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Filtering Internet in Public Libraries
from the don't-read-past-the-dept dept.
Many of Shaw's plays deal with the absurdity of modernity. As Shaw wrote HeartbreakHouse in 1919, he was looking back over the old century he was from, but also turning his gaze forward to the new era of technological whirligigs: their promise and, more often, their price. In the production I saw at the ShawFestival, the crazy machinery and projected film images from the era set the tone for Shaw's bemused, puzzled, sad question: what on earth are we to do now?
Monday night's meeting at the library was an informational forum arranged by the League of Women Voters. It opened with a detailed talk by a lawyer about exactly what the local ballot initiative means in legal terms, which was interesting to me but which many attendees found tedious. Oddly enough, the first item on his agenda was the First Amendment, which he simply skipped as too complicated. In the final analysis, of course, it may be the only legal issue of any importance.
After a half-hour of careful explanation, the co-chair of one of the local pro-filtering groups took her turn at the lectern, and began her talk by listing the organizations that were for and against filters in libraries. Those in favor: 2500 local signers of the petition, the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, our beloved governor John Engler, her group Holland Area Citizens Voting Yes, several Republican groups I didn't catch, and I think she would have mentioned Thomas Jefferson, John F. Kennedy and Mother Theresa if they weren't dead.
The groups against filters? The Gay/Lesbian Alliance, and Feminists For Free Expression - who, she was careful to point out, believes that the proper response to "badporn" is "goodporn."
Well, isn't that special. No word on whether the Communist Party or Atheists International had taken sides on the issue.
She repeated that the library does not track patron usage and so does not know if there is a problem with pornography. This is one of the contentious issues - with tens of thousands of patrons using the internet in the last four years, there have been only six instances where someone had to be removed for violating library usage rules. Only one of these is known to involve viewing pornography. In that respect, Holland is probably fairly typical; my local library has roughly the same number of complaints proportional to number of terminals.
I wanted to point out that, even if the library did keep logs, it would be a full-time job just to keep figures on the appropriateness of patrons' reading choices. I know. I've written perl code to break down a month's worth of school and library logs in the state of Utah: a gigabyte gzipped. We still don't have good figures. About four-tenths of a percent of websurfing is inappropriate for libraries, is our best guess. But we don't know.
When the first anti-filtering speaker got up, almost the first words out of his mouth were that he wasn't affiliated with the gay and feminist groups mentioned - and a nervous laugh and smile. I can't blame him.
I was the first one to stand up with a question. I briefly mentioned the fact that, in Loudoun County, a federal judge had declared library censorware to be a violation of the First Amendment and struck it down - after an extended and expensive legal dispute. I asked how, hypothetically, such a dispute would impact the city.
I was hoping to get people thinking about the way that a simple vote could divide the community. Holland has the potential to become one of the nation's test cases, and I'm not sure the city realizes what it's getting into.
But the woman who walked to the lectern to answer my question was KimberleyFraser of the Family Research Council, to whom I had addressed a Slashdot openletter earlier that same day.
I'd told Kimberley last week that I would be writing such a letter, and told her she'd get a chance to respond. I made it clear that her response would not be edited in any way. I'd just print it as she wrote it. Free publicity.
But when she got to the mike, the first thing she said was that she would not be responding. Why? Take a look at that letter again. Each Slashdot story has a clever little "dept." that it's "from" - this story pointed out that the Blue-Footed Booby was blocked by the stupid software, so I ran it "from the don't-look-at-those-boobies dept."
I'm not sure if any Slashdot regulars are even reading the depts. - I've never gotten e-mail or read a comment that even mentions them. But Ms.Fraser did. She informed us that she would not be responding to the letter because it was "from the don't look at those boobies department" (pause for dramatic effect). She held aloft a printout of the Slashdot page and shook it. From my chair I could see the yellow streaks of highlighter.
I'm not sure she even understood that the boobies in question were birds. She may not have read the whole letter. She then proceeded to share more comments, as many as she was allowed in her one minute to answer my question. It seems many of the blocked sites I'd listed were (as I said) from products besides SurfWatch, as if that entitled her to ignore SurfWatch's own errors; then she started making another point and her minute ran out. She walked out of microphone range saying that the debate would be continued. Debate?
The anti-filtering side did manage to stand up and talk about the effect of legal action on the community. I'm sure nobody remembers what they said.
Another question was on how patrons will know that material is blocked, so that errors can be unblocked. Good question - our analysis of the Utah logs shows that, in practice, errors are almost never corrected. For some reason, patrons just don't want to go to their librarian to say, "please let me look at this page that apparently is hardcore pornography."
