Censoring the Internet
he Supreme Court heard arguments last week in a case that will help shape
the degree to which free speech prevails in cyberspace. To qualify for
federal funds, libraries are required to block access to pornographic Web
sites. This means that the law, in effect, coerces libraries to deny access
to constitutionally protected materials. The libraries are rightly
challenging the law. The court should strike it down.
The First Amendment guarantees freedom of expression on the Internet. The
Supreme Court made this clear in 1997 when it invalidated portions of the
Communications Decency Act that made it illegal to post sexually explicit
material online without restricting minors' access to it. But the
Internet's technology poses an array of legal issues that do not occur
offline, such as the question of filtering.
The Children's Internet Protection Act requires that libraries receiving
federal aid for Internet access install filters that block material
considered obscene or, in the case of underage users, "harmful to minors."
Libraries regard the law as an infringement on their ability to provide
information freely to their users. They say it requires them to use
software that erroneously blocks access to many inoffensive sites. A group
of libraries sued, and last year, a three-judge court unanimously held the
law unconstitutional.
It is clear that the software being forced on libraries prevents their
patrons from seeing a large amount of constitutionally protected material.
By one estimate, it "overblocks" by 15 percent or more, meaning that untold
hundreds of thousands of Web sites that should be accessible to library
users are not. The trial court found that the software blocked the Web
sites of political candidates and sites discussing such topics as sexual
identity and abstinence.
The government argues that librarians can remove the filters when asked to
do so. But the unblocking technology is itself flawed. There was testimony
at trial that only one person in a library system, no matter how large or
busy it is, can have access to unblock the software. And as the lower court
found, patrons may be unwilling to ask librarians to unblock sites if they
cannot do so anonymously. Forcing users to specifically request information
about subjects like sexually transmitted diseases or homosexuality may, in
some cases, effectively deny them access to it.
The Children's Internet Protection Act is the first federal law ever to
impose free-speech restrictions on local libraries, and it does so in a
constitutionally unacceptable way. If there is a problem with library
terminals being used to gain access to inappropriate Web sites, it is a
problem the court should trust local libraries to solve.
