Internet Porn Filters

When I was in New York City on vacation I went to the public library to check my email. While doing so I clicked on a link and received a message on screen that as recipients of federal funds the New York City Public Library System had to install anti-obsenity filters and the link I had clicked on had not made it through the filters.

Here's the link. It's to a bit from that famously obscene program, Jay Leno's "Tonight Show."

There are arguments, mostly poor ones, that can be made for limiting the access of minors to "obscene" material through library owned computers. Aside from the philosophical objections, as a practical matter such filters are overbroad. I have no idea how this clip came to be censored. It's well known, however, that information having to do with people's health, one of the great benefits of the internet, particularly for people with no or little private access to the internet is among the information most frequently barred by these filters. Filters that deny access to sites containing words such as "penis," "vagina," "sex," and other terms referring to reproductive health, but often also, incidentally, to porn sites, are actually a threat to public health and quite probably contribute to the continuing lack of access to information that makes it more difficult for people with limited access to public health professionals to learn about how to effectively battle STDs and unwanted pregnancy.

It could lead the cynical among us to suspect that only information referring to abstinence is allowed to be disseminated, that the filtering of other information isn't a bug; it's a feature.