EFF and ACLU Urge Court to Maintain Block on Mississippi's 'Age Verification' Law (eff.org) 32
An anonymous Slashdot reader shared the EFF's "Deeplink" blog post:
EFF, along with the ACLU and the ACLU of Mississippi, filed an amicus brief on Thursday asking a federal appellate court to continue to block Mississippi's HB 1126 — a bill that imposes age verification mandates on social media services across the internet. Our friend-of-the-court brief, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, argues that HB 1126 is "an extraordinary censorship law that violates all internet users' First Amendment rights to speak and to access protected speech" online.
HB 1126 forces social media sites to verify the age of every user and requires minors to get explicit parental consent before accessing online spaces. It also pressures them to monitor and censor content on broad, vaguely defined topics — many of which involve constitutionally protected speech. These sweeping provisions create significant barriers to the free and open internet and "force adults and minors alike to sacrifice anonymity, privacy, and security to engage in protected online expression." A federal district court already prevented HB 1126 from going into effect, ruling that it likely violated the First Amendment.
At the heart of our opposition to HB 1126 is its dangerous impact on young people's free expression. Minors enjoy the same First Amendment right as adults to access and engage in protected speech online. "No legal authority permits lawmakers to burden adults' access to political, religious, educational, and artistic speech with restrictive age-verification regimes out of a concern for what minors might see" [argues the brief]. "Nor is there any legal authority that permits lawmakers to block minors categorically from engaging in protected expression on general purpose internet sites like those regulated by HB 1126..."
"The law requires all users to verify their age before accessing social media, which could entirely block access for the millions of U.S. adults who lack government-issued ID..." And it also asks another question. "Would you want everything you do online to be linked to your government-issued ID?"
And the blog post makes one more argument. "in an era where data breaches and identity theft are alarmingly common." So the bill "puts every user's personal data at risk... No one — neither minors nor adults — should have to sacrifice their privacy or anonymity in order to exercise their free speech rights online."
HB 1126 forces social media sites to verify the age of every user and requires minors to get explicit parental consent before accessing online spaces. It also pressures them to monitor and censor content on broad, vaguely defined topics — many of which involve constitutionally protected speech. These sweeping provisions create significant barriers to the free and open internet and "force adults and minors alike to sacrifice anonymity, privacy, and security to engage in protected online expression." A federal district court already prevented HB 1126 from going into effect, ruling that it likely violated the First Amendment.
At the heart of our opposition to HB 1126 is its dangerous impact on young people's free expression. Minors enjoy the same First Amendment right as adults to access and engage in protected speech online. "No legal authority permits lawmakers to burden adults' access to political, religious, educational, and artistic speech with restrictive age-verification regimes out of a concern for what minors might see" [argues the brief]. "Nor is there any legal authority that permits lawmakers to block minors categorically from engaging in protected expression on general purpose internet sites like those regulated by HB 1126..."
"The law requires all users to verify their age before accessing social media, which could entirely block access for the millions of U.S. adults who lack government-issued ID..." And it also asks another question. "Would you want everything you do online to be linked to your government-issued ID?"
And the blog post makes one more argument. "in an era where data breaches and identity theft are alarmingly common." So the bill "puts every user's personal data at risk... No one — neither minors nor adults — should have to sacrifice their privacy or anonymity in order to exercise their free speech rights online."
Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
> "Would you want everything you do online to be linked to your government-issued ID?"
Exactly. The opposition to this has NOTHING to do with age verification or keeping kids away from porn "like porno mags."
It's about linking your identity to every single page you visit online. Able to be used by every single unscrupulous woke Democrat and every Trump aligned "actual Hitler" in government
For anyone wary of MS' new copilot, THIS should scare you far more.
Re:Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. This is exactly what this is about. That you got moderated to -1 just shows how abysmally stupid many people are, how unaware of history and how incapable to distinguish relatively minor concerns from critical ones. It is exactly these people that will cause the next fascist or otherwise authoritarian catastrophe because they vote in the person that tells them what they want to hear and do not even begin to understand that a working, liberal democracy (no, not that definition of "liberal") is far, far more important than "winning" the next election.
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It used to be the Republicans who really didn't like Russia.
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Yep. Just think of folks like McCarthy that basically tried to crucify anybody friendly to the USSR. Seems that Russian propaganda, infiltration and Zersetzung have successfully and thoroughly corrupted a GOP that was never very smart to begin with.
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What has Trump got to do with it ? Was this something introduced during his tenure earlier ?
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My first thought was that it could be done by adapting Yao's Millionaires problem [wikipedia.org]. The website reports its age limit as the value a, and the government reports (or authenticates) the user's age as the value b, with communication being done over an anonymous channel or routed through the user
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You are such a fucking imbecile.
