Barely a week after Extreme Associates' husband-and-wife operators were arrested on obscenity charges, the Bush Administration is asking the Supreme Court to reinstate the Child Online Protection Act, meant to punish adult and other "inappropriate" Website operators whose material is exposed to children, and on hold since the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the law. 

U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson filed an August 11 appeal saying a recent high court ruling – that public libraries getting federal computer technology funds can be forced to install content filtering – is insufficient, according to the Associated Press. Olson told the nine justices children "are unprotected from the harmful effects of the enormous amount of pornography on the World Wide Web." 

Filtering critics have argued that the technology is still so inexact that the filters block "legitimate" news and information Websites almost as often as they block adult and other "obscene" or "inappropriate" sites, RedNova said. The COPA's critics have argued that this law, like an earlier law aimed at blocking porn from children that the Supreme Court struck down as a too-broad abrogation of free speech, abrogates the rights of adults to see and buy what they want online. 

ACLU associate legal director Ann Beeson told the AP the government wasn't as likely to persuade the high court to uphold COPA as it was on the filtering law. "I would have thought the Justice Department would have better things to do with its time than to defend what is clearly an unconstitutional law," she said.  

The Supreme Court had earlier sent the COPA back to a federal appeals court in Philadelphia for further review of the law's First Amendment implications, RedNova added, while noting the same appeals court had ruled the COPA violates free speech in two prior rulings.