By Maria Giordano | The Tennessean
May 20, 2009

A list of “best books for young adults” chosen by the national Young Adult Library Services Association has been removed from Williamson County schools’ web sites for being too “salacious” for students.

Every year the district puts together a recommended summer reading list, and this year Ravenwood High and Brentwood High schools’ Web sites included links to the Library Services’ list.

But at least one parent and school board member Terry Leve found some selections on the list, which includes titles like Debbie Harry Sings in French, in which the protagonist explores his interest in cross-dressing, and Living Dead Girl, in which a teen girl lives as an abductor’s live-in rape victim, inappropriate for students.
“YALSA’s list does not reflect the recommended reading list published by Williamson County Schools,” Leve wrote to his constituents via e-mail. “To be perfectly blunt, many of the selections were extraordinarily salacious, sensual and sensationalistic.”

As a result, the district has removed the suggestion that the books on the list are recommended, though school officials say the list still can be an additional source for students and their families.

See the full YALSA list here.

Beverly Goldberg, American Libraries Online Posted on May 20, 2009

A Knox County, Tennessee, high school librarian and one of her students, as well as two secondary-school students in the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, became the plaintiffs May 19 in a First Amendment lawsuit against the school districts for blocking access to information about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered issues on school computers while allowing access to anti-gay sites.

Franks v. Metropolitan Board of Public Education was filed in U.S. district court by attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Tennessee on behalf of the four, all of whom are involved in their respective schools’ Gay-Straight Alliance Club but who cannot access the clubs’ parent website on campus workstations. However, students and faculty can access the sites of groups that condemn gay sexuality and promote therapy, including the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality and the Traditional Values Coalition.

The blocking of LGBT sites was discovered in December 2008 by Andrew Emitt, a 17-year-old senior at Central High School in Knoxville. “I wasn’t looking for anything sexual or inappropriate,” Emmit explained in an April 15 statement issued by the ACLU. “I was looking for information about scholarships for LGBT students, and I couldn’t get to it because of this software.” The ACLU wrote (PDF file) school officials cautioning that the civil-rights organization would take legal action if sites remained inaccessible after April 29. Metro Nashville’s Department of Law responded (PDF file) May 6, “Unblocking this particular category of websites is not a simple task [and] there are many issues to consider.”

The lawsuit contends that the two school systems blocked access through the Education Networks of America’s customizable Blue Coat filter to the blocking software’s LGBT category, defined by ENA as including “sites that provide information regarding, support, promote, or cater to one’s sexual orientation or gender identity [which] may include adult content, chat capabilities and personals.” Metro Nashville and Knox County school districts are two of more than 100 Tennessee school districts sharing the networked filter through the Greenville City Schools Consortium, although the blacklist and whitelist settings are configurable “for as many exclusive locations as desired,” according to the firm’s website (PDF file).

The filter “only allows students access to one side of information about topics that are part of the public debate right now, like marriage for same-sex couples,” asserted Karyn Storts-Brinks, librarian at Fulton High School in Knoxville and one of the four plaintiffs. The other three are Keila Franks and Emily Logan, who are enrolled in Metro Nashville’s Hume-Fogg High School, and Bryanna Shelton, who attends Fulton High School.

Acknowledging that the districts must, as recipients of the e-rate telecommunications discount under the Children’s Internet Protection Act, prohibit the display of online material that is considered harmful to minors, the complaint (PDF file) goes on to argue: “Because the defendants have already elected to block access to Adult/Mature, Pornography, Chat/Instant Message, and Personals, they do not need to block access to the LGBT category to block access to content in those areas,” adding that the mandate applies only to “visual depictions” anyway.

Six trustees were elected to two-year terms in the Freedom to Read Foundation (FTRF) 2009 Board of Trustees election, held in April. Congratulations to the following individuals:

Bernadine Abbott Hoduski
Jonathan Bloom
Robert P. Doyle
Susan Hildreth
Christine Jenkins
Candace Morgan

The terms for these trustees begin in June.

