Student Testifies in Internet Suit

A Harvard student testified for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Tuesday in a federal lawsuit on Internet accessibility.

Benjamin G. Edelman ’02 was called by the ACLU two years ago to conduct a research study on blocking internet accessibility. The ACLU is currently is currently in court to challenge a federal law—the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA)—that requires public libraries to use filters to limit Internet access to obscene material.

CIPA, sponsored in part by Sen. John S. McCain (R-Ariz.), aims to protect children surfing the internet from pornographic and other potentially objectionable websites.

The case, Multnomah County v. United States, includes in its list of plaintiffs a number of public libraries, a 15-year-old girl who does not have computer access at home and planetout.com, a leading website for gay, lesbian and transgendered persons.

Speaking before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, Edelman said that his research had shown Internet filters were not actually effective—censoring far more than the potentially inappropriate sites they are intended to block.

In an interview yesterday, Edelman said his research had shown that Internet blocking programs “when configured according to what CIPA would seem to require, inevitably leads to systematic and persistent overblocking of websites offering non-objectionable and non-pornographic content.”

Edelman conducted his research by compiling a list of nearly half a million Yahoo-affiliated websites available in February 2001. He used this list to test four of the most popular blocking programs.

Edelman said he discovered that 6,777 of the websites blocked by the filters would have been deemed completely inoffensive by CIPA.

For instance, the website of House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) was among those blocked. Edelman said the system also blocked a flour store with a website called sexybloomers.com.

“It wrongly blocked a flour store as if it was pornography, a serious problem for the First Amendment,” Edelman said.

According to ACLU President Nadine Strossen ’72, the proposed blocking system is not the only problem with CIPA.

She said the government unfairly requires public libraries to comply with the restrictions in order to receive funding.

“To say that well, you don’t have to take the money the federal government is offering if you don’t want to go along with the statute is perpetuating the digital divide of the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ in terms of access to the Internet,” Strossen said.

Strossen said that several plaintiffs in the case are high school students who need access to the Internet for school assignments.

Since library filters block material not cited by CIPA as objectionable, she said, valuable material on topics like abortion, contraception and rape can also be blocked.

Peter Hamon, director of the Central Library System in Wisconsin, testified that the act would be too costly and staff-intensive.

He said in an interview yesterday that the act would pose a problem for library staff when adults need to access websites blocked under CIPA for their own research.

He compared the situation to a library attempting to monitor which books adults can take out.

“We lent 9 million books last year,” Hamon said. “I would hate to personally tell people they can’t take out each book or not, looking over their shoulder and deciding what they can’t have.”