Freedom of Speech on the Internet; What You Should Know

Erin Dorney, Kendall Senior High School Student, Kendall, NY, 2002

When people log online at their local library or in their school, they don't think much about if the facility is censoring their Internet usage. Not until they try to go to a site that is "Restricted", that is. Even then, people have become complacent, and don't make a big deal out of it. They either find another site or forget what they were looking for. The American Library Association reports that about twenty percent of the 15,000 library systems in the nation use some type of filtering program. You should be aware that the censorship programs that schools and libraries are currently forced to enlist might not be respecting your Constitutional rights.

The CIPA (Child Internet Protection Act) was enacted in December of 2000. The legislation gave libraries 120 days to implement a filtering or censoring system into their networked computers, or they would begin losing federal funding. This act was passed even after two previous acts to try and censor the Internet were found to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court Of The United States. The CDA (Child Decency Act) and COPA (Child Online Protection Act) were both found to be intruding on Americans first amendment rights; The freedom of expression and speech. There are numerous reasons why this decision was made, all of them legitimate and true. If only the nation would become more aware of these attempts by the government to deprive us of what is Constitutionally ours. Then, perhaps, instead of allowing the Federal government to gain more and more of our rights, we could stand up for ourselves and fight for the freedom we deserve.

I think that this issue is especially important for teenagers such as myself, because we are the ones who are being prohibited from accessing important and valuable information. I also believe that this should be a strong issue for adults, because they are losing valuable rights as well as minors. This may become important when teenagers leave for college, because their library computers will certainly have a filtering system on them. If you are researching for a paper, you may not be allowed to access some sites that you want to gain information from. I even encountered problems at my own high school when trying to access some sites that I could access from my home computer, but not from the protected school computers. I am not saying that children should be able to access sites that are sexually graphic. All I am trying to stress is that the idea of censoring the Internet is full of flaws and holes. Putting filtering systems these school and libraries to try and fill those holes have proven to be unfair, biased, and discriminatory. The next few pages will explain why I think this, according to the research that I have done and what is currently happening with this increasingly dangerous loss of freedom.

The United States government first tried to pass The Child Decency Act in 1997. The law was found to be unconstitutional by all 9 justices of the Supreme Court in the case ACLU v. Reno. The Supreme Court's reasoning for this was that "...the interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship."

COPA was Congress' second attempt to impose severe criminal and civil charges on the display of protected, non-obscene speech on the Internet. It targeted speech that was harmful to minors according to "contemporary community standards." This is the first of many weak points of the act. Community standards differ with location and the specific community. What is acceptable in one place, may not be acceptable elsewhere. Some places in the United States are more open in talking about sex, and some places are more conservative about such topics. When the provisions for COPA included this, it meant that people in the whole nation would have to abide by the strictest community standards. The government, however, argues that contemporary standards about what is harmful to minors has become reasonably constant across America. There is no evidence of this whatsoever, or none that the government has shown to the people, and in all actuality, the factors point towards the opposite, that standards about what is appropriate differ widely according to geography. One example of how the standards differ can be found in the politicians themselves. The government asserted that some of the plaintiffs' speech in the case ACLU v. Reno was harmful to minors while some Members of Congress who support COPA have filed briefs arguing that none of the speech is found to be inappropriate under this statute.

Another point that the government tried to make is that COPA should be upheld just because it is not quite as censorious as the CDA. This is, by far, the most irrational reason ever heard of. "A law banning books does not become constitutional just because it is rewritten to remove only every other book on the shelves." The government had also completely and utterly ignored recent cases rejecting COPA in states such as New York, Michigan, and Virginia.

Another reason that COPA is believe to be unconditional is that it suppresses an abundant amount of material on the world wide web that adults are entitled, by the constitution to have access to. This is because there is no fair way to restrict minors without also restricting adults. The law contains no exceptions for material that has educational or medical value. The government has come up with a plan to "fix" this problem, and they suggest that adult users would have to enter a credit card number or access code to remove censoring or filtering. Therefore, people who do not have credit cards, or who are not willing to give their credit card number out willingly onto the unknown web are denied rights to Internet access. If everyone started giving out their credit card numbers, fraud would be everywhere, and no ones information would be safe. Also, if the government requires adult access codes, they may be able to track a persons on-line ventures, which is a violation of their privacy.