The example that the Family Research Council has been using to show how easy it is to unblock sites is The Onion (and this was what Kimberley said in her answer). They've been standing up in front of audiences while their techies click at the keys, showing first how The Onion is blocked as obscenity, then how with a swift adjustment of the filter, we can read the story Local Prostitutes Eagerly Await Dentists' Convention. Then - I'm not making this up - Kimberley reads the first few paragraphs of that story, to illustrate how lascivious it is.
The funny thing is that their demonstration illustrates the opposite.
Their techies only type in www.theonion.com to be
unblocked; graphics.theonion.com remains blocked, so the
pictures don't come through. They've actually been demonstrating how
difficult it is for librarians to make on-the-fly corrections
to blacklists. Nobody has seemed to notice.
After some more questions, an exchange developed where the director of the library ended up pointing out that attendants are near the internet terminals, and explaining the procedure to follow if someone is offended by inappropriate material. (Some people do complain: the last complaint I heard about was the BritneySpears site, though I doubt they thought it was offensive for the same reason that I do.)
The meeting closed with Kimberley retorting, "If my child sees porn, how will you erase that image from his mind?" I assume that was a rhetorical question. "A library attendant is good," she said, "but an attendant can't throw his body between the child and the screen." It was late and the building was closing; that pretty much wrapped things up.
In my work with the Censorware Project over the last two years, I've gotten used to analyzing blocking software in intricate detail. Often I think we know more about some software packages than even their manufacturers; in any event we pore over megabytes and gigabytes of data to learn as much as we can.
That knowledge is worth nothing at meetings like these. Nobody cares how the software works. Nobody is interested in terms like keyword blocking, overbroad blocking or underblocking, nor even information on effectiveness or First Amendment legal issues. The issue will be decided purely on the basis of emotion. Gigabytes evaporate down to two bits of data: (1)there exists porn; (2)filters block porn. There seems to be nothing more that anyone wants to know.
Through much of HeartbreakHouse, the characters talked past each other, unable to communicate, unable to understand. At the end, the stage that had served as workshop and sitting-room for the entire play slowly cracked open, drew apart, and a chasm grew between the rear of the stage and the front. The players, now set outside on a balcony, talked fearfully as the lights reddened and the first mortars of the GreatWar were heard in the distance. As Shaw and his audience knew in 1919, all of their talk, their whole world from the past, was now a faded backdrop of meaningless words to the machine guns, zeppelins, aeroplanes, and tanks of the modern era. Technology itself had caused the chasm between centuries. Some things never change.
The internet has no local standards (Score:3)
(1) Library acquisitions are and must be governed by local community standards.
(2) There are no local community standards on the internet.
(3) Therefore, if libraries are going to make use of the internet, they will have to find a way to impose local standards on it, EVEN if that means much desirable content is lost.
As a matter of political fact, this argument will win EVERY time, but it's also the right argument. (3) follows from (1) and (2). Which premise do you disagree with?
The 150th Time... (Score:5)
Ever hear the phrase "Tyranny of the Majority"? It was coined by one of the founders of the United States (don't remember which one, but I'm reminded of Hamilton or Jefferson).
The majority of people want nothing more than a warm bed, food, and a few shiny things to make their lives worthwhile. A society that provides that doesn't need documents like the American Bill of Rights. If you like that, look at Communism, Socialism, or Monarchy done well. There have been marches in Russia calling for a return to the days of Joseph Stalin. Why? Those people aren't stupid or brainwashed, they're hungry and cold. Their newfound freedom hasn't gained them what they want. They remember food, warmth, and safe streets. The oppression was, to them, worth it. So you may see, this is not just about protecting the children--this is about people who either:
a) Want freedoms for themselves but don't feel them appropriate for children.
-or-
b) Don't want people to excersize freedoms they have and can't get around that pesky First Amendment.
It's not about what the majority wants. It's about living the life that you want to live--quality of life. If people want to view controversial pages at the library, they should. Knowledge (and thus libraries) are not about what the entire community feels comfortable showing their children.
If you want to protect your children, that's fine--but you do it. You can't leave children alone in the world. The Internet and Libraries reflect the world--as they should. Why should you be able to leave your child alone there? Don't try to make the world be a parent for you. If you don't have enough time to spend with your children, don't have them . . . it's that simple.
While library terminals are obviously not the place to be viewing pornography, a librarian can be infinitely more effective than blocking software. A community of tens of millions of people can post pornography at a rate with which active blocking can never compete. It's impractical. Computers just aren't that smart yet.
Furthermore, incorrect blocking clearly violates the rights of minorities who need to be heard. They can never recover the damage from being blocked--mindshare.
Given that, you must understand that the library is responsible--as a public institution--to aide them in being heard. They are not responsible for protecting your children from the world. It is impractical at best--censorship at worst.
