1. United States
2. Pa.
3. Letter

I am writing to urge you to oppose the package of "child online safety" bills currently moving through Congress, particularly the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the App Store Accountability Act. These measures would eliminate online anonymity and create unprecedented mass surveillance infrastructure under the guise of protecting children. There is no way to verify age without verifying identity through government documents, payment information, or other identifying data. Whether stored by platforms or third-party vendors, this permanently links users' offline identities with their online behavior. This represents one of the most sweeping civil rights rollbacks in recent history. The consequences would be severe for vulnerable populations. Whistleblowers could be tracked and fired. Trans people could be outed in hostile states like Kansas, which recently invalidated hundreds of trans residents' driver's licenses. Young people seeking reproductive health information could lose anonymous access. Undocumented immigrants could lose communication channels. The U.S. government is already flooding social media platforms with subpoenas to unmask anti-ICE accounts, and these laws would make targeting dissenters far easier. KOSA would empower state attorneys general to mass censor content deemed "harmful to minors." The Heritage Foundation has publicly stated it plans to leverage KOSA to remove LGBTQ+ and abortion content from the internet. Lead co-sponsor Sen. Marsha Blackburn said the bill is essential to protect children from "the transgender in this culture." These laws do not protect children. They create massive data collection systems that predatory companies and government agencies can exploit. Last week, the FTC declined to enforce COPPA, a landmark children's data protection law, to incentivize ID verification instead. The Pentagon is already seeking to use AI models to mass surveil U.S. citizens by harvesting commercially available data. Age verification would dramatically expand this surveillance capacity. A free society depends on the right to publish and consume information anonymously. I urge you to oppose all legislation requiring identity verification or age verification systems that would eliminate online anonymity.