THE ELECTRIC NANNY

Boy, libraries have sure changed since I was a kid hanging around the children’s stacks looking for that tattered copy of "Where the Wild Things Are." If you needed any proof of that, it’s being provided in a courtroom in Philadelphia.

At issue is the Children's Internet Protection Act, a law signed by President Clinton in 2000. Apparently, some people worried that, if we brought that bad old Internet into the public library, nine-year olds were going to sit down at the computers and make a beeline for the porn. Of course, anything anybody is worried about must become the subject of federal legislation, whether or not there’s any real evidence of an actual problem, especially if you can tack the words "protection" and children" onto the bill. So the cry went up with the most dangerous words in American politics: "There oughta be a law!" Since the Clinton administration in the post-Monica era was gun-shy of anything that might make it look like they were supporting sexual naughtiness in any way, shape or form, Clinton went along. He signed into law a rule that requires that public libraries receiving certain types of federal funding install "filtering software" to prevent access to online pornography. The American Library Association and a group of public libraries and library patrons have challenged the rule in court.

As with most cases involving words like "pornography" and "obscenity" the testimony in this one tends towards the bizarre. According to the Associated Press story on the topic, a librarian on the stand testifying against the act was "shown a particular page with an extremely raunchy title. When asked, she read it aloud — to the uncomfortable snickers of some audience members." She then went on to matter-of-factly state "We have sex manuals with similar pictures to this one." (See, I told you libraries have changed. The raunchiest thing I ever found in the library was James Joyce’s "Ulysses" which avoids being pornographic by being mostly incoherent).

Another expert, this time a computer geek testifying on behalf of the government, was less blasé. He was asked to describe "some of the more disturbing Web sites he had encountered. He haltingly described pornographic sites involving, among other subjects, elderly women. ‘It was disturbing,’ he testified."

I won’t even attempt to argue that there are sites on the Internet that are not appropriate for children. As shown above, there are sites on the Internet that aren’t even appropriate for adults.

Nor am I suggesting for a moment that children should be allowed to access pictures of nekkid people over the Internet in public libraries. Let them find their smut the way kids did back in the good old days: by rummaging through that stack of magazines in the back of Dad’s closet.

But there’s one major problem with the mandated "filtering software": it doesn’t work very well. This is because of one fact about computer software that most people don’t seem to realize: software is incredibly stupid. Having a computer is like having a loyal but severely mentally challenged friend: it’ll do anything you tell it to, but it will only do exactly what it’s told. Most of the filtering software works by excluding websites with certain "forbidden" words. Since the English language, however, is chock full of double meanings, blocking some words with dirty connotations is also liable to block out legitimate sites as well. The classic example is the software that blocked out all sites having to do with breast cancer, because there’s no way to describe breast cancer without using the word breast, and the software was trying to block sites that actually showed, well, breasts.

There’s no software substitute for a pair of human eyes with a functioning brain behind it, a brain that most likely can be found between the ears of the friendly librarian. The profession does not trend to attract the brain-dead, unlike, say, politics.

So here’s a radical idea. Just put the computers out in a public room, where people can see the monitors. It’s unlikely that anyone will try to find the sites for "LIVE XXX TEEN GIRLS" if there’s a kindly old gray haired librarian seated a few feet away behind the circulation desk. From what I’ve heard, most libraries place the Internet-ready machines in plain view anyway, out of common sense. Unfortunately, however, the government doesn’t seem to want to rely on common sense. And since it’s the poorer libraries that are most in need of the funding at issue, they’re the ones who are most likely to get screwed by this law.

Whoops. I said "screwed". Looks I’m gonna get filtered this week.

COPYRIGHT 2002 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.