Going all the way back to 2002 (and many times after that), we've talked about courts struggling with whether or not it's okay to ban people from the internet after they've committed a crime. The question comes up in many different cases, but most prevalently in cases involving child predators. While courts have struggled with this issue for so long, it's only now that the Supreme Court has weighed in and said you cannot ban someone from the internet, even if they're convicted of horrific crimes -- in this case, sex crimes against a minor. The case is Packingham v. North Carolina, and the Supreme Court had to determine if it violated the First Amendment's free speech clause and the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause, to make it a felony for convicted sex offenders to visit social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, as was the case under a North Carolina law. In this case, Lester Packingham is a convicted sex offender for an event that happened back in 2002. In 2010, he went on Facebook to brag about getting a traffic ticket dismissed -- using his middle name as his last name. A local police officer saw the post and connected the dots to figure out that the poster "J.R. Gerard" was actually Lester Gerard Packingham and charged him with violating that NC law on using social media as a sex offender. Various state courts went back and forth with the NC Supreme Court eventually saying that the law was "constitutional in all respects." The Supreme Court of the United States, however, did not agree. The ruling is interesting on a number of levels. It cites, pretty directly, EFF's amicus brief, noting just how important and central to our lives sites like Facebook have become. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/2...ple-internet-no-matter-what-theyve-done.shtml
