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DAILY TECH E-LETTER | ARCHIVES
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Supreme Court Upholds Internet Filters
Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, June 23, 2003; 11:59 AM The Supreme Court upheld today a federal law that seeks to prevent
Internet users at public libraries from gaining access to pornography, a
decision that could affect the online choices available to millions of
Americans who use the World Wide Web at libraries. By a vote of 6 to 3, the court said the Children's Internet Protection
Act (CIPA), which requires libraries that receive federal Internet aid to
use anti-pornography filtering software, does not violate the
constitutional guarantee of free speech. The law had been opposed by the American Library Association and a
coalition of Internet users and Web sites. They argued that filtering
software is so imprecise that, in aiming at child pornography and other
obscene material, it blocks not only a large amount of constitutionally
protected sexual material, such as medical information and avant-garde
art. Other, less restrictive means, would work better, they said. "While a library could limit its Internet collection to just those
sites it found worthwhile, it could do so only at the cost of excluding an
enormous amount of valuable information that it lacks the capacity to
review," Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote in an opinion that was
joined by three other justices, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and
Clarence Thomas. "Given that tradeoff, it is entirely reasonable for
public libraries to reject that approach and instead to exclude certain
categories of content, without making individualized judgments. . . .
" The other two votes in support of the court's judgment came from two
strong supporters of free speech, Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen
G. Breyer, who wrote separate concurring opinions to explain their reasons
for voting to uphold CIPA. The decision was something of a departure for a Supreme Court that has
generally taken an expansive view of the First Amendment in recent years.
In two previous reviews of attempts by Congress to regulate sexually
explicit material in cyberspace during the last half-decade, the court
struck down one previous law on First Amendment grounds and issued a mixed
ruling on a second. But in this case, Rehnquist wrote, the law was not an abuse of
Congress' powers to control how the money it spends is used. CIPA "does
not violate [library] patrons' First Amendment rights, [and] does not
induce libraries to violate the Constitution" themselves. Kennedy wrote that he was satisfied that adults could have the
filtering software removed simply by asking librarians to do so. Breyer
explained that he would have subjected the law to a higher degree of
constitutional scrutiny than Rehnquist's plurality, but would have found
that the harm it caused to free speech was not disproportionate to the
benefits in terms of preventing the dissemination of obscene or illegal
material. Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg
dissented. About 143 million Americans use the Internet regularly, and about 10
percent of them rely on access at a public library. Some 95 percent of all
U.S. libraries now offer Internet access, and federal aid has been a
crucial factor in this expansion. The aid comes through two separate programs. The first, the "E-rate"
program administered by the Federal Communications Commission, requires
Internet service providers to give discounts to libraries; this was worth
$58.5 million to libraries in the year ending June 2002. The second
provides direct federal grants to link libraries to the Internet; the
grants totaled more than $149 million in fiscal 2002. The case is U.S. v. American Library Association Inc., et al., No.
02-361.
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