I’ve previously written about the serious First Amendment problems with the “judicial privacy” bill which was recently added to the National Defense Authorization Act. If passed into law, every American would risk facing mandatory takedown orders for posting basic facts about federal judges online, including their birthdates, the colleges attended by their children, and the jobs of their spouses. The bill stifles access to relevant information about public officials, arbitrarily limits its restrictions to the internet but not other media, and allows speech to be suppressed even if it poses no possible security threat. For all these reasons, as I wrote late last year in the Wall Street Journal, the law would clearly violate the First Amendment.
Ironically, because of the serious constitutional problems with the bill as currently written, its provisions restricting speech would likely be struck down by the courts and thus fail to accomplish their stated goal. Members of Congress who want to protect judges in those rare cases where public information does pose a real threat should support a different approach, one that would evaluate takedown requests on a case‐by‐case basis and thus comply with Supreme Court precedent.
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