site blocking

Any time the government attempts to filter the public’s access to information, there’s bound to be controversy. Such is the case with the current debate over public Internet access and the filtering software that many of these computers have installed on them. On one hand, you obviously do not want a pervert sitting in a public library salivating (or worse) over images of a pornographic nature, meanwhile children sit reading about George Washington in the background. At the same time, the very notion of information filtering by the government (regardless of what kind of information is being filtered) rubs many people in the wrong way.
One of the issues with filtering software is the fact that, by the very nature of their design, they often deem appropriate material to be unacceptable. This could interfere with research on a topic such as breast cancer, simply because of the presence of the word “breast” on a w...