The following is a copy of a speech Dr. Justin Moore presented during the public comment portion of the June 25, 2026 meeting of the Fairfax County School Board.
I'm Dr. Justin Moore, the father of one former and one current FCPS student. I have a PhD in computer science, have been in the tech policy space for 25 years, and am currently Head of Infrastructure and Security for a 200-person software company.
I am deeply concerned by the wave of legislation creating age verification mandates for websites, phones, and computers. Like at bars, the only way to age-verify minors is to age-verify everyone. The most common digital methods are to either get a copy of a government ID or upload a video for an AI to guess your age. Since children don't have government IDs, ultimately these laws force children to take videos of themselves for random age verification services.
These laws – which Facebook has spent millions to support – have already passed in several countries and US states, and as we speak a "compromise" bill is moving through Congress. They have been bad at protecting kids, but very good at building databases of government IDs and biometric scans.
If these pass here, FCPS will be put in the position of forcing every student to take age verification videos for Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and others, just to use their school-issued devices.
A lab computer used by a 13 year-old one period could be used by an 18 year-old an hour later. And AI is famously bad at not only age estimation, but any facial recognition involving non-white people. What happens when a class on a subject like the Holocaust is delayed because students are blocked by age gates? What happens when data on minors leaks, like it already has in the UK and other places?
I urge FCPS (and everyone here) to contact our U.S. Senators and Representatives and tell them to oppose any legislation which would encourage the use of age verification methods, no matter how well-intentioned, or even if the law claims it does not require them. They are bad for students, bad for schools, and bad for everyone.
Thank you.
Footnotes:
I, personally, was in charge of all Civics and Elections data flowing into Alphabet, including Google Search, Ads, YouTube, Trust and Safety, and the Play Store
This included the data powering the Civic Information API, used by essentially the entire internet – including the Commonwealth of Virginia – to provide basic information on upcoming elections, and current officeholders
If you've ever Googled "where do I vote" or used the official Virginia polling place lookup tool, you've used my project (I was also a technical lead in the original Google polling place lookup feature in 2008)
Under existing federal law, I and my team were personally forced to start using Google's existing age verification methods to block school websites (and any other websites our automated systems decided were primarily targeted at children) from accessing information about (a) the calendar of upcoming elections, (b) the names, party affiliations, and districts of current officeholders, and (c) the names, party affiliations, and districts of candidates, due to its "adult" and "political" nature
This means that if a FPCS government class set up a website which used this technology to allow students to see that there were elections at times other than in November, or to see that there are multiple levels of government, Google's automated compliance systems would prevent those websites from working because of their "political" nature being inappropriate for children
The KIDS Act
Even though the KIDS Act [text on congress.gov] says that it doesn't require age verification, it says that various provisions apply if the website or app either knows that a user was a minor or "willful[ly] disregard[ed]" that someone was a minor. (Section 2.7)
The "Kids Internet Safety" director will be a political appointee under the Trump Commerce Department, not under Health, Education, or any other health or child-focused department (Section 526(a))
The Director will establish standards for which age verification technologies sites must use (Section 526(c)(3)(A))
Within one year, websites and apps MUST adopt the age verification methods mandated by this Trump political appointee (Section 103(a)(1) and (b)(1))
Meanwhile, data from age verification databases and government ID verification databases tends to leak. Examples from the last two months alone include:
A million passports and government IDs collected by cannabis retailers in Europe for (among other things) age verification were leaked to the Internet; and