(among others). The the ACLU's Complaint claims that the libraries are using filters to block certain material, and refusing to manually unblock the material on the user's request:
[T]he NCRL has configured its SmartFilter software to block Web sites in the following categories, or in categories equivalent to the following categories: Alcohol, Anonymizers, Chat, Criminal Skills, Dating/Social, Drugs, Extreme, Gambling, Game/Cartoon Violence, Gruesome Content, Hacking, Hate Speech, Malicious Sites, Nudity, P2P/File Sharing, Personal Pages, Phishing, Pornography, Profanity, School Cheating Information, Sexual Materials, Spyware, Tobacco, Violence, Visual Search Engine and Weapons. [This is necessarily a tentative allegation, based on the ACLU's current information and belief; presumably discovery during litigation will confirm or correct this.]
Plaintiff Sarah Bradburn has attempted to use computers maintained by the NCRL to conduct Internet research -– particularly regarding alcohol and drug-addiction topics -– in connection with academic assignments. When Ms. Bradburn tried to access material and obtain information relating to youth tobacco usage, the Internet filters that the NCRL had installed on its computers prevented her from doing so....
Plaintiff Pearl Cherrington is a professional photographer, her work consisting mostly of landscapes and outdoor scenes. She has attempted to use computers maintained by the NCRL to conduct Internet research and obtain information regarding art topics – including art galleries that might be interested in displaying her work. She has also attempted to use NCRL computers to conduct Internet research and obtain information about health topics. Her ability to conduct her research and obtain information via the Internet has been restricted by the filters that the NCRL has installed on its computers....
Plaintiff Charles Heinlen has attempted to use computers maintained by the NCRL to conduct Internet research and obtain information on topics relating to firearms. His ability to conduct research and access information related to firearms has been restricted by the Internet filters that the NCRL has installed on its computers. The filters have also denied Mr. Heinlen access to various dating sites, publications such as Soldier of Fortune Magazine (www.sofmag.com), the Web log (or “blog”) that he maintains at www.myspace.com, and photographs embedded in commercial emails that are sent to his Hotmail and Yahoo! email accounts....
One of the publications that Plaintiff SAF sponsors is Women & Guns, a magazine with its own Web site, located at www.womenandguns.com. Women & Guns is written and edited by women, for women. It covers topics such as self-defense, personal protection, recreational shooting, new products and legal issues. Women & Guns’ Web site has been blocked by the Internet filters that the NCRL has installed on its computers. The information contained in Women & Guns is protected by the First Amendment of the Unites States Constitution and by Article I, Section 5 of the Washington State Constitution. Because the NCRL’s Internet filters have blocked access to www.womenandguns.com on the NCRL’s computers, SAF has been prevented from communicating with Internet users in North Central Washington who rely on public library computers for Internet access.
Whether libraries have a First Amendment duty to disable filters on patron request is an unsettled question; the Court's United States v. American Library Ass'n (2003) left the matter unresolved. The ACLU's Web page also says that "the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the [federal library funding law that requires some filtering out of sexually explicit material] to mean that libraries should disable those filters upon the request of an adult," but in my view that's an overreading of ALA. Those who want to read my quick summary of the current state of the Supreme Court's law of government-funded speech can click below. (Note that the summary is from the relevant chapter of my First Amendment textbook; it is necessarily sketchy, since it's aimed at students who will read the summary and then [supposedly] read the cases that the summary refers to.)
Nonetheless, while the ACLU's First Amendment argument is far from an obvious winner, the case is important and interesting (and will be even more so if it ends up leading to an appellate decision, rather than just settling). And it's good that the ACLU is exposing such practices on the library's part, practices that strike me as bad service to Washington residents, even if they are ultimately found to be constitutionally permissible.
Of course, the ACLU made library filtering inevitable, because they have argued that there should be no (or almost no) limits on what can be shown or produced. If there weren't websites offering porn and hate propaganda, there wouldn't be a need for libraries to filter Internet access.
It should be obvious to any rational person (i.e., non-ACLU members) that there are materials that are inappropriate for children, and of very limited value (if any) for adults. Libraries have traditionally been selective as to what they put on the shelves. The value added to the society by stocking the shelves of a public library with bestial porn and neo-Nazi hatred is actually negative.
The rationalization that the ACLU and the ALA use for distinguishing the "filtering" that they do for physical media and the Internet is that shelf space is limited. True enough, but bandwidth, while cheap, isn't free. Why should the library patron downloading several megabytes a day of porn impair the performance of the library patron who is searching for articles about drug addiction treatment? Only an ACLU member would argue that these are so equal in value that the government should subsidize them equally.
There is also the question of sexual harassment. If, as liberals like to believe, the presence of nude pictures in a workplace qualifies as sexual harassment, why is it no different when a librarian has to sort through the printouts from the library terminals, with sexual pictures scattered in amongst items that are part of a library's highest purpose?
Fair enough. So impose a download limit per patron, whether he be downloading pictures of Mars or of porn, so the library's bandwidth is divided fairly among the number of terminals the library chooses to fund.
Any adult patron should be allowed to have the filter removed upon proving that he is in fact an adult. The printout problem is somewhat salient, although at the library I frequent you have to pay a few cents per page for printouts which means in practice that you go to one of a few distinguished terminals, each of which has its own printer, and no library staff has to sort through the printout. Also, I doubt most porn viewers print out their stuff.
-dk
Question: Didn't the ACLU argue against the library's right to use filtering software at all a few years ago?
