Yet another state will demand that, in order to access some of the internet, you hand over your digital papers.
“Missouri wants to see your ID before you can look at legal content, and it is selling that demand as child protection. Governor Mike Kehoe signed House Bill 1839 on July 9, turning an attorney general rule into hard law and dropping the state deeper into the widening group of governments that treat online anonymity as a loophole to close.”
But they don’t just want to verify your age; they’re interested in far, far more, in order to be able to link you with specific websites.
“The check collects far more than a birthday. A visitor can hand over a government-issued ID, a form of digital identification tied to their legal name, or submit to what the bill calls ‘a commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data to verify the age of an individual.’
“That transactional data, the text spells out, can be pulled from mortgage, education, and employment records. Confirming that someone has cleared 18 now means surfacing where they went to school, who holds their loan, and where they work.
“Missouri could have asked for a birth year. It chose instead to build a system that welds a person’s real identity to the specific sites they visit, about the most sensitive browsing there is.”
Purportedly, this information is not supposed to be kept on record… which is also the promise given by 3rd party “verifiers” who have leaked just such records.
Ah, but it’s just naughty pictures to protect children, some may say. But this is never about children and it would be foolish to think that this would be limited to just naughty web sites. Once the infrastructure is in place, and the requirements normalized, it can and will be applied to whatever the states wants to apply it to
The full bill passed into law can be read here, or below:
