Spy vs Spite

Two blond students lean over his shoulder, as a dark-haired student listens to the conversation in the background. "Wow, big surprise. I hear they always lie," one boy says.

"I guess they just want us to feel sorry for 'em," says a girl, as they look at a page titled "Holocaust Myth 101."

"Well. They can lie all they want," says the boy who found the page. "Looks like we dug up the truth."

At this point, the instructor leading the workshop is supposed to stop the video and begin a discussion, using questions from an accompanying guide. On the whole, the questions are predictable classroom fare: "What happened?," "Has anyone ever experienced a similar situation?," and so on. But one question stands out: "Should the school have some kind of policy regarding what students can access on the Internet?"

In fact, many public secondary schools have Internet policies for minors, as do almost all public libraries. And both types of institutions are leaning toward the use of filtering software to limit what children can access on the Web. The San Francisco Unified School District, for example, employs a systemwide filter to block access to a variety of material, including "intolerance." School officials would not identify the name of the filter.

The policy discussions regarding the protection of minors on the Internet thus far have dealt almost exclusively with pornography. In the heated debate over First Amendment freedoms on the Web, smut has taken center stage because it has already been addressed and narrowly defined. The Supreme Court has ruled that "obscene" speech, meaning material appealing to a prurient or unhealthy interest in sex and lacking serious artistic, scientific, literary, or political value, can be regulated by the government.

The Supreme Court has also ruled that the definition of "obscene" can take the age of the audience into account. Thus, for adults, pornographic films are, by and large, protected by the First Amendment. But the government may prohibit the sale of these films to minors by labeling the material "indecent," a much broader, generally ill-defined category.

In 1996, Congress tried to apply the court's broad definition of "indecent" in its passage of the Communications Decency Act, a law prohibiting the transmission of "indecent" material over the Internet. But in 1997, the Supreme Court struck down the law in Reno vs. ACLU, declaring that communications on the Internet cannot be limited to what is suitable for children. The landmark ruling prevents a library from installing porn filters on terminals intended for adult use. But it still allows schools or libraries to restrict a minor's access to smut.

A school or library may also limit children's access to hate speech, but for a different reason. Ordinarily, in a public forum, anything outside the narrow definition of "obscene" is protected by the First Amendment. But schools and libraries are not the same as the town square (or the Internet), where people can spout hateful rhetoric to their heart's desire. A library has only so much shelf space; thus a professional librarian has the right to choose which materials to include in a collection, and which to leave out. The same goes for schools, which have the right to set their own curriculums and base the selection of library books on those curriculums.

"That's why if you were to go to your local library in search of books on the Holocaust, you would probably find many," says Frederick Schauer, a First Amendment professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. "But it's not likely you'll find any books that say the Holocaust didn't happen. And I think most people would agree that's appropriate."

Schauer says he believes the debate over allowing speech filters for minors into the public forum is only just beginning. Would it be possible for the ADL HateFilter to find a place in public libraries and schools? Yes, he says, although it would be challenged in court, and would probably be more likely to be allowed in secondary schools than in public libraries that serve all ages.

Some First Amendment lawyers find it curious that the ADL would even be getting into the business of speech filters. The Anti-Defamation League, after all, considers itself a civil rights organization. Judging from literature promoting the HateFilter software, it's clear the ADL is thinking about the apparent conflict between the civil right of free speech, and the limitation of speech inherent to Internet filtering software. Almost every page of HateFilter literature mentions the First Amendment, and explains that the ADL does not seek to censor or limit speech on the Internet. The HateFilter does not remove sites or censor their content, says ADL Director Elizabeth Coleman; it only blocks these sites from coming into the home at the parents' discretion.

Parents have good reason for wanting to keep these sites off their computers, Coleman says. Many extremist sites cater to children, she says. For example, the World Church of the Creator site has a special link for kids. Other sites, she says, are highly polished, presenting themselves as mainstream academic thought. This misinformation, she says, can lead to the kind of violence that has made headlines in recent years. Last August, for example, three teenagers firebombed a judge's house in San Jose, believing he was Jewish. (He was actually Catholic.) Investigators say two of the kids had used computers at school to access white supremacist Web sites. Also, Matthew and James Williams, brothers suspected of murdering a gay couple in Redding and setting fire to three synagogues in Sacramento, were reported to have been led astray by radical right philosophies ferried on the Internet. (Although at 31 and 29 years of age, the brothers would not have been constrained by an Internet filter aimed at minors.)