At odds is the use of Internet filtering on the computers in the city library. Councilman Pete Constant supports the use of filters to weed out adult content form public computer stations.
"There have been multiple complaints of lewd acts and public indecency [that] are not discouraged or even addressed by the city's current computer use policy," he said.
Constant has some ammunition for his fight, gathered back in 2007 when he teamed up with KGO TV 7, the San Francisco ABC affiliate, which caught men watching fullscreen porn at computer stations in the library.
The city last considered the use of such filters back in 1997, and the city council rejected them because they believed they would filter out too many non-adult pages whose content included certain keywords — pages about breast cancer, for example.
But opposing Constant is head librarian Jane Light and a host of civil libertarians who argue that Internet filtering remains the blunt instrument that it was after the dawn of the widespread Internet age.
In any event, Constant is mostly fighting his fight alone. Most of his city council colleagues back librarian Light.
