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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.
RELATED LINKS
Anti-Defamation League HateFilter
"a unique product that helps parents to make sure that messages of hate and
bigotry on the Internet do not reach their children"
Childrens' Internet Protection Act
The full text of the proposed text on THOMAS: Legislative Information on the
Internet
Spy vs. Spy
The classic MAD Magazine comic strip
>From ADL Watch:
ADL & HUAC
ADL and McCarthyism
ADL Enemies Lists
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