Right. Because if not for the ACLU, there would be little or no pornography on the internet.
The leaps of false logic in just two sentences are so numerous and vast that it is almost impossible to know where to begin. I am sure others will jump in for an astute point by point rebuttal, parsing the implicit and explict falsities in each phrase.
The more appropriate response, however, is just to stand back, point, and laugh.
I don't know about your local library, but the computer terminals at my library are all taken by poor(er) people mostly trying to take online lessons.
It's really heartening to see all the computers taken, everyone learning, and people standing in line waiting for their turn.
Go find another computer.
Where?
THe first Amendment creates a right to speak, not a right for a state to supply one with whatever information one requests.
There may be a legitimate federal-state issue with regard to the scope of the Spending Clause if local libraries disagree with the Federal Mandate, but the ACLU has long claimed that the First Amendment requires government to subsidize speech it favors. And it has been repeatedly rebuffed by the Courts, most recently in a case involving the Solomon Amendment.
It was worth noting in that case the ACLU opoenly admitted that in its view the First Amendment should only protect speech the ACLU favors and not speech it disfavors -- it actually said that the First Amendment provides greater protection to universities with views it regards as socially valuable (such as its view on homosexuality) than views such as those favoring racial discrimination.
The First Amendment simply doesn't limit what government can spend on or do itself. It only limits government regulation of private speech. It doesn't require government to assist private individuals. When government supplies a monpoly like the postal service or the internet, there are First Amendment considerations. But a library is a service that creates no monopoly.
So it's ok if libraries in Texas censor out all "liberal" material? The DCCC is out, but Michelle Malkin is in. No prob?
It is neither clear (non-nuts believe gun ownership reduces overall crime) nor present.
Cramer,
I'm mostly with Rick B. but I can't resist some point by point rebuttals.
First of all I don't know how much Oreilly some of the commenters here have been watching but there is no such thing as THE liberal view. One can't show the ACLU is wrong because some liberals somewhere think sexual harrasment laws are more important than free speech. Also many people draw a distinction between harrasment by the customer and by your boss/co-worker giving the former more free speech protection. I personally am very strongly opposed to the library filters, generally support the ACLU but oppose specific laws targeted at sexual harrasment (either make general anti-harrasment laws or none at all...being harassed because you are fat hurts just as much).
Your argument itself is flawed from the start as it asks us to assume that the ACLU should be held responsible if people do something bad because the ACLU frustrated them from engaging in a bad act they really really wanted to do. This is like arguing that the abolitionist movement is responsible for Jim Crow and lynchings because, 'abolitionists made it inevitable that whites would have to intimidate blacks to stop them from voting.' In Jim Crow the correct solution was for people to get over their irrational prejudice against blacks. In regards to library filtering the correct solution is for people to get over their irrational belief that seeing a few naked people has horrible consequences for kids. Most of the reputable studies on the subject seem to suggest action violence that is allowed on TV all the time is more harmful than pictures of people having sex and until we have reason to believe otherwise we shouldn't treat a demand to protect kids from sexuality any more seriously than a demand to protect them from atheist propaganda.
Your worry that patrons downloading porn will use up library resources has already been addressed. However, I should add that the marginal cost of bandwidth is 0, so going in and using the libraries unused bandwidth for porn really doesn't cost the taxpayer a dime. As for the worry that this will impair the access of other users this is easy to fix by setting up the router to correctly balance the amount of bandwidth used by different terminals.
Finally we come to your main argument that the library shouldn't allow people to get access to these materials because they are just bad and having them accessible actually reduces utility. The problem is this argument proves far too much. The very same argument shows that we should repeal the first amendment and just ban neo-Nazi propaganda and porn all together. I also think your moral prejudices are causing you to ignore the enjoyment some people get from porn but that is another discussion.
The reason libraries shouldn't be allowed to pick and choose what people see on the Internet is the same reason the government shouldn't be allowed to pick and choose what is printed in the newspaper. Given the power to censure history has shown that governments invariably misuse it. Sure you might find plenty of towns who agree with you about what is bad but you are also going to find places like Berkeley who think that sexuality is sacred, second amendment advocacy is a clear harm and that Hamas is an acceptable resistance organization but the ADL is a hate group. The benefit from denying people 'bad' information is small at best and often backfires by making that information seem more enticing, e.g., European anti-hate laws, while the harm from denying them important information like drug treatment, safe sex and similarly potentially controversial topics is great. Thus it is necessary to limit the power of the government to decide what is and isn't beneficial/good as much as possible.
In fact I would argue that there are systemic pressures which virtually guarantee that the government gets it wrong whenever it is put in the position of deciding what is worthwhile for people to see. The very reason that information on safe sex, harm reduction for drug use (clean needles etc.) and similar material is valuable is often precisely the fact that it is a societal taboo. As a result the consumers of such information are reluctant to pressure the government to keep it legal while it is easy for those who oppose it to righteously demand it be outlawed. Furthermore, the sort of speech people like to ban evokes immediate strong emotional reactions in the viewer clouding judgement about potential consequences. For instance the disgust that hate speech arouses in many people causes them to demand that it be banned without properly considering whether than ban will actually make hate propaganda more effective.
I am a public librarian and there are several factors to consider here.
Who is making the decision to filter? Is it the local library director or were they ordered to do so by some higher authority like the city council. Any library receiving federal funds and providing internet access to children, last time I checked, was required by federal law to provide some filtering or other restriction on access.
