19 February 1997
The Editor
The Boston Globe
Boston, Massachusetts 02107
To the Editor:
Contrary to your editorial ("Indecent Exposure," 14 Feb.), installing information-blocking technology in Boston's public libraries is not "a sensible middle course between unlimited license and censorship." It is censorship. That it is done mechanically, rather than by government decree, and applied to computerized material, rather than books makes it no less so.
America's libraries exist, in large part, to make a range of information and ideas freely available to the public of all ages. Yes, librarians make judgments about what material will show up there, but these decisions are open to public scrutiny, challenge and debate. In contrast, CyberPatrol, Boston's blocker of choice, like other censoring software, is created and maintained by a private business, which encrypts and then guards its list of off- limit sites as if it were the purest plutonium -- and for good reason, since its profits depend on it.
But, just in case proof were needed that the best censorship systems have holes, last year, cyberspace activists and journalists Declan McCullagh and Brock Meeks got hold of and deciphered CyberPatrol's list of "Cybernots." The list then included some 4800 Web sites and 250 newsgroups, which were blocked because something about them triggered such proscribed categories as "violence/profanity," and "gross depictions."
According to McCullagh and Meeks' research, published on CyberWire Dispatch, Boston library users will now be saved, not only from the "smog" of dirty pictures, but also from information about animal rights, gay and lesbian politics, health, feminism, gun control (including the Web site of a California group connected to the National Rifle Association), and, in another of censorship's little ironies, the censorship archives of the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- all of which are Constitutionally protected speech.
Even if the overheated rhetoric about pornography online were justified (and it is not), installing keystroke kop software is neither an appropriate nor effective response for a public library. CyberPatrol's broom sweeps up-- and out -- the "good" stuff along with the "bad," as word and image clean-up campaigns inevitably do. Parents may want to control what their children read and see at home, but libraries are not parents or their stand-ins. They are public institutions and they should not be patrolled -- in cyberspace or on the ground.
Nan Levinson
cc: Mayor Thomas Menino
Liam Kelly, Director, Boston Public Library