By Barbara Miner

Imagine if an unknown person came into your school library every month and removed books from the shelves. You would never be told which books were being taken or why, other than that someone, somewhere, deemed them "inappropriate," "indecent," "radical," "tasteless," or "gross." Imagine if the books included works on the Holocaust, Islam, AIDS/HIV, gay rights, the National Organization for Women, or the International Workers of the World union.

Couldn't ever happen? Guess again.

Under the guise of protecting children from "smut" and "indecency," Internet filtering programs routinely block access to thousands of World Wide Web pages, chat-rooms, newsgroups and other Internet options -- including the topics listed above. What's more, if Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) gets his way, Congress will pass legislation mandating that school districts must use filtering software if they want to receive discounts on telecommunications services, or what is known as the E-rate.

Groups fighting censorship, in particular organizations which want to nurture the democratic potential of the Internet, are hoping to scuttle the legislation. They also want to alert the public to the dark underside of seemingly innocuous filtering programs.

"The word 'filter' is much too kind to these programs. It conjures up inaccurate, gee-whiz images of sophisticated, discerning choice," Seth Finkelstein, a founder of The Censorware Project, said in testimony on the McCain bill this spring. "When these products are examined in detail, they usually turn out to be the crudest of blacklists, long tables of hapless material which has run afoul of a stupid computer program or person, perhaps offended by the word 'breast' (as in possibly 'breast cancer') ... ."

Such warnings are more than political rhetoric. Every filtering program that has been examined in detail, for instance, has placed feminist organizations on its list of censored sites, according to The Censorware Project, an on-line group founded by computer software experts, free speech advocates, and Internet activists. A number of filtering software companies have even blocked sites reporting on political and technical problems with the software.