CIPA was tacked onto a larger spending bill by John McCain (R-Arizona) and passed by Congress in December 2000. It mandates that libraries purchase and install commercial filtering software on all computers with Internet access, effective April 20th, 2001. Both the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the American Library Association (ALA) have filed suits against this bill, claiming it impedes free speech, is expensive and unnecessary, and does not work.

CIPA was forged in the spirit of the unconstitutional Communications Decency Act of 1996, and it attempts to regulate constitutionally protected free speech from both minors and adults. This law is overly broad and protective, especially for citizens who have the right to view the blocked material. The only exception made for adults is that "an administrator, supervisor, or person authorized by the responsible authority... may disable the technology protection measure concerned to enable access for bona fide research or other lawful purposes." The Supreme Court has continually held that restricting the ability of adults legally able to view indecent or questionable materials, even in the interests of "saving the children," unconstitutional. CIPA directly violates these rulings.

There are financial concerns as well. CIPA mandates that all libraries buy commercial filtering software, such as Cyberpatrol or Surfwatch, and install it on all computers with Internet access, not just those that the Federal Government invests in. This is very questionable, as filtering software is notorious for not blocking what it should, and blocking what it should not. For instance, AOL’s youth filter blocks out sites pertaining to Buddhism much more frequently than Christian sites. CIPA requires libraries all over the US to massively invest in a technology that is unwanted and ineffective, kind of like the Star Wars program. The clear benefactors from this law are the Internet filtering companies, which have been cast into disrepute by their software. One can only wonder what occurred between supporters of this bill and the providers of Internet filtering software.

It has been shown time and again that Internet filtering software fails to do its job. Not only are libraries forced to spend thousands of dollars on unnecessary software, but no available commercial software blocks all obscene sites. It is bad enough that libraries are being forced to purchase defective products.

Some of the clients on whose behalf the American Civil Liberties Union is challenging this bill because their sites were blocked include two candidates for Congress, Planetout.com (a site for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities), and Planned Parenthood Federation of America. These are not the only sites that are blocked with filtering software. Sites on reproductive health, any website on gay issues, and even completely non-sexual sites that happen to have names that often trigger the blocking mechanism, such as the popular Hotmail service, are all blocked. Creators of filtering software often refuse to disclose their blocked lists to the public, and with this bill they will be able to censor virtually any site they please. One critics of the Act created a site with a compilation of quotes on Bush sites, as well as anti-abortion groups and the Boy Scouts, and asked the software companies to review it. It was blocked. When he revealed the sources of these quotes, the companies ignored him. We should not subject our libraries to this kind of censorship. It only serves the corporate and ideological goals of certain businessmen, partisans, and ideologues.

CIPA flies in the face of reason and violates the ideal that libraries were founded on: to provide uncensored educational materials to those who wish to use them. If Congress mandated that libraries censor all books in the same manner Congress wishes the Internet to be censored, thousands of classics and very important books would be banned. All materials on human sexuality and every romance novel would be thrown out the window. Books that use "naughty words" would be removed from our shelves, and all we would be left with is a large collection of children’s books.

This entire bill seems silly since there have not been major problems with children viewing inappropriate websites in public, in the first place. Most libraries have an Internet use policy that controls viewing as is appropriate for the local community. This law is unwelcome in most places, as evidenced by the suit brought by the ALA. It is much better to leave the control over questionable Internet material to local libraries, which can be much more effective in keeping such material away from children while still allowing responsible people to view it.