URL:
http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2000-02-02/feature.html
Spy
vs Spite The
Clinton administration has praised the
Anti-Defamation
League
for helping shield kids from Internet
hate. But should a group that spied on
thousands of Californians be allowed to
police the Web? By Matt Isaacs
THE first snow of the
season is falling on New York in big
fluffy flakes, making the city look new
again. The offices of the Anti-Defamation
League of B'nai B'rith, located in U.N.
Plaza, are stuffy, the windows steamed.
Everyone appears a bit disheveled; rumpled
clothes and flattened hat hair seem to be
in vogue. Jordan Kessler, a
handsome young man with a beard, sits at a
computer terminal, talking about how he
compiles his list.  Kessler
is personally responsible for the ADL's
HateFilter, a software program that blocks
access to Web sites that, the ADL
contends, contain bigoted or hateful
speech. This 25-year-old Columbia grad has
accepted the enormous task of seeking out
and cataloging inflammatory language among
the roughly 800 million Web pages
available to the public. He has help, of
course. The ADL, a group dedicated to
securing "justice and fair treatment for
all citizens alike," has 30 offices around
the country tracking extremists of every
different shade, and each office has
Kessler's direct line.
Kessler assembles a list of all the
groups his organization deems dangerous;
it's a list that must be constantly
updated because, he says, hatemongers have
a tendency to mutate. To be deemed
objectionable by the ADL, a site must be
cleared by a committee of the
organization's managers before it makes
Kessler's list. He won't say how many
people are on the committee, or reveal the
names of the organizations he has labeled
as dangerous. Some of the groups he watches, Kessler
says, also watch him. Some revel, just
because their sites have been chosen by
the ADL, he says. It's like making the big
time. The Web designers for the white
supremacist site World Church of the
Creator, for example, actually promote
their work with a quote taken out of
context from a Kessler report in which he
grudgingly complimented the graphics for
that site. "If their Web site gets blocked by the
ADL, in their eyes they've made it," he
says. "They think we are all-powerful, in
control of the government and everything
that stands in their way." Kessler's screen displays a number of
yellow file folders. One folder is titled
"Gays," presumably a file on gay-bashers.
Another is titled "Arabs," presumably a
list of anti-Arab groups. He says he takes
great care in reviewing a site before he
brings it to the committee. Many sites may
be offensive, he says, featuring
anti-Semitic jokes or caricatures, but
they won't make the list of those to be
blocked by the ADL's HateFilter. On the
other hand, he says, some sites might be
recommended for the list based on what the
ADL knows about the organization rather
than the content of the site. His
organization has been monitoring hate
groups for more than 85 years, he says,
bringing an expertise that stretches far
beyond HTML or Java codes. The ADL has
been fighting anti-Semitism, in its own
way, since 1913. The organization was
founded by Sigmund Livingston, a
Chicago attorney, hoping to fight the
overt presence of anti-Semitism in
American society following the turn of
the century. Livingston began with two
desks, $200, and the sponsorship of the
Independent Order of B'nai B'rith,
meaning "Children of the Covenant."
Since then the organization has grown
into a national nonprofit organization
that took in $46 million in revenues in
1998 and employs 200 people in its New
York headquarters alone. In the 1960s
the ADL fought stridently for the
passage of the Civil Rights Acts of
1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act
of 1965. More recently it pioneered
efforts to create a model for "hate
crime" laws. It is an organization with a unique
mission, given that its existence is
largely based on the continuance of racism
and bigotry. If anti-Semitism had
disappeared from the face of the Earth
during the 20th century, the ADL might
have withered away, too. But even five
decades beyond the fall of Nazi Germany,
the world continues to be a prejudiced
place, and the organization still
regularly denounces anti-Semitic
statements made in print, over the
airwaves, and, more recently, over the
Internet. The Web is a new frontier, presenting
the ADL with fresh challenges and
opportunities for growth. The medium has
given every electronic pamphleteer the
reach of a worldwide television
broadcasting network, making it easy for
anyone with a computer to spread his
message, racist or otherwise. Because the
Web is essentially unregulated, the ADL
believes cyberspace is "a dangerous place
for children," according to the
organization's literature. "There are no
parents or teachers standing by to guide
and advise a child who has come upon a
site that promotes hate. Without that
guidance, there is a real chance children
will simply accept what they read as
fact." In response to this supposed threat to
young minds, the ADL has stepped up its
own efforts to combat intolerance by
introducing the HateFilter, which runs on
Mattel's CyberPatrol, a software package
that blocks a wide gamut of material on
the Internet. Consumers who purchase the
HateFilter receive all of CyberPatrol's
features, including categories other than
hate speech, among them graphic violence
and pornography. But CyberPatrol purchased
on its own does not include the
HateFilter, because Mattel has its own
version of what it considers hate speech,
and does not market the filter, nor does
it necessarily approve of what the ADL's
HateFilter blocks, company officials
say. So far, the ADL HateFilter has been
marketed as a service to be used in the
home. But that may soon change.
