Privacy and Pornography...
...and Rex Murphy:
Here's the Cross Country Checkup session during which Rex talks to Canadians about the Scandal de Jour.
I've been thinking about the whole privacy thing. There was a time, and it's not that long ago, that everybody knew everybody else's business. The idea of privacy in the small rural community that I knew growing up, for example, was unheard of. And I think that goes way back in time throughout all cultures. It used to be that fear of gossip and shame about unacceptable behavior was a strong incentive to behave and was universally used as a mechanism of social control. And it worked.
Then along came the Internet.
Having worked in libraries for years and years, privacy concerning peoples' reading habits and what books they borrowed was a well established principle that librarians and library associations had stood by for years. It was standard practice for libraries to refuse police requests for information about what books someone had borrowed, unless they presented a warrant. It was a principle even extended to parents inquiring about what books their teenagers had "out". The first one I had no problem with. The second, I had some qualms about. But that's not the point of this blog entry.
Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s public libraries become places where the public could go to access the internet and there was a big concern by many people about pornography on the internet. In one library I worked in, in the first few months after we got our first "Public Internet Access Computer", we had sleazy men, who otherwise would never have set foot in a library, coming to use the computer, and of course, accessing porn sites was exactly what they wanted to do.
Sooo, out come the policy wonks and by the time the decade was out, most public libraries had policies governing public access to the internet. Many a heated argument was heard at library board meetings and many a librarian was torn by the issue.
But the Internet is NOT the same thing as a carefully crafted library collection. There are layers and layers of "filtering" that goes on before a book lands on a library shelf, beginning with the writers of manuscripts.
Filter #1, someone who puts together a booklet of kiddy porn is not going to submit his work to a reputable publisher. To do so would call attention to his criminal behavior. Filter #2, no reputable publisher is going to publish it, for the same reason. Filter #3, no one is going to write a review about the book extolling the virtues of a work of kiddy porn.
Reviewing journals (magazines filled with book reviews) are a librarian's most indispensable tool for selecting material for a library collection. The Internet, on the other hand, was a wild frontier where anybody and his dog could put up a website on anything they wanted. There was no filtering and endless hours were spent debating the merits of blocking websites that certain keywords might lead to.
In most cases, public library policy statements included, in one way or another, a prohibition regarding the viewing of porn on the libraries' computers. It worked to clean up a public space that had for a long time been a hub of the community, and long-time library patrons, who, for a short time had become reluctant to come into the library for fear of what they or their children might see on the public computers, were once again happy to spend time at their library. All was well.
Now, that's certainly not the same thing as giving police access to the logs of computers in private homes used by people on their own time away from public view. That's a whole different animal, and where children are being exploited in a most grotesque manner, it is a problem from hell. I think there has been a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to this scandal de jour. I think we need to have a discussion about it. Maybe it's time to resurrect the old ways, and question whether or not all this privacy business is really necessary - and perhaps, whether elevating privacy to such a pillar, is conducive to criminal, socially harmful consequences.
And I hate it that the Cons have shot themselves in the foot.
Here's the Cross Country Checkup session during which Rex talks to Canadians about the Scandal de Jour.
I've been thinking about the whole privacy thing. There was a time, and it's not that long ago, that everybody knew everybody else's business. The idea of privacy in the small rural community that I knew growing up, for example, was unheard of. And I think that goes way back in time throughout all cultures. It used to be that fear of gossip and shame about unacceptable behavior was a strong incentive to behave and was universally used as a mechanism of social control. And it worked.
Then along came the Internet.
Having worked in libraries for years and years, privacy concerning peoples' reading habits and what books they borrowed was a well established principle that librarians and library associations had stood by for years. It was standard practice for libraries to refuse police requests for information about what books someone had borrowed, unless they presented a warrant. It was a principle even extended to parents inquiring about what books their teenagers had "out". The first one I had no problem with. The second, I had some qualms about. But that's not the point of this blog entry.
Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s public libraries become places where the public could go to access the internet and there was a big concern by many people about pornography on the internet. In one library I worked in, in the first few months after we got our first "Public Internet Access Computer", we had sleazy men, who otherwise would never have set foot in a library, coming to use the computer, and of course, accessing porn sites was exactly what they wanted to do.
Sooo, out come the policy wonks and by the time the decade was out, most public libraries had policies governing public access to the internet. Many a heated argument was heard at library board meetings and many a librarian was torn by the issue.
But the Internet is NOT the same thing as a carefully crafted library collection. There are layers and layers of "filtering" that goes on before a book lands on a library shelf, beginning with the writers of manuscripts.
Filter #1, someone who puts together a booklet of kiddy porn is not going to submit his work to a reputable publisher. To do so would call attention to his criminal behavior. Filter #2, no reputable publisher is going to publish it, for the same reason. Filter #3, no one is going to write a review about the book extolling the virtues of a work of kiddy porn.
Reviewing journals (magazines filled with book reviews) are a librarian's most indispensable tool for selecting material for a library collection. The Internet, on the other hand, was a wild frontier where anybody and his dog could put up a website on anything they wanted. There was no filtering and endless hours were spent debating the merits of blocking websites that certain keywords might lead to.
In most cases, public library policy statements included, in one way or another, a prohibition regarding the viewing of porn on the libraries' computers. It worked to clean up a public space that had for a long time been a hub of the community, and long-time library patrons, who, for a short time had become reluctant to come into the library for fear of what they or their children might see on the public computers, were once again happy to spend time at their library. All was well.
Now, that's certainly not the same thing as giving police access to the logs of computers in private homes used by people on their own time away from public view. That's a whole different animal, and where children are being exploited in a most grotesque manner, it is a problem from hell. I think there has been a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to this scandal de jour. I think we need to have a discussion about it. Maybe it's time to resurrect the old ways, and question whether or not all this privacy business is really necessary - and perhaps, whether elevating privacy to such a pillar, is conducive to criminal, socially harmful consequences.
And I hate it that the Cons have shot themselves in the foot.
Labels: child abuse, children, Conservative Party, libraries, pornography, privacy
posted by Louise at 12:34 am
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