世界各国の軍事企業などが出展する国際武器見本市「DSEI Japan 2025」が来週21日から三日間、千葉県の幕張メッセで開催される。（藤ヶ谷魁）

家計調査報告（貯蓄・負債編）2024年（令和6年）平均結果（二人以上の世帯）

情報通信審議会　情報通信技術分科会　新世代モバイル通信システム委員会（第34回）の開催について

第217回統計委員会

携帯音声通信事業者による契約者等の本人確認等及び携帯音声通信役務の不正な利用の防止に関する法律施行規則の一部を改正する省令案に対する意見募集

広域連携による市町村事務の共同実施モデル構築事業の採択団体の決定

地方自治法施行規則及び市町村の合併の特例に関する法律施行規則の一部を改正する省令（案）に対する意見募集の結果

行政手続における特定の個人を識別するための番号の利用等に関する法律施行規則等の一部を改正する命令（案）に対する意見募集

行政手続における特定の個人を識別するための番号の利用等に関する法律施行令の一部を改正する政令（案）に対する意見募集

村上総務大臣閣議後記者会見の概要

不適正利用対策に関するワーキンググループ（第9回）

接続料の算定等に関する研究会（第95回）

国立研究開発法人審議会（第22回）

John L. Young, who died March 28 at age 89 in New York City, was among the first people to see the need for an online library of official secrets, a place where the public could find out things that governments and corporations didn’t want them to know. He made real the idea – revolutionary in its time – that the internet could make more information available to more people than ever before.

John and architect Deborah Natsios, his wife, in 1996 founded Cryptome, an online library which collects and publishes data about freedom of expression, privacy, cryptography, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and government secrecy. Its slogan: “The greatest threat to democracy is official secrecy which favors a few over the many.” And its invitation: “We welcome documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide.”

Cryptome soon became known for publishing an encyclopedic array of government, court, and corporate documents. Cryptome assembled an indispensable, almost daily chronicle of the ‘crypto wars’ of the 1990s – when the first generation of internet lawyers and activists recognized the need to free up encryption from government control and undertook litigation, public activism and legislative steps to do so.  Cryptome became required reading for anyone looking for information about that early fight, as well as many others.    

John and Cryptome were also among the early organizers and sponsors of WikiLeaks, though like many others, he later broke with that organization over what he saw as its monetization. Cryptome later published Wikileaks’ alleged internal emails. Transparency was the core of everything John stood for.

John was one of the early, under-recognized heroes of the digital age.

John was a West Texan by birth and an architect by training and trade. Even before he launched the website, his lifelong pursuit of not-for-profit, public-good ideals led him to seek access to documents about shadowy public development entities that seemed to ignore public safety, health, and welfare. As the digital age dawned, this expertise in and passion for exposing secrets evolved into Cryptome with John its chief information architect, designing and building a real-time archive of seminal debates shaping cyberspace’s evolving information infrastructures.

The FBI and Secret Service tried to chill his activities. Big Tech companies like Microsoft tried to bully him into pulling documents off the internet. But through it all, John remained a steadfast if iconoclastic librarian without fear or favor.

John served in the United States Army Corps of Engineers in Germany (1953–1956) and earned degrees in philosophy and architecture from Rice University (1957–1963) and his graduate degree in architecture from Columbia University in 1969. A self-identified radical, he became an activist and helped create the community service group Urban Deadline, where his fellow student-activists initially suspected him of being a police spy. Urban Deadline went on to receive citations from the Citizens Union of the City of New York and the New York City Council.

John was one of the early, under-recognized heroes of the digital age. He not only saw the promise of digital technology to help democratize access to information, he brought that idea into being and nurtured it for many years.  We will miss him and his unswerving commitment to the public’s right to know.

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is back in the Senate. Sponsors are claiming—again—that the latest version won’t censor online content. It isn’t true. This bill still sets up a censorship regime disguised as a “duty of care,” and it will do what previous versions threatened: suppress lawful, important speech online, especially for young people.

TAKE ACTION

KOSA Will silence kids and adults

KOSA Still Forces Platforms to Police Legal Speech

At the center of the bill is a requirement that platforms “exercise reasonable care” to prevent and mitigate a sweeping list of harms to minors, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance use, bullying, and “compulsive usage.” The bill claims to bar lawsuits over “the viewpoint of users,” but that’s a smokescreen. Its core function is to let government agencies sue platforms, big or small, that don’t block or restrict content someone later claims contributed to one of these harms. 

When the safest legal option is to delete a forum, platforms will delete the forum.

This bill won’t bother big tech. Large companies will be able to manage this regulation, which is why Apple and X have agreed to support it. In fact, X helped negotiate the text of the last version of this bill we saw. Meanwhile, those companies’ smaller competitors will be left scrambling to comply. Under KOSA, a small platform hosting mental health discussion boards will be just as vulnerable as Meta or TikTok—but much less able to defend itself. 

