by Christina Maas, Reclaim The Net:
The latest congressional hearing on “protecting children online” opened as you would expect: the same characters, the same script, a few new buzzwords, and a familiar moral panic to which the answer is mass surveillance and censorship.
The Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade had convened to discuss a set of draft bills packaged as the “Kids Online Safety Package.” The name alone sounded like a software update against civil liberties.
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The hearing was called “Legislative Solutions to Protect Children and Teens Online.” Everyone on the dais seemed eager to prove they were on the side of the kids, which meant, as usual, promising to make the internet less free for everyone else.
Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), who chaired the hearing, kicked things off by assuring everyone that the proposed bills were “mindful of the Constitution’s protections for free speech.”
He then reminded the audience that “laws with good intentions have been struck down for violating the First Amendment” and added, with all the solemnity of a man about to make that same mistake again, that “a law that gets struck down in court does not protect a child.”
They know these bills are legally risky, but they’re going to do it anyway.
Bilirakis’s point was echoed later by House Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-KY), who claimed the bills had been “curated to withstand constitutional challenges.” That word, curated, was doing a lot of work.
Guthrie went on to insist that “age verification is needed…even before logging in” to trigger privacy protections under COPPA 2.0.
The irony of requiring people to surrender their private information in order to be protected from privacy violations was lost in the shuffle.
Guthrie praised the TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed by President Trump in May, as a model of legislative virtue, despite the fact that digital rights groups have flagged it for censorship risks and missing safeguards. “Countless other harms exist,” Guthrie warned, “and it is our responsibility to find a solution.”
The phrase “find a solution” is Capitol Hill’s version of the blue screen of death: a signal that the machine has crashed, but no one wants to admit it.
The only people complaining were Democrats, and not because the bills threatened privacy or free expression. Their gripe was that the bills didn’t go far enough.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) called the current proposals “really frustrating,” adding that “the legislation that has been offered by the Republicans does not do the job” and “we have a long, long way to go to protect our children.”
