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School system alters Internet filter policies
The Prince William school system announced last week that it is changing its Internet filter policy and will no longer block sites containing information about gay issues.The announcement came about a month after the Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union threatened to sue the school district over its Internet filtering policy, which the ACLU said amounted to “unconstitutional censorship.”
The school is legally required to provide Internet filters to keep students and staff from accessing “objectionable” sites, such as those containing pornography or instructions for building bombs. But Prince William's filters also blocked out anti-bullying sites such as the GSA Network, Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network, and the It Gets Better Project.
When the ACLU first threatened suit in April, school spokesman Ken Blackstone said filtering is largely an automated process and the school system did not intentionally block content that is constitutionally protected.
The school system uses the Blue Coat company to provide its filters. On Tuesday, Blue Coat spokesman Steve Schick said Blue Coat provides a special filter category for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues specifically so that clients can choose to keep them from being blocked.
“We tried to create a category that really focused around education and issues,” he said, adding that Blue Coat worked with the national ACLU to develop the LGBT category. “It's up to each customer to filter each category they want to block or filter or prioritize.”
Schick said the company's filters work by putting sites into categories so a client can filter a pornography category while protecting an LGBT category. That would effectively block gay porn without blocking gay issues.
Blackstone confirmed later in the day that the school division had chosen to block the LGBT category but that the decision was made 10-15 years ago when the filters were installed. That was before anyone in the current administration took office and it was in the early days of the Internet, when content was often much dicier.
“The Internet has evolved quite a bit over the last few years,” he said.
And it's not just the Internet that's evolved. The national acceptance of homosexuality has also changed since the 1990s and Blackstone agreed that the LGBT topic also “has certainly evolved over the years.”
Because the filtering is an automated process handled by the IT staff, Blackstone said the policies are not the kind of thing anyone would notice or think to change unless a specific request is made. The school division does have a process where staff can submit a request to unblock a specific website, but the larger categories are a detailed, technical function that aren't widely known outside of the IT Department.
Blackstone said it wasn't until the school division got a letter from the ACLU that they realized there was a problem.
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