Latest news with #Totenberg
an hour ago
- Politics
Judge blocks Georgia's social media age verification law, citing free speech concerns
ATLANTA -- Georgia has become the latest state where a federal judge has blocked a law requiring age verification for social media accounts. Like in seven other states where such laws have been blocked, a federal judge ruled Thursday that the Georgia law infringes on free speech rights. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg means that the Georgia measure, which passed in 2024, won't take effect next week as scheduled. Instead, Totenberg granted a preliminary injunction blocking the law until there's a full ruling on the issue. Georgia's law would require some social media providers to take 'commercially reasonable' steps to verify a user's age and require children younger than 16 to get parental permission for accounts. It was challenged by NetChoice, a trade group representing online businesses. 'The state seeks to erect barriers to speech that cannot withstand the rigorous scrutiny that the Constitution requires,' Totenberg wrote, finding the law restricts the rights of minors, chills the right to anonymous speech online and restricts the ability of people to receive speech from social media platforms. Georgia will appeal, a spokesperson for Attorney General Chris Carr said Thursday. 'We will continue to defend commonsense measures that empower parents and protect our children online,' spokesperson Kara Murray said in a statement. Parents — and even some teens themselves — are growing increasingly concerned about the effects of social media use on young people. Supporters of the laws have said they are needed to help curb the explosive use of social media among young people, and what researchers say is an associated increase in depression and anxiety. Totenberg said concerns about social media harming children are legitimate, but don't outweigh the constitutional violation. Totenberg wrote that NetChoice's members would be irreparably harmed by the law. She rejected arguments from the state that the group shouldn't get temporary relief because it had delayed filing its lawsuit by a year and because the state would be required to give 90 days' notice before enforcing the law. 'Free expression doesn't end where government anxiety begins," NetChoice Director of Litigation Chris Marchese said in a statement. "Parents— not politicians — should guide their children's lives online and offline— and no one should have to hand over a government ID to speak in digital spaces.' It's the ninth state where NetChoice has blocked a law over children's use of social media. In Arkansas and Ohio, federal judges have permanently overturned the laws. Besides Georgia, measures are also on hold in California, Florida, Mississippi, Texas and Utah. Louisiana agreed to not enforce its law while litigation proceeds. Only in Tennessee did a federal judge decline to temporarily block a law, finding NetChoice hadn't proved that people would be irreparably harmed if the law wasn't blocked before trial.
Winnipeg Free Press
8 hours ago
- Politics
- Winnipeg Free Press
Judge blocks Georgia's social media age verification law, citing free speech concerns
ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia has become the latest state where a federal judge has blocked a law requiring age verification for social media accounts. Like in seven other states where such laws have been blocked, a federal judge ruled Thursday that the Georgia law infringes on free speech rights. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg means that the Georgia measure, which passed in 2024, won't take effect next week as scheduled. Instead, Totenberg granted a preliminary injunction blocking the law until there's a full ruling on the issue. Georgia's law would require some social media providers to take 'commercially reasonable' steps to verify a user's age and require children younger than 16 to get parental permission for accounts. It was challenged by NetChoice, a trade group representing online businesses. 'The state seeks to erect barriers to speech that cannot withstand the rigorous scrutiny that the Constitution requires,' Totenberg wrote, finding the law restricts the rights of minors, chills the right to anonymous speech online and restricts the ability of people to receive speech from social media platforms. Georgia will appeal, a spokesperson for Attorney General Chris Carr said Thursday. 'We will continue to defend commonsense measures that empower parents and protect our children online,' spokesperson Kara Murray said in a statement. Parents — and even some teens themselves — are growing increasingly concerned about the effects of social media use on young people. Supporters of the laws have said they are needed to help curb the explosive use of social media among young people, and what researchers say is an associated increase in depression and anxiety. Totenberg said concerns about social media harming children are legitimate, but don't outweigh the constitutional violation. Totenberg wrote that NetChoice's members would be irreparably harmed by the law. She rejected arguments from the state that the group shouldn't get temporary relief because it had delayed filing its lawsuit by a year and because the state would be required to give 90 days' notice before enforcing the law. 'Free expression doesn't end where government anxiety begins,' NetChoice Director of Litigation Chris Marchese said in a statement. 'Parents— not politicians — should guide their children's lives online and offline— and no one should have to hand over a government ID to speak in digital spaces.' It's the ninth state where NetChoice has blocked a law over children's use of social media. In Arkansas and Ohio, federal judges have permanently overturned the laws. Besides Georgia, measures are also on hold in California, Florida, Mississippi, Texas and Utah. Louisiana agreed to not enforce its law while litigation proceeds. Only in Tennessee did a federal judge decline to temporarily block a law, finding NetChoice hadn't proved that people would be irreparably harmed if the law wasn't blocked before trial. Georgia had argued the law was meant to protect children in a dangerous place, likening it to banning them from bars serving alcohol instead of restricting their speech.
