CENSORSHIP FILES

Librarians fight back

By Sam Smith

CENSORED: Sheldon Kaye says the Portland Public Library doesn’t want internet filters but needs federal money.

At its midwinter meeting last week in Washington, DC, the American Library Association’s executive board voted to initiate legal action challenging the recently enacted Children’s Internet Protection Act, which was signed into law in December and requires public libraries and schools to put Internet filters on their computers to protect kids from the seedier sides of the Net.

“We haven’t had a single problem, and they’re trying to tell us we have a problem,” says Melora Ranney, a co-chair of the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Maine Library Association and an attendee at last week’s ALA meeting. “I think the thing that offends me the most is it tells my patrons and my staff that we are incapable of running our library well.”

And while a similar feeling was expressed by many of the librarians in DC, bigger issues were on their minds, namely the First Amendment, which the ALA argues is being infringed upon by Congress in its effort to block information that is “harmful to minors,” as the Children’s Internet Protection Act puts it.

“There’s no technology that filters out pornography that doesn’t filter out Constitutionally protected information as well,” says Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the Washington office of the ALA. Sheketoff points out that while filters will block out sexually explicit Web sites, they can often inadvertently block things like safe sex sites or breast cancer awareness sites along the way.

And while they’ve decided to file separate suits, the ALA and First Amendment fighters the American Civil Liberties Union will be working closely on the issue, says Ann Beeson, an ACLU staff attorney (who notes that the Maine Library Association was the first organization to join the ACLU’s suit challenging the Children’s Internet Protection Act: “You’ve got good people in Maine”).

Libraries could avoid the filtering mandate, which is to be implemented on April 20, but they would have to give up federal funding to do so, and Sheldon Kaye, director of the Portland Public Library, says his facility, for one, would have a difficult time going without the federal support.

“But at some point,” he says, “you have to ask if it’s worth the money.”