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EDITORIAL
Op-Ed; There's no stoppin' a Net porn search
THOMAS M. KEANE JR.

03/12/2003
Boston Herald
All Editions
027
(Copyright 2003)

I spent the other day at the Boston Public Library, looking for pornography - and I found it, right in the Children's Room.

My research was prompted by a 2001 federal law called the Children's Internet Protection Act, or CIPA. It's the latest in a series of efforts by benighted members of Congress to place restrictions on the Internet.

CIPA requires that all libraries in the country filter their Internet-connected computers. If they don't, they'll lose federal funds.

Libraries are aghast at the law. They won a lower court challenge in May; last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on their case.

The libraries believe they know better than the federal government how to run their own businesses.

They worry that the restrictions will cut deeply into their core mission: Providing unfettered access to information. And most tellingly they argue:

The law won't work.

A variety of companies make software (such as Net Nanny, Safe Surf or CYBERSitter) designed to filter out offensive content.

The Boston Public Library uses one called Cyber Patrol.

How good is it? I went to the BPL, used my 12-year-old daughter's library card and logged on. It took me less than a minute to beat the filter.

True, when I went to playboy.com, Cyber Patrol instantly stopped me. So I did a search for "playboy" and found a Japanese version. I got on without a problem.

Now, of course, because I read Playboy for its in-depth interviews and scintillating fiction, this was a problem, since I can't read Japanese.

But no matter what the language, the pictures are pretty much the same.

Then I did a Google search for "nudes." About two-thirds of the sites that came up were blocked.

But about a third of them were not. True, some of them shouldn't be blocked anyway (for example, a site selling prints of Renoir's nudes).

But others were less, shall we say, artistically inclined.

My little experiment on the dark side of the Internet exposed a problem that critics of filters call "underblocking." There are lots of creative ways around the filters.

For one, cached sites in Google - even the most sordid - are not blocked (although oftentimes pictures on those sites are).

In fact, there are even Web sites devoted to showing users how to get around the filters.

There's another problem as well: Filters overblock.

Sites that someone should be able to view get stopped. Filters often block out sex-education sites or those that deal with sexually transmitted diseases, for example.

That's understandable, but others are harder to figure. On various occasions, filters have blocked political candidates Web sites, organizations such as Amnesty International, and even a pet grooming service in Virginia.

So what should we do? Pull out computers altogether, consigning library users to books only?

Hardly. There's a much better approach - one that is in place at the Boston Public Library.

The BPL focuses on protecting children, but leaves adults alone. Computers in the children's and young adults areas have Cyber Patrol; those used by adults do not.

Moreover, to address the "overblocking" issue, any child, with a parent's permission, can have access to the unfiltered computers as well.

That solution, novel in 1997, is now in use by about 25 percent of libraries nationwide. BPL officials say it's working well.

Although, as my excursion to the Children's Room showed, the filter can be beaten, it probably functions pretty well to prevent a child from inadvertently accessing porn.

Moreover, the "opt-out" feature of the policy ends up giving control to parents - which is where it properly belongs.

And how about the unfiltered computers? I walked around the library, peering over the shoulders of those who were online.

One person was downloading an MP3, another was watching a music video, and a third was buying something on Amazon.com. No one was looking at dirty pictures.

The reason they weren't, I imagine, is the same reason that few people read Hustler magazine on a crowded train - everyone can see what they're doing.

The same is true at the BPL, where all computers are out in the open.

All of which is why I felt a bit like a creep as I was online. I hid the screen with my body, shutting down questionable sites quickly, nervously expecting a librarian to come up any minute and say, "Ahem."

My conclusion? CIPA won't work. It's a ham-handed approach to solving a problem that libraries are better able to manage themselves. And, quite frankly, if you want to see pictures of naked people at the BPL, there are better ways than the Internet. Do what I used to do as a kid: Look up back issues of National Geographic.

Tom Keane can be reached at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.