CyberPatrol is already in 15,000 private
and public libraries, schools, and
universities, and the ADL has not ruled
out broadening the distribution of
HateFilter software to public
institutions. "Right now, the HateFilter
is not meant to be used by the government,
but over the next few months we will be
discussing whether we will advocate for
its use in schools and libraries," says
Sue Stengel, an ADL attorney.  It
appears, however, that the organization,
which wields tremendous clout in
Washington, has already begun to advocate
-- at the highest levels. The ADL's
national director, Abraham Foxman,
met with President Clinton at least
twice last year, once following the
Littleton shooting in May, and again in
the wake of an attack on a Jewish
community center in Granada Hills in
August. After the latter meeting, Malcolm
Hoenlein, a top official in the Conference
of Presidents of Major Jewish
Organizations, told reporters that Clinton
had agreed to take the lead in persuading
Americans to install a "hate filter" on
their computers. In October, Clinton again
met with the ADL, and began his speech
with a tribute to the organization's new
software. "Thank you for your pioneering
work to filter out hate on the Internet --
which, lamentably, was part of the poison
that led to the tragedy at Columbine High
School," Clinton said.
More recently, Elizabeth
Coleman, the ADL's director of civil
rights, was asked to participate in a
panel discussion concerning a "family
friendly" Internet at a conference for the
National Association of Attorneys General
a few weeks ago -- a conference where
Attorney General Janet Reno gave
the keynote address. Coleman demonstrated
the filter for all the law enforcement
officials in attendance. She said over
lunch that the organization had also shown
the filter to Vice President Al
Gore, who "loved it." If made explicit, White House support
for the ADL filter could have a
significant impact on the policy decisions
of public schools and libraries across the
country. Although decisions regarding
school and library Internet filters are
currently made at the local level, a bill
before Congress spearheaded by Sen.
John McCain, called the Children's
Internet Protection Act, would require all
schools and libraries receiving federal
funds to install Internet filters on
computers accessible to children. If the
bill wins approval, even a mention by the
White House, combined with the ADL's
strong regional lobbying, could go a long
way toward encouraging local jurisdictions
to choose the HateFilter from the
filtering software on the market. But if Clinton
likes and Gore loves the HateFilter (at
least in the ADL's eyes), many are
aghast at the thought of the ADL having
any say over what children may or may
not see. These critics, whose political
and religious affiliations vary widely,
repeatedly describe the ADL as a
self-appointed agent of Israel that
cloaks itself in the rhetoric of
fighting hate, while actively
attempting to silence those who are not
hatemongers, but mere opponents of
Israeli government policy. "The Number 1 goal of the ADL is the
protection of Israel," says Pete
McCloskey, a former Republican
congressman from San Mateo who regularly
criticized Israel's policies. "Any group
whose sole purpose is to protect a foreign
nation should not have anything to say
about what's said or written here in
America." On a number of occasions since the
1970s, the ADL has been caught
distributing lists of its enemies, replete
with detailed descriptions of "black
demagogues" and "pro-Arab propagandists,"
including poet Amiri Baraka in the
list of demagogues, and Massachusetts
Institute of Technology professor Noam
Chomsky under the propagandist label.
