Latest Version of Judicial Privacy Bill Is Even Worse for Free Speech

Thomas A. BerryOn Tuesday, the House and Senate Armed Services Committeesfinally released the proposed text of theNational Defense Authorization Act, all 4400 pages of it. And as had beenpreviously reported, a “judicial privacy” bill takes up30 of those pages. As I ’ve explained inearlierposts, this judicial privacy bill would violate the First Amendment by censoring truthful speech about public officeholders. Unfortunately, the latest text of the bill as incorporated in the NDAA is even worse than previous versions.The basics of the bill remain the same as prior versions, and those basics are bad enough. If passed into law, every American would risk facing mandatory takedown requests for posting standard biographical facts about federal judges online, including their birthdates, the jobs of their spouses, and the colleges attended by their children. The bill also arbitrarily limits its restrictions to the internet but not other media, and it allows speech to be suppressed even if it poses no possible security threat. As I wrote late last year in theWall Street Journal, the law would clearly fail to satisfy First Amendment scrutiny under several Supreme Court precedents.But the latest version of the text makes it explicit that the bill would not only stifle the speech of individuals, but would also place a tremendous burden on online speech platforms. In new text, not present in prior versions, the bill nowannounces that nothing in the bill shall be construed “to impo...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs