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Electronic Frontier Foundation

EFF and ACLU Urge Court to Maintain Block on Mississippi's 'Age Verification' Law (eff.org) 65

Posted by EditorDavid from the ordering-the-courthouse dept.
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."

EFF and ACLU Urge Court to Maintain Block on Mississippi's 'Age Verification' Law More | Reply

EFF and ACLU Urge Court to Maintain Block on Mississippi's 'Age Verification' Law

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  • Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)

    by christoban ( 3028573 ) on Monday October 07, 2024 @07:47AM (#64845233)

    > "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)

      by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Monday October 07, 2024 @07:58AM (#64845247)

      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.

      • This is also why 2FA using a mobile phone is being pushed so heavily and everyone wants you to log in with a google/microsoft/apple/faecesbook account. Corporations/governments want to end anonymity on the web.

        • This is also why 2FA using a mobile phone is being pushed so heavily and everyone wants you to log in with a google/microsoft/apple/faecesbook account. Corporations/governments want to end anonymity on the web.

          I remember the discussions many years ago that Facebook and the like were hoping they would eventually become legally required identification services for the United States government. Funnily enough, I don't know that anybody saw the obvious end-run through the corporations, negating the need to make anything official. We've been forced to multi-factor, and yes, that ties us to our device, which ties us to everything we do on that device. Which is a lot. Forced on us by the corporations that control nearly

        • Corporations/governments want to end anonymity on the web.

          If they succeed, they will end the Internet itself, it will become unusable for anything other than retail.
          I dunno about anyone else but if I had to show my gods-be-damned government ID card just to use the Internet, I think I'd just cancel my access and forget about it.

        • The reason everyone wants you to login with Google/Microsoft/Apple/Facebook is that people don't like creating accounts on web sites especially to do simple things. But various smaller vendors want to have authenticated actions for fairly harmless reasons (like tracking orders.) Logging in with an identity provider like Google makes the process better for everyone.

          2FA is a separate discussion.

    • What has Trump got to do with it ? Was this something introduced during his tenure earlier ?

    • Here's a question: if a state really wanted to implement age verification, could they do so cryptographically so neither the state nor the website learns anything about the user except whether the user is old enough?

      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

      • And even if they do, there would be nothing preventing a corrupt government from saying "You need to be 100 years or older to visit Wikipedia".

        This is true. It doesn't solve anything but this is why if the government is going to be doing stuff like this in terms of hosting servers or systems for public use the code behind it should be open source and verifiable somehow so people can check the servers are running what they say they are running. I know there's ways around that.

        I think about this many times because I love the idea of algorithmic re-districting so we can stop the silly game of how lines are drawn, just let a computer do it and publi

      • Why should the service have to figure out if someone is old enough. Simply have the site advertise an age limitation, make the browser look at that. Since kids almost never can afford their devices without parental involvement, parent sets the birthday in the browser, locks that part of the config. Problem is 95% solved and the person responsible for the child is empowered without impacting everyone else. As a web site operator, it isn't their job to raise your child.

    • every single unscrupulous woke Democrat

      Explain why every age verification law so far enacted has been by Repulbican/MAGA states.

      For instance, Texas requiring porn sites to collect personal information of those that consume that.
      That being said, I've yet to come across a child that has a device to access the internet that they were able to afford for themselves. So why are you demanding (since it's maga/republicans/conservatives that have implemented these laws) that complete strangers raise your children for you? Every child has a parent or guar

      • every single unscrupulous woke Democrat

        Explain why every age verification law so far enacted has been by Repulbican/MAGA states.

        I think you may have gone off half-cocked there. The full sentence was "Able to be used by every single unscrupulous woke Democrat and every Trump aligned 'actual Hitler' in government". In other words, christoban was dissing and distrusting the government, not one party or the other.

        As for the Republicans being the ones enacting age verification, would their similarly rabid counterparts among the Democrats not do something equivalently dystopian if they thought it would serve the cause of DEI?

      • Regardless of who *enacts* the legislation and for what purpose, things that can be abused tend to be abused. The OPs point seems to be that political alignment and strategies change. Right now, the Republicans are on somewhat of a sinking ship and are looking to gain traction. Remember, no Republican presidential candidate has won a national popular vote since 20004. For people voting for the first time in November, not once has a Republican presidential candidate won a popular vote in their lifetime.

  • The problem (or not) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gnasher719 ( 869701 ) on Monday October 07, 2024 @08:55AM (#64845367)
    These "age identification" schemes also determine the identity of the person who identifies their age, even and especially when they are old enough.

    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".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AvitarX ( 172628 )

      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.

      • Mysteriously, the one 18 year old teenager owns 300 phones.

        Or are we saying we can't factory reset these or change the biometrics after it's done? Who owns these devices, anyway?

    • Re:The problem (or not) (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Monday October 07, 2024 @09:45AM (#64845465)

      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]

      • This law wouldn't exist if not for lobbyists.

        The question is, which ones are funding it:
        1) The social media companies trying to prevent more onerous regulations
        2) The companies that think this is juicy information for marketing and want to get in on that.

        It's also possible that it's a mix of both.

    • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by flink ( 18449 )

      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.

    • Not every device is a phone. Most of the time, I prefer to use my desktop, which doesn't have any biometric input.
      A public library computer shouldn't either.

  • Third Party Companies need you SSN and address to do this!

  • have to have their porn even if nobody else can have any.

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