Then, in 1993, a longtime ADL
investigator admitted to working with
a member of the San Francisco Police
Department to illegally gather information
on almost 10,000 people, including members
of socialist, labor, and anti-apartheid
groups. Some of the targets of that
information-gathering effort have gone to
court in an attempt to gain access to
their dossiers, currently in possession of
the ADL, but the ADL has refused to
release the files, claiming that its
investigator was an "investigative
journalist" whose unpublished reporting
materials are protected against disclosure
by the California shield law, which was
originally adopted to help journalists
keep confidential sources who reveal
important public wrongdoing
confidential. Thus the ADL finds itself in a sticky
position: While it advocates for a
software product that limits access to the
Internet's open exchange of ideas, the
Anti-Defamation League is also hiding
behind a law put in place to encourage
people to speak freely.
The ADL recently added one episode to a
videotape it uses in workshops that are
meant to promote cultural understanding in
schools. The vignette shows a boy, about
15 years old, surfing the Web in his
school library. He comes across a page
called the Zundelsite, with the headline
"Did Six Million Really Die?" "Hey guys, come here," the kid says to
his friends. "Check this out. It says here
the Holocaust was a bunch of bull. Like it
never really happened like the Jews say it
did." Two blond students lean over his
shoulder, as a dark-haired student listens
to the conversation in the background.
"Wow, big surprise. I hear they always
lie," one boy says. "I guess they just want us to feel
sorry for 'em," says a girl, as they look
at a page titled "Holocaust Myth 101." "Well. They can lie all they want,"
says the boy who found the page. "Looks
like we dug up the truth." At this point, the instructor leading
the workshop is supposed to stop the video
and begin a discussion, using questions
from an accompanying guide. On the whole,
the questions are predictable classroom
fare: "What happened?," "Has anyone ever
experienced a similar situation?," and so
on. But one question stands out: "Should
the school have some kind of policy
regarding what students can access on the
Internet?" In fact, many public secondary schools
have Internet policies for minors, as do
almost all public libraries. And both
types of institutions are leaning toward
the use of filtering software to limit
what children can access on the Web. The
San Francisco Unified School District, for
example, employs a systemwide filter to
block access to a variety of material,
including "intolerance." School officials
would not identify the name of the
filter. The policy discussions regarding the
protection of minors on the Internet thus
far have dealt almost exclusively with
pornography. In the heated debate over
First Amendment freedoms on the Web, smut
has taken center stage because it has
already been addressed and narrowly
defined. The Supreme Court has ruled that
"obscene" speech, meaning material
appealing to a prurient or unhealthy
interest in sex and lacking serious
artistic, scientific, literary, or
political value, can be regulated by the
government. The Supreme Court has also ruled that
the definition of "obscene" can take the
age of the audience into account. Thus,
for adults, pornographic films are, by and
large, protected by the First Amendment.
But the government may prohibit the sale
of these films to minors by labeling the
material "indecent," a much broader,
generally ill-defined category. In 1996, Congress tried to apply the
court's broad definition of "indecent" in
its passage of the Communications Decency
Act, a law prohibiting the transmission of
"indecent" material over the Internet. But
in 1997, the Supreme Court struck down the
law in Reno vs. ACLU, declaring that
communications on the Internet cannot be
limited to what is suitable for children.
