From:      "Patrick Greene, PhD" pgreene@fgcu.edu
To:        cipa-study@ntia.doc.gov
Date:      Thu, Aug 8, 2002  2:13 PM
Subject:   comments in response to section 1703 of the Children's Internet Protection Act
(CIPA)

As an Educational Technologist, I have continuing and passionate 
interest in seeing CIPA adequately address the technological needs of 
the nation's K-12 students.  In its present form, I do not think it does 
that, for the following reasons (pertinent to section 1703):

First, the primary needs of an educational institution are to educate. 
 Educating kids in proper ways to avoid inproper Internet content, and 
measures to take when this content is inadvertantly accessed, requires 
the same type of connectivity that is experienced in the children's 
home, the local Library, or the office of the child's parents.  In none 
of these locations are there filtered content.  Because of this, the 
Internet atmosphere at the schools, under CIPA, presents a inauthentic 
environment.  Within this environment, teachers cannot prepare their 
charges to deal with the realities they will face outside the 
overprotected school walls.

Second, the companies producing filtering software, do not allow access 
to the blocking database.  The schools/districts are therefore cosigned 
to the filtering decisions of an outside party, whose ideas of 
inappropriateness may not conform to the schools policies.  Also, the 
filtering software blocks large amounts of acceptable and legitimate 
information, depriving students from its use.

Third, the filtering companies have been selling their filtering 
software to right-wing religious organizations, as produsts that 
correspond to their philosophy(s).  In this context, they are blocking 
decisions that may violate the legal rights of public school students. 
 An example of this is blocking of sites favorable to a homosexual 
lifestyle, but not blocking sites that are unfavorable to this 
lifestyle.  In these cases, a school or district can be leaving 
themselves open to lawsuits.  This liability will remain unknown to the 
district administration because they have no access to the database 
being used by the filtering software.

Patrick Greene, PhD
pgreene@fgcu.edu
Florida Gulf Coast University