SALEM NEWS ONLINE
ACLU | March 6, 2013

In a consent judgment signed Tuesday, a federal district court-ordered the Salem Public Library to stop blocking patrons’ access to websites related to minority religions that the library’s web filters classified as “occult” or “criminal.” Blocking access to material based solely on viewpoint is a violation of the First Amendment.

Judge E. Richard Webber entered the judgment in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Eastern Missouri on behalf of a Salem resident who was blocked from researching websites discussing minority religions’ ideas about death or death rituals.

“Even libraries that are required by federal law to install filtering software to block certain sexually explicit content should never use software to prevent patrons from learning about different cultures,” said Tony Rothert, legal director of the ACLU-EM.

The resident had originally protested to library director Glenda Wofford about not being able to access websites about Native American religions and the Wiccan faith.

Read on…

Original NDLA posting.

RELATED ARTICLES:
“Judge rules Salem Public Library can’t block website content”
(5 KDSK | March 6, 2013)

“Missouri library agrees not to block witch websites”
(St. Louis Post-Dispatch | Robert Patrick | March 6, 2013)

“‘Access Denied’: Net Filtering in Rhode Island Schools”
(Bookshelves of Doom | March 14, 2013)

ACLU
February 28, 2013

The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Pennsylvania have sent a letter requesting that school officials at Governor Mifflin School District in Berks County stop using Internet filters that violate students’ First Amendment free speech rights. The district uses a “sexuality” filter that blocks sites that express support of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, and an “intolerance” filter that blocks political advocacy sites that are labeled as intolerant.

Junior Maison Fioravante discovered that Governor Mifflin Senior High School was blocking access to web content geared toward LGBT communities while researching for a class project on social issues. However, sites for organizations that condemn homosexuality were not blocked. Fioravante circulated a petition and online video asking the school to stop blocking these sites, which has over 3,200 signatures.

“It’s not only important for support for LGBT students and those questioning their sexual identities to be able to access these sites, but also for students who simply want information for school projects,” said Fioravante. “It’s wrong for my school to determine that this kind of information is too sensitive for the student body.”

Fioravante was unable to access websites for organizations like the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN), Safe Schools Coalition, Freedom to Marry, the Equality Federation and Lambda Legal. Those sites were blocked for falling into the commercial filtering software’s “sexuality” filter.

“Being able to access information on the Internet at the school library is not only critical for academic purposes, it can also be a lifeline for LGBT students in crisis who don’t feel safe seeking support on their home computers,” said Reggie Shuford, executive director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania. “Blocking these sites not only violates the First Amendment, but it does a disservice to students trying to learn about themselves and the world around them.”

Although the “sexuality” filter blocks only websites that express an LGBT-supportive viewpoint, a separate filter called “intolerance” blocks some websites from organizations like the National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council, which oppose legal protections for LGBT people.

“Regardless of whether you support or oppose legal protections for LGBT people, these sorts of viewpoint-based filters puts everyone’s First Amendment rights at risk,” said Joshua Block, staff attorney with the ACLU LGBT Project. “If you give school officials the power to censor viewpoints they don’t like, they may use that power to block your own viewpoint too.”

Governor Mifflin School District uses filtering software from Smoothwall, Ltd. Last year, a federal judge ruled against a school district in Camdenton, Missouri, that refused to remove a similar discriminatory filter.

The letter asks the district to advise the ACLU by March 14 whether and how it will address the filtering problem.

More information, including a copy of today’s letter to the school district, can be found here: www.aclu.org/free-speech-lgbt-rights/governor-mifflin-school-district-and-filtering-lgbt-online-content.

More information on the ACLU’s work on LGBT school issues can be found here: www.aclu.org/safeschools.

THE ATLANTIC
Jathan Sadowski | February 26, 2013

Our privacy is now at risk in unprecedented ways, but, sadly, the legal system is lagging behind the pace of innovation. Indeed, the last major privacy law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, was passed in 1986! While an update to the law — spurred on by the General Petraeus scandal — is in the works, it only aims to add some more protection to electronic communication like emails. This still does not shield our privacy from other, possibly nefarious, ways that our data can be collected and put to use. Some legislators would much rather not have legal restrictions that could, as Rep. Marsha Blackburn stated in an op-ed, “threaten the lifeblood of the Internet: data.” Consider Rep. Blackburn’s remarks during an April 2010 Congressional hearing: “[A]nd what happens when you follow the European privacy model and take information out of the information economy? … Revenues fall, innovation stalls and you lose out to innovators who choose to work elsewhere.”

Even though the practices of many companies such as Facebook are legal, there is something disconcerting about them. Privacy should have a deeper purpose than the one ascribed to it by those who treat it as a currency to be traded for innovation, which in many circumstances seems to actually mean corporate interests. To protect our privacy, we need a better understanding of its purpose and why it is valuable.

Read on…

GiGaOm
Rani Molla | November 13, 2012

Google released data today that shows requests for censorship and surveillance are on the rise worldwide. Google keeps track of government requests to remove its content (requests it sometimes abides) and releases data biannually. We mapped those numbers, which include July 2010 through June of this year, to show the main products each government is targeting and the reasons they gave for doing so.

What it shows is that censorship varies greatly across the world — some of which stretches the definition of what people usually define as censorship.

Read on…