Essayist: Filters Should Be Subject to Testing

Staff -- Library Journal, 1/15/2001

In a long essay in The American Prospect entitled "The Internet Filter Farce," Geoffrey Nunberg, a principal scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, criticizes makers of filtering software for refusing to make their block lists public: "The real danger...is that people would rapidly see just how inadequate their software is." If filters are installed in public institutions, filter companies should be required to reveal their block lists, he writes. Also, filters used in public institutions should be subject to independent testing and judicial or administrative review. He concludes that, even with filters, we can't "return to an age when the library was a haven protected from unsavory content.... Tearing down the walls of the library cuts two ways: It opens up a new world of knowledge, but it also allows the street people to come and camp out in the reading room. On the whole, it's a favorable bargain, but parents and teachers will have to help children deal with the pitfalls of web surfing...."