The landmark ruling prevents a library
from installing porn filters on terminals
intended for adult use. But it still
allows schools or libraries to restrict a
minor's access to smut. A school or library may also limit
children's access to hate speech, but for
a different reason. Ordinarily, in a
public forum, anything outside the narrow
definition of "obscene" is protected by
the First Amendment. But schools and
libraries are not the same as the town
square (or the Internet), where people can
spout hateful rhetoric to their heart's
desire. A library has only so much shelf
space; thus a professional librarian has
the right to choose which materials to
include in a collection, and which to
leave out. The same goes for schools,
which have the right to set their own
curriculums and base the selection of
library books on those curriculums. "That's why if you were to go to your
local library in search of books on the
Holocaust, you would probably find many,"
says Frederick Schauer, a First
Amendment professor at the Kennedy School
of Government at Harvard University. "But
it's not likely you'll find any books that
say the Holocaust didn't happen. And I
think most people would agree that's
appropriate." Schauer says he believes the debate
over allowing speech filters for minors
into the public forum is only just
beginning. Would it be possible for the
ADL HateFilter to find a place in public
libraries and schools? Yes, he says,
although it would be challenged in court,
and would probably be more likely to be
allowed in secondary schools than in
public libraries that serve all ages. Some First Amendment lawyers find it
curious that the ADL would even be getting
into the business of speech filters. The
Anti-Defamation League, after all,
considers itself a civil rights
organization. Judging from literature
promoting the HateFilter software, it's
clear the ADL is thinking about the
apparent conflict between the civil right
of free speech, and the limitation of
speech inherent to Internet filtering
software. Almost every page of HateFilter
literature mentions the First Amendment,
and explains that the ADL does not seek to
censor or limit speech on the Internet.
The HateFilter does not remove sites or
censor their content, says ADL Director
Elizabeth Coleman; it only blocks these
sites from coming into the home at the
parents' discretion. Parents have good reason for wanting to
keep these sites off their computers,
Coleman says. Many extremist sites cater
to children, she says. For example, the
World Church of the Creator site has a
special link for kids. Other sites, she
says, are highly polished, presenting
themselves as mainstream academic thought.
This misinformation, she says, can lead to
the kind of violence that has made
headlines in recent years. Last August,
for example, three teenagers firebombed a
judge's house in San Jose, believing he
was Jewish. (He was actually Catholic.)
Investigators say two of the kids had used
computers at school to access white
supremacist Web sites. Also, Matthew
and James Williams, brothers suspected
of murdering a gay couple in Redding and
setting fire to three synagogues in
Sacramento, were reported to have been led
astray by radical right philosophies
ferried on the Internet. (Although at 31
and 29 years of age, the brothers would
not have been constrained by an Internet
filter aimed at minors.) Coleman
says the best part of the HateFilter is
that it doesn't just block sites, it
also routes Internet surfers back to
links on the ADL Web page that provide
information about extremists such as
white supremacists or Holocaust
deniers. "Nobody else has the same
educational component," she says.
But critics of Internet filters wonder
if they actually do more harm than good. A
highly regarded study by Chris
Hunter, a graduate student at the
University of Pennsylvania, for instance,
found that the devices block an average of
21 percent of Web sites containing useful,
legal information, while failing to block
an average of 25 percent of sites
containing "objectionable" content. (The
ADL's HateFilter was not included in the
study.) Even organizations that have
historically spoken out against racism and
gay-bashing, such as the American Civil
Liberties Union, object to Internet speech
filters. Ann Brick, an attorney
with the civil rights organization, says
that one of the inherent risks of filters
is that consumers never know the political
or commercial biases of the filter's
manufacturer. "The ADL is a partial
organization, in that they have a point of
view," she says. "And what they consider
hate speech might be a complex exposition
of the Israeli-Arab conflict." The Southern Poverty Law Center,
another civil rights
organization that publishes its own
annual list of extremists on the Web, is
also unconvinced of the efficacy of
filters. Joe Roy, director of the
center's intelligence project, says his
organization supports any effort to fight
hatred, but would not endorse a speech
filter because, in the organization's
opinion, filters simply don't work. The ADL's software manufacturer,
CyberPatrol, has taken an especially hard
beating from critics who say the filtering
software has mistakenly blocked sites such
as Creatures Comfort Pet Care Service and
the MIT Project on Mathematics and
Computations, for their explicit sexual
content. Because the HateFilter has a narrower
scope, ADL officials say, it is more
sophisticated than other filters on the
market. "You're getting 85 years of
