The American Civil Liberties Union is interpreting a ruling by the Librarian of Congress on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as a green light for its clients to repost the program that reveals sites blocked by the CyberPatrol filtering software. The ruling allows decryption of copyrighted Internet filtering software to find out what sites are blocked, so that the methodology can be criticized and debated openly and fairly.
“Our position from the beginning has been that our clients have every right to post the CyberPatrol key code,” ACLU attorney Chris Hansen said. “Now that Congress is poised to pass legislation mandating blocking software on school and library computers, it is crucial that parents and consumers be made aware of the many valuable sites that they will be missing as a result.”
ACLU attorneys acted as counsel for three individuals who mirrored the original “cphack” utility developed by codebreakers in Canada and Sweden in an appeal of U.S. District Court Judge Edward Harrington’s order barring its distribution. The appeal was dismissed in September because the mirror-site operators were not parties to the original case. The ACLU also interprets this as confirming its view that its clients’ actions are not bound by the original decision.
Posted November 13, 2000.