EFF

The test case is Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, over the city's roughly 175 plate-reading cameras. A January 2026 district court sided with Norfolk, ruling its 21-day data retention too short to count as a search; the appeal now has 15 states lined up behind the city.

One close reader warns the article oversells: Chatrie's private-location logic has "almost no analog" in third-party recordings of public movement.

The EFF reads the KIDS Act (built around KOSA, H.R.7757) as age verification by indirection. Instead of mandating ID checks, it sets a 'know or should have known' negligence standard for under-13 and 13-16 users, pushing every covered service to verify all ages to avoid liability. The result, EFF argues, is a less private internet for adults too.

The most-cited voice was a founder who dislikes the bill yet explained its support: for non-tech-savvy homes the real choice today is no devices or kids raised by addictive feeds, because the industry refuses to give parents working tools.

The bill orders 3D printers sold in California to run compliance software and reject jobs from any pathway designed to evade detection — effectively banning open slicers unless they ship the censorship layer too. The stated goal is stopping untraceable firearms.

The thread's analogy did the demolition: imagine a lathe that refuses to make a baseball bat, or scissors that phone home before cutting. You don't ban the tool to ban the act.

The bill creates a federal cause of action against officials who coerce companies into censoring lawful speech, plus transparency rules for government-to-platform contacts. EFF cites its own client: the maker of ICEBlock, pressured off the App Store.

EFF's hedge: not every government message to a platform is coercion, and treating it that way could chill good-faith safety work. Platforms, it adds, have their own First Amendment right to moderate. The thread argued over whether a Cruz co-sponsorship survives that.

The Open Courts Act of 2026 would scrap PACER and CM/ECF for one free platform, ending the fees that pull in over $150 million a year from people reading public documents. A near-identical bill cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee once and then died.

The thread's most-upvoted voice wasn't cheering. "Nothing is actually free," he wrote: make records free and you fund a profession used mostly by well-paid attorneys out of the general tax pool.