The American Library Association has an answer for parents who are concerned about pornography on library computers: Buzz off. What’s more, the association recommends that libraries furnish private booths in which patrons, including children, may view Internet porn undisturbed. A growing number of protesters — parents, social conservatives, and some librarians themselves — are fighting back.
Their protests stem from the decision of the Supreme Court last June to void half of the 1996 Communications Decency Act — the half that sought to outlaw the display of online smut to minors. Although the library association, the American Civil Liberties Union, and other groups claim credit for the court’s decision, none of them dared challenge the law’s other half — the one that bars the display to minors of “obscene” material, the type of porn that fails to meet the legal test of literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Outside certain business and free-speech enclaves, this law is popular: One poll found that 80 percent of Americans believe government should curb Internet pornography.
This sentiment is shared by most librarians, who have traditionally refused to buy pornographic or otherwise obscene books. Over the last few years, however, more than 40 percent of the nation’s libraries have each paid at least $ 3,000 to buy a computerized portal into the Internet — and so have stocked their electronic shelves with an array of cyberspace porn, complete with color, sound, and full-motion-video action.
The most interesting portion of the Internet is the World Wide Web, which consists of endlessly interlinked series of “Web sites,” each containing a storehouse of images and information. To find your way through these millions of pages, you can use any of dozens of electronic indexes, called “search engines.” Thus, if you type in “puppy,” you will be led to hundreds of Web sites, dedicated to pictures of wellgroomed canines, advertisements for pet products, a rock band named Skinny Puppy, a fishing-tackle outfit called Mud Puppy — and a group of deviants at “alt.sex.bestiality,” where “Happiness is a warm puppy.”
In this way does the Internet provide libraries with instant access to a world of useful information but also convert computer-equipped libraries — including those in schools — into government-funded peep shows. Says Mitzi Brown of the National Law Center for Children and Families in Fairfax, Va., ” It is illegal to allow minors into an adult bookstore. Why are we allowing them into the porn sections of the Internet?” Her group advocates restrictions on the Internet links of library computers, contending that the Supreme Court’s decision has left online “non-obscene pornography” with even fewer restrictions than porn videos and magazines or The Simpsons on television (which is rated TV-PG for bad language).
For parents, politicians, and decency-minded librarians, one obvious solution is a type of software that severs libraries’ Internet links to offensive Web pages. Naturally, the first generation of this software has had problems, largely because it is difficult to find every pornographic needle in the fast-growing Internet haystack. For example, one product barred access to Web pages containing the words “sex” and “couple,” thus blocking a Web page created by the good citizens of Middlesex, England, as well as the White House Web page, which featured the first couple.
This sort of defect has provided ammunition to the library association and allied groups, which call the smut-filtering software “censorware” and argue that developers secretly build into it right-wing political ideology, preventing access to pages that support abortion, homosexuality, or drug use. That objection is being answered by improved technology and trialand-error experiments. Librarians in Austin, Texas, for instance, have worked with a software developer to narrow the filters to block only obscenity and “gross depictions,” while librarians in Boston use very broad filters in the children’s corners. The local government in Loudoun County, Va., has voted to install filters in all its computers, while other libraries reject any filter at all, simply keeping their computers near check-out desks, where middle- aged ladies tend to shame the underaged away from porn.
This jumble of experiments may look like a democratic compromise-in- progress, but the American Library Association will have none of it. Its lobbyists adamantly oppose any and all use of filtering technology and have distributed tip-sheets and legal briefs in support of their cause. According to Judith Krug, director of the association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, any use of smut-filtering software in government-funded libraries is an unconstitutional violation of free-speech rights. In her opinion, no filtering software could be constitutionally valid because no developer can devise a filter that excludes all obscenity while keeping the door open to all less-than-obscene pornography. “Porn is erotica, and that is constitutionally protected speech, and if you don’t want your children to access that information, you had better be with your children when they use a computer,” she says. And those little booths? They are needed, she maintains, to protect users’ privacy. Of parents concerned about Internet porn, Krug is dismissive: “Their number is so small that it is almost laughable.” Only one child “out of a trillion billion” might use library computers to seek out porn, she believes.