knowledge and experience monitoring these
groups," says Coleman. "Yet we want to be
subtle. You can't use a sledgehammer in
this endeavor." And in a limited test run of the
software, the HateFilter does appear to be
more refined than its competitors. It
doesn't block the Pat Buchanan Web
site, though Buchanan has been critical of
Israel and made controversial statements
about Jews in the past. It does block a
site called Radio Islam, which blatantly
flaunts its hatred of Jews. It also blocks
what appears to be a very thoughtful --
and hardly controversial -- site called
Interracial Voice, containing a long list
of essays describing the challenges of
growing up with parents from different
cultures. Elizabeth Coleman says the ADL's block
on the Interracial Voice page was an
oversight. The ADL will
not provide a list of blocked sites,
officials say, because in the wrong
hands, it could be used as a kind of
address book for extremists, allowing
them easier communication with one
another. Without a list of blocked
sites, however, it's hard to get a
picture of what the ADL deems
inappropriate for children. And an
understanding of this bigger picture is
important, critics say, because
contrary to Coleman's claims, the ADL
has a history of making blacklists that
do, in fact, attack legitimate schools
of thought with a sledgehammer. In the early 1980s, for example,
records show the organization circulated
through college campuses a confidential
list of pro-Arab sympathizers "who use
their anti-Zionism as a guise for their
deeply felt anti-Semitism." The report
contained the names of respected
professors from Georgetown University,
Columbia University, and the University of
California at Berkeley, among others, who
had criticized Israel for its invasion of
Lebanon. When the Middle East Studies
Association discovered the document, and
called for the ADL to disown it, a
high-ranking ADL official was quoted in
the New York Times blaming it on an
"overly zealous student volunteer." Francis Boyle, a professor of
law at the University of Illinois, still
has vivid memories of what it was like to
be the recipient of the ADL's wrath. He
says when he and a colleague began giving
lectures critical of Israel's attack on
the Palestine Liberation Organization in
Lebanon, the ADL and a local Jewish
organization went far out of their way to
silence them. Boyle says ADL members would
sit in the front row during his lectures,
simply to shout him down. The
organizations also filed a complaint
against him with the dean of the law
school, he says. "I was really surprised.
Here I thought the ADL was this great
civil rights organization, and they're
doing these things that are totally
antithetical to what academic freedom is
supposed to be about." But Boyle says things were much worse
for his Jewish colleague. When the
colleague began speaking about the
atrocities he had seen when he visited
Lebanon in 1982, Boyle says the ADL
organized for students to boycott the
professor's classes and requested that the
administration deny the professor tenure.
"The ADL was far worse on Jews who
criticized Israel than they were on Arabs.
They treated them like traitors," Boyle
says. "The ADL has turned itself into a
dirty tricks organization for Israel."
Steve Zeltzer and Jeff
Blankfort had already been active in
Middle Eastern politics for many years
when, in 1987, they founded an
organization called the Labor Committee on
the Middle East, a group that, by their
description, was devoted to alerting
American workers to the plight of laborers
in all the Middle Eastern countries. It
could hardly be called an organization,
they say. It was really just a handful of
like-minded people. Or so they
thought. The first meetings were held at
Zeltzer's house in San Francisco. Those
who attended were familiar with one
another, except for a man named Roy
Bullock. Blankfort says he had seen
Bullock around the American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee. "I
recognized him and was a bit surprised to
see him at our meeting. I wondered if he
was really interested," Blankfort
says. But, Blankfort recounts, Bullock said
he liked what they were doing and wanted
to be a part of the gang, and, evidently,
that was good enough for the other
members. As is often the case with those
who fashion themselves to be part of the
radical left, the members chose as one of
their first projects an event that had
little to do with the group's core
interest. They decided to organize a
picket line at the Fairmont Hotel in San
Francisco, protesting a luncheon being
held by an Israeli organization called
Histadrut, which reportedly had financial
interests in South Africa, then still in
the grip of apartheid policies. The guests of honor at the event were
former California Assemblyman Richard
Katz from Sylmar, and then-Speaker of
the Assembly Willie Brown. At the time, there was a growing
anti-apartheid movement in the U.S.,
strongly supported by African-American
organizations in the Bay Area, and if the
public were to become aware of Histadrut's
financial ties, Brown's participation in
the event would not look good. Evidently
he was aware of this, and sent a
thoughtful, two-page response declining
Zeltzer's request for him to pull out of
the event. The Labor Committee on the Middle East
went forward with the protest, organizing
about 60 people, including Roy Bullock, to
picket in front of the Fairmont. Not long after the demonstration,
Blankfort received an anonymous envelope.
