By The Electronic Frontier Foundation
On April 4th, EFF is partnering with the Center for Civic Media at MIT and the National Coalition Against Censorship to bring attention to the longstanding problem of Internet censorship in public libraries and schools for 404 Day.
Join us on Friday, April 4th from 12 p.m. – 1 p.m. PST for a digital teach-in with some of the top researchers and librarians working to analyze and push back against the use of Internet filters on library computers.
Speakers:
Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. She has written extensively about CIPA and blocked websites in libraries.
Chris Peterson, a research affiliate at the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab. He is currently working on the Mapping Information Access Project.
Sarah Houghton, director for the San Rafael Public Library in Northern California. She has also blogged as the Librarian in Black for over a decade.
Moderator: April Glaser, activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation
We also invite librarians and concerned bloggers across the country to blog about Internet filtering in libraries on 404 Day to raise awareness and share stories of free speech infringing censorship in schools and libraries. Want to blog about it? Write an email to april@eff.org to let us know.
About The Children’s Internet Protection Act & Censorship in Libraries
More than 10 years ago, Congress passed the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), a bill that brought new levels of Internet censorship to libraries across the country.
The law is supposed to encourage public libraries and schools to filter child pornography and obscene or “harmful to minors” images from the library’s internet connection in exchange for continued federal funding.
Unfortunately, aggressive interpretations of this law have resulted in extensive and unnecessary censorship in our cherished public libraries, often because libraries go beyond the legal requirements of CIPA when implementing content filters.
As a result, students and library patrons across the country are routinely and unnecessarily blocked from accessing constitutionally protected websites.
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Comments welcome.
Posted on April 2, 2014