At any rate, has anyone proposed a compromise? Bottom line, anything that is blocked is *LEGAL* material for adults to view. Has anyone considered blocking software that can be deactivated for adults?
The issue is that there are some things that can have an adverse effect on children because they are not prepared to deal with those things. Adults don't have that problem. What about conditional blocking?
At any rate, just because you find it unpleasant or unsuitable for your children, doesn't mean it has no place in a public library or in our society. It's just not for you or your children.
That said, try conditional blocking that accomplishes the same thing without violating others' rights--or better yet, start a children's library. That would completely solve the problem, wouldn't it?
Because minority speech has rights too (Score:3)
I think you fail the test.
Re:The internet has no local standards (Score:3)
1) The filtering software does not impose a local standard. It _attempts_ to impose a standard that is set by a particular group. Even if it succeeded in properly setting that standard and was infallible, it still wouldn't be the local community standard.
2) The library already has a _lot_ of stuff in it that the people complaining about the internet would probably find objectionable, but they don't know it's there. Go into the library and find information about homosexuality, abortion, and sex in its various guises and you'll probably be successful, even in Holland. Any kid can check that stuff out (if they can get past handing it to an adult to process), and any kid can read it in a carrol in the library without having to talk to an adult at all.
Now, if the same people protested the presence of a book in the library, they'd see a lot more concerted resistance, including the entire ACLU and ALA on their backs withing seconds. And they'd lose.
Re:Sounds like you got out - played.. (Score:3)
It is doubly offensive for the "the majority" to try to promulgate a non-solution to a largely imaginary problem. Another point you might want to take into account is that "the majority" in a case like this is the majority of those who participate in political campaigns - the majority of interfering busybodies, frankly.
Re:The internet has no local standards (Score:3)
Library acquisitions are made to get the most value for a limited budget amount. Professional librarians choose the selections. Truely professional librarians will select information that is if need to and desired by some segment of the the local community no matter how controversial. It is in fact, more costly and time-intensive to filter the Internet than to not do so. Therefore, the decision to filter the Internet is a decision to spend money to impose censorship and needs heavy justification because the Library is a function of local government.
Now the exposure of children to inappropriate material is sufficient justification IMHO to install filters in the children's section, but that is not sufficient justification to impose filtering on adult users as well.
Filtering software uses the narrowest set of definitions available to maximize the market.
If someone wants filtering and objects to some stuff that is not filtered, there is a lost customer. Thus the comercially available filters tend to be overbroad, implement the lowest community standard in their market and do not meet the test of implementing "local community standards".
There is no filtering software specifically to remove pornographic material because there exists no algorithm to identify pornographic material that does not also indentify non-pornographic material. Even people can't agree on what is pornographic.
I don't think that it was reported on
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Re:The internet has no local standards (Score:5)
The whole "Protect our Children" mantra is getting old; My wife and I neither want nor expect Big Brother to tell us how to raise our children - that is our sole right and responsibility. If you want your children "protected" from pr0n (somthing censorware is unable to do, BTW), then do it yourself - supervise your child when s/he is surfing the net. Don't expect me to subsidize your religious predjudices with my tax dollars.
A public library is a repository for books owned in the collective public interest -- it is not a free day-care facility for your personal use, nor an indoctrination center for you to impose your belief system on other people.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Re:Sounds like you got out - played.. (Score:3)
The whole point to the Bill of Rights is that there are some things that we want to have the right to do that may not hold up to a majority vote at all times.
It is only the majority the people willing to show up and speak at this meeting and similar ones. Those who want filters are painting anyone who doesn't want them as corrupting the morals of the youth. That is a honorable role once played by Socrates; his award for it was a nice bowl of hemlock. People who stand up individually against these filters may experience the modern day equivalent.
If each book public libraries acquired were first approved in such public meetings, the contents of most of our libraries would be vastly different. In my experience, libraries contain a wide range of books that while reflecting local interests also reflect many conflicting view points. There are books in my public library that I find highly offensive and others that I know many other would. I am glad they are there.
One of my favorite library books was, "Fold a banana." I would not like to have to justify its purchase. It is a small fun book that I find funny. It contains suggestions of things you could do if you are bored and illustrations of them. If taken literally it and its sequel "Throw a tomato into a fan." could be viewed as a very bad influence on children--just imagine the messes from the titles alone! Yet, it was there in the library. I can just hear the argument about what should have been purchased instead. Some boring book that had a better moral lesson no doubt. The web allows library patrons access to both fun sites and the boring moral sites, no extra charge.
Also in our library were such classics as "Joy of Sex", "My Secret Garden", "Sex, a User's Manual" as well as various books on homosexuality. If the library has such books, why not allow web pages with similar content to be viewed in the library? You certainly can read those books there, even the ones with explicit illustrations, as long as you aren't noisy about it. I know I have.