Filters

The Children's Internet Protection Act altered the Erate program, conditioning the funds to schools and libraries on the development of an Internet safety plan and the implementation of filters. COPA and the Tax Moritorium Act require ISPs to provide notification to subscribers of the availability of filtering software.

Filters and other technological solutions are, however, problematic. Schools and libraries may be concerned not only with the useful blocking of harmful content, but also with the harmful blocking of useful content. Companies that offer filtering services are private companies that select what material to filter according to their own criteria. You may or may not agree with their selection.  The problem is that with some companies you may not know what they are blocking. Filtering companies have argued that the database of blocked Internet material is proprietary, and they will not release it for review. This means that the selection process of what is blocked is largely a hidden process with little accountability.

Given the tremendous amount of material on the Internet that must be reviewed, it is inevitable that a few mistakes will be made and otherwise useful material blocked.  Groups critical of Internet filters have found that the following sites have been blocked:

• Amnesty International
• American Family Association
• Banned Books On-line
• The Religious Society of Friends
• The Safer Sex Page
• The Web site of Rep. Dick Armey
• Dozens of Web sites of candidates in the last election
• Child Online Protection Act commissioners’ pages that had the word “cum” (as in “magna-cum-laude”) in the bio
• Information on China’s response to the spread of AIDS
• National Association of Women
• People of the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)
• The American Association of University Women Maryland.

A useful report concerning Internet filters is the “Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Faulty Filters: How Content Filters Block Access to Kid-Friendly Information on the Internet” (December 1997) (www.epic.org).

Peacefire recently conducted a review of the sites one Internet filter, SurfWatch, blocked of the first 1,000 working .coms. According to Peacefire, out of 1,000 sites tested, 147 were blocked. Of those 147 blocked sites, 96 sites were under construction and did not have content, 42 were non-pornographic and did not have sexually explicit content and nine were pornographic.  According to Peacefire, this constitutes an error rate of 82 percent. A search of the Surfwatch (now SurfControl) Web site revealed press releases acknowledging - but not refuting - the Peacefire study. See also official government reports reviewing the effectiveness of filters.

Papers

• Mary Minow, Lawfully surfing the Net: Disabling public library Internet filters to avoid more lawsuits in the United States, First Monday 4/30/2004
• Documentation on Internet Filtering Worldwide, Harvard Law
• REPORT: See No Evil: How Internet Filters Affect the Search for Online Health Information, KFF 12/13/02
  • Internet Filters' Affect on Online Health Information, Kaiser 12/13/02
  • Study: Web Filters Block Health Information, NYT 12/13/02
  • Web filters blocking health sites, CNET 12/13/02
• Internet Filtering Software Wrongly Blocks Many Sites, EFF 9/18/02
• EFF: School Communities Give Internet Filtering Law Failing Grade, EFF 9/18/02
• Children's Online Protection Act Commission Report 2000
  • Section II.B. Filtering/Blocking
• Peacefire, Amnesty Intercepted: Global human rights groups blocked by Web censoring software December 12, 2000
  • Blind Ballots: Web Sites of U.S. Political Candidates Censored by Censorware  November 7, 2000
  • Sites blocked by Cyber Sentinel 8/2/2000
  • SurfWatch error rate for first 1,000 .com domains August 2000
  • CYBERsitter: Where Do We Not Want You To Go Today?
• EPIC:  Faulty Filters: How Content Filters Block Access to Kid-Friendly Information on the Internet  December 1997
• ACLU:  Censorship In a Box: Why Blocking Software is  Wrong for Public Libraries 1998
  • Fahrenheit 451.2: Is Cyberspace Burning? How Rating and Blocking Proposals  May Torch Free Speech on the Internet
  • Alternatives to Blocking Software

Ashcroft v. ACLU, 542 U. S. ____ (2004) (COPA II)

"Blocking and filtering software is an alternative that is less restrictive than COPA, and, in addition, likely more effective as a means of restricting children’s access to materials harmful to them. The District Court, in granting the preliminary injunction, did so primarily because the plaintiffs had proposed that filters are a less restrictive alternative to COPA and the Government had not shown it would be likely to disprove the plaintiffs’ contention at trial. Ibid.

Filters are less restrictive than COPA. They impose selective restrictions on speech at the receiving end, not universal restrictions at the source. Under a filtering regime, adults without children may gain access to speech they have a right to see without having to identify them-selves or provide their credit card information. Even adults with children may obtain access to the same speech on the same terms simply by turning off the filter on their home computers. Above all, promoting the use of filters does not condemn as criminal any category of speech, and so the potential chilling effect is eliminated, or at least much diminished. All of these things are true, moreover, regardless of how broadly or narrowly the definitions in COPA are construed.

. . . . . " Continued

Ashcroft v. ACLU, 542 U. S. ____, slip op. 7-11 (2004). See also Ashcroft v. ACLU, Sec. II.A.3. Least Restrictive Means (Third Cir. Mar. 2003) (discussing filtering as an alternative)