David Burt (filtering Advocate) - Filtering Facts

Filtering Facts

In July 1997, his concerns about children potentially being exposed to pornography on the Internet led him to start Filtering Facts, a nonprofit organization that encouraged libraries to voluntarily adopt filters. Burt's advocacy included testifying as an expert witness in the library filtering case Mainstream Loudon v. Board in 1998; before the National Commission on Library and Information Science; as well as state legislatures, city councils, and local library boards. This activism was profiled in an article in the New York Times in 1999.

In 1999, Burt filed over 15,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests of public libraries seeking public records documenting incidents involving Internet pornography in public libraries. Burt compiled the over 2,000 incidents into a report published by the Family Research Council entitled Dangerous Access 2000: Uncovering Pornography in America's Libraries The reports included news stories but also anecdotal, often second and thirdhand, reports. Judith Krug, director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, stated that the report was "inflammatory and sensational", based on an agenda "to control what everyone reads, views, and listens to."

Dangerous Access 2000 was entered into the Congressional Record in 2000 in support of the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), a law Congress passed in 2000 requiring public libraries that receive certain types of federal funding to purchase filtering software.