CDT Files Amicus Brief in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, Challenging TX Age Verification Law

CDT, in coalition with New America’s Open Technology Institute, The Internet Society, Professor Daniel Weitzner, Professor Eran Tomer, and Professor Sarah Scheffler, filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court with the assistance of Keker, Van Nest & Peters in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. In this case, Free Speech Coalition is challenging a Texas law requiring websites and online services that host a certain percentage of “sexual material harmful to minors” to verify the age of their visitors and prevent minors from accessing their sites. After the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the injunction preventing the law from going into effect, relying upon reasoning wholly contradicting established Supreme Court precedent, Free Speech Coalition appealed to the Supreme Court.

In our amicus brief supporting Free Speech Coalition, we describe the various current methods of age verification that would satisfy the requirements of the Texas statute. For each method, we note how they purport to work, and the ways in which they are often inaccurate; can be circumvented; present privacy and security risks; and may be entirely inaccessible to certain groups, including undocumented immigrants, unbanked individuals, people with disabilities, and others who either do not have access to government ids or who might be more commonly misidentified by biometric technology.

We explain that these shortcomings in currently available age verification methods are of constitutional import because they will prevent and chill access to constitutionally protected speech by adults and will fail to achieve the government’s goals of protecting children because children will still be able to access the content either because they can easily circumvent these technologies or because of the error rates of age estimation technologies (which often were not trained on young faces). We also detail the ways in which current age verification methods increase risks to both privacy and security online, endangering not just access to the information the statute contemplates, but also internet use more broadly for everyone online.

For those reasons, we believe the Texas statute is unconstitutional and should not be enforced.

Read the full brief here.