| Bar Bulletin |
June,
2003 |
| MSBA News |
|
Something To Offend Everyone
~Public Awareness Committee Recognizes Law
Day with Internet Safety Conference~
By Patrick Tandy
And then I think, I have no right to roam for I’m
homesick when I put to sea and seasick when I’m home.
The words on the
heavy wooden plaque hanging in the third-floor hallway at the Maritime
Institute of Technology in Linthicum seemed to reflect the inner conflict
shared by the many librarians, educators and attorneys from around the
state who traveled to the Institute for the 2003 Law Day Conference
entitled The Information Highway: Free Speech v. Safety on May 13.
The day-long
program, cosponsored by the MSBA’s Public Awareness Committee (PAC) and
the Citizenship Law Related Education Program for the Schools of Maryland,
grappled with the issues of First Amendment rights and child safety as
they pertain to the Internet. The various sessions and guest speakers
shared this common thread, focusing on the concerns of the attendees, many
of whom as parents find themselves forced to reconcile their professional
duty to champion the rights of individual expression and the natural
instinct to protect their children.
Dr. Carla Hayden,
Executive Director of the Enoch Pratt Free Library of Baltimore City and
President-Elect of the American Library Association, opened the conference
with a keynote address that framed the issues within the context of the
current sociopolitical landscape.
“We are now at a
crossroads of individual rights and intellectual freedom and protecting
the people that we serve,” said Hayden. But while citing the importance of
protecting the people that she serves, Hayden staunchly challenged
knee-jerk reactions that frequently punctuate public outcry for such
measures as book-banning and Internet filtration.
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“One of our things
that we have been very proud of has been to let the ideas battle it
out on the shelves,” she said. “We have something to offend everyone.
The idea of a library is that a person can come in and ask [for
information] without fear of retribution. We are one of the few
institutions where an adolescent can go and find information about
some of the vital issues that they are facing at the time. Everything
from birth control to lifestyle changes. All types of things that they
might not feel comfortable with talking about in the home setting for
whatever reason.” |
| Della
Curtis, Coordinator, Office of Library Information Systems (right),
and Carolyn Mollenkopf, Professional Research Librarian, Baltimore
County Public Schools, discuss "The Birthing of a Telecommunications
Policy in Schools." |
But for many, the
unprecedented accessibility and ubiquity of all kinds of information
afforded by the Internet call for a reassessment of traditional arguments.
“Watching my
two-year-old niece boot up a computer is a chilling thing,” said guest
speaker Paula Bruening, Staff Counsel for the Center for Democracy and
Technology, echoing the oft-cited inequity of computer know-how between
parents and their children. “We have to make sure that parents are as
smart about computers as their kids are.”
Bruening took a
broad overview with her program “Protecting Children Online: First
Amendment Considerations,” outlining past and present legislative attempts
to regulate content on the Internet and their impact upon basic freedoms
as defined by the Constitution.
“Kids think that
they know more than we do,” said Karren Jo Pope-Onwukwe, who co-chairs the
PAC with Adam Sean Cohen. “They know the hardware more than we do, but we
know people, we know human nature better than they do, and so this will
hopefully help the teachers and the counselors and the IT people do what
we ask them to do.”
But there is more
in question than pornography; obscenity is in the eye of the beholder. And
as a parent, the issue is as personal for Pope-Onwukwe as it is for
anyone. “My son is 14 years old,” she said. “He goes to high school, and I
went to the [high school’s] webpage one day to get some information, and a
pop-up ad appeared, telling them that they won a sweepstakes and asking
for all of this personal data…on the high-school webpage.”
“Sometimes, we
folks that live here in the Baltimore/Washington corridor don’t realize
that we have a lot of information,” added Pope-Onwukwe. “But when you go
outside of this area, people just don’t know. The Public Awareness
Committee wants to make sure that this is something where people get
information, useful, practical information that they can take back to
their communities and help them with what they’re doing.”
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