CENSOR'S SENSIBILITY

Seeking to protect fellow citizens from depravities ranging from TV violence to rap lyrics, from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Howard Stern, some Americans have always had a hard time restraining themselves from trying to circumvent the First Amendment. And the World Wide Web, with its infinite plenitude of pro-Satan home pages and SEXY NUDE BABES! sites, has more, um, free speech in need of protection than any medium in history. As lurid tales of online obscenity seep into America's consciousness, a variety of Internet sentinels have volunteered their services.

Or was that Internet censors? What one group claims as guardianship of public morality strikes another as unconscionable, not to mention unconstitutional, interference. In June the Supreme Court slapped down the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which prohibited the posting of "indecent" material over the Net. This decision in turn has created a hot market for products that derisive Net-heads call "censorware"--such software filters as CyberPatrol, NetNanny and SurfWatch ($29.95 to $39.95) that offer to help nervous parents keep inappropriate material from prying but underage eyes.

Just what is inappropriate is a messy issue, as citizens of Loudoun County, Va., a conservative enclave northwest of Washington, can attest. Last month, after six public hearings and over the objections of library staff, the county library board adopted the region's most restrictive Internet-access policy. Henceforth, the library will arm its computers with filters to censor obscene sites--the definition of obscenity, of course, being largely up to whichever filter Loudoun County ends up deciding to buy. Adults who want to cruise the Net sans filter will have to ask the librarian to call off the watchdogs; children under 17 will be able to do so only if accompanied by an adult. "The issue is whether pornography will get into the library," says board president John Nicholas. "Our task is to protect our children."

A more politically fireproof sentence has yet to be conceived by mortal man. On the surface the policy seems reasonable, given the prevalence of offensive sites and the ease with which even a novice Web surfer can find them (though most porn sites these days can't be accessed without a credit card). But free-speech advocates call censorware a cure worse than the disease. Filtering programs block Web pages in one of two ways. The more primitive method is to search for key words in the pages' titles, a system with all the subtlety of a Gatling gun. America Online, for instance, once banned the word breast from some areas of its service, which outraged breast-cancer sufferers locked out of their bulletin boards. And SurfWatch legendarily banned sites featuring the word couples, only to discover that that word appears on the White House's official site.

A better method is to study individual sites--yes, that means hundreds of thousands of them, one at a time--and then place them on yes or no lists that can be updated as new pages pop up in the Web's endless sprawl. A program called CyberPatrol identifies 12 categories of troublesome material (violence, profanity, sexual acts and so on) that parents can block at their discretion. The software can also be adjusted for different age groups. "My six-year-old son doesn't need to know how to put on a condom," says CyberPatrol spokeswoman Sydney Rubin. "But I'll sure want him to know when he's 13."