children accessing porn; adults turning off filterware

[Shaken Angel]

On Tue, 8 Jul 1997, Burt, David wrote:

>  Mark Wilden wrote:
> 
> >But this is why I'm talking about free speech. There are some
> governments which >believe that exposing its citizens to anti-government
> opinion has bad side-effects, >so they prohibit it. A basic concomitant

Yeah.  Case in point; my former area of residence, Singapore.  They have
what amounts to a gigantic proxy server wrapped over the entire island's
incoming IP, and it filters out messages that the Government deems
inappropriate.  If you put on your web page a message like "The Government
of Singapore Sucks" the proxy will filter it out and nobody on the entire
island will be able to get your page.

The pro-censorship folks would probably love this.  A proxy server
filtering *EVERY* connection for the entire country??  Hooray!

Personally, I think the Government of Singapore (and perhaps some other
people) need to learn that nearly all technology is inherently liberating,
and to try to circumvent that is harmful and probably ultimately futile.

> of free speech is that some of us will think >some of it is harmful.
> Personally, I'd rather not have my son exposed to religious
> >proselytizing, but I certainly wouldn't ask the local library to filter
> such material.
> >Not all speech is protected, of course. But pornography is. And if it
> should be >allowed to be "spoken" it should be allowed to be listened
> to. The First Amendment >includes no age limit.
> 
>  So why doesn't your local public library provide "Hustler" for your
> son?
> After all, it's protected by the First Amendment.
> As Justice Brennan pointed out in the Pico decision on the removal of
> books from a school library, libraries are *not* obligated to acquire
> materials for patrons, constitutionally protected or not.  A connection
> to the Internet does not mean the library has "acquired the Internet",
> so the library is under no constitutional obligations to provide
> *anything* on the Internet.

I'm of the opinion that getting a connection to the Internet *is*
"acquiring the Internet", as I've stated before.  I don't think I'm alone
in this.  However, I imagine the issue of Internet-as-whole-acquisition
versus Internet-as-fragmented-acquisition will eventually come to a legal
conclusion, maybe in the upcoming CDA2 (am I the only one who feels *very*
ill when confronted with the phrase "CDA2"?) or CDA3 or CDA99999 or
however many iterations of the CDA it takes for the censors to win or die
off. 

-- john f., miami university library systems
speaking, natch, for myself.