You literally quote something saying "the same *First Amendment* rights" and go on to talk about non 1A rights. And no, minors' rights are not "afforded through their parents", whatever the fuck you think that means. Children have rights on their own account. It's why you can't do what you like to someone just because they're an orphan, you absolute bellend.
And then you start conflating needing an ID to buy alcohol with needing an ID to go on Wikipedia. You are so, so shit at
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Re:Minors enjoy the same First Amendment right as (Score:4, Insightful)
The EFF and ACLU are not complaining about the restriction to the constitutional freedoms of minors, though they should be a concern. They are rightly arguing that these schemes infringe on the constitutional freedoms of all, including adults. That they also infringe on the freedoms of minors is just a consequence. There might be ways to protect minors from inappropriate content, but forcing everyone to identify themselves is probably not the correct way. Naturally this will only become a concern the next time a pastor or some other "figure of authority" has their Grinder profile de-anonymized.
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The EFF and ACLU are not complaining about the restriction to the constitutional freedoms of minors, though they should be a concern. .
Did you even read the EFF's statement?
"At the heart of our opposition to HB 1126 is its dangerous impact on young people's free expression. Minors enjoy the same First Amendment right as adults to access and engage in protected speech online"
This is not about conspiracy. This is, first and foremost, an argument that minors should have unfettered internet access regardless of what parents or governments want. That's going to crash in higher courts, hard. Minors do NOT have the same rights to access as adults
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And who do you think should be controlling that access? There are way too many issues with having government rather than parents control this.
And a 17 year old should not be lumped in with a 12 year old and with a 4 year old in any law. But it varies more by the individual than it does by age.
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Swap porn for guns in your argument.
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We need this so parents can protect there kids
Parents can already protect their own kids. Giving media companies access to your personal information doesn't add to that. Giving your kids unfettered Internet access has plenty of its own problems without bringing social media into it.
And your whole web filter thing is silly. You don't need to MITM your whole network to make this work. You can blacklist the entire IP range.
A law to force social media companies not to commingle their IP address pool with other services to prevent blocking would do som
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The problem is that in order to verify age, everybody, explicitly including adults, would have to give their identity and information to verify that identity to every site they visit.
Online privacy would cease to exist.
It's not about kids. It's about everybody.
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in order to verify age, everybody, explicitly including adults, would have to give their identity and information to verify that identity to every site they visit.
As poster gnasher719 suggested below, you only have to share the information that e.g. "user is above 18 y.o." through a ID wallet app. Maybe this project in Mississippi is terrible and needs to be repealed, but in general it is possible to implement age verification that preserves privacy. It is in project this way in other countries.
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It is called "not being total scum", an idea which you obviously have to invest considerable effort into.
The problem (or not) (Score:5, Interesting)
If there are things you are not allowed to do at 17, then by all means stop 17 year olds from doing them. WITHOUT identifying 18 year olds or 65 year olds beyond the fact they are at least 18.
I think it would be no problem to add some software to popular phones so they can be asked "is the owner of this phone at least 18, and is the person holding the phone in posession of a finger print or face that allows them to use this phone". And nothing else.
So you go to your phone store once with your ID, they install the software for you, and as soon as you reach the age, some porn site asks "are you 25", you press the finger print sensor, and the phone says "a person with the finger print of the owner is present, and the owner is 25 years old". Or it says "not 25 years old" or "don't know".
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You probably don't even need the phone store employee part (except for burner style prepaid).
If the account holder is 18+ let them have control of if a phone is owned by someone 18+ or not.
Account holder can then set if a phone on their account is 18+
This doesn't cover desktops, but seems a relatively simple and robust way to verify age.
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Technologically, this is possible and could easily be solved. But the reason behind "age" verification is not age verification. It is identifying everybody on the internet to profile, record, judge and eventually do selection on them. Selection in this sense here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I think it would be no problem to add some software to popular phones so they can be asked "is the owner of this phone at least 18, and is the person holding the phone in posession of a finger print or face that allows them to use this phone". And nothing else.
You could always require the phone be tied to the parents'/legal guardians' phones and that the parents would have to do the authorization. For the edge cases of legally emancipated, something could always be worked out where the date of birth (and nothing else) is added by an official organization that would handle it. The parents would then be able to do the equivalent of MDM similar to how it is done when you get a corporate phone.
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Make photo IDs into smart card. Put 2 certificates on the card: an ID cert that has name, address, DOB, driver's license class & expiry. Then have an age verification cert that just has birth date with no ID.
Third Party Companies need you SSN and address to (Score:2)
Third Party Companies need you SSN and address to do this!
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Indeed, it pretty much is. Funnily, China uses almost the same propaganda lies to justify it.
because religious fanatics (Score:2)