In October 2011, the ACLU of Maryland received a complaint that Montgomery County, which uses iBoss filtering software on all of its government computers, was improperly blocking access to a wide variety of LGBT-related websites by falsely labeling them as pornography. The county promptly sought to rectify this problem, by unblocking specific sites that were called to its attention as being improperly blocked. iBoss also took steps to update its software to make the filtering less aggressive. But the ACLU contacted iBoss after those adjustments had been made, because several innocuous LGBT-related websites continued to be blocked, including: 

  • Evangelicals Concerned (ecwr.org),

  • Families Like Ours (familieslikeours.org),

  • Freedom to Marry (freedomtomarry.org),

  • Lesbian Health & Research Center (lesbianhealthinfo.org),

  • Marriage Equality USA (marriageequality.org),

  • Pride At Work Action Center (prideatwork.org), and

  • Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (sldn.org).    

ACLU "Don't Filter Me" Project

Attorney(s)

Deborah Jeon, legal director of the ACLU of Maryland, worked together with the national ACLU's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Project.

Date filed

October 24, 2011

Status

Victory!