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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 Once there is a enough support, try to get the law repealed.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.
The Washington Post article indicates that the decision was 6-3, not 5-4. Maybey they had a typo and corrected it later.
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.
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
Plurality opinion here.
Dissents are here and here.
Concurrences are here and here.
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.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
The SCOTUS did say that having a librarian temporarily disable the filter is acceptable (and that's why the case was decided this way, in part; it isn't an undue burden, if a legit site is blocked it can be bypassed, and it will prevent a majority of porno or whatever.) Take a look over at SCOTUSblog, there's more information there.
I'm on a road shaped like a figure eight; I'm going nowhere but I'm guaranteed to be late.
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.
kids should be beating off at home in their bedrooms, not in the library.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
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
Read the ALA's opinion...
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.
Yes, it was indeed librarians who opposed the law here's the link...
probably off topic.
I was doing some work for a private religious school that had software of the CIPA type installed on their server, and it was preventing the students (grade schoolers) from doing their research.
The topic at hand was something on their favourite sports team. The CIPA type software had a default not to allow access to such things.
I looked into the config files, and modified the defaults to allow sports-type web pages to be accessed.
I decided to test this (with all the kiddies watching no less) by going to www.nfl.com
Lo and behold it worked, with the front page of the NFL talking about the suspension, and jail time, of a star player for drug use, rape and murder of his pregnant girlfriend....
perhaps those filters are in place for a reason?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
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).
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
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
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.
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?
The report is out, has tons of data about blocked sites. Here is the executive summary:
The abstract is online in HTML as well. The whole PDF is 10.6MB.
-- Are you an EFF member yet?
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
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.
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
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?
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