Porn in the court: Librarians repeating unspeakable words in battle over Internet smut

PHILADELPHIA (AP) _ Inside the stately courtroom of U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III, there's language coming from the bench and the witness stand that renders George Carlin's ``seven words

Monday, April 1st 2002, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

PHILADELPHIA (AP) _ Inside the stately courtroom of U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III, there's language coming from the bench and the witness stand that renders George Carlin's ``seven words you can't say on television'' tame by comparison. And then there's the nudity.

In the first week of a trial debating the constitutionality of a requirement that public libraries install porn-blocking software on their computers, gray-haired librarians uttered words that could make a longshoreman blush, soft-spoken computer analysts described bizarre sexual proclivities and federal judges mulled the definition of ``fetish.''

One of the three veteran jurists hearing the case, U.S. District Judge John P. Fullam, summed it up as he flipped through a huge binder of color printouts from pornographic Web sites: ``Dirty pictures.''

And though the judges seem to be taking a certain enjoyment in the proceeding's unusual nature, they're focused on the importance of the issue: How or if a law can shield children from hardcore pornography without trampling on the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.

Week two of the trial over the Children's Internet Protection Act, or CIPA, begins Monday.

The law, signed by President Clinton in 2000, requires that public libraries receiving certain types of federal funding install filtering software to prevent access to online smut. The rule was challenged by the American Library Association and a group of public libraries and library patrons. The American Civil Liberties Union is now arguing their case.

Librarian Candace Morgan, the first plaintiffs' witness, didn't flinch when government attorney Timothy Zick placed an open binder of Web porn photos in front of her.

``Is it your testimony that I have the right to look at these Web sites?'' Zick asked.

``Yes, it is,'' replied Morgan, the associate director of the Fort Vancouver, Wash., regional library.

Shown a particular page with an extremely raunchy title, she read it aloud _ to the uncomfortable snickers of some audience members _ and matter-of-factly stated, ``We have sex manuals with similar pictures to this one.''

Government witness Chris Lemmon, of computer testing firm eTesting Labs Inc., was clearly less comfortable when asked to describe some of the more disturbing Web sites he had encountered. He haltingly described pornographic sites involving, among other subjects, elderly women.

``It was disturbing,'' he testified.

Unlike two previous laws addressing Internet porn that were struck down by federal judges in Philadelphia, CIPA deals only with funding and not with direct restrictions on Internet access.

The 1996 Communications Decency Act, which made it a crime to put adult-oriented material online where children can find it, was thrown out by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.

The 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which required sites to collect a credit card number or other proof of age before allowing Internet users to view material deemed ``harmful to minors,'' was sidelined by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court is expected to rule this year.

The plaintiffs in the latest case say CIPA relies on inexact technology that censors protected speech and lets porn through; amounts to ``economic censorship'' for libraries serving poor areas; and improperly takes content decisions away from the libraries and their patrons and gives them to the federal government.

The government maintains that librarians can unblock sites improperly censored by the software _ and they say safeguards need to be placed between children and World Wide Web porn purveyors lying in wait for them.

Libraries that don't want filters can simply turn down the subsidies, the government lawyers say.

The judges are expected to rule on the case by early May to give libraries time to comply if the law is upheld and goes into effect as scheduled July 31. Any appeal of the panel's decision would go directly to the Supreme Court.