To avoid liability, platforms will over-censor. It’s not merely hypothetical. It’s what happens when speech becomes a legal risk. The list of harms in KOSA’s “duty of care” provision is so broad and vague that no platform will know what to do regarding any given piece of content. Forums won’t be able to host posts with messages like “love your body,” “please don’t do drugs,” or “here’s how I got through depression” without fearing that an attorney general or FTC lawyer might later decide the content was harmful. Support groups and anti-harm communities, which can’t do their work without talking about difficult subjects like eating disorders, mental health, and drug abuse, will get caught in the dragnet. 

When the safest legal option is to delete a forum, platforms will delete the forum.

There’s Still No Science Behind KOSA’s Core Claims

KOSA relies heavily on vague, subjective harms like “compulsive usage.” The bill defines it as repetitive online behavior that disrupts life activities like eating, sleeping, or socializing. But here’s the problem: there is no accepted clinical definition of “compulsive usage” of online services.

There’s no scientific consensus that online platforms cause mental health disorders, nor agreement on how to measure so-called “addictive” behavior online. The term sounds like settled medical science, but it’s legislative sleight-of-hand: an undefined concept given legal teeth, with major consequences for speech and access to information.

Carveouts Don’t Fix the First Amendment Problem

The bill says it can’t be enforced based on a user’s “viewpoint.” But the text of the bill itself preferences certain viewpoints over others. Plus, liability in KOSA attaches to the platform, not the user. The only way for platforms to reduce risk in the world of KOSA is to monitor, filter, and restrict what users say.

If the FTC can sue a platform because minors saw a medical forum discussing anorexia, or posts about LGBTQ identity, or posts discussing how to help a friend who’s depressed, then that’s censorship. The bill’s stock language that “viewpoints are protected” won’t matter. The legal incentives guarantee that platforms will silence even remotely controversial speech to stay safe.

Lawmakers who support KOSA today are choosing to trust the current administration, and future administrations, to define what youth—and to some degree, all of us—should be allowed to read online. 

KOSA will not make kids safer. It will make the internet more dangerous for anyone who relies on it to learn, connect, or speak freely. Lawmakers should reject it, and fast. 

TAKE ACTION

TELL CONGRESS: OPPOSE KOSA

　「トランプ関税」に世論の注目が集まっている陰で、日本の３自衛隊を束ねる「統合作戦司令官」発足を受け、日米同盟の下での日米軍事一体化がまた一段進んだ。在日米軍の構想は横田に統合軍司令部を置き、六本木に戦闘司令部の拠点を置く。日本を米国の世界覇権戦略に組み込んだ危険な戦争路線がいよいよ現実化しつつある。そこで懸念されるのは、過去の「統帥権の独立」を思い起こさせる「軍令」の独走だ。沖縄では台湾有事の際、先島諸島から住民らを九州などに避難させる計画まで浮上した。公然たる「戦争準備」..

We’ve covered a lot of federal and state proposals that badly miss the mark when attempting to grapple with protecting young people’s safety online. These include bills that threaten to cut young people off from vital information, infringe on their First Amendment rights to speak for themselves, subject them (and adults) to invasive and insecure age verification technology, and expose them to danger by sharing personal information with people they may not want to see it.

Several such bills are moving through the California legislature this year, continuing a troubling years-long trend of lawmakers pushing similarly problematic proposals. This week, EFF sent a letter to the California legislature expressing grave concerns with lawmakers’ approach to regulating young people’s ability to speak online.

We’re far from the only ones who have issues with this approach. Many of the laws California has passed attempting to address young people’s online safety have been subsequently challenged in court and stopped from going into effect.

Our letter outlines the legal, technical, and policy problems with proposed “solutions” including age verification mandates, age gating, mandatory parental controls, and proposals that will encourage platforms to take down speech that’s even remotely controversial.

There are better paths that don’t hurt young people’s First Amendment rights.

We also note that the current approach completely ignores what we’ve heard from thousands of young people: the online platforms and communities they frequent can be among the safest spaces for them in the physical or digital world. These responses show the relationship between social media and young people’s mental health is far more nuanced than many lawmakers are willing to believe.

While our letter is addressed to California’s Assembly and Senate, they are not the only state lawmakers taking this approach. All lawmakers should listen to the people they’re trying to protect and find ways to help young people without hurting the spaces that are so important to them.

There are better paths that don’t hurt young people’s First Amendment rights and still help protect them against many of the harms that lawmakers have raised. In fact, elements of such approaches, such as data minimization, are already included in some of these otherwise problematic bills. A well-crafted privacy law that empowers everyone—children and adults—to control how their data is collected and used would be a crucial step in curbing many of these problems.

We recognize that many young people face real harms online, that families are grappling with how to deal with them, and that tech companies are not offering much help.

However, many of the California legislature’s proposals—this year, and for several years—miss the root of the problem. We call on lawmakers work with us to enact better solutions.