Besides bandwidth there are only so many computers in a public library and often there can be a wait of an hour or two and occasionally even longer to have your turn. Are you ok with people doing research or trying to do some activity that has to be done on a computer like applying for a job having to wait 2 hours so someone else can look at porn for an hour?
For instance the USCIS (formerly the INS) requires anyone who wants to make an appointment to do so online. Many people seeking their citizenship do not have any other access to a computer and the USCIS says on the handout they give to people to go to their library to use the free internet.
Plus the fact that libraries are workplaces and employees should not be forced to view porn in the course of their duties. I know of at least one case from a few years ago of library employees filing a sexual harassment suit over being forced to repeatedly view porn on a user's computer. There are also the people (including children) wandering by the computers who may be exposed to graphic sexual images when they just want to go to the library to check out a book.
I personally do not think filters are the answer and like the policy we use: no porn and no illegal activities allowed. Every patron sees the warning when they start up internet explorer. If we see you looking at porn you can not use the computers again for a few weeks and if caught again you are banned from the computers permanently. Not perfect but it avoids the problem of filters blocking good information and non-offensive sites.
I think I'm missing something. It would seem that your summary leaves no room for the library to filter at all. After all the Internet connection in the library seems clearly a indiscriminate facilitation of viewpoints (or at least accessing them) and no limitation of resources prevents them from not censoring at all. So how does library filtering fit into this scheme.
Reader,
Ohh c'mon. You can't seriously think the ACLU is arguing that speech that say the Bell Curve is (legally) less valuable than some pro-affirmative action book.
Obviously what the ACLU is saying is that learned treatises, scholarly works and serious books, regardless of their viewpoint, are more valuable than random hate group ravings or extremist black power propaganda. It is not the conclusion they are concerned about but whether it is a sophisticated intellectual/social argument or just a rant. They are just endorsing the established case law that allows the government to make quality based discrimination even when they can't engage in viewpoint based discrimination.
As for your other point, If you had read the little intro about the state of federal law you would have seen that the case law makes a distinction between situations where the government indiscriminatly funds lots of speech and where it is promoting its own viewpoint. Even when the government is facilitating private speech with limited funds and thus must make choices it still cannot do so in a manner which discriminates against viewpoints. Thus a government library couldn't refuse to stock pro-democratic books while maintaining a large pro-republican section.
Yes. Perhaps you could reserve specific computers for job applications, and leave others for "random surfing." The wait for the random surfing ones could be longer.
I can see why you would like this policy. You have substituted a human filter (the librarian) for a human-written, automated filter (the computer program). This is probably better than the automated filter, which sometimes generates absurd results (e.g., I once was blocked from the mars explorer website, presumably because "marsexplorer" had "sex" in it....).
But the problem remains. Who decides what constitutes porn? You do, right? What is the standard? Just for example, would you let a child view Mapplethorpe's more graphic work? An adult? Why or why not?
Well obviously I think that applying for a job or student aid is more important porn is hardly unique in this regard. I feel exactly the same way about someone looking up information on UFO abductions, their BS religion, posting on inbred political blogs where everyone agrees about how much the other guys suck or a hundred other things. Should we have a no UFO policy because it wastes time? If so then why not a no religion policy?
Still I'm not arguing that people should be allowed to go get their sexual jollies downloading pics of naked redhead girls in cages. While I think this is should be protected expressive content the limited computer space is a good point. However, I would object to a blanket restriction on sexual images, naked women or sexually explicit stories. If someone is going a term paper on the depiction of the female figure in pornography or something similar they shouldn't be denied use of the computers because someone other people would look at those images for less important reasons.
This ultimately just comes down to a question of enforcement. The policy you describe seems right supposing the librarians would make an exception if someone with the depiction of women term paper asked.
I am kinda curious how you enforce the bit about illegal activity. Also do you stop people from reading erotic stories? If so where do you draw the line? De Sade?
--
As for sexual harassment somehow companies that actually produce porn as well as strip clubs manage to exist. It can't just be flat out illegal to expose an employee to porn during the course of their work and I don't why a library would be any different. I mean if this was a problem every prison guard in the country could probably win a sexual harassment suit (and not just the one freak case). Besides at best this points out a problem with the sexual harassment law.
As for people being forced to see porn, I agree one ought to minimize this (even if it is an irrational preference no reason to annoy people). However, if we weren't so concerned about people 'getting away' with looking at porn on library computers you could just position the computers so the screen wasn't visible or attach those side view blockers.
Rather I think that a distinction can be made between informational activities like reading, searching for forms, etc.. and other computer activities like browsing for porn, listening to music, downloading (legal) mp3s, burning a CD etc.. I think it is reasonable to prioritize informational and job application type activities over the latter, or even ban the latter entierly if necessery.
However, I don't think looking at porn in the library computer is any different than listening to music on the library computer or downloading a disk image to install linux on your home computer.
A few years ago the town's DSL carrier had some contract dispute with someone else -- I forget the details -- and there was a city-wide outage of one class of broadband customer for a couple of days. That's the ONLY time there has ever been a queue to use the computers [the library got its capacity from a hardwired T1 line]. The library shortened the slots from 1 hour to 30 minutes. Problem solved.
-dk
Do you think that advertising doesn't influence people? Do you think that children aren't influenced even more strongly by what they see than adults?
And you won't find me arguing that violence in entertainment isn't a problem. I would consider it even a bigger problem than a lot of mildly explicit sexual material.
