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The Children's Internet Protection Act has significant implications on the role that public libraries play in providing patrons with access to information. The purposes of this dissertation are to 1) further public understanding of the role of the public library; 2) analyze the legal and practical aspects of implementing mandatory Internet filtering in public libraries; and 3) determine if the CIPA is capable of doing what Congress is asking of it.
The only federal court (at the time of this writing) to consider the question ruled unconstitutional the mandatory filtering of Internet access for the adult patrons of public libraries. That 1998 decision helped the American Library Association and other free speech advocates fend off mandatory filtering for two years at the state and federal level, against the vigorous efforts of filtering proponents. Then, in 2000, the U.S. Congress conditioned federal funding of libraries on filter use, forcing the question into the courts as the latest colossal struggle over Internet regulation. This Article contends that the federal court in 1998 was right, and the Article counters criticism that has been leveled against that decision since. The public library is the quintessential venue for citizens to exercise their First Amendment right to receive information and ideas. As such, the library should be preserved against the imposition of automated content filters, which are too imprecise, and alternatively value-laden or arbitrary, to meet exacting constitutional safeguards.
A study of Internet blocking and filtering around the world: analyses by leading researchers and survey results that document filtering practices in dozens of countries. Many countries around the world block or filter Internet content, denying access to information that they deem too sensitive for ordinary citizens—most often about politics, but sometimes relating to sexuality, culture, or religion. Access Denied documents and analyzes Internet filtering practices in more than three dozen countries, offering the first rigorously conducted study of an accelerating trend. Internet filtering takes place in more than three dozen states worldwide, including many countries in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Related Internet content-control mechanisms are also in place in Canada, the United States and a cluster of countries in Europe. Drawing on a just-completed survey of global Internet filtering undertaken by the OpenNet Initiative (a collaboration of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, and the University of Cambridge) and relying on work by regional experts and an extensive network of researchers, Access Denied examines the political, legal, social, and cultural contexts of Internet filtering in these states from a variety of perspectives. Chapters discuss the mechanisms and politics of Internet filtering, the strengths and limitations of the technology that powers it, the relevance of international law, ethical considerations for corporations that supply states with the tools for blocking and filtering, and the implications of Internet filtering for activist communities that increasingly rely on Internet technologies for communicating their missions. Reports on Internet content regulation in forty different countries follow, with each two-page country profile outlining the types of content blocked by category and documenting key findings. Contributors Ross Anderson, Malcolm Birdling, Ronald Deibert, Robert Faris, Vesselina Haralampieva [as per Rob Faris], Steven Murdoch, Helmi Noman, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, Mary Rundle, Nart Villeneuve, Stephanie Wang, Jonathan Zittrain
How can we preserve free speech in an electronic age? In a masterly synthesis of history, law, and technology, Ithiel de Sola Pool analyzes the confrontation between the regulators of the new communications technology and the First Amendment.
In U.S. v. American Library Association (2003), the Supreme Court upheld the Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which mandated that libraries receiving federal funding for public Internet access install content filtering programs on computers which provide that access. Since almost all public libraries receive such funding, and since they generally require the money to remain in operation, the statute creates a de facto requirement that public libraries install Internet filtering programs. These programs analyze incoming content, and block the receipt of objectionable material, in particular pornography. Thus, patrons at public libraries are protected from unintentionally (or intentionally) accessing objectionable material, and, in the case of minors, from accessing potentially damaging material. At least, that is the official story. In this paper, I develop three points. (1) I argue that CIPA and ALA are better read as examples of the enforcement of a regime of normative sexuality. The question of minors accessing pornography is only relevant to the official story insofar as it provides a rhetorically persuasive example of deviance from that normative regime. There are less intrusive means to stop kids from getting pornography at the library. Analysis of the legislative history of CIPA, and of the Supreme Court's language in upholding it, suggest its breadth and the extent to which exclusive attention to the regulation of pornography functions as a legitimatory red herring. CIPA's full target includes information about topics such as homosexuality and contraception. (2) Rather than (or in addition to) punishing deviances directly, CIPA attempts to constitute a "public" in which such deviancy can never occur in the first place. Because its appearance is blocked, in the world of CIPA and from the point of view of those who rely on the "public" space of the Internet at the library in the formation of their subjectivities, deviance does not exist. Hence, the designation of a "public" space serves to domesticate alternative sexualities and to sanitize that space of sexual difference. (3) This interaction at the border of the public and private spheres in turn offers an opportunity to reflect on and underscore the ways that subject formation and subjectivity are mediated through technological artifacts like the Internet.
Discusses the First Amendment and censorship on the Internet