Nunberg on censorware in libraries makes moral judgments

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ 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


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