Supreme Court Barely Prevents Censorship

iritant writes "CNN reports here that The Supremes have once again rejected congressional attempts to protect us from ourselves. Ruling in favor of Playboy, they agreed with the lower court who said that since there were less draconian ways to protect children, Congress could not limit hours or specify blocking methods of cable channels. This is clearly relevant to the Internet, as this decision may keep Congress from causing content providers much grief. The scary part is that it was only 5-4, with a peculiar split of Thomas in the majority and Scalia and Breyer in the minority. Scalia's opinion was particularly appalling, since he claimed that protection was allowed, not just for children, but for adults. The thought police are coming. Here is the decision. " It's actually quite an interesting decision. Congress was attempting to ban sexually-explicit cable channels during daytime hours, using the excuse that even though they were scrambled for non-subscribers, the scrambling wasn't 100% perfect and kiddies could still turn on the scrambled channels. It's not directly applicable to the internet, but it's related to many other free speech cases in its use of the least restrictive means test - although Congress might have an interest in coming between kids and porn, so too does Playboy have a right to speak, and since individual subscribers could, if they wished, contact the cable company and have the Playboy channel entirely blocked, that that would be a way of accomplishing the goal of keeping kids from porn without entirely banning the Playboy channel.