Today, April 4th is 404 Day. EFF, along with our friends at the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Center for Civic Media at MIT, are using today to call attention to blocked and banned websites in libraries and public schools across the country. Join us this afternoon, at 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT for a digital teach-in with some of the top researchers and librarians working to analyze and push back against the use of Internet filters on library computers. Use #404day on Twitter to send questions and comments our way.
Internet filters are widely used on public and staff computers in public schools and libraries across the country to block content and websites in order to be in compliance with the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA). The law was passed in 2000 and requires that all public libraries and schools that receive federal funds through the E-rate program or the Library Services and Technology Act, install filters to block child pornography and obscene or “harmful to minors” images.
The problem is that library systems that are afraid of breaking the law often implement filters in aggressive ways that block constitutionally protected content from being accessed by students, researchers, and library patrons. Beyond the requirements of CIPA, some libraries have implemented discretionary filtering, and websites have been blocked about Wiccan, Native American spirituality, and astrology, as well as the sites that contain information about LGBTQ communities, youth tobacco usage, art galleries, and Second Amendment advocacy.
As common as they are, not all library systems use Internet filters. This is the case in the San Jose Public Libraries, where one of our panelists today, librarian and blogger Sarah Houghton conducted a study of available filtering technology. It turns not that not only did filters allow for obscene images to still be accessed by library patrons, they also cost more to implement than the funding provided by the federal grants.
To help us understand the contours of the law, Deborah Caldwell-Stone of the American Library Association will join us. As she discusses in her paper, Filtering and the First Amendment, a school or a library has never been found to be out of compliance with CIPA nor has the FCC, the agency responsible for enforcement, ever established what constitutes effective filtering under the law.
Our third Panelist is Chris Peterson, a researcher at the Center for Civic Media at MIT who is working on the Mapping Information Access Project, a critically important investigation into how schools and libraries implement filters. They aim to develop a comprehensive record of what library systems filter, how they decide what gets filtered, the kinds of technology used, and how libraries and schools process challenges to blocked content. Research like this will help us to understand where and how filters are being used to block constitutionally protected content.
When you're using a computer in a public library or school and you encounter a banned website or blocked information we highly recommend using Herdict, a project by the folks at Harvard's Berkman Center that allow users to log web blockages, censorship, and filtering as it happens. Users that are concerned about Internet censorship shouldn't simply visit another site when they are denied access to parts of the Internet; they should report it. This data will help researchers and advocates know what's happening and where. Visit the website and type in which site you were prohibited from accessing. Herdict will log that information in its database of blocked and filtered websites around the world.
We've invited bloggers and librarians from across the Internet to write about censorship in libraries for 404 Day. Read what they have to say and join us at 12pm PDT / 3pm EDT for our digital teach-in about banned websites in libraries. We're recording the event, so if can't you tune in live, visit back later to see the video.
Read more:
- Ryan Budish, director of Herdict, wrote a blogpost about the importance of reporting website inaccessibility with Herdict for 404 Day.
- Barbara Fister of the Folke Bernadotte Memorial Library of Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota wrote on op-ed for the Chronicle of Higher Education: 404 Day: Protecting Kids from... What?
- The Library Shipwreck Blog has contributed two excellent posts about how censorship in public libraries manipulates the information environment available to patrons and the trade off that librarians are forced to make when deciding between accepting much needed federal funds and the intallation of restrictive content blocking software.
- Jessa, a librarian of the Radical Reference collective, wrote a blogpost about her encounter with 404 messages as a researcher unable to access important information about her topic of study.
- Librarian Frances Harris of the University of Illinois Laboratory High School wrote a blogpost about how the langauge of "harmful to minors" in CIPA is over interpreted in high schools to block constitutionally protected speech.
- The Hickman-Johnson-Furrow Learning Center at Morningside College has collected helpful resources on CIPA and the effects of filtering in libraries in one place.
- Writer and open Internet advocate Susan Ricker wrote about how important libraries were to her education and why we should extend the open Internet to them instead of relying on outdated, flawed technology.
- Student Sean Beck, who participated in the teach-in, wrote up his own thoughts on the dangers and ineffectiveness of misguided filtering.
- Kendra Albert at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society writes about how anti-malware filters can also block content online and suggests that library systems develop better methods to encourage reporting and feedback about website accessibility.
