have to ask the librarians every time you look for information on breast cancer? Or even worse... you're looking up Penis cancer. Lo and behold, you'll have to walk up to a librarian and say "Excuse me... could you unblock Penis cancer, you commie swine?"
Working in a library, I'm certain this will happen. The worst part is no so much the filtering, but what it does to a poor library's ability to control their own agenda: you want computers, bow down to the morality of whatever company makes your filtering software of choice.
Just what we ALWAYS wanted... private companies determining the morality of the public.
It seems to me, that all these problems and objections could be avoided if someone just made a program that would only block the _binary_ data from black-listed sites. That means you'd still be able to see text and HTML, but no images, no file downloads, etc...
I'm sure this would satisfy FAR more people than the current system of all-or-nothing.
Additionally, I don't see why the libraries don't just all band together and make their own filtering solution, rather than giving a blank check to companies? They could maintain absolute control, and decide wether blocking site XYZ is limiting someone's right to free speech.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I'm a sysadmin at a public library. I have been following these fights for a few years and see only one solution. Kill SLC.
Eliminate the Schools and Libraries Corp and the tax that supports it and the problem goes away. These eternal attempts at control by the FedGov are only possible by the indirect method of tying it to Federal Money. The actual number of dollars our library gets that can be traced directly to SLC is small enough we would just tell them to shove it, but when we looked into it we found it intermingled throughout the state and other misc funding to the point we would lose a buttload of money. Kill SLC.
THE SLC MUST BE DESTROYED.
Democrat delenda est
If you buy this logic, Renquist is just a two-bit terrorist with the wonderous decoration of a black robe. Makes the Critical Legal Studies folks seem more right every day.
It's interesting to see what they censor. I went to FCPS schools in fairfax virginia, they censor out www.beretta.com but also pro-gun sites. Even more interesting is that they will not censor out gun control sites; it's deciding what kids see. I don't know how else I was effected, but an extreme (very!) pole of this could be whether or not maybe cnn.com were blocked as opposed to msn.com or any other news site.
just interesting.
Sig & Below
Yuck Fou
Well, on one hand, it's the fed's money, so they can pretty much do what they want with it. It's pretty lame to make that money conditional based on these filters, but when someone is giving you free money, you're pretty much in their house.
On the other hand, libraries should be allowed to deal with such things in their own way. I volunteered at a public libary for awhile, and their policy was to cruise by the terminals to shoulder surf the users. If we saw pornography, we were to turn off the monitor and inform them that surfing pr0n was not allowed and if they continued they would have to get off the computer. If they raised a stink all we had to do was point to the police station right out the window.
-R
Indeed. I recall finding that a lot of Linux sites were being blocked by the filter used by a school in which I was working. I eventually worked out that it was counting occurences of the letter 'x' and blocking sites that had a lot of them, thinking that they were pornography...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I get a laugh out of people complaining that their rights are being violated because they can't go to a public library and look at pornography. Are you insane?
A library is a public place. There are also public indecency laws. These are the same laws that prevent you from walking down the sidewalk with your penis hanging out of your pants, or waving your private parts at bus-fulls of old ladies and puppy dogs.
So why should you be allowed to expose pornography (which, by and large, is a VISUAL medium - yes there is written pornography, but you can't look over somebody's sholder and immediately tell they're reading smut quite as easily as you can look over somebody shoulder and see a double-fist-penetration scene.) to those who do not want to see it?
"Turn the computer the other way!"
Horse shit, and you know it. It's still a public venue. It amazes me that people will go to such lengths to support things like being able to go to a library and get their jollies on a computer. Nobody is making pornography ILLEGAL, they're making it more difficult to view in a public place.
Think of it as an open container law for porn. Can you crack open a beer, walk down the street with it? In a few places, sure, but by and large this is a law thats in place to prevent things like drunk driving. You can drink beer in a bar or in your house, sure. So go home if you want to yank your franklin, keep it out of the library.
thanks, chances are I'm getting modded down for making sense.