Porn filters: The battle of protection vs. free speech in local, national libraries Thursday, February 19, 2009 By Chris Bausinger, Jason Le Miere, Dominique Dumadaug, and Dan Lu, SJSU News The Internet is hailed as the last true bastion of free speech, but how free should it be in a public place where individuals and the innocent eyes of children watching? This is the essence of the debate over whether pornography filters should be installed on the computer systems of public libraries. Porn filter advocates say they are a must as children need to be protected from seeing illicit material on the Web, as well as to prevent unscrupulous users from viewing such material and engaging in public acts of profanity. The other side of the debate is that porn filters not only infringe on an individual’s right to freely view any desired material, but that filters will unintentionally block non-harmful sites, particularly those containing health information. The issue gained notoriety in San Jose over the past year as council member Pete Constant attempted to get the San Jose City Council to vote to install pornography filters in all of the city’s public libraries. Constant’s argument, according to the San Jose Mercury News, was that men were using libraries to view explicit material and then exposing themselves. In a December 2007 interview with Constant, he said he became interested in the topic when he saw a November 2006 TV report by ABC Channel 7 News correspondent Dan Noyes, who brought the issue out into the light. At the time, this was countered by San Jose Library Director Jane Light who said that only 12 arrests were made for computer related sex offenses during the 2006-07 budget year, according to the San Jose Mercury News. In a February 2006 article in the Spartan Daily, University Library Dean Ruth Kifer countered Constant’s concerns by saying “the library does not have a significant problem with pornography and inappropriate behavior,” Kifer said, “The vast majority of our library users utilize the computers to access digital information resources in a responsible manner.” Current SJSU librarian Paul Kauppila said that he believes most librarians to be against the installation of filters. “It’s simply not possible at this point to develop any sort of filter technology that does not also block many forms of legally protected speech,” Kauppila said. Despite this view, filters are in use at half of the country’s libraries. Even though the librarians have shown their dislike for using filters in their libraries, some patrons feel differently about what goes on inside the library. In a random polling at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library, 14 of 35 people polled thought that the viewing of pornographic material was a problem inside the library. Of those 14, eight said they witnessed a library visitor viewing the material on a library terminal. While age was not a question in the polling, yes-responding participants generally were older and parents, which is a key point for Constant in his proposals to the City Council. In the interview with Constant he said, “My biggest group of supporters are parents,” also adding that, “The city should not be paying for people to view porn.” Constant is not alone in his beliefs and has the support of not just parents, but SJSU students as well. “The library is a place for studying,” Samantha Nitta, a junior public relations and Japanese double major said, “and you should not be able to go to the library to look at content like this. If people are going to do that, they need to do it in the privacy in their own home.”