What concerns me more than either alone is the amount of violent porn and degrading porn out there--and which shows up as spam in my inbox with depressing regularity. Maybe you think it is liberating to show children pictures of horses having sex with women, prepubescent girls fellating adult men, and depictions of gang rape. Sorry, I disagree, and except for the ACLU and a few law professors, I am not just in the majority, but the VAST majority.
Wrong. The marginal cost is a pretty significant step function, when you have to make the leap from OC1 to OC3 rate, depending on how the service is purchased. If the library is consistently using 40 Mbps and because of increased downloading, has to make the leap to 55 Mbps, there can be a big jump in price.
There are fractional bandwidth allocation schemes as well, but if you really think the marginal cost of bandwidth is 0, then why does it cost anything at all? I can keep adding 100 Kbps bandwidth demand every day, and the cost of the service will never go up? That's quite a trick.
So you are proposing "porn, violence, and degradation terminals" at the library, with appropriate throttling of their feed?
You seem to have missed my point: if you want this stuff, it is readily available. Why should the taxpayers be funding it?
By the way, there's no need to repeal the First Amendment. Laws against obscenity remain on the books, and they remain enforceable--much to the chagrin of the ACLU, who are upset that harccore porn rape/murder depictions put out by Extreme Associates are being prosecuted by the U.S. DOJ.
You mean "censor," right?
The analogy fails, because the government is not prohibiting publication, but simply refuse to pay for its provision to library patrons. By your reasoning, a library that doesn't have a complete set of Mexican Split Beaver Quarterly and Barnyard Fun on the shelf is engaged in censorship.
If liberals actually believed this, we would have an interesting discussion. But liberals don't believe in limiting government, except in a few areas where they see a clear benefit to limited government. It is astonishing how rapidly this "limit the power of the government" argument disappears when it comes to gun control, EEO laws, the welfare state, and the rest of liberalism's list of "the government's gotta tell people how to live" requirements.
What society are you living in? I didn't realize that there were Internet connections from 1970 available!
Who's arguing for a ban on propaganda? I'm arguing that a library has no obligation to carry each and every publication that is offered to it, nor is it obligated to pay for each and every publication, and it doesn't matter whether it is paper or electrons.
2) The ACLU's argument here is referring to a specific part of the decision not noted above: "Assuming that
such erroneous blocking presents constitutional difficulties, any such concerns are dispelled by the ease with
which patrons may have the filtering software disabled. When a patron encounters a blocked site, he need only ask
a librarian to unblock it or (at least in the case of adults)
disable the filter.". If you can't get the censorware shut off at all, then obviously that's contradicting that part of the Supreme Court's ruling.
"I think it is reasonable to prioritize informational and job application type activities over the latter, or even ban the latter entierly if necessery."
Except that means someone has to make to the distinction and then monitor the usage to make sure no one is cheating. The porn-nonporn distinction is relatively easy and you can often tell from a glance even 20 feet away, but distinguishing recreational from non-recreational uses is not.
"The library shortened the slots from 1 hour to 30 minutes. Problem solved." Which is fine if you know how to use a computer and can get your work done in 30 minutes. But if you do not have access to a computer at work or at home, then it will probably take a lot longer to fill out an application online. Especially if you do not know how to type or have never even used a mouse before.
And there are people who will sit and use library computers for hours on end every day if you let them, particualarly the homeless. For public libraries with lots of computers that is not an issue, but in many cities the demand for free computer access far exceeds the supply.
"As for sexual harassment somehow companies that actually produce porn as well as strip clubs manage to exist. It can't just be flat out illegal to expose an employee to porn during the course of their work and I don't why a library would be any different." Except that being exposed to explicit images is part of the job description in working for a strip club and for other jobs like prison work. There have been plenty of lawsuits that say it is not ok to expose workers to pornagraphic images, especially if the images have nothing to do with their actual work. Would your company's HR people be ok with you putting up pronagraphic calandars or showing your coworkers porn on your computers?
I actually largely agree with you. There's a lot of stuff that simply isn't appropriate for a public library. I don't find downloading music (or Linux) offensive, but it gobbles an enormous amount of bandwidth that should be reserved for, you know, the primary function of a library: a source of knowledge.
I fear, from reading a lot of these comments, that a fair number of the readers have no idea of the degrading trash that is out there, and to which children are being exposed. Guess what? We aren't talking about Playboy. We aren't even talking about Hustler.
Does your library carry works of fiction?
1. Anyone that goes to work in the entertainment industry and isn't expecting continual vulgarity and sexual depravity is suffering a naivete that may be terminal. I mean, this is the industry that invented "the casting couch."
2. From reading the claims the plaintiff was making, assuming that they accurately described the situation, I can't imagine a bunch more in need of a good spanking from Mommy and Daddy--and a jury award would have to do.
And yes, prisoners get prosecuted for exposing themselves to prison guards with enough regularity that I have seen several cases involving such charges--and I wasn't even looking for them.
Irrational preference. You mean like some people have an "irrational preference" for not hearing the N-word. How liberal of you.
Actually, I'm not sure this claim about "great degrees of legal sexual material than the US" is true. Name one category of pornography that is illegal here, but legal there. Even real (as opposed to virtual) child pornography is now a criminal matter in just about all European countries.
Even on the matter of violent pornography, I recall the Canadians are now ahead of the U.S. in taking steps to prohibit violent porn.