There is also the issue of the government trying to instill their set of morals on the nation's children. As stated in COPA itself, "...while custody, care, and nurture of the child resides first with the parent, the widespread availability of the Internet presents opportunities for minors to access materials through the worldwide web in a manor that can frustrate parental supervision or control." Parents should be watching their children while they are on the Internet until they become of an age where they can decipher between what is wrong and what is right. A study by consumer reports shows that 7 out of 10 parents monitor their children by being with them at all times. The job of instilling morals and values is the job of the parent, not the government. "The protection of the physical and psychological well being of minors by shielding them from materials that are harmful is a compelling governmental interest." I am not entirely sure why this is true. No one has been caused actual physical harm by clicking on playboy.com. Hundreds of people die daily in car accidents. Maybe the United States government should get it's priorities straight. Also, in lieu of the research shown about filtering and censoring, these acts may be the governments way of shielding people from seeing antigovernment sites. Perhaps they don't want children to grow up knowing that their government has secrets, and has done horrible things, and that there are others who oppose the government. Perhaps the political side of the country wants to raise a new generation of fully fledged patriots, who agree with anything the government says, and goes along willingly, not complaining when more and more of their rights are being stolen away from them.

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that COPA, like the CDA, was unconstitutional in June of 2000. US District Judge Lowell A. Reed noted that the case involves "a conflict between the First Amendment rights and the nation's responsibility to protect children." As soon as this legislature was shot down, the government tried again.

CIPA is an act that forced public as well as private libraries and schools to implement filtering and/or censoring equipment onto there Internet networks. Congress made this mandatory through "power of the purse." Libraries and schools were given 120 days to abide by the new law, or they would begin to lose their vital federal funding. This mandate will cost libraries more to install and continue than they will actually receive in federal aid, with software/service cost, training, staff time, dealing with complaints, consultant and system administration costs, and of course, litigation. Censor ware works by blocking a person from receiving or sending certain information. This is the greatest threat to free speech because you cannot control censorship. There is a list of blocked sites (a blacklist) and usually, the lists are encrypted. (In October 2000, the Library of Congress ruled that filtering companies must make this list available to anyone using their service, but the only if the person can decipher the code, which defeats the whole point) There are many reasons why filters should not be used as a solution to the Internet "problem." As Comsumer Reports states, "Filtering is no subsitute for parental supervision. Most products we tested failed to block one objectionable site out of ten."

You would think that if you were forced to use a filtering system, you would at least get to know what is not accessible. Companies keep these lists secret, and it's no wonder why. The censoring is crudely unfair, biased, and discriminatory. First of all, you have no idea how the company decides what to censor or not censor. One option that companies use is software analysis. This is when a computer decides which sites to block according to key words or phrases. This is unfair because it may block a whole web site just because of one prohibited word. One example of this was in 1999 when Dr. Jamie McKenzie, the publisher of an on-line journal about educational technology found his web site blocked by a major filtering company, which warned users that McKenzie's site was in the "sexually explicit" category because it contained a file named adult.hltm. Software analysis is the most common means used to censor websites, even though companies claim that it is not. Another, less frequently used way of content filtering is by human analysis. This is when people review sites individually and then place them on a list to be blocked or suitable for children. This is not a popular way to work because of the time it consumes, looking at thousands of sites daily. Site labeling is another way that companies can create their blcklists, but it does not work well either. It is a ratings system that website owners place on their own sites. They are unsually inaccurate, resulting in an innappropriate site on a "ok for children" list.

