Testimony Covers Limits of Filtering Software

Software products that claim to stop personal computers from accessing pornographic sites on the World Wide Web are doomed to fail, a computer language expert testified in a case challenging a federal effort to require libraries to install filtering software on computers.

At the trial, which is looking at how far the U.S. government can go to prevent children from exposure to pornography on library computers, Stanford University linguist Geoffrey Nunberg testified that the crude mathematical methods used to operate filtering software are simply no match for the subtleties of human judgment.

A special three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court is presiding over the constitutional case, which was brought by a coalition of libraries, library patrons and Web site operators hoping to overturn the Children’s Internet Protection Act with a free-speech challenge.