You know, you don't even have to go looking for this stuff--it often comes looking for you, or shows up in unexpected places. There is (or at least was) an Internet news group called alt.binaries.pictures.astro, for the posting of astrophotographs. There are also an enormous number of Internet news groups with names of the form alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.*. Someone trolling for customers assumed that every news group with a name of the form alt.binaries.pictures.* was a porn group--and posted a picture of a girl no more than nine years old, on her knees, having sex with an adult man. The subject line was purposely not instructive of what the picture included.
The news reader I used at the time brought this repulsive picture up, and I was both stunned, shocked, and disgusted. Now, you good little liberals can all sit around and call me narrow-minded and bigoted for being "offended" by this.
Liberalism is an astonishingly naive philosophy--people with very middle class values who simply fail to appreciate that there really is evil in the world. No, not evil in the sense of, "They want to cut the growth rate of the welfare state" but evil in the sense of that kind of wickedness.
Now are we agreed that the Internet is international? That other countries will have websites with sexual material acceptable to their own social mores, which can be more open than the US?
2) I refer you to the first sentence in the top post "refusing to manually unblock the material on the user's request:"
No, they argued in favor of filtering--at least, when they were arguing against the Child Online Protection Act. See Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union (2004):
It is all very Goldilocks. Don't try to ban pornography online--filtering and blocking can solve the legitimate problem. But now someone has called the ACLU's bluff--and they aren't happy about that, either.
One of the sad things is how high minded organizations become whores for particular industries. NORML became largely a legal defense organization for mid-level drug dealers, and the ACLU seems, at least in this area, to have become a legal defense organization for the most grotesque parts of the porn industry.
That is, the ironies do exist - but the knee-jerk bashing ironies aren't the actual ones.
One popular rant-and-rave technique is to conflate arguments about the rights of adults with arguments about minors. These are, as a legal matter, quite different.
Please identify some places in the U.S. where you can't get legally just about any pornographic material that you want (with the exception of child porn). I can't think of any place that I have ever lived where this stuff isn't readily available, either on cable, or in bookstores. (Hey, maybe Idaho really is wild liberals.)
Care to give some examples? Perhaps bestial porn and rape/murder porn is legal in Europe, unlike here, where it is technically illegal, but hasn't been prosecuted until the Bush Administration. But I would like to see some citations for this. There is this image that liberals have of the U.S. as the last benighted part of the planet about porn, and as near as I can tell, this is simply not true.
Why is it so important for the ACLU that minors have access to grotesque pornography? Are their lawyers not getting enough leftovers from their clients like NAMBLA?
Are we AT LEAST agreed that the Internet is international?
"Yet the argument the ACLU used when trying to strike down COPA is that it was not the least restrictive method of keeping minors away from porn--filtering was a better solution." - Correct. But it's a bit more subtle in structure. The argument in COPA is that censorware could be used by PARENTS ON THEIR CHILDREN. But it should not be used by PUBLIC LIBRARIES ON ADULTS. This has some very complex problems, indirectly. But the immediate contradiction people imagine, is in fact not there.
C'mon, I thought this was a libertarian site, Where's the outrage?
I can't speak to NORML or the ACLU directly with evidence one way or the other. But I'm not the first to say it is indeed ironic how many of the rights we love and cherish were forged in the defense of some particularly unsavory (read: "evil") characters (read: "monsters").
Example: The government asks a company IT employee to unlock and enter the office of a VP and record the data (child porn) off the VP's work computer. Upheld by the district court, this is deemed an illegal search and siezure on appeal. The government may not use proxies to end-run constitutional safeguards.
Result: You are more secure in your rights to privacy, private property ownership, and freedom from unlawful searches.
Other result: A guy who was beyond a reasonable doubt guilty of possession of child pornography walks. This is in spite of all the evidence and witnesses and the fact that he'd pled guilty, stipulated (fortunately for him) on the failure of that appeal.
I am appreciative of the Courts for clarifying what is and is not acceptable police behavior under the US Constitution. I am not, however, prepared to thank the defendant for his role in defining it.
Such is Justice in the world we must all live in and contend with.
That is not a proper analogy. Public (i.e. government) libraries using filtering software isn't analagous to the government deciding what private parties can print in their own newspapers, it is analagous to public libraries deciding for themselves what newspapers and other periodicals they will provide for their patrons. Surely you wouldn't expect your local public library to be forced by the constitution to provide you with physical copies of issues of hardcore pornographic magazines. Especially not those magazines whose content is illegal to possess.
The power to censor is not the only one governments inevitably abuse. The power to compel and force also comes to mind.
The question of values is properly a local question that each community can decide for itself using political means. I see no need for nationally uniform values determined by unelected, unaccountable justices that would disenfranchise local communities. If Berkeley wants to go its own way on what sorts of material its libraries provide, then that is their right and part of the genius of federalism.
Think about what you just said: Some communities might disagree with you so it is imperative that you get the legal system to impose your standards on everybody. That way there's no chance they could overturn your tyranny through the political process. And to do this you want to warp an amendment stating that the government can't keep people from saying or publishing what they want and make it say that governments must provide access to what people have published. That's the difference between saying that I can't keep you from getting on your soapbox and saying that I must provide you with an audience.
I have had to monitor computer access at a public library and I can tell you that the result of what you want to do would be to make it far more difficult for libraries to provide internet access for low income patrons who have no other options. The plaintiffs may have been obstructed by filters in their searches, but they had recourse to the assistance of a reference librarian. If the ACLU wins then library boards may begin to reconsider offering internet access at all.
