|
|
 |
Mr. Mewett says that internet content filters are adequate to deal with the inadvertence problem. What is the danger that a child will accidentally come across a sexually site? It works fine for that purpose. The evidence from his own studies show that.
It is very, very unlikely a child will come across a sexually explicit site inadvertently. He did one study on a filter by AOL. He tested it against a random of URLs, websites, web pages drawn from the Google directory, and the incidence of domestic, unblocked websites was .04 percent, four out of 10,000. In the designs of domestic unblock sites, if a child went to a single website each day for years, and randomly chose that website, it would be 6.8 years before the child would come across that domestic unblocked website using the AOL filter.
Other tests of the danger of children coming across a random website show not that good — not quite as good a success as that, but show significant success in showing the danger of inadvertence.
Now, the second issue then is the deliberate child who sets out to try and find sexually explicit material websites. COPA goes into effect, that child will be able to find that overseas if no other place.
If filters are in effect, that child may be able to find sexually explicit websites. But the odds are less. Mewett did a study of the most common search terms. And when you think about the most common search terms, that is what kids are going to use when they are trying to find sexually explicit sites. Filters are the most effective. Almost all of the filters that Mr. Mewett tested were at least 35 percent effective. Think about the five percent effectiveness compared to where we start with COPA being 50 percent ineffective, because of the overseas sites. Almost by a startling percentage, filters are significantly more effective than COPA would be.
Now, Mr. Gomez has presented the images to your honor that your honor referred to before, before we began, and is going to discuss them in his opening statement. I would like to make a couple of points about those images.
First, he used some images derived from Mr. Mewett's study. Four of the six images that he will use from Mr. Mewett's study are overseas sites. They are scary images, unpleasant images, but they won't be affected by COPA at all. For him to get up in a sensationalist way and say, this is what will happen if COPA is not in effect is simply wrong. Those images will still be available to every U.S. child, even if COPA goes fully into effect.
All of the images from Mr. Mewett that Mr. Gomez is going to present were blocked by at least one of the filters. Indeed, all were blocked by at least six of the filters in that Mr. Mewett test. Some were not blocked by some of the filters that Mr. Mewett tested but there are filters out there that blocked very single one of the images that he is going to show you that come from Mr. Mewett. His sensationalist effort to scare the court by believing these pictures will be protected if COPA goes into effect and unprotected under filters should simply be rejected.
Now, the defendant, as your honor knows, has made a point of making a distinction between so-called enterprise filters and so-called home-use filters. That is a distinction that is largely illusory and largely made up by the defendants. The so-called enterprise filters and so-called home-use filters Dr. Cranor will testify and your honor will hear use the same technology. They use the same black list technology, and that will be explained to your honor, the same white list technology and same dynamic filtering technology. Technology is the same. Moreover, more and more filtering technology is moving to a network level. You used the AOL filter, for example, through the AOL network. In that respect, the enterprise filter and home use filter become absolutely identical.
And finally, Vista. Microsoft is coming out with a new operating system that will replace Windows. The Microsoft Vista product has in it, as Dr. Cranor will testify, parental control filters, so there will no longer be any distinction between the so-called enterprise filters and so-called home use filters. They will work the same way and they will work with products.
Although they won't quite put it this crudely, the defendants argue that parents are too stupid to be able t use these filters. Insulting argument. And it is wrong. Use of filters is quite simple. It is just as simple as most other computer programs. It is probably more simple than Word, for example.
Filters, however, are not the only alternative that parents can use if they are concerned about protecting their children. One very important alternative is educating your child as to the nature of the internet, how to engage in searches, what is inappropriate for them and what is appropriate for them.
The school librarian witnesses that your honor will hear from will talk about the fact that schools don't rely solely on filters. In fact, they spend considerable time educating the students about the nature of the internet, about how to conduct searches and about how to find what it is that they want to find without finding things they don't want to find.
Parental education, school education, librarian education all play a very significant role in protecting children.
There are other techniques, and Dr. Cranor will testify to those other techniques, monitoring the way in which your child uses the internet, keeping the computer in the living room, so that the child knows there is always a danger that an adult will walk by and see what the child is doing and others that she will discuss.
There are also, as I referred, other alternatives that the government could be using to protect children. The primary one of those, of course, is the obscenity laws. In defining what is obscene and what is not obscene, in response to the contention interrogatories, the defendant said violence against women is one of the categories that we think of as obscene. It is so much worse than — what is worse than harmful to minors. Violence to women counts as an obscenity.
As your honor has seen, some of the images that Mr. Gomez is going to talk about this morning involves violence against women. It fits the precise definition they gave in the contention interrogatory as obscene. One would ask Mr. Gomez whether that was referred to the criminal division for prosecution and, if not, why not?
|
|
|
|
