Jonathan Wallace, in this month's Ethical Spectacle, denounces the Supreme Court's decision upholding CIPA, as a fraud. Jonathan is very well informed about filter software, having run the Censorware Project with Seth Finkelstein, for some years. He makes the point that the fundamental problem with filtering the web is its size and the automated spiders which do most of the assessment are not clever enough to make the required assessments. Also that the few humans involved in assessing sites for software filters are often untrained and subject to unreasonable time contraints and daily quotas, which don't allow them to do the job properly. He goes on:
"Another issue of stunning importance raised by censorware is whether libraries can appropriately delegate their
decision-making processes to twenty year old art students with no training clicking through hundreds of sites a day. Even if
librarians could create their own censorware by reviewing web sites and deciding which to "acquire" for the library, there seems
something inherently suspect in allowing strangers to do it--especially when the strangers refuse to disclose to the libraries the
contents of their blacklists or even the methodologies used to compile them...
Significant portions of my site, such as An Auschwitz Alphabet, and even the pornography essays cited above, are routinely
used as sources by high school and college students writing papers. If you block me on a library computer, you are segregating
me from a significant section of my audience whom I believe would benefit from being able to read my views. If that segregation
has occurred because some artificial stupidity software misapprehended the nature of my site, or a homemaker working
part-time for a censorware company didn't take enough time to understand what my site is about, don't I have reason to
complain? "
That's a fair question IMHO. He reserves his most stinging criticism for Chief Justice Rehnquist, who said in the majority opinion "Assuming that such erroneous blocking presents Constitutional difficulties, any such concerns are dispelled by the ease with which patrons may have the filtering software disabled." I questioned this in the context of the embarrassment factor in an earlier post but Jonathan has another more important point given the current state of the art with software filters:
"The Chief Justice says that the wholesale mischaracterization of innocuous or socially useful sites as porn by a
program that then prevents you from seeing them in a forum in which a large number of Americans secures Internet access,
may not present any kind of free speech problem. That's not food for thought; its poison for thought.

The rest of the sentence is a howler. As the trial court discovered, censorware is not easily turned off in a library. Most
products forward you through a single proxy server. The library does not have the ability to get you out to the Internet through
any other port, and there is no way to switch off the proxy. The best the library can do is contact the censorware company and
request that the particular site the library patron wishes to view be removed from the blacklist. Sometimes the censorware
companies don't respond to such requests; when they do, it can take weeks, rendering the unblocking futile, as the patron has
probably forgotten, lost interest, or turned in her research paper by now. Finally, there have been instances of censorware
companies manually unblocking a site several times, only to have it re-added to the blacklist by the spider...
Since censorware itself is a fiction--a startling case of doing something inaccurate, poorly planned, buggy, in order to create the
fiction of doing something-- it is not surprising that the Chief Justice tacked on an additional fiction, that the censorware can be
turned off when a user requests. If we can pretend that censorware works, we might as well also pretend that it can be shut off." Food (or 'poison' as Jonathan might content) for thought.