This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, December 30th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Should a Facebook post land you in jail?

What if you're a sex offender should the government have the power to keep you off the internet long after you've served your time?

Edo Institute adjunct scholar and Vaulach conspiracy blogger David Post discusses the Packingham case that will go before the US Supreme Court next year.

People, law enforcement but also the public had a right to know what is, after all, public information, namely that so-and-so has been,

was convicted of a sex crime in the past.

So the original statutes were all notification statutes.

They required people to register, to say where they lived. The police register with law enforcement.

Law enforcement would then make that information public. They would inform neighbors,

they would put it up on a website that so-and-so who was convicted of such and such a crime

so many years ago is now living in your neighborhood.

And the idea was that that would help people

protect themselves and it would alert the police on the on the theory that these

people are more likely to be recidivists it would also help the police to

investigate if there were any problems in the neighborhood.

It has become, it's gone way beyond, in virtually all states.

It has gone way beyond that original disclosure rationale. Most states now have some regime that involves prohibitions on particular kinds of activity and in the in the truly awful ones and some

are truly awful this means you can't live in certain places within a thousand

feet of a church within a thousand feet of a church, within a thousand feet of

the school. Some states make it unlawful for you to enter the school or a

church or a playground or a library unless you have some exemption because if your child is in the

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