Supreme Court will take up case on porn age verification laws in Texas
Supreme Court will take up case on porn age verification laws in Texas

19thnews.org
Supreme Court will take up case on porn age verification laws in Texas

Supreme Court will take up case on porn age verification laws in Texas
Supreme Court will take up case on porn age verification laws in Texas
Man I’m so paranoid. Why do I feel like it’ll be something stupid like claiming encryption is unconstitutional or that freedom of speech only applies to words that come out of a physical person’s mouth?
I'm kinda with you on this. It seems like quite a number of the cases they're taking on are to make their mark on condoning fascism and oppression.
My hot take is that it won't fly, but that Texas can also potentially revise the law to make it pass.
The problem is that this is targeting websites serving non-porn material if the site also serves porn. Like, there's porn on Reddit, for example. But this doesn't say "we restrict access to minors just to porn", but "we restrict access to the website", where someone like Reddit can do finer-grained filtering. It's hard, I think, to argue that this is the "least restrictive means" to solve the issue.
For a law that that restricts speech to pass the First Amendment, it has to pass strict scrutiny, and "least restrictive means" is one requirement of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny
The ACLU lawyer references a "reasonable" criteria, and apparently that's one element of the "rational basis" review, so I'm guessing that they're attacking it on those grounds.
The only thing is that corporations need encryption and I don't think they want to disobey their corporate masters.
Oh that's easy. Encryption is only legal when communicating with a business that is registered with the IRS and not when doing peer to peer. There, we've hopelessly broken digital privacy while letting the US government determine who gets to exist online.
they can't do the latter, or that would mean corporations can't pump infinite money to politicians