There has been a sharp increase in high-technology surveillance. Surveillance is almost alwaysproposed as a complete response on a wide variety of safety issues. At the same time, there has beenan increase in criminal activity online. There is therefore a considerable interest in using Internetfiltering to regulate the behavior of individuals on the Internet. In recent years, many countries havechosen to restrict content on the Internet, where child-abusive material is the content that moststates currently block access to.

The main purpose of this master thesis is to explore a selection of Swedish librarians view of professional ethics. The latest master thesis written on the subject was published in 1997, which concluded that the Swedish public librarians had a poor awareness concerning professional ethics. We wanted to investigate if something had changed. We interviewed six librarians from five public libraries, asking them questions concerning ethical guidelines, responsibility, censorship and selection, pressure from lobbyists, and ethical problems relating to Internet. The answers we got gave the impression of a divided profession, and the librarian?s awareness of professional ethics can hardly be said to have been improved since 1997.

This paper is a research review in the realm of censorship systems andfiltering systems. It applies ethical considerations to the creation of censorshipsystems bringing forward discussion on the ethics of technology with thepurpose of limiting access to information.There is active research being done in the area of automatic content filteringand censorship systems. These are systems that can filter out undesiredmaterial, typically from the Internet, automatically. Used in some nations,many schools and even mandated in some libraries there are many ethicalquestions raised concerning censorship and access to information.Part of the review concerns the level of accuracy of these systems presentedby researchers in the field and the different approaches used. Reviewedarticles centre around automatic content classification and filtering ofpotentially harmful materials with regards to minors while some relate tocensorship technology in a wider sense.Results show a general lack of discussion concerning the ethics of thetechnology in the research reviewed.