Re: school filter legislation

[Anonymous <anon@anon.efga.org>]

Filtering sex off the Net in schools 
By Reuters 
NEWS.COM 
February 10, 1998, 5:55 a.m. PT 
URL: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,19002,00.html 

WASHINGTON--Senate Commerce Committee chairman John McCain 
(R-Arizona) and Sen. Ernest
Hollings (D-South Carolina), the ranking Democrat on the panel, 
introduced a bill yesterday to protect children
from sexually explicit materials on the Internet at school and in 
the library. 

The Commerce committee will hold a hearing on indecency on the 
Internet today. 

The legislation would force schools and libraries to filter or 
block access to some Internet sites in order to
qualify for billions of dollars of federal subsidies aimed at 
bringing more computers into classrooms and public
libraries. 

Under the legislation, schools would have to certify with the 
Federal Communications Commission that they
are using or will use a filtering device on computers with 
Internet access so that students will not be able to
access sexually explicit or other materials deemed "harmful." 

A school would not be eligible to receive government subsidies 
for universal access to the Internet unless it
met those conditions. 

To qualify for the subsidies, libraries would be required to use 
a filtering system on one or more of their
computers so that at least one computer would be "suitable for 
minors' use," McCain's office said. 

"The prevention lies not in censoring what goes on the Internet, 
but rather in filtering what comes out of it onto
the computers our children use outside the home," McCain said. 

In a speech on the Senate floor introducing the measure, McCain 
noted that when the word "teen" was typed
into a Web search engine, a site about teen sex was the first 
search result to appear. 

Civil liberties groups have criticized efforts to filter access 
to materials available on the Internet, saying that
such technologies often block out data that children need to 
learn about AIDS prevention and find support for
depression and issues related to their sexuality. 

Hollings said the legislation gave schools and libraries "an 
added financial incentive to filter children's access
to the Internet," adding, "We must tackle this problem of 
children innocently stumbling onto indecent material
while using the Web for legitimate research purposes or face dire 
consequences." 

Under the legislation, school and library administrators would be 
free to choose any filtering or blocking
system that would best fit their community standards and local 
needs. 

The bill forbids the federal government from making "qualitative 
judgments about the system a school or
library has chosen to implement," according to a summary. 

Sen. Dan Coats (R-Indiana) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) 
are also sponsoring the legislation. 

Story Copyright � 1998 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. 


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