If you want to limit the power of governments to decide what non-governmental information they will provide to the public then feel free to try but please don't pretend that the first amendment has already done so.
Let's at least try to keep this argument reasonable. This sort of thing is clearly an ad hominem attack. The ACLU's concern is not letting children access this material but adults. The very issue is that if you want to access embarassing or controversial material you may be denied access (as here) or at least be forced to ask for the filter to be removed. If you are trying to deal with sexual malfunction in your marriage you may not want to have to reveal this to a librarian to access that info.
You are conflating two very different uses of filtering software. In this case the ACLU was talking about using filtering software for children not adults. Nothing about this makes it inconsistant to think it is a problem to inflict filtering on adults.
Moreover, just like everyone else, the ACLU gets to rank the outcomes and prefer the less bad ones. Obviously the people at the ACLU would prefer restrictions at some public libraries than a law making it difficult for everyone at home to access any edgy/sexual content. This doesn't mean they have to favor filtering at the library, certainly not for adults.
Yah, so someone was doing something illegal and got busted for it. What's the problem? It's still illegal whether we have filtering or not. If the danger of someone looking at child porn requires filtering then why don't we require filtering at home? I don't see how this argues for filtering at all. The harm at issue here is not that someone might look at child porn at the library but that they would look at child porn at all. Besides, filtering just isn't going to be very effective in blocking child porn. By virtue of it's near universal illegality child porn often is published at underground websites and other sites that will be off the radar of the filtering companies.
As for your bit about seeing a pornographic image once I hardly think that is a compelling argument. Especially since no one even uses usenet anymore, where people who didn't understand usenet making posts made this far more likely. I browse the web a whole lot and can't remember ever accidentally stumbling on porn. However, even if you are correct it isn't an argument against not filtering adults.
So when is the last time you accidentally stumbled on some bestiality on the Internet? Probably never.
Yes, I agree advertising has an effect on us but I very much doubt it would have an effect if it was just an image we saw once. Advertising works because we are repeatedly bombarded with the ads, not because it takes over our minds if we just glimpse the ad.
My response was to your worry that children might glance at this bad content on someone's screen and it also applies to them accidentally happening on a picture. I'm not arguing that it's perfectly cool to show children hours of footage of violent rape, showing children significant amounts of sexual violence does seem to be harmful. However, it's irrational to think that just glimpsing one image is so harmful that we better make sure adults can't see these images in case a kid happens to look over their shoulder.
It should have been clear from my post that I was talking about the difference between using some of the bandwidth the library has purchased and using more of it. Sure, the library shouldn't be going out and buying a bigger connection so people can download porn but in all likelihood the libraries connection goes partially unused most of the time.
In any case I agree that the when bandwidth becomes limited the library staff should kick off people who are using the bandwidth for non-informational purposes. What I object to is a rule barring adults from accessing sexual/erotic material. When bandwidth becomes limited the library should start kicking off everyone who is downloading mp3's, Linux or whatever to free up bandwidth to people who want to use it for more informational purposes.
Jan Myers and Crammer,
I was not arguing that filtering information at the library was censorship (it may be but that wasn't my point). Rather I am pointing out that we should expect this sort of filtering to do more harm than good for the same reason we expect government censorship to do more harm than good.
If the government only censored material that was harmful and had no redeeming qualities it would probably be a good thing. People would get less bad information and more good information. So why don't we encourage the government to censor those expressions we are convinced are totally worthless?
The answer in the censorship case is that we don't think the government will use the power to censor wisely. Experience has taught us that they will choose to censor valuable material because of outrage or other pressure. The point is that libraries who choose to deny access to information will inevitably do the same.
As far as community standards go as a free society we accept that there are limits on community self determination. We don't let communities decide that supporting the democrats is against community standards, or that castration is an acceptable punishment. As far as controlling access to information goes we feel much the same. We don't think even a democratically elected government should get to decide that the populace can't view opposition information so why should we treat local communities any differently.
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Finally Crammer your arguments would be more convincing if they weren't so obviously arguing against some caricature of a liberal who isn't involved in the discussion. Even if you were right the fact that some liberals somewhere might believe something bad is never going to be relevant to this argument.
Moreover, you sure seem to know an awful lot of hardcore porn subjects and titles. Makes me wonder . . . .
That would be a good reason to try to have your library change its policies but a bad basis on which to assert a natural law right that would force all governments to kowtow to Mr. Limpet’s desire to receive government services on his terms rather than the government's.
Inflict? Nobody's forcing them to use taxpayer-provided computers to access the internet. And what about all the kids who are at libraries? Not only are they going to be potentially exposed to pictures and films all sorts of sex acts but the library is going to have to spend scarce resources ensuring that kids don't get on those computers.
Additionally, the free availability of pornography is going to attract people who don't mind sexually arousing themselves in public or the possibility that people will see what they are doing. Some subset of that group is going to be dangerous predators. Sure, they can and probably do already use libraries as stalking grounds but is that any reason to do something that will specifically attract them?
And I would prefer not to work at a place that has just become a part of the ever-expanding sex industry. I already have to stop people from having sex in the bathrooms, can you imagine what it would be like if patrons could sexually overstimulate themselves with internet porn? But I suspect it wouldn't come to that because our board would likely remove the patron computers rather than submit to becoming an outlet for the sex industry. Does the ACLU rank that outcome above people not being allowed to download bestiality at the government's expense?
