City council makes library censor 'Net access

I remember when Casey Kasem used to do his "What ever happened to..." feature where he'd talk about what became of some singer or band that had a song in the countdown years earlier. This article is kind of like that.

I recall in the late '90s doing a piece in The Last Word about David Burt, a librarian who avidly backed censorware. Not Bert (like Ernie's friend), but Burt. (That's the Burtster pictured here.) But just now, I asked myself, what ever happened to David Burt?

Welp, it turns out that in 2001, Burt was hired by Bush's Department of Justice as a consultant to help defend the clearly unconstitutional right-wing law that requires public libraries to install filtering software on computers. But he also runs a blog that provides links to mainstream news articles about censorware.

About a story in the Detroit News, Burt made a Freudian slip. He writes, "Over ten later, library fitlering fights still rage." Ten what later? And the Freudian slip is his misspelling of 'filtering'. I think 'fitlering' is the more suitable spelling, because installing censorware on public computers sounds like something a certain 20th century dictator would do.

In Royal Oak, Michigan, the right-wing city council passed an ordinance requiring the public library to install fitlers (sic) on all but one computer in the grownup section of the library. This isn't the kids' section we're talking about, but the big people section.

Like the law Burt defended, this is blatantly unconstitutional suppression of free speech, and the mayor and the library director oppose it. But tyranny creep seems to have caused the new ordinance to go pretty much unchallenged - though if I lived in that area and one of my sites was censored, there'd likely be a lawsuit. A decade ago, I had my first censorware encounter when I found that the Kenton County Public Library in Kentucky was blocking my website. I immediately wrote a letter to the Kentucky ACLU, which got on the library's case until the libe wrote back saying the censorware had been removed. (I don't remember if I ever tested to see if the library was telling the truth about this.)

Luckily, Michigan is more on the ball than most states. Under Michigan law, all public libraries must (and I mean must) have at least one computer that is unfiltered, and that's why Royal Oak's ordinance lets one computer go uncensored instead of blocking access from all of them. Kentucky needs a law like Michigan's that requires at least one uncensored machine. And badly. It's a shame Kentucky's legislature has so many fascists that it likely won't pass a law to curtail library censorship any time soon.

(Source: http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080520/METRO/805200419/1361)