"Put aside any rumors you may have heard to the contrary: The strongest human urge is not sex. It is censorship."

So began the first Political Awareness Speaker of the year, visiting writer and lecturer Roger Newman of NYU Law School, to his St. Olaf audience. Newman went on to attack the "religious right" as the principle proponents of Internet censorship, and applauded the legal efforts of the ACLU. Both the 1995 Communications Decency Act and the 1998 Child Online Protection Act were overturned by the Supreme Court, on the grounds that they violated the First Amendment. For Newman, "Free speech is not cheap, nor is it always acceptable or pleasing. But it is the price we pay for democracy, American style."

Due to filtering programs put out by private companies, however, censorship is still a concern for those accessing the Internet from public schools or libraries. Such filtering programs most often block sites based on a list of "keywords." The result is that they succeed in blocking not only pornographic web sites but other, harmless ones as wellÑsuch as recipes for "chicken breasts."

Newman fears the stealthy installation of what he terms "silent censorship." "The government, in the spirit of the day, is privatizing censorshipÑcontracting it, outsourcing it to software companiesÑdoing indirectly what government cannot constitutionally do directly," he explained.

"The software that can selectively block materials inappropriate for children without also blocking constitutionally protected materials for adults simply does not exist," he added While Newman acknowledged that there is "a lot of horrible stuff" out there on the Internet, he insisted, "Filters will not make children into good citizens. They are merely mechanical tools wrapped around subjective judgement." He stressed the importance of parentsÕ roles and proposed Internet ethics courses in schools. "The very notion of censorship clashes with the idea of democracy. For in a democracy, no one is fit to be a censor. The only acceptable censor is the internal one."

St. Olaf College does not use any Internet filtering programs. Students are free to access whatever sites they choose to and must act on their own judgement. However, there are consequences to be paid by anyone caught looking at "horrible stuff" on school computers.