Is your home a public place? Do tax dollars pay for your internet connection at home? The court has ruled that the government can set pretty much whatever conditions it wishes on money that it spends because you don't have to accept the money or whatever else that money is providing. Is the court wrong? If so, would you care to explain why?
Actually, the harm is also that people other than that specific patron will be unwillingly exposed to any sort of pornography. If you put up a poster of nude women (no sex) in your workplace, you have just created a hostile work environment and liable under the law. If a library allows patrons to display pictures of nude people and people having sex and an employee sees it then they are liable because seeing that sort of thing isn't a requirement of the job as it would be if one worked at Bob's XXX Film Shack.
For that statement to be meaningful, you would need to specify the percentage of that "whole lot" that was spent looking for porn. It isn't surprising if you don't accidentally stumble on porn during those times when you are actively looking for it. That said, I have been redirected from innocent web addresses to pornographic websites.
If we allow the viewing of porn at libraries, we will attract people who voluntarily bombard themselves with it.
It's irrational? Why don't you go to a Chuck E. Cheese or somewhere else with kids, whip out a hardcore porn magazine, and try to look at it.
So we do get to judge the value of what people are doing online? Then why can't we make such judgments at a policy level? Of course, we don't make those judgments based on bandwidth, but on maintaining community standards and keeping the library a safe and respectable public accommodation. People playing MMOGs are fine even if the connection is slowed to a crawl.
This will really blow your mind but libraries won't let you view porn even it is your own material that you brought with you. And if you refuse to comply, they will eject and possibly ban you.
We do and the Supreme Court has upheld it. Go look up the exceptions to the Free Speech and Free Press clauses. Prior restraint has a really high threshold to be acceptable but it still can be acceptable. There are a number of things that SCOTUS has ruled the government can prohibit you from saying or publishing and can punish you if you do.
When you get a court to rule that the US government is forced to give Castro equal time on Radio Marti, then I will believe you.
Maybe because the Supreme Court has repeatedly said that local communities may constitutionally proscribe the possession and distribution of material that their local standards deem obscene? Obscenity is precisely what is at issue in this case. The only difference is that here the government is attempting not to be forced to become part of the distribution network.
Also Clayton Cramer: It should be obvious to any rational person (i.e., non-ACLU members) that there are materials that are inappropriate for children, and of very limited value (if any) for s.
Do tell Clayton - when did you become a liberal?
If disputes go in favor of the patron, I have no major problem. Just out of curiosity, where would you come out on the Mapplethorpe question?
Cramer writes:
This is sufficiently laughable that it isn't even a good ad hominem attack. What "good little liberal" has, or ever would, call you "narrow-minded" for being disgusted by child porn? A name would be useful here. Otherwise, I guess we'll have to conclude that "liberal" is your synonym for "imaginary evil people."
I was wondering what all your postings about European standards of what is porn, etc. has to do with what a library in the United States filters out. Shouldn't matter the source of the porn, just the availability in the library.
As to the other person who is not concerned if kids see porn in passing by, should not that be up to the parent of said kids and not you? You may be right up to date with allowing the kids to see anything at all, but you have no right to impose your standards of what kids can see on others. After all that is one of your complaints about censorship in any case. Until you can specifically keep kids out of sections of the library where adults are able to see porn, then I think filters are a good choice. What you are trying to do is tell people that you can set the standards and they can all go pound salt. My view is that if you want to watch porn on the computers, get your own computer and have at it, be my guest. I see no reason that the city library with the limited funds that libraries have should have to foot the bill for you to get your porn freak.
Note again this lawsuit is about ADULTS being prevented from reading various non-sexual material, because the library policy is throwing out the baby with the bathwater, in violation of Supreme Court opinion (seems to be an argument over whether it's law or dicta, and I'm not a lawyer).
How do you explain the Supreme Court's Rust v. Sullivan holding that government can prohibit people receiving federal funding from providing information favorable to government while providing information opposing it? The Supreme Court expressly said that government could engage in viewpoint discrimination in its ruling. It said it again when it upheld a prohibition on funding of "indecent" art. Ignoring these cases strikes me as wishful thinking.
Reno vs. ACLU involved general regulation of private individuals, not intergovernmental grants under the Spending Clause. Spending clause cases are treated far more deferentially.
The 4-judge plurality in USA vs. ALA cited Rust v. Sullivan as having precisely what I said: most libraries don't include e.g. pornographic materials in their print collections, they have no First Amendment obligation to do so under Rust, therefore under Rust thry should not be subject to heightened scrutiny if they choose not to include them in their electronic offerings.
Justice Kennedy's concurrence said that if filters could be unblocked, the ALA wouldn't even have a prima facia case that there was any meaningful on the plaintiffs. But he simply didn't reach the issue of whether a private plaintiff would have a First Amendment case if filters couldn't be unblocked. I imagine some readers might simply assume he would joing Breyer et al. if this occurred, but he actually didn't hold anything at all in this case.
So the reality is there is no majority in either side in this situation. We have a 4-4-1 split in ALA vs. ACLU with Kennedy refusing to offer an opinion on the situation. And we have new justices, both possibly with viewpoints to the right of O'Conner and more in alignment with the Rehnquist/Thomas/Scalia/O'Conner plurality. One can present ones arguments as persuasively and matter-of-factly as one wants, but the fact of the matter is it is by no means a foregone conclusion which side will win.
First of all the 'danger' that someone else might be exposed to an obscene image is easily resolved. Simply put the computers in private cubicles or otherwise face them away from the general public.
