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Nunberg on censorware in libraries makes moral judgments
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 13:15:06 -0500
------ Forwarded Message From: Seth Finkelstein <sethf () sethf com> Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 12:52:33 -0500 To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>, ip <ip () v2 listbox com> Subject: Nunberg on censorware in libraries makes moral judgments [ And a small personal credit note, the "Google cache sites part" was exposed in my report "BESS vs The Google Search Engine (Cache, Groups, Images)" "BESS bans cached web pages, passes porn in groups, and considers all image searching to be pornography." http://sethf.com/anticensorware/bess/google.php ] [ http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/weekinreview/09NUNB.html ] March 9, 2003 Computers in Libraries Make Moral Judgments, Selectively By GEOFFREY NUNBERG [S]mut in the stacks! What better conjures up the broken promises of the Internet than the image of children sitting in a public library downloading pornography? Congress has made several attempts to control access to online porn, most recently with the Children's Internet Protection Act, passed at the end of 2000. The act required schools and libraries to install software filters to screen out obscene sites as a condition for receiving various federal subsidies. Shortly after that, the American Library Association and the American Civil Liberties Union sued to block the law's enforcement in public libraries, arguing that the software isn't up to the task the law set for it. In June 2002, a three-judge federal panel agreed. It overturned the law, describing filtering technology as a "blunt instrument" that not only fails to block many pornographic sites, but also blocks a substantial amount of constitutionally protected speech. Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in the government's appeal of that decision. I served as an expert witness for the library association in its suit, on the basis of my background designing automatic text classification systems, of which porn filters are merely a special case. In their workings, filters are no different from the software that companies use to automatically sort e-mail messages, a job they perform with tolerable accuracy. Tolerable, however, is a relative notion. We can live with the errors that classification software make when its output is subsequently reviewed by hand - for example when the F.B.I. uses it to try to locate potential child pornography sites. But human review isn't a practical option in surveying the vastness of the Web. It has taken the St. Louis Public Library 135 years to build its collection of 4.5 million holdings; the Web adds that many new documents every three days. No software can identify a large portion of the pornography on the Web without taking down a great many innocuous or useful sites on the way. In testing several filtering systems used by libraries, I found them blocking access to everything from teenage sex advice sites posted by Planned Parenthood and Rutgers University to a dollhouse furniture site, Salon magazine and the home page of the Canadian Discovery Channel. A recent study sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that even at their most restrictive settings, filters failed to block 10 percent of porn sites. That leaves more than 10,000 sites to choose from, which should satisfy even the most tireless devotee of the genre. But at those settings the filters blocked 50 percent of safe-sex sites and 24 percent of all health sites. Current filtering software can identify pornographic sites only by looking at the words they contain, which is a crude indicator. Do a database search on one vulgar phrase for oral sex, for example, and you'll turn up a huge number of porn sites, but you'll also turn up poems, song lyrics, movie reviews, cocktail recipes and articles from The Times Higher Education Supplement. Systems designed to spot pornographic images fare even worse. They can't distinguish a painting of St. Sebastian from a Penthouse centerfold, and routinely block pictures of pigs and tapioca pudding, which have the color and texture of human skin. IT is true that the law permits librarians to unblock access to forbidden sites that patrons want to consult for "bona fide research." But many patrons are understandably uncomfortable about asking librarians to unblock sites: think of a 15-year-old girl searching for information about sexually transmitted diseases. Advocates of filters argue that they will get better, but there is an inherent trade-off in such systems: the more complete you try to make the coverage the more innocent sites you flag. Software will never be able to wholly reproduce human linguistic and perceptual capacities, much less distinguish between a Playboy calendar and an Edward Weston nude, or between "Tropic of Cancer" and "Trailer Park Swappers." Then, too, the architecture of the Internet itself requires filters to block hundreds of thousands of sites that they haven't identified as porn - Google cache sites, for example, and any site that is unlucky enough to be hosted by the same computer that's hosting a porn site. Filtering advocates say libraries have always been selective in building their collections. As Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson argued before the Supreme Court last week, libraries that use filters are "simply declining to put on their shelves what has traditionally been kept off the shelves." But public libraries acquire the Internet as a single package, along with the risks inherent when someone buys a collectible on eBay, enters a chat room or hunts for a mate. Librarians can help people find their way through the forest of the Web - which is one good reason for asking public libraries to serve as the mediators of Internet access for people who wouldn't otherwise have it. And as the lower court noted, filters aren't the only way to mitigate the problems caused by obscene Web content. Libraries can set usage policies, put privacy screens around monitors used by adults, and restrict young children's surfing to preapproved sites. But public libraries will never again be the sheltered enclaves they were in the age of print. They can't entirely shield their patrons from the evils lurking in cyberspace, nor can technology eliminate all the problems it has created. A few years ago, people were portraying the Internet as a New Jerusalem. For the foreseeable future, we will be living with something that feels a lot more like the current one. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy ------ End of Forwarded Message ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- Nunberg on censorware in libraries makes moral judgments Dave Farber (Mar 10)