Krug’s touching faith in the virtue of American youth aside, the association’s laissez-faire fundamentalism clashes with several facts. First, it is a federal crime to display obscene materials to children. Second, industry is selling cyberspace maps that prod users toward favored Web sites, many of which will soon receive quality ratings. These maps and ratings are prepared by search-engine companies, which make their money by nudging users to corporate Web pages that buy advertising slots or pay for prominent positions in the electronic index. Thus, the association’s hands-off approach would, in essence, invite online advertisers to take over the librarians’ task of indexing and grading the content of libraries.
Third, the association is entirely willing to push kids to certain sites — liberal ones. It has developed a guide to 700 politically correct sites, including those for Young Feminists in NOW, the Sierra Club, multiculturalism, Latin American issues, American Indians, and origami “Cranes for Peace.” (There is even one for Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.) Krug says that selecting World Wide Web content is “exactly what librarians are doing, but not in the way [social conservatives] want us to do it.”
Her views are entirely representative of the library association’s hierarchy. “We don’t think we should put blinders on kids,” says Barbara Ford, association president. But it is unclear how many of the association’s 57, 000 members share their leaders’ hardline position. Nor is it clear how much of the association’s budget comes from the taxpayers, although 36 percent of its $ 33.8 million in revenue for 1995-96 came from the purchase by libraries of association products. Also, the association’s Fund for America’s Libraries receives financial support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Information Agency, and the Microsoft Corporation, which seeks to minimize the regulation of its Internet business.
On the smut-filtering issue, the association works hand-in-glove with the ACLU. “I don’t think [filtering] technology can do the job of a jury and judge” in determining what material meets the legal test of obscenity, says Ann Beeson, an ACLU staff attorney. As for the little booths, she says, “I think that’s a good idea.” Beeson is threatening to sue libraries that use filters — which is hardly surprising. The ACLU argues that parents should have no right to limit their children’s use of library computers, and it backed a California lawsuit that sought to legalize computerized simulations of adult-child sex.
At its base, the argument advanced by the library association and its friends is that the Web should — and will treat all information equally, undermining traditional morality and promoting “diversity,” sexual autonomy, and moral relativism. So far, it seems that they are correct — much to the benefit of corporations, which are delighted to supplant the judgment of librarians with the sell-anything-now ethos of an online marketplace carefully segmented by age, race, wealth, education, and sexual urges.
So, what should conservatives do in response? They could adopt a libertarian stance: shut down the libraries and let citizens do their own Web searches at home, with or without filters. Or they could try to take the libraries back from the American Library Association; perhaps local politicians could fire recalcitrant librarians, which would free up cash for computerequipped charter schools whose librarians treat parents’ concerns with respect. The Republican Congress could pass a law that helps parents sue librarians who fail to take reasonable measures to abide by the Communications Decency Act. Congress could even go a step further and prod the Justice Department to jail careless librarians when the computers under their charge are used to break the law.
There is room for optimism: Several legislators, including Republican senator Dan Coats of Indiana, have drafted bills designed to curb commercial online pornography. Some of the larger Internet companies are eager to buy respectability in suburbia and protection from porn-related lawsuits brought by outraged parents by exiling their lucrative online-porn business to backwater reservations in cyberspace, from which filters can bar children. Industry’s increased support for filters allows President Clinton and his techno-veep Al Gore to trumpet those filters as “seat-belts for the information superhighway” without worrying about a hostile reaction from Silicon Valley a reaction that would surely ensue if the Justice Department actually prosecuted online-obscenity cases.
In this debate over technology and morality, conservatives will need a ready-for-TV answer whenever they are slammed as free-speech-hating Babbitts.
Judith Krug says of conservatives, “I don’t want their view of the world to affect what my kids have access to.” Maybe conservatives can simply echo her.
Neil Munro is a policy reporter for the Washington Post Company’s business newspaper, Washington Technology.
