The CIPA has passed and now everyone has to come to terms with their essential hypocrisy. The filtering industry who seem to support this wonderful act (surprise) and armies of telephone calls and sales men get to work in earnest to provide their solutions to this “terrible problem” re: child protection and so many of them are claiming to be the best and most comprehensive solution.

The ALA gags on this turn of events and ponders the dealing with the hideous prospect of reading more inadequate technical manuals for inadequate filters and probably kludge computer systems. Is windows 95 an old technology? The more activist oriented refuse to filter. Forget the money "Hell no - we wont go".

The family values organizations shake their head in disbelief of course the libraries must filter. and they do filter ..where is the porn wing where all the porn literature and videos are stored..filtering exists in the acquisitions the rebellious kids find workarounds, crack, expose and harass the most pathetic of the filtering industry and draw broad base assumptions about the entire industry. The government gets heavy handed and says if you want to take our money you have to filter.

Have you noticed something about all of these groups? The "activists" are all agendized, galvanized and intolerant of a view in opposition to them. There is very little (if any) co-operation. And that is the real problem. We need to build a new model one which insulates the children in accordance with their regional cultural values and protects adults from being limited in any search for information. This can be done but will require a co-operative technological/cultural model that is reminiscent of the early days of the internet. There in lies the problem. In the early years of the 21 St. Century we all have become "more bad" at co-operation.

For the libraries the rubber has hit the road. They must voluntarily or involuntarily filter or as it stands now suffer economic consequences n the form of government dollars withheld.

What is required is some constructive co-operation, re-evaluation and an honest endeavor to solve this problem. There are many things to do and many ways to go about it. The bar is currently so low that our endeavor is now to be “less worse “ and to help make things œleast bad.

We need to discuss what might be done about it and how a co-operation of such divergent factors could be achieved. Lets get the œobnoxious quotient down.

A state wide or national approach is needed. If some national organization such as the ALA (arbitrary choice just used as an example) We would be glad to donate our lists to provide a leg up to such a non profit enterprise. We probably could adapt our technology to meet your needs at a very low cost. Such an enterprise would probably cost about twenty percent of what is being quoted as prices now. And it would be the filtering the libraries require because it would all be adapted to their specifications. It would be "less worse" for sure.

If you are not familiar with the background of these issues...just do a goggle search using these terms:

  internet filtering +(research papers)

or go to:

  The ThunderChip of filtering facts