The sexual harassment issue is irrelevant as far as constitutional matters go and it simply isn't the case that any workplace showing sexual material violates these laws. You admit this and try and squirm around it by saying that seeing sexual material isn't a requirement of the librarian job the way it is for an employee at Bob's XXX shack. Yet this is clearly circular. If I am right and a library offering internet access has a constitutional requirement not to restrict certain sorts of material then part of the job requirement for a librarian is to deal with patrons viewing sexual material on the internet. Also only the 'internet librarian' need to be exposed to this. Finally as you will see below I hardly think they will be exposed to it anymore than they are now when they need to kick off the people who are illicitly looking at porn.
Ultimately if you can make the sexual harassment point into a real legal argument concluding that the library has a legal duty to prevent patrons from looking at nude images then give me cases or law citations which back it up. Otherwise it really isn't a compelling point.
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Your objection to my point about irrationality seems to be that people really really believe it but this is hardly an objection at all.
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As for how we should govern computer usage I totally agree that we shouldn't be letting people use the computers for MMORPGs. In fact exactly what I am proposing is that we insist that people use the computers for actual research/information and not downloading mp3s, Linux, playing MMORPGS, or viewing porn for salacious pleasure.
We won't attract people to the library for porn viewing because waking off to porn on the internet at the library won't be allowed. The only viewing of porn that would be acceptable is a genuine research project on the subject
My issue is not that the library can't reserve the computers for people who want to get information as opposed to jollies or playing video games. It is that the library can't impose high barriers on certain sorts of genuine research because it doesn't like the subject.
In other words what I object to is a content based policy that stops the people who need to do a real report on the sexual depiction of woman, or who are analyzing nudes in renaissance art as well as the person who is just getting off on pictures of redheads in cages.
This is where the 1st amendment precedent comes in. The government is not allowed to have a program encouraging indiscriminate access to a resource and then block certain kinds of messages.
If filtering software could magically block only obscene images then you would be legally correct. My main problem is that it doesn't. My concern is not that people won't get to see their porn but that genuine information and opinions will be blocked in some libraries. In effect such a policy will make it unduly difficult to access relatively explicit information about having safe anal sex, or political information about nudists movements in some libraries.
A library that tried to put all the books that favored democrats behind the counter and required that you make a request to access them but left the republican books out in plain view would be clearly violating the 1st amendment according to established precedent. This situation is no different because the filters cannot possibly block only obscene material.
The policy argument that I give is relevant for two reasons. First of all it explains why 1st amendment precedent says what it does, i.e., why the government can't decide that library computers can show anti-gun sites and not pro-gun sites. Secondly it establishes that the harms from removing filtering are not high enough to establish a compelling governmental interest.
Your argument seems to be that removing filtering will result in the government funding some people looking at bad images and a few people glancing these images on someone's screen. As I outlined above this won't be a significant drain on library resources as I'm not proposing we allow random porn viewing any more than we allow random MMORPG playing. Thus the moral offense this might give (my tax dollars etc..) simply isn't a compelling interest that can override the fact that this filtering system blocks access to constitutionally protected material.
Eeewwwh!
Now librarians need sanitary scrubes to clean up the private cubilces. The library may incur additional ventilation costs for those rooms as well, increasing their energy load and reducing sustainability in those climate where outside air needs conditioning or humidification/de-humidification.
This entire discussion thread of presumably intelligent people, and at least 90% of you don't get the point. The question is not whether you personally would ban certain web pages. The point is whether the government should have the authority (constitutional, legal, or moral) to do so. Whether Joe Commentposter likes candystriper.com (or likes the people who like candystriper.com) is irrelevant.
Sk
I disagree
The issue in this case has absolutely nothing to do with whether government has authority to ban certain web sites. The question is whether government has an obligation to pay for people's access to them. It's a very different question and the two have little to do with each other.
I think all that needs to be said in the latter case is to observe that when public schools hire a French or Spanish teacher, they have no obligation to hire teachers in Chinese, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Swahili, and hundreds of other teachers to teach all the world's known language. If it did there would be no public instruction. Likewise there would be no public libraries if in order to buy one book government had to buy all. Yet no-one speaks of government
"banning" Serbo-Croatian instruction when it chooses not to pay for it. Picking and choosing among priorities is an inevitable reality of actual (as distinct from ideal) governments. Government chooses which things it wants to subsidize and pay for all the time. Doing so does not present the same First Amendment issue as banning private citizens from paying for the thing themselves. Private citizens need only pay for access to these websites themselves for them to be available. There is no question of a ban on access, only question of subsidies.
How is this analogous to internet content filtering on the public access terminals?
I'd submit the public access terminal is much more closely analogous to the photocopier machine. (I've never even heard of a content restriction on the photocopier machine, except for a note about compliance with copyright restrictions, so I don't know if that has been tested.) Similarly, you can bring your own books into the library if you need a quiet place to read, make notes, or have access to other materials.
I worked at a place with highly restrictive filters in place. We used to regularly have to go through channels to get completely legitimate sites unblocked. (Example: I was modeling aircraft trajectories and creating visualizations. Most of the good, publicly-available work in that field is for gaming. Gaming sites often were blocked.)
One day I was doing some casual personal research during my lunch break. Sites concerning a certain literary work by Vladimir Nabokov and its film adaptation would not pass through the filter, no matter what I tried.
(No First Amendment issues there of course, it was my employer's equipment and bandwidth.)