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Judge blocks Georgia's social media age verification law, citing free speech concerns
ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia has become the latest state where a federal judge has blocked a law requiring age verification for social media accounts. Like in seven other states where such laws have been blocked, a federal judge ruled Thursday that the Georgia law infringes on free speech rights. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg means that the Georgia measure, which passed in 2024, won't take effect next week as scheduled. Instead, Totenberg granted a preliminary injunction blocking the law until there's a full ruling on the issue. Georgia's law would require some social media providers to take 'commercially reasonable' steps to verify a user's age and require children younger than 16 to get parental permission for accounts. It was challenged by NetChoice, a trade group representing online businesses. 'The state seeks to erect barriers to speech that cannot withstand the rigorous scrutiny that the Constitution requires,' Totenberg wrote, finding the law restricts the rights of minors, chills the right to anonymous speech online and restricts the ability of people to receive speech from social media platforms. Georgia will appeal, a spokesperson for Attorney General Chris Carr said Thursday. 'We will continue to defend commonsense measures that empower parents and protect our children online,' spokesperson Kara Murray said in a statement. Parents — and even some teens themselves — are growing increasingly concerned about the effects of social media use on young people. Supporters of the laws have said they are needed to help curb the explosive use of social media among young people, and what researchers say is an associated increase in depression and anxiety. Totenberg said concerns about social media harming children are legitimate, but don't outweigh the constitutional violation. Totenberg wrote that NetChoice's members would be irreparably harmed by the law. She rejected arguments from the state that the group shouldn't get temporary relief because it had delayed filing its lawsuit by a year and because the state would be required to give 90 days' notice before enforcing the law. 'Free expression doesn't end where government anxiety begins," NetChoice Director of Litigation Chris Marchese said in a statement. "Parents— not politicians — should guide their children's lives online and offline— and no one should have to hand over a government ID to speak in digital spaces.' It's the ninth state where NetChoice has blocked a law over children's use of social media. In Arkansas and Ohio, federal judges have permanently overturned the laws. Besides Georgia, measures are also on hold in California, Florida, Mississippi, Texas and Utah. Louisiana agreed to not enforce its law while litigation proceeds. Only in Tennessee did a federal judge decline to temporarily block a law, finding NetChoice hadn't proved that people would be irreparably harmed if the law wasn't blocked before trial. Georgia had argued the law was meant to protect children in a dangerous place, likening it to banning them from bars serving alcohol instead of restricting their speech. Jeff Amy, The Associated Press Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Federal judge dismisses lawsuit that challenged Georgia's electronic voting machine system
In Monday's ruling on Curling v Raffensperger, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Totenberg credited the plaintiff's role in providing evidence that exposed a major security breach of Georgia election equipment in Coffee County, pictured above, following the 2020 election. (File) A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit challenging the security of Georgia's electronic voting machines even though the judge maintained substantial concerns about the system. According to U.S. District Court Judge Amy Totenberg ruling issued Monday, the plaintiffs in Curling v Raffensperger are not able to demonstrate that the state's electronic voting system disenfranchises them from exercising their right to vote in elections. She wrote that the election activists Coalition for Good Governance and Georgia voters lacked standing in the lawsuit. Totenberg also wrote that some of the plaintiffs legal objections to the touchscreen ballot marking devices are more about policy disagreements rather than constitutional violations. Totenberg, however, wrote that she has substantial concerns about the electronic voting technology that has long faced allegations about the risks of being hacked and potentially compromising elections in Georgia. The state's electronic Dominion Voting Systems machines were rolled out statewide in 2019, but by that time the state was already involved in the pre-emptive federal court legal battle with the Coalition for Good Governance and other individual plaintiffs who claim that the electronic system is vulnerable to cyber attack and operational problems that violate voters' constitutional rights. Totenberg credited the plaintiff's role in providing evidence that exposed a major breach of election equipment in Coffee County following the 2020 election. Also, she cited a report by a University of Michigan expert on cyber security that detailed the potential threats to ballot marking devices, as well as the possibility that future elections could be compromised by unauthorized access to voter data. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger applauded Totenberg's ruling in the District Court for Northern District of Georgia case. Raffensperger has long defended the security of Dominion voting machines, arguing that there is no evidence of fraud affecting Georgia's 2020 and 2024 presidential election results. 'Today's ruling is just one more resounding vindication of Georgia's elections,' Raffensperger said. 