ne month after Congress passed a law pressuring public schools and libraries to install blocking or filtering software on computer terminals to screen out Internet smut, three free-speech powerhouses are gearing up to slay the measure in federal court.
"This law requires, for the first time in the nation's history, that local libraries censor speech for every adult and every child. That's got to present First Amendment problems," said Chris Hansen, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, referring to the new federal statute, known as the "Children's Internet Protection Act."
Hansen said that the A.C.L.U. will file a lawsuit within two months attacking the constitutionality of the law, possibly in federal district court in Philadelphia. He said the lawsuit's named plaintiffs will include several libraries, library patrons (adults and possibly children) and Web site publishers.
Philadelphia is a charmed city for the civil liberties union. In recent years, the group successfully challenged in federal court there two other laws aimed at restricting online sexual content: the Communications Decency Act and the Children's Online Protection Act. Portions of the decency act were ultimately struck down in 1997 by the United States Supreme Court in a landmark cyberlaw case, Reno v. A.C.L.U. More recently, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, affirmed a lower court ruling that Children's Online Protectgion Act violated the First Amendment. The government is weighing an appeal to the Supreme Court in that case.
In addition to the A.C.L.U.'s planned legal campaign, the executive board of the American Library Association gave the green light earlier this week to a lawsuit against the new filtering law, according Judith Krug, director of the library group's office for intellectual freedom. The library association, which strongly opposes library filtering schemes, participated in the widely-publicized legal challenge to the Communications Decency Act. Krug said the library group's suit would likely be separate from the A.C.L.U.'s, although the two lawsuits could later be consolidated by the courts.
Meanwhile, the People for the American Way Foundation, another civil liberties group, is planning a legal attack on the new law as well, according to Larry Ottinger, a senior staff attorney for the organization. The group, along with the A.C.L.U., successfully defeated a mandatory library filtering policy in Loudoun, Va., in 1998.
The law in question, spearheaded through Congress by Senator John McCain and signed by President Clinton last month, is complex. But in simple terms it requires public libraries that receive E-rate funds -- money from a federal program that subsidizes Internet and other telecommunications expenses -- to install some sort of technology on computer terminals used by adults to block Internet access to visual images that are obscene or depict child pornography.
For library computer terminals used by children under age 17, libraries have to screen out these two categories of material plus a third one: visual material that is "harmful to minors," such as sexually-explicit images without social or educational value that are obscene for children but legally protected for adults. Under the new law, a library staff member has authority to unblock any computer for a patron's legitimate research purposes.
The law imposes an identical scheme of Internet blocking requirements and exceptions for public schools that use E-rate funds. School and library administrators are free to decide which filtering or blocking system best fits their community standards and local needs.
