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excerpts from Freedom To Learn Network Newsletter Volume IX, No. 2 June 2001 Harrisburg Actions Short-Sighted Susan Miller/Freedom to Learn Network Newsletter, June 2001 -- As Philadelphia city schools struggle to provide basic educational services, the Governor and his spokesmen continue to shake their fingers and imply that their shortfall is due to mismanagement and hidden "fat." David Hornbeck, rough diamond that he was, advocated for students and reorganized city schools to make them neighborhood friendly. The Ridge Administration would rather not mention that improved test scores under Hornbeck spoke to the effectiveness of his work. When he left, a Ridge-approved businessman undid a great deal of Hornbeck’s work. Ridge has prevailed in his dealings with with Mayor Street, the teachers’ unions, and the school board. The threat of a takeover still hangs over their heads. Yet the fact remains that Philadelphia must educate almost a third of the poorest children in Pennsylvania with a $200 million budget shortfall. Nothing has been done under the Ridge Administration to change the funding formula to meet the needs of these children. Rather, according to the Pennsylvania School Reform Network’s Tim Potts, the gap between the most wealthy and poorest schools grew by $20,400.00 per classroom under Ridge at a time when there were unprecedented budget surplusses. Other people got tax breaks: business, prisons, technology initiatives....Stadiums are financed and built. But not schools - they’re not even repaired. The question is why. Susan Miller is the Editor of the Freedom to Learn Network Newsletter. Reprinted by permission of the Freedom to Learn Network (flninpa@netcarrier.com), an all-volunteer public education advocacy organization. 
Should Libraries Be Made to Suppress Information? Aubrey Hicks/Freedom to Learn Network Newsletter, June 2001 -- On December 15, 2000, Congress passed the Labor, Health and Human Services Education Appropriation Bill (HR 4577) containing a filtering mandate - a "technology protection measure." It called for libraries and schools that receive federal funding to install filtering software by April 2001. Its purpose was to block online access by minors to obscene "visual depictions" on the Internet. This deadline has now been extended for a year. There is obvious need for public debate. Is filtering the best way to handle the issue? To filter is to remove some undesirable agent. A filter is software designed to block specific Internet content. At the outset, it sounds simple. We can block online access to sites that are obscene, contain child pornography, or are harmful to minors by "filtering." So how does it work? Filtering software works in three ways. First is keyword blocking, in which chosen keywords (e.g., sex, breast, penis, butt, and death) found in a site will block the site from appearing. Site blocking works through human intervention by blocking specific pre-identified uniform resource locators (URLs). The last technique is a web-rating system, which also requires human intervention. Looking at these options, the last seems most compatible with society’s intent to protect children from violent or obscene materials. We have already seen ratings of other forms of information—of television, films, music. However, any web-rating system designed today could only involve a site’s proprietor setting the rating for his/her site. There is no ruling board to establish or enforce the ratings. Also, there are at least a few hundred sites working their way into the Internet every day. How could a single organization, even a huge one, possibly evaluate the entire Internet? The same question could be asked of site blocking. How could any one entity sift through the entire Internet to perform accurate filtering? Site blocking is also proprietary, so we have no idea what sites are being blocked from access. How could we determine the merits of the software if we are denied access to criteria for blockage? Last, keyword blocking is much like keyword searching. In a keyword search such as "motorcycles book art," you find all items with those words. Typically, the search engine sorts the results by relevance, indicating sites with all three key words before sites with just one. Keyword blocking takes away relevance and simply asks the question "allowed or denied?" Filtering cannot keep out the "visual depictions" as mandated in HR 4577. Another thing to keep in mind is that keyword blocking cannot filter for intent. Is the word "breast" used with medical or "obscene" intent? The software does not distinguish them. The ACLU announced on December 19th, 2000 that it would fight the law. "This is the first time since the development of the local library in the 19th century that the federal government has sought to require censorship in every single town and hamlet in America" (www.aclu.org/action/blocking107.html). What is blocking if not censorship? The "obscenity" found on the Internet is not like a display of Playboy magazines or Marvel comics in your local store. In my 6 years of specializing in information services, I have found one thing to be true: unless you are looking for it, you will not find it. Doing a key word search using "sex" with the search engine Google (www.google.com), the first two hits obtained are not "pornography" sites. SurfWatch, a popular filtering software, is the second hit in this key word search. Will all parents want their children to view the first site, a "safer sex" website? No. Is blocking the site the way to go? To filter is to remove something unwanted. What happens with the debris? In Eudora, a popular e-mail program, the filter helps proportion your mail by "filtering." I subscribe to four listserves, and I use the filter to check my incoming mail for messages and "filter" each message into its prospective mailbox. It is this idea of filtering that brings me to one solution to the "filtering in libraries" debate. I suggest that there be two levels of filtering. First, all pornography sites should have the following domain designation: "XXX.com" (for example, www.barelylegal. XXX.com). Again, the problem with this is that there is no regulation of the Internet, unlike magazines and videos, which are sold by someone with a license and are not legally sold to minors. Once this domain name is in place, libraries could "filter" all sites with the XXX.com domain into a password-protected box. Access to the password would be obtained only by an adult or with parental permission to allow complete, partial, or fully filtered access. Parents would sign permission slips indicating what level of access their children are allowed. This solution would also allow librarians to go back to what they do best: guide and teach. Although I believe our debate over Internet content is yet another way in which children are denied rights, I believe this simple solution could force parents to choose an access level for their own children rather than implement across-the-board censor- ship. Blocking is censorship. The bill passed by Congress and signed by the President requires our libraries to deny access to patrons. We must find better ways to sift, separate, and reorganize, rather than remove, block, and dam information. Aubrey Hicks has a Master's degree in Library Science and does Internet research at Cornell University Press. For more information on Internet software and censorship, contact her at auberon27@yahoo.com. Reprinted by permission of the Freedom to Learn Network, an all-volunteer public education advocacy organization (flninpa@netcarrier.com).
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