U.S. Efforts on Open Web Access Should Begin at Home.

IT'S heartening to hear that the United States government is planning to fund a system to help Internet users avoid online censorship.

But those users are in China, not here in America. While the Chinese can certainly use some help in dodging their government's Web filters, it's ironic that the assistance could come from the United States -- a government that imposes its own form of censorship on its youngest and most vulnerable Web surfers.

The New York Times reported recently that the International Broadcasting Bureau -- the agency responsible for "Voice of America" radio broadcasts -- is planning to hire a small California company called Safeweb to build an anti-censorship network that caters to Chinese Net users.

Safeweb already runs a service that helps Web surfers hide the sites they visit from their Internet service providers and other possible snoops. The service has proven popular with Chinese Web users who want to skirt the government-mandated filters that drastically limit their access to online content. But the government has caught on to that ploy and has begun blocking access to Safeweb's servers.

Now it seems the International Broadcasting Bureau is willing to pay Safeweb to design a new service that caters to the Chinese. The service would be made more resistant to government intervention, perhaps by changing the servers' Internet addresses frequently enough to confound blocking software.

Censorship at home

It sounds like a great idea. And when they work out the bugs, they should make the service available to American school kids and public library patrons who may soon be suffering from our own government's censorship.

The Children's Internet Protection Act, passed by Congress in December, requires schools and libraries to install Web filtering software before they can accept federal subsidies for Internet technology purchases. It has been challenged in court by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of libraries, library patrons and Web site publishers, and the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the case in February.

There are dramatic differences, of course, between the kind of censorship imposed in China and the system proposed by the new U.S. law. China's policy restricts the surfing of adults and children alike. It also applies to every public and privately owned computer in the country, a more drastic infringement than even the most conservative U.S. lawmakers would likely propose.

Schools and libraries also are free to ignore the law, though that means going without federal technology subsidies. For those who believe such a choice would be painless, consider that a public school in my area recently asked children to bring their own toilet paper to class to help preserve its meager operating budget. Libraries aren't much better off, and most would have trouble providing quality public Net access without federal funds.

In some ways, the censorship regime set up by the Children's Internet Protection Act is more troubling than the one our government hopes to defeat. At least the Chinese government itself decides what sites its citizens' shouldn't see. Here in the United States, we leave those critical choices up to the unaccountable private companies that sell blocking software. These firms usually keep their "block lists" secret, preventing teachers and librarians from figuring out just what sort of material their patrons might be missing.

Filtering the poor

Software filters are notorious for blocking perfectly innocuous pages, particularly those that advocate gay rights, free speech and other causes the filtering companies themselves find offensive. In that way, they're similar to the filters that block political news and other information the Chinese government doesn't want its citizens to see. Even if filtering companies could manage to keep their ideology out of their block lists, they cannot design software that restricts only obscenity, child pornography or material "harmful to minors" -- the categories of content the law says should be blocked.

The restrictions proposed by the Children's Internet Protection Act are most onerous for those who rely on schools and libraries for Net access -- that is, the poorest and least powerful members of society. So by censoring all of its citizens, the Chinese government is actually being more democratic than the country that invented the concept.

We should be proud that our government is trying to help Chinese Web surfers avoid online censorship. But unless the Bush administration scraps plans to defend the Children's Internet Protection Act in court, it won't be showing its own citizens the same respect.