No strings on me: Librarians fight filters.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Citings

THE SAN JOSE Public Libraries receive about $20,000 each year from the E-rate program, a federal effort to finance public access to the Internet. Next year, though, they might not get any. San Jose is one of several library systems around the country that say they will refuse Washington's subsidies rather than accept the strings attached to them--specifically, the requirements of the Children's Internet Protection Act (CI PA), which Congress passed in 1999 and the Supreme Court upheld in June.

Under CIPA, institutions that receive E-rate subsidies will have to install "a technology for computers with Internet access to filter or block material deemed to be harmful to minors." This requirement offends many librarians, sometimes on free speech grounds and sometimes simply because such filters rarely work as advertised. "We have a belief in open access to materials on the Internet," explains Ned Himmel, assistant library director in San Jose.

In San, Jose's case, the final decision to accept or refuse the funds rests with the city council, not the library. But the conclusion seems foregone: The city already has taken a stand against such filtering programs.

It's not a hard stand to take. San Jose's E-rate subsidy is only about 0.01 percent of its annual operating budget, indeed, the most consistent theme among the libraries saying no may be that they either didn't receive the grant to begin with or could discard what they do...