To the Editor:
Dan Kleinman of the Plan2Succeed Citizens Group advocates installing "constitutionally approved Internet filters" in a letter to the editor titled "Masturbation Redux" (The Dartmouth, Aug. 12.) It is worth pointing out, however, that blocking software doesn't merely prevent access to pornographic material.
According to a report by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, many Internet filtering programs block non-pornographic gay and lesbian sites, including many major family, youth and national mainstream organization websites with non-pornographic gay and lesbian content.
Unlike the highly qualified and credentialed librarians at Dartmouth, the individuals who rate material for filtering and blocking companies rarely have a background in library science. A group of amateurs using secret criteria and attempting to apply an "I know it when I see it" standard to information does not exactly inspire confidence.
Peacefire.org, a longstanding opponent of internet filters, ran an experiment in which it created four "hate" sites, which consisted entirely of anti-gay statements from the home pages of four mainstream conservative sites: the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, Dr. Laura's official site and Concerned Women for America, without any attributions.
Peacefire subsequently submitted these sites to six very popular and common blocking software companies for review, and all six agreed to block the submitted sites. When Peacefire told them where the text on those sites came from and challenged them to block the original sources, the blocking companies refused to give a response.
There are countless other examples of overly broad filtering occurring. The next time you go the library to research sexual harassment, do you really want half of your search results to be unviewable because they contain the word sex? If you're writing a paper on breast cancer for a biology class, do you want to be unable to view images of lumps and tumors?
We are in college. We are adults. And we are expected to be doing adult-level work.
Anyone who wants to limit what they can see on the Internet should install blocking software on their own computer and stay home. As for me, while I like Dr. Seuss, I'd like to be writing my papers with material a little more advanced then "The Lorax" and "One Fish, Two Fish."