'From day one, we knew these accusations were meritless. All the real-world evidence shows that Georgia's paper ballot system works well. Our local election officials are professionals. And the voters of this state know that their votes are counted securely, accurately, and quickly.' The Coalition for Good Governance has long argued that Georgia elections should use hand-marked ballots, claiming that method is the safest way to vote. The debate over electronic voting machines versus paper ballots was the focus of conspiracy theorists who blamed Dominion's system for Republican President Donald Trump's loss to Joe Biden in 2020. Conspiracies about the Dominion machines swirled after Fox News settled a lawsuit with the voting machine maker over the network's false reports about the system's reliability. Over the last couple of years, a prominent pro-paper ballot movement has been led by VoterGa, a largely pro-Trump faction that has urged people to request that state officials get rid of the electronic voting system. Totenberg wrote Monday that the case has led to some Georgia legislative action that assuaged some of her concerns, such as the Dominion machines relying on use of QR codes for counting votes on paper ballots, a practice that has been criticized by ballot security advocates. Last year the Georgia Legislature approved Senate Bill 189, which calls for replacing the QR code by July 1, 2026 with a new method of either readable text or a bubble style mark similar to what is currently used for absentee and provisional ballots. Next year, the paper ballots movement could gain traction in the Legislature through Senate Bill 214, which would allow Georgia voters to cast a hand-marked paper ballot at polling places during early voting and on Election Day. The measure, which was approved last week by a Senate Ethics Committee, would give voters the ability to cast their votes in polling places using pen or pencils, which can now be used to complete absentee ballots. This year is the first in a two-year cycle and bills that don't pass this year will be alive in 2026. 'Although the plaintiffs have not prevailed in this court of law, their advocacy has helped spark real legislative action,' Totenberg wrote. 'If (SB 189) legislative measures are ultimately funded and implemented, they are the type of legislative action that bolster public confidence in the management of Georgia's voting system,' Totenberg wrote. 'Through litigation and other means, plaintiffs no doubt played a part in prompting these changes.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Judge in long-running lawsuit declines to block the use of Georgia's voting system
ATLANTA (AP) — A federal judge has declined to block the use of Georgia's electronic voting system in a long-running lawsuit that alleged that the system is vulnerable to attack and has operational issues that could deprive voters of their constitutional rights. U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg found that the activists and individual voters who challenged the state's voting system did not prove that the problems they identified prevented them from voting, diluted their votes or kept their votes from being counted. She wrote in a ruling Monday that they lack standing to sue and she is unable to consider the merits of their claims. Georgia election officials have consistently said the system is secure and reliable and that it is up to the state to decide how it conducts elections. The ruling follows several years of intense focus on Georgia's elections in the aftermath of President Donald Trump's narrow loss in the state to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Trump claimed without evidence that election fraud cost him victory, and his allies spread wild conspiracy theories about the Dominion Voting Systems machines used in Georgia. But the lawsuit at issue long precedes those claims. It was originally filed in 2017 by several individual voters and the Coalition for Good Governance, which advocates for election integrity, and targeted the outdated, paperless voting system used at the time. After Georgia purchased a new voting system in 2019, the suit was amended to target that system. The election system used statewide by nearly all in-person voters includes touch screen voting machines that print ballots with a human-readable summary of voters' selections and a QR code that a scanner reads to count the votes. The human-readable summary only lists the voter's choice, not the names of other candidates or the details of a ballot question. The activists and voters who filed the lawsuit argued that since people can't read a QR code, they are unable to ensure that what the scanners are reading accurately reflects their selections. They also asserted that it is burdensome for voters to have to check their selections twice — once on the voting machine screen and again using the limited information on the printed ballot. They asked Totenberg to stop the state from using the touch screen voting machine system as the standard method for in-person voting. 'Although Plaintiffs have not ultimately prevailed on their legal claims, their work has identified substantial concerns about the administration, maintenance, and security of Georgia's electronic in-person voting system,' Totenberg wrote. 'These investigative and educational efforts have prompted meaningful legislative action to bolster the transparency and accountability of Georgia's voting systems.' In addition to other changes, a law passed by Georgia lawmakers last year requires QR codes to be removed from ballots by July 2026, though she noted that funding and government action would be required to implement that change. The judge outlined the evidence presented at trial in early 2024, including the findings of University of Michigan computer scientist and professor J. Alex Halderman. He testified that an attacker could potentially alter the QR codes to change voter selections, install malware on the voting machines and obtain county-wide passwords, among other issues, she wrote. A report Halderman wrote in 2021 as part of this lawsuit prompted the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in 2022 to put out advisory recommending steps that should be taken by election officials in places that use the voting machines that Georgia uses. Georgia election officials in 2023 said they planned to wait until after the 2024 election to install a software update to address some of the security flaws, saying they had taken other measures to protect the state's voting system. Totenberg's ruling puts an end to a long and twisting path. Throughout the process she has repeatedly raised concerns about the state's voting system and practices and, early on, accused state officials of ignoring problems. In an August 2019 ruling, she prohibited the state from using its antiquated paperless voting machines beyond that year. The state had agreed to purchase new voting machines from Dominion a few weeks earlier and scrambled to deploy them ahead of the 2020 election cycle. Conspiracy theorists and people looking to give credence to Trump's claims of a stolen election have seized on Totenberg's intermediate rulings in the case, as well as on Halderman's findings. But Halderman has always made clear that his mission was to identify vulnerabilities in the system, that he was not tasked with looking for and had not found any evidence that those weaknesses had been exploited.