Inside was a torn-out page from a
newsletter published by the Institute
of Historical Review, a Holocaust
denial organization. Blankfort wondered
why he would get something from a neo-Nazi
group he despised. He was shocked to see
it was an article accusing Roy Bullock of
being a spy for the ADL. But spies of one kind or another are
not uncommon in radical circles, Blankfort
says. "My father was a blacklisted writer,
and the FBI was poking around for years,"
he says. "I'm used to it."
As it turns out, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation was tracking Bullock's
activities; the FBI, however, was
concerned with Bullock because he was an
operative for the South African
government. When Bullock was questioned in 1993,
according to court records, he told FBI
agents that he had been instructed by the
ADL to gather information on
anti-apartheid groups, a statement he
would later recant. He told federal agents
he had been working as a "fact finder" for
the ADL since 1954, when he was asked to
gather information on a Communist Party
club in Indianapolis. In 1987, he said, he
met Tom Gerard, an officer with the
San Francisco Police Department, who began
supplying Bullock with records such as
motor vehicle registrations and criminal
histories -- records that, by law, are to
be used by police and prosecutors only in
legitimate criminal investigations.
Bullock also admitted to receiving
approximately $16,000 from the South
African government in exchange for
information on anti-apartheid groups. He
also admitted to turning over information
to Israel. At the time, Israel and South
Africa maintained loose diplomatic
relationships, because both faced trade
sanctions, Israel from Arab countries, and
South Africa from a wide variety of
nations opposed to its apartheid
policies. The ADL says Bullock was acting on his
own while collecting information on
anti-apartheid groups. In an investigation by the city, San
Francisco police seized 10 boxes of
information from the offices of the
ADL. A police
officer testified that 75 percent of the
material was illegally obtained from
confidential government sources, according
to court records. Police also
examined Bullock's computer files, which
contained information on 9,876 people,
along with 1,394 driver's license numbers.
The people were divided into four
categories: "Arabs," "Pinkos," "Right,"
and "Skins." Zeltzer and Blankfort were
listed under "Pinkos." Included in
Zeltzer's dossier was a description of the
protest at the Fairmont Hotel. Although thousands of nonpublic
documents were found in the possession of
both Bullock and the ADL, the city offered
a settlement agreement to the organization
in November 1993. As a result of the deal,
the ADL paid a $75,000 civil fine --
most of which went
to charitable causes along the lines of
the ADL's own interests, such as a Hate
Crimes Reward Fund -- while denying
all allegations of wrongdoing. Gerard, whom
the ADL had sent on an
all-expenses-paid trip to Israel in
1991, pleaded no contest to a
misdemeanor charge of unauthorized use
of a police computer and was sentenced
to three years' probation, 45 days in
jail, and a $2,500 fine. He is no
longer with the Police Department.
Since the city settled its civil case
against the ADL, 17 people who had been
subjects of the ADL's investigation have
attempted to recover their files; they are
represented in court by former Congressman
Pete McCloskey, whose wife is one of the
plaintiffs. So far, the ADL has blocked
those efforts, claiming to be a
news-gathering organization and invoking
the need for journalists to protect their
confidential sources. The California Court
of Appeals has ruled that plaintiffs who
were the target of illegitimate
information-gathering that resulted in the
transfer of information to a foreign
government have a right to see what was
transferred. The lawsuit has certainly shed light on
how the organization has gathered
information. For example, the former
director of the ADL's San Francisco
office, Richard Hirschhaut,
testified that he was aware that Bullock
had prepared reports on hundreds of
individuals and organizations. He also
said that up to half of the ADL's
activities in the seven years between 1986
and 1993 had been centered on discrediting
political views that disagreed with the
organization's support of Israel, rather
than on the ADL's traditional efforts to
counter bigotry and anti-Semitism.
