The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Eastern Missouri reached a settlement with the Camdenton R-III School District on March 28 regarding a judge’s ruling that the school district was using Internet filtering software inappropriately to block websites that supported the rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) individuals while allowing access to anti-LGBT websites. The settlement requires the district to stop blocking the websites in question, submit to 18 months of monitoring to make sure the websites stay unblocked, and pay $125,000 in legal fees.
The filtering software that the district used—URL Blacklist—has since changed its design to comply with the ruling. More information about the case is available on the ACLU’s website.
The ACLU has been helping students combat such discriminatory filtering through its Don’t Filter Me campaign, written about in much more detail by my colleague Ian Quillen in this story.