The right to anonymity is powerful, and America is destroying it
To cover American tech policy over the past few years has been to watch a series of individually dangerous waves of regulation and political operations roll toward an inevitable convergence. To cover American tech policy over the past few months is to watch those waves collide invisibly beneath the surface and head squarely in the direction of the nearest population center, with no storm warning in sight.
At the end of June, the Supreme Court torched a two-decades-old precedent protecting the right to online anonymity. It declared that requiring age verification for adult websites posed a negligible speech burden and was permissible under the First Amendment, allowing such laws to proceed in nearly half of US states, including
Related Knowledge Center: Digital privacy and data security
If you’re online, you’re generating a constant stream of information about yourself — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes unwittingly — that is assembled and used to craft your online experience. And generate wealth for data brokers. Meanwhile, designers and managers of the digital infrastructure on which the world depends are engaged in a never-ending effort to thwart attempts, by both criminal enterprises and state actors, to exploit vulnerabilities in those systems.
Signalgate | State surveillance
Related Knowledge Center: Democracy and politics
News organizations are scrambling to find a coverage approach that adequately informs the American public about the country’s slide from democracy to authoritarian rule.