OFFICE OF INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM'S CENSORIOUS "FRIEND"

Today I was appalled to learn from the Assistant Director of ALA's Office of Intellectual Freedom, that some of the "friends" ALA/OIF has accepted as friends and co-signers in the ALA Supreme Court lawsuit concerning the Federal Decency Act are the online providers American Online (AOL) and CompuServe, who are major censors of information and information transfer, print and nonprint. Indeed, AOL is notorious for its blatant censorship, going so far as to censor the use of the word "breast" (see the article by AL Editor, Leonard Kniffel, AL, March, 1996, p. 27) on their service. AOL, with 5 million subscribers and 400,000 to 500,000 users online with AOL at any one time during "peak hours", may be the greatest censor in the "Free World" at this time. I have been told by AOL workers that AOL cancels hundred's of customer's accounts each week for transmitting print or nonprint transmission through them that they subjectively deem to be "indecent".

Ms. Liebow admitted that AOL was a great censor, and that OIF did not approve of their censorship, but said that, "we may need to deal with that in the future".

To me this is pragmatism gone mad!

Until AOL stops censoring information, I do not think that the ALA should have any relationship with AOL and its censorious ilk, much less accept them as "friends" and associates. I fully support the ALA/OIF suit, have supported the OIF for decades, and count Judy Krug as one of my friends, but I DEMAND that ALA disassociate us from AOL (etc.) immediately, in all ways. And I ask that the Freedom to Read Foundation and the ALA Executive Committee immediately act to see that this happens. We do not need to be in bed with these blatant enemies of intellectual freedom!

R. M. Collard
LIS Consulting
Cobden, IL