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Reply
from Simon Cooper 21st November Dear Mr Williams, Essex Libraries use an Internet content filter for the following reasons: · We believe the majority of our customers expect us to attempt to ban the most extreme material on the Internet. · We should not aid the transmission of material by individuals that would be illegal. · We have a duty to of care to protect children who use library computers. The type of content filter that we employ is necessary for our size of network and the supplier is among the market leaders world-wide. At the time that the Peoples Network was implemented in Essex a consortium of local authorities in East Anglia banded together to jointly purchase the network infrastructure, including an Internet content filter. The organisation that was set up to do this is called E2B or the East of England Broadband Consortium. As Essex was the first library authority among the partners to get to the stage of needing a content filter we did the initial work on selecting the categories that would be blocked or not blocked and when the other library authorities came on line our choices were adopted by the whole consortium. Amongst the categories of site that we chose to block was the "Drugs" type. This covers sites that "provide information on the purchase, manufacturing and use of illegal or recreational drugs". I believe this is a legitimate category to ban in a public library context.The intention in choosing this category was not to block sites that dealt with campaigns to legalise drugs, these would be expected to be categorised as "Politics. Opinion, Religion", nor did we intend that sites that dealt with health issues around drugs use would be blocked, we would expect these to be covered by the category "Self-Help". Neither of the latter two categories are blocked on our network, as it is clearly possible to campaign for legalisation of drugs or provide health information without also offering information on how to procure and use them we felt (and continue to feel) that this is a reasonable and balanced position. I do not think that it could be described as "blind blanket censorship of the whole topic of drugs" as you suggest. In a case such as that of the UK Cannabis Internet Alliance web site where it appears that the category "Drugs" may have been misapplied by our content filter providers we supply details of how this can be contested directly with our suppliers. We believe that this is better done by the site owners than by us as it is clearly not the role of ECC employees to argue a particular case on behalf of another organisation. As your experience shows this can be an effective path, as soon as the update from Smartfilter is loaded on our system your site will be viewable from any PC on our network. Given the size of the Internet we could not possibly manage a filter "in house" so it becomes inevitable that we purchase this service from an external supplier. It is therefore not possible for me to give detailed information about the length of time a particular site has been blocked, how many sites involved in a particular campaign are blocked nor to advise organisations that their site is blocked at the time that this occurs. However, our suppliers do have a very usable facility on the Internet that enables customers to find much of this out for themselves on a site by site basis. Local changes to the content filter settings are not part of the normal operation of the filter. Such changes would require significant work around making the initial assessment, getting the agreement of regional partners who would also be affected and in subsequently monitoring the site to ensure that its local classification or declassification remained accurate. We do not therefore, offer local changes to content filter settings as a part of our normal service and, although there is no precedent as yet for local changes to be made I suspect that if we did offer this service we would consider making a charge for it. In terms of the public library role in political debate, in the normal course of events we do not accept hard copy political campaign material for display from any party or organisation in order to maintain the position of neutrality that is one of our strengths and a public expectation. At the same time we clearly do have a general responsibility for providing the widest access to information that we can achieve given the constraints of our physical and financial resources and our duty of care to younger members of the population. I believe that in our choice of Internet content filter categories to block (and not to block) we have done our best to continue this tradition in the era of the Internet. To the best of my knowledge there have been no complaints to the library service from the general public regarding the blocking of your site prior to your own so I tend to feel that the impact on the overall political debate so far has been negligible. If customers had requested information while your site was blocked then library staff would normally have attempted to fulfil this demand by putting the customer in contact with you directly, referring to news items on the debate and other alternative sources. Again, this suggests that any actual impact on the political discourse would certainly not "have effectively prevented one side of a serious political debate from presenting their case". We are aware that the way in which the content filter works is not perfect and that mis-classifications occur or sites escape classification altogether rendering them "invisible" to the filter. However, all filters of this type suffer from the same problems to some degree. Smartfilter are improving their product all the time and we, of course keep our options open by reviewing other potential filter systems with our partners in the regional consortium. We believe this is the best way that we can improve the situation in the long term and counter what can otherwise seem like an inconsistent application of the filter on specific topics. I hope that this has helped to explain our position and that I have covered all the points that you make. I think I should just clarify that the Peoples Network web site is managed by Resource, the council for Museums, Archives and Libraries and as such is the umbrella site for the initiative. The Peoples Network sub-group that worked on the filter categories was part of the team of library officers implementing the network locally. Yours
sincerely,
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