ACLU, SAF Sue Library Over Internet Filter
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Second Amendment Foundation have joined forces to file suit against the Washington North-Central Library District over the filtering of content on its terminals used by the public to surf the web.
On information and belief, the NCRL has configured its SmartFilter software to block Web sites in the following categories, or in categories equivalent to the following categories: Alcohol, Anonymizers, Chat, Criminal Skills, Dating/Social, Drugs, Extreme, Gambling, Game/Cartoon Violence, Gruesome Content, Hacking, Hate Speech, Malicious Sites, Nudity, P2P/File Sharing, Personal Pages, Phishing, Pornography, Profanity, School Cheating Information, Sexual Materials, Spyware, Tobacco, Violence, Visual Search Engine and Weapons.
Looking at that laundry list, it's easy to see where people doing research would run afoul of the filter. The plaintiffs had good reasons to want to search for that kind of information. The SAF is involved primarily because of its publication that was filtered: Women and Guns.
It's ironic to see the ACLU helping a gun rights organization with a first amendment case, but I'm sure it will work out.
Josh Poulson
Posted Friday, Nov 17 2006 10:36 AM
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