The Washington State Supreme Court handed down its decision in Bradburn v. North Central Regional Library District yesterday, the library filtering case in which CDT filed an amicus brief with EFF last year. The case dealt with the North Central Regional Library’s (NCRL) refusal to disable filtering software on library computers following an adult patron’s request, with the state Supreme Court shockingly finding that the library system’s actions to prohibit access to constitutionally protected material did not violate the Washington Constitution.
The federal standard for library filtering, developed in the U.S. v. American Library Association case challenging the Children’s Internet Protection Act, is clear: the constitutionality of government-mandated filtering regimes depends upon the ability of adult patrons to request that filtering mechanisms be disabled entirely. While there was no majority holding in the ALA case, all nine Justices argued either that library filtering violated the First Amendment, or that the constitutional defects of a mandatory filtering scheme could be avoided only if library patrons could, in fact, get full, unfiltered access to the wealth of constitutionally protected speech online.
[C]ensoring material on the Internet is not the same thing as declining to purchase a particular book. It is more like refusing to circulate a book that is in the collection based on its content. That would raise serious constitutional concerns.