Seth Finkelstein, the programmer responsible for the investigation of X-Stop filtering software and it's flaws (Mainstream Loudoun v. Loudoun Co. Library) observes: "The claims made by censor ware vendors are technologically absurd and mathematically impossible. If people argue endlessly over what is considered art, how can a shoddy computer program ever have an answer? Imagine if a bigoted organization could, at the touch of a button, secretly remove from a school or library all books they deemed objectionable. That is the reality of censorship. This is book burning on the Internet, by unaccountable blacklisters."At first, religious figureheads such as the Christian Coalition were all for CIPA, thinking that it would protect children from the "evils" of the world. But these leaders have recently begun changing their views after discovering that some of their very own sites were being blocked; Sites about pro-life abortion issues, etc. Many sites are blocked unexplainably. These may be the result of mismatched algorithms, or of biased companies, we will never know because the lists and means of making the lists are kept secret or lied about. Some sites that are blocked intentionally are political web sites. This only proves that the censoring companies are biased. When Peacefire.com tested the web sites of political candidates from a variety of parties, two of the most popular filtering systems for schools, N2H2 Bess, and Cyber Patrol were found to block 5 Republican web sites, 6 Libertarians, and 1 Democratic site, as well as 13 other third party candidates web sites, (N2H2 Bess) and 4 Republican, 5 Democrat, and 1 Libertarian web site (Cyber Patrol). Nikki Oldaker, a Floridian independent write in, made this statement after her site was blocked. "This type of software can be very useful in private organizations to keep employees from engaging in non work related web surfing on company time. The software is also useful in schools and public learning facilities (like libraries) to prevent children from accessing pornography. The fact that it is being used to filter out a web site for legitimate candidates speaking about the issues and their candidacies is a disservice to the American voters and the FEC and the Secretary of the Senate should be fully investigating the matter to find the responsible persons behind the censorship...The guilty party should be brought to trial and prosecuted under the FEC election laws for tampering." When a political site is censored, and it become public, the filtering company soon removes the site from it's blacklist, saying that it was "just a mistake." But the damage has already been done, and the candidates may have lost valuable voters because their opinions have not been publicly shared on the Internet. Political web sites are not the only sites to be unfairly blocked. A number of human rights sites have been discovered blocked by popular filtering systems. See the page attached to this report for a list of a few of these blocked web sites.

EPIC ( The Electronic Privacy Information Center) recently conducted a study that searched the Internet using a traditional search engine. Then it searched the Internet using a "family friendly" search engine. The words EPIC searched for included "Smithsonian," "Christianity," and "eating disorders." In every case, they found that the "family friendly search engine prevented almost 90 percent of relevant search information from being displayed. The "family friendly" search engine denied access to 99 percent of material that would otherwise be available on a normal search engine. Filtering, therefore, prevents people from obtaining useful and appropriate information, while sometimes allowing inappropriate to be displayed. One example of this is when EPIC did a search on "Dr. Suess". The "family friendly" search displayed only 8 items while the traditional search engine displayed 2,638 matching sites. One of the eight documents displayed was a parody of a Dr. Suess story using details from the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson.

The main point is that the government's attempts to censor the World Wide Web are not working. They are trying to steal rights from American citizens. There is no way that adult rights will not be harmed, and minors will obviously suffer from losing access to thousands of web sites. Unless someone stands up for these rights, they will slowly slip away from society, and people will forget they ever existed. Imposing criminal charges and fines on people who are only trying to share their opinions contradicts the Constitution itself. What right does anyone have to suppress other people's thoughts? People want to "protect the children" but if children grow up being protected from every little thing, what kind of people are they going to become? They are going to flip out when they come across something that they have ever seen before. If parents want to limit their child's access to the Internet, that is fine, it is their choice as a parent how they raise their kids. But the government is the last institution that should be raising children in America. The control should not go to private companies, either, that are trying to force their set of morals on a new generation, by deciding what to censor and what to leave accessible. Just as newspapers and magazines are places of free speech, I believe that the Internet should be free of censorship. Information should be available to the American people. They have a right to be informed if they choose so. The choice of whether to believe the information the find is up to them, but the information should at least be available. censoring the Internet is a violation of the Constitution of the United States of America, written by the framers hundreds of years ago. If people do not stand up for their rights, these rights will be quickly and quietly taken from them.

top of page