Abbott Hoduski and Doyle were elected to their second consecutive terms; Bloom and Morgan were re-elected after a mandatory period off the board; and Hildreth and Jenkins are newly elected. Also joining the 2009-2010 board will be incoming ALA President Elect Roberta Stevens and incoming ALA Intellectual Freedom Committee Chair Martin Garnar, both of whom will serve on the board in ex-officio capacities.

These trustees will join Carrie Gardner, Barbara Jones, Burton Joseph, Pamela Klipsch, and Kent Oliver, who are elected board members, as well as incoming ALA President Camila Alire and Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels, who are ex-officio board members. Deborah Caldwell-Stone is the acting secretary of the board and acting executive director of the Foundation.

For biographical information on the six election winners can be found at http://www.ala.org/ala/newspresscenter/news/pressreleases2009/may2009/ftrfbot.cfm.

For more information on the Freedom to Read Foundation, visit http://www.ftrf.org.

The Censors Right Here at Home
By Christopher Werth | Newsweek
May 25, 2009

Internet censorship used to be pretty easy to spot. When China blocks YouTube or prohibits anything on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, it’s not hard to figure out what’s going on. But as governments and commercial firms get savvier about the Internet, censorship is getting more subtle. A slow Web site could be an accidental glitch or something more intentional.

A new Web site now promises to add some much-needed data to what’s so far been mainly anecdotal evidence. The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University has for years produced reports on filtering practices by country. In March it launched Herdict (a combination of “herd” and “verdict”), a Web site that uses the power of crowd sourcing to produce just-in-time data about what’s blocked and what’s not. Users report sites that are unavailable or slow. This information appears in Herdict’s “herdometer”—a kind of annotated map of the world that reveals online censorship as it unfolds. Incoming reports pop up in windows across the map.

When China (once again) began blocking YouTube back in March over video of Tibetan protests, Herdict was among the first to know as reports came flooding in from the field. Another test came in March, when the popular muckraking Web site Wikileaks landed on Australia’s list of censored sites. Wikileaks became suspiciously inaccessible for a few hours that same week. Users from across the world barraged Herdict with hundreds of reports. As it turned out, Wikileaks was down for maintenance—but the false alarm served as proof of the integrity of Herdict’s reporting system.

Herdict’s creator, Jonathan Zittrain, believes that the Web site will help uncover subtle forms of censorship in the West—not by governments, but by commercial firms. Internet service providers and Web sites are continually making decisions about what makes it onto the Internet and what doesn’t—largely behind closed doors, and not always in the public interest. In Britain, for instance, service providers formed the Internet Watch Foundation, a private nonprofit that informs them of which sites host online gambling, hate speech and child pornography. This self-policing has headed off legislation, but very little is known about what lands on Internet blacklists.

Activists worry that such unmediated systems for monitoring the Web can be abused, mainly by mission creep, and that the public would be none the wiser. “Once you’ve built that infrastructure,” says Zittrain, “you see it starting to get used for other things.” ISPs in several countries, including Britain, have already begun blocking the Pirate Bay, the well-known Swedish file-sharing site in Stockholm, whose founders were handed prison sentences in April for stealing intellectual property. But they’ve appealed, arguing that they were only serving as a directory for downloading sites and thus weren’t breaking the law; last year ISPs won a ruling in Italy against the music industry.

It’s still early, but Herdict may also detect if and when service providers begin violating “Net neutrality” rules by restricting or slowing down access to Web sites depending on which ones they do business with. Herdict is also good at revealing cases of geolocational filtering, such as when YouTube blocks content critical of Thai royalty specifically in Thailand. One of the most inaccessible sites, Herdict has found, is the Australian Broadcasting Corp., which, for copyright reasons, prevents users outside Australia from viewing videos online. In time, Herdict may wake up Westerners to the censorship in their backyards.