Child Internet Protection Act of 2000

Controversial Internet Filtering Act Becomes Law

Opponents Prepare Court Challenge

Response to the passage was swift and aggressive with The Center for Democracy and Technology, The Electronic Frontier Foundation and a dozen other freedom of speech groups preparing court action. These groups believe the bill raises serious constitutional free speech concerns. In addition they object to the lack of local control over where and when the filtering software is to be used.

Background

Former Presidential candidate John McCain has pushed various versions of this legislation for several years. Coordinating with several conservative and liberal legislators, McCain hoped to force public and private libraries and especially schools to install Internet content filtering software, or else be denied a variety of vital federal funding.

The chairman of the budget joint conference committee offered McCain and Istook the opportunity to hammer out a joint version of the filtering language. This was done, and the new result was put in the bill. After further refinements to satisfy the President and VP, the bill was passed into law, since the larger funding measure has passed with their rider.

It is very curious that this law was passed since it is opposed by such diverse groups ranging from the ACLU and the American Library Association to the Eagle Forum and the Christian Coalition. Congress's own Child Online Protection Act Commission rejected mandatory filtering in their recommendations to the legislature last month.

the WIZARD, fkap has taken an unusually neutral position on this issue. We believe the American Library Association has turned a blind eye to the very serious situation of child access to sexually explicit materials. There is a necessary balance required in protection of minors that the ALA seems to recognize everywhere except on the Internet. At the same time, there are serious Freedom of Speech Issues raised by this bill.

Despite some early religious-right support for the notion of censorware, conservative groups now raise virtually identical concerns with this legislation as their liberal counterparts. There is growing concern within the conservative community regarding the use of filtering systems by schools and libraries that deliberately filter out web sites and information that promote conservative values.

A primary issue involves the subjective filtering criteria, in which a software company is forced to decide broadly what is and is not available to some or all persons through the Internet. When installed by a parent or guardian, these controls are an extension of normal parental supervision. When installed by a school, the same software can be seen as coercion. The software company employees or their consultants may choose to block material that is not even covered by any stated filtering criteria of the product/service in question.

Watchdog groups like the EFF have show that such biases have blocked everything from EFF's own site to gay-rights news stories to Christian church Web pages. And PEACEFIRE, the Youth Alliance Against Internet Censorship has demonstrated that while all censoring software will mistakenly block innumerable sites as "pornographic" when in fact they contain no such content at all, the same software lets massive amounts of hard core pornography slip through.

Reasonable action by the American Library Association might have averted this law. The ALA needed to learn a lesson from the MPAA which set in place a parental warning system and thus avoided Federal Action. The WIZARD believes this law is flawed and will be overturned in court.