Perhaps as expected, Utah's new anti-porn law – mandating Utah-based adult sites label their content "harmful to minors" and requiring Internet service providers to block sites the state attorney general lists as objectionable – is about to undergo a legal challenge. A lawsuit could be filed as early as June.
Published reports indicate a group of attorneys is drafting a legal challenge to the law. State attorney general Mark Shurtleff told reporters the American Civil Liberties Union contacted him directly to tell him the legal challenge was coming.
The ACLU is being joined, reportedly, by the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington-based interest group that tried to warn Utah lawmakers in advance that the law, if signed by the governor, would face a legal challenge on First Amendment and other constitutional grounds.
First Amendment attorney Lawrence G. Walters told AVNOnline.com he expects the Utah law to go the same way as a similar law in Pennsylvania that was shot down in court recently.
"Frankly, there is no practical way for a Web site operator to make his or her Web site entirely unavailable to minors," Walters said. "This is the eternal problem of online age verification. And until we get to the point were there are retina scans and fingerprint verification, it's going to be impossible to identify who actually is behind the keyboard."
CDT attorney John Morris told reporters Utah's law affects legal speech outside the state, violating the commerce clause of the Constitutiom. The ACLU's Utah director, Dani Eyer, said only that her office wouldn't comment until the lawsuit is filed. Shurtleff said he would wait to see if a court hands down a temporary restraining order blocking the law's enforcement before hiring an investigator to begin hunting for objectionable Web sites.
Shurtleff also said his office would go ahead and hire the investigator if it turns out the case would be heard without a restraining order. The investigator would work with the state's Internet Crimes Against Children task force, dividing time between building the "objectionable" site database and hunting online pedophiles, the reports said, although the job has yet to be advertised formally.
Pennsylvania's former law resulted in blocking a reported 1 million legitimate Web sites on behalf of trying to block 400 child porn sites, but Utah lawmakers were said to have worked to avoid the Pennsylvania problems in drafting the Utah law.
"Any of these laws requiring Webmasters [to] prevent minors from accessing their sites, you're asking for a virtual impossibility," Walters said. "And to the extent that ISPs are required to block, that is a substantial violation and blatant government censorship.
