California state agencies have standard privacy guardrails around data-sharing. But the cities and counties that collect some of your most personal info? Nope. Zip. Zero. A.B. 1337 would fix that.

マイナ救急の全国一斉開始日の決定及び広報イベントの実施

情報通信審議会　情報通信技術分科会　陸上無線通信委員会空間伝送型ワイヤレス電力伝送システム作業班（第11回）

令和7年度優良地方公営企業総務大臣表彰

情報通信行政・郵政行政審議会　電気通信事業部会　市場検証委員会（第1回）

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton did not end the legal debate over age-verification mandates for websites. Instead, it’s a limited decision: the court’s legal reasoning only applies to age restrictions on sexual materials that minors do not have a legal right to access. Although the ruling reverses decades of First Amendment protections for adults to access lawful speech online, the decision does not allow states or the federal government to impose broader age-verification mandates on social media, general audience websites, or app stores.

At EFF, we continue to fight age-verification mandates in the many other contexts in which we see them throughout the country and the world. These “age gates” remain a threat to the free speech and privacy rights of both adults and minors.

Importantly, the Supreme Court’s decision does not approve of age gates when they are imposed on speech that is legal for minors and adults.

The court’s legal reasoning in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton depends in all relevant parts on the Texas law only blocking minors’ access to speech to which they had no First Amendment right to access in the first place—what has been known since 1968 as “harmful to minors” sexual material. Although laws that limit access to certain subject matters are typically required to survive “strict scrutiny,” the Texas law was subject instead to the less demanding “intermediate scrutiny” only because the law was denying minors access to this speech that was unprotected for them. The Court acknowledged that having to prove age would create an obstacle for adults to access speech that is protected for them. But this obstacle was merely “incidental” to the lawful restriction on minors’ access. And “incidental” restrictions on protected speech need only survive intermediate scrutiny.

To be clear, we do not agree with this result, and vigorously fought against it. The Court wrongly downplayed the very real and significant burdens that age verification places on adults. And we disagree with numerous other doctrinal aspects of the Court’s decision. The court had previously recognized that age-verification schemes significantly burden adult’s First Amendment rights and had protected adults’ constitutional rights. So Paxton is a significant loss of internet users’ free speech rights and a marked retreat from the court’s protections for online speech.

The decision does not allow states or the federal government to impose broader age-verification mandates

But the decision is limited to the specific context in which the law seeks to restrict access to sexual materials. The Texas law avoided strict scrutiny only because it directly targeted speech that is unprotected as to minors. You can see this throughout the opinion:

• The foundation of the Court’s decision was the history, tradition, and precedent that allows states to “prevent children from accessing speech that is obscene to children, rather than a more generalized concern for child welfare.
• The Court’s entire ruling rested on its finding that “no person – adult or child –has a First Amendment right to access speech that is obscene to minors without first submitting proof of age.”
• The Court explained that “because the First Amendment permits States to prohibit minors from accessing speech that is obscene to them, it likewise permits States to employ the ordinary and appropriate means of enforcing such a prohibition.” The permissibility of the age verification requirement was thus dependent on the unprotected nature of the speech.
• The only reason the law could be justified without reference to protected speech, a requirement for a content-neutral law subject to only intermediate scrutiny, is that it did not “regulate the content of protected speech” either “‘on its face’ or in its justification.” As the Court explained, “where the speech in question is unprotected, States may impose “restrictions” based on “content” without triggering strict scrutiny.”
• Intermediate scrutiny was applied only because “[a]ny burden experienced by adults is therefore only incidental to the statute's regulation of activity that is not protected by the First Amendment.”
• But strict scrutiny remains “the standard for reviewing the direct targeting of fully protected speech.”

Only one sentence in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton addressing the restriction of First Amendment rights is not cabined by the language of unprotected harmful to minors speech. The Court wrote: “And, the statute does not ban adults from accessing this material; it simply requires them to verify their age before accessing it on a covered website.” But that sentence was entirely surrounded by and necessarily referred to the limited situation of a law burdening only access to harmful to minors sexual speech.

We and the others fighting online age restrictions still have our work cut out for us. The momentum to widely adopt and normalize online age restrictions is strong. But Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton did not approve of age gates when they are imposed on speech that adults and minors have a legal right to access. And EFF will continue to fight for all internet users’ rights to speak and receive information online.

　ノンフィクション･ジャンルからチョイスした本の紹介です(刊行順･販価は税別)◆金子勝『フェイクファシズム─飲み込まれていく日本』日刊現代 7/15刊 1500円　トランプ大統領は日本に25％の関税を突きつけた。関税を武器に力の外交交渉を進め、世界の経済秩序を脅かしている。さらにロシアのウクライナ侵攻、イスラエルのガザ市民虐殺など、世界はまさに「カタストロフ」の渦中に置かれている。この世界の大危機に、どう立ち向かうか。日本を創りかえるための基礎政策を提言する。　著者は1952..

　６月23日、戦後80年という節目の沖縄「慰霊の日」は、沖縄戦の実相や教訓をいかに継承するかという大きな課題が改めて浮かび上がる日となった。戦争体験者の多くが世を去り、生の証言を直接聞くことが困難となる中、沖縄戦の実相を […]

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　戦後80年に合わせた19～20日の天皇、皇后の即位後初の広島訪問では、市内の小学校２校の児童約１００人が社会科授業として「お出迎え」に動員されたほか、夜の行事「提灯（ちょうちん）奉迎」への参加呼びかけチラシが、市内全小学校の５、６年生と市立高生全員に配布された。　主催団体の名誉会長は知事。戦前回帰を思わせる動きに、教育・市民団体、被爆者団体、労組などが、「児童・保護者の思想・良心の自由を侵害する」。「奉迎行事が天皇･皇后の政治利用に道を開くと危惧される」として「学校行事とし..