If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Poland’s Council of Ministers voted this month to approve a bundle of internet laws that, if enacted, would require adult websites to verify the identity of every visitor, speed up the government’s ability to block online content it classifies as “illegal,” and ban mobile phones in primary schools starting in September. Prime Minister Donald Tusk framed the entire package around protecting children. The age-verification bill does away with the self-declaration checkbox. Under the proposed rules, sites would have to confirm a visitor’s age through banks, mobile carriers, credit cards, or a government digital ID wallet. Poland’s mObywatel app, which already stores identity data for around 12 million people, is the most likely tool. Providers who don’t comply face fines ranging from 10,000 to 1 million zloty (roughly $2,700 to $270,000). The government can also order their sites blocked entirely. That blocking power is where the bill stops being about children and starts being about control. It works against sites hosted outside Poland, bypasses Polish courts, and requires no foreign cooperation. Domestic networks get the order and the connection dies. Digital affairs minister Krzysztof Gawkowski told reporters the companion legislation would let “paedophile material, child grooming attempts, fraud and identity theft” be blocked faster “and under full judicial oversight.” Nobody is going to argue with blocking child abuse material. But the bill doesn’t stop at child abuse material. It aligns Polish law with the EU’s Digital Services Act, and the DSA defines “illegal content” to include “illegal hate speech.” The government writes the definition of what qualifies. That gap between the stated purpose and the actual reach of the law is the whole problem. Poland’s own data protection authority, the PUODO, flagged this a year ago. The International Bar Association reported that the PUODO objected because the drafters never defined what “harmful content” means anywhere in the statute. The method for age verification was left to non-binding recommendations that sit outside the legal hierarchy entirely. Rights and obligations can’t be derived from recommendations. When the rule that gets your content deleted was never spelled out in binding law you have no grounds to challenge it. This all follows news that the Polish Sejm voted 419 to 19 on June 11 to criminalize the online publication of content that depicts crime, animal cruelty, or “degrading treatment” of another person. Anyone convicted faces up to three years in prison, rising to five when the content involves a minor. The bill now heads to the Senate, which can delay but not kill it, and then to President Karol Nawrocki’s desk. The law targets patostreaming, a Polish portmanteau of “pathological” and “streaming” that describes broadcasts where hosts do awful things on camera for paying audiences. The English equivalent is “trashstreaming.” The hosts are easy villains, and they gave lawmakers an excuse to pass something much broader than what’s needed to stop them. Two provisions in the bill reach far beyond shock-value livestreamers. The first concerns consent. The ban on distributing content showing “degrading treatment” applies even when the person being filmed agreed to appear. Two adults who consent to record something that a prosecutor later decides was degrading are both criminally exposed. The participants’ own judgment about what their conduct meant is overridden by the state’s judgment. A government prosecutor, not the people actually involved, gets the last word. The second concerns fiction. The same penalties apply to anyone who simulates or stages one of the prohibited acts without actually committing it. That means a performance depicting a crime that nobody carried out can still send its creator to prison. The offense lives in the depiction, not the act. Documentary footage of police violence depicts a crime. Protest video can be called degrading to someone. Satire can be staged. Once you’ve criminalized depictions and tied the trigger to “personal benefit,” which covers ad revenue, donations, or follower growth, you’ve written a law that can reach almost any online video a prosecutor wants to target. The vote itself was remarkable. Donald Tusk’s ruling coalition and the opposition Law and Justice party, bitter enemies on nearly everything, lined up together. The only opposition came from the right-wing Confederation and Confederation of the Polish Crown. PiS MP Michal Wojcik celebrated the result by tweeting, “This is a major success for Polish democracy.” When a tool to silence people is described as a success for democracy by a party that spent eight years in power dismantling judicial independence, that ought to tell you how useful the tool will be to whoever holds it next. Digital affairs minister Krzysztof Gawkowski told Polsat News he expects no presidential veto. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post The Broad New Powers Hiding Inside Poland’s Child Safety Bills appeared first on Reclaim The Net.