The Internet has undoubtedly made it
easier for children to access
inappropriate information. Few would argue
that a child has something to gain by
reading the diatribes of the Farm Belt
Führer, and, although hate crimes are
actually on the decline in terms of
numbers, the hate incidents that have
occurred recently are conscience-shocking.
Last year the country was introduced to
Benjamin Smith, who went on a
rampage in Indiana, wounding six Jews
coming home from Sabbath and killing an
African-American and an Asian-American
before committing suicide. Buford Furrow
Jr. became famous for shooting up a Jewish
community center in Los Angeles. And of
course there were Columbine's Dylan
Klebold and Eric Harris, two
teenagers wreaking bloody havoc on their
classmates. Teenagers are laughing while
they send bullets into their peers, and
the World Church of the Creator has a
special section for kids. Who wouldn't be looking for ways to
stop the haters? Potential presidents
certainly are. John McCain is stumping through
New Hampshire with his Children's Internet
Protection Act, a bill that would require
all public libraries and secondary schools
receiving federal subsidies for their
Internet hookups to install filtering
software on computers accessible to
minors. Many experts say the bill is very
likely to win approval from Congress. Al
Gore's campaign Web site has a link to
Internet Safety for Parents and Kids,
complete with follow-on links to the
filter sites Cybersitter and Netnanny. Judith Krug, a law expert with
the American Library Association, says she
expects to see an avalanche of Internet
filtering laws passed at the state level.
(Some states, including South Dakota and
Virginia, have already mandated Internet
filters for library computers accessible
to children.) "Without a doubt, schools
have to find ways to protect children from
inappropriate material," says CyberPatrol
Vice President of Marketing Susan
Getgood. "I see schools implementing
filters in record numbers." It
seems that the ADL's pet project,
HateFilter, couldn't have materialized at
a better time.
Throughout its long
life, the ADL has spent vast amounts of
money collecting information on the groups
it considers threatening, all for a small
number of ADL publications that few people
would ever read. Now the
organization has the opportunity to have a
major impact on how young people view the
world. It's quite
possible that every library and school
receiving federal funds across the
nation will be forced to install
filters on its computers, not just for
pornography, but for extremist speech
as well. These institutions will have a
choice between a few commercial
monoliths that provide filtering
software -- and a civil rights
organization that can accurately say it
has 85 years of experience in fighting
bigotry. Some public institutions will
almost certainly choose the HateFilter.
And without a list of sites the ADL has
decided to block, parents won't ever know
what their children are missing. Perhaps a
lecture by Noam Chomsky on the mainstream
media monopoly. Or a RealAudio spoken-word
monologue by Amiri Baraka, formerly known
as Leroi Jones. Or a detailed analysis of
the conflict between Israel and
Palestine. So far, nobody is connecting the dots
in a public way: An organization with a
history of ruthlessly silencing its
critics is trying to dictate the Internet
content available to the country's young
minds. And when asked about the
HateFilter, the White House offers this
vague comment of apparent support: "The
president certainly supports any tool that
blocks hate and other inappropriate
material on the Internet."
The Labor Committee on the Middle East
fizzled out a few years ago, but Steve
Zeltzer is still active in radical
politics. His Victorian home in Bernal
Heights is cluttered with tall stacks of
videocassettes, material for the
documentary television show he produces,
Labor on the Job. Zeltzer says he's still haunted by the
paranoid feelings that began when he
realized he was being watched. For the
first couple of weeks after his
confrontation with ADL "fact-finder" Roy
Bullock, Zeltzer says, his phone rang
repeatedly; when the answering machine
came on, the caller began dialing random
numbers, an apparent attempt to retrieve
messages left for Zeltzer. Now, if he
answers the phone and nobody's there, he
can't help but wonder if he's still being
targeted. Zeltzer says he's not surprised that
the ADL is creating an Internet filter. To
him, it's an extension of what the
organization has been doing for decades.
"They have always had enemies lists, and
they have always wanted to control the
flow of information," he says. "The
HateFilter is just an extension of that."
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