#waleg 2026 at the midpoint: surveillance, privacy, AI, and age verification legislation overview

Terminology note: #waleg is an abbreviation for Washington legislation, used as a hashtag on Blacksky and Mastodon and other social networks

Washington's legislative session has been in high gear ever since it started on January 12, and as of today we're almost exactly halfway through. So it seems like a good time for an update.¹

February 4 was the cutoff for bills to advance past their initial policy committee, and February 9 was the cutoff for the fiscal and Transportation committees. Bills that haven't made it through those hurdles are probably dead for the session, unless they get marked as NTIB (Necessary to Implement Budget).²

If that all seems like it's moving very fast, well, yeah, it is. This is a "short session" of only 60 days, ending on March 12, so things happen very quickly.

I've testified on almost a dozen bills so far. They fall into four main categories:

• Surveillance and civil liberties: SB 6002, also known as the Driver Privacy Act, regulating Flock and other ALPRs. I didn't get to testify live at the Law & Justice committee's hearing on SB 6002 (or the House Civil Rights & Judiciary committee hearing for thecompanion bill³ HB 2332, which isnow probably dead for the session), but here's my written testimony – PRO although with an extensive list of needed improvements. Instead of improving it, the Law & Justice committee further weakened it. Bummar. On February 4, Senate advanced the weakened version, with a few minor changes. Next stop: Civil Rights & Judiciary, which probably won't start working on it until February 18 at the earliest, and needs to act by February 25.
  
  There's too much to say about SB 6002 to fit into a bullet point so I'll cover it in more detail in an upcoming post.
• A series of artificial intelligence bills I support. Amy Sundberg's Washington Legislature Grapples with Slew of Bills Regulating AI for a roundup of most of these. The one I'm most enthusiastic about is Senator T'wina Noble's SB 5956, which protects students by prohibiting schools from using racist AI surveillance technologies like facial recognition technologies, risk scores, and biometrics to infer students’ sensitive psychological or personal characteristics. HB 2481, prohibiting surveillance pricing (maximizing profits by charging some people more than others for the same item), is another one that I was equally enthusiastic about although it encountered a huge amount of industry pushback and wound up dying in Appropriations.
  
  Other AI bills I've supported, while advocating for improvements, include HB 1671. regulating high-risk AI (except for Autonomous Vehicles, which for some reason get an exemption); HB 2503, requiring generative AI platforms to publish a list of datasets they've used for training, where I unexpectedly wound up as the only PRO live testifier after the two others had technical and scheduling issues; and HB 2599. regulating AI in therapy, which alas didn't get out of committee so is probably dead for the session.
• Bills regulating AI Companion Chatbots that I don't support yet, because I think the current version would be actively harmful. Not only does SB 5984 (and it's companion bill HB 2225) have a major loophole that would make it easy for chatbots to escape regulation, it explicitly allows chatbots to use manipulative engagement techniques on seniors, people with cognitive disabilities, people with mental health problems seeking assistance, and other vulnerable adults. But I also haven't opposed these bills, because there's still time to address these problems – and I do think regulation is urgently needed in this area. My written testimony on SB 5984 has more.
• So-called "child safety" bills that require age verification, which I very strongly oppose. Age verification is a privacy disaster that puts kids, teens, and adults at risk by increasing doxxing, stalking, identity theft, and immigrant profiling risks. Age verification laws also erase LGBTQ+ dentity from the internet and censors abortion information, as a coalition of over 90 groups working to protect LGBTQ+ rights, abortion access, rights for youth, privacy, and freedom of speech highlights: "for vulnerable communities, a biometric scan or an ID upload can serve as a huge obstacle, especially for low-income, unhoused, and undocumented people who already have to navigate an increasingly digital world, with less access to tech tools".  So unsurprisingly, I've opposed all these bills.
  
  HB 2112 (based on a bad Texas law) and SB 6111 (based on the even worse Mississippi law I wrote about last August) have died in committee. Huzzah! Hopefully Democrats have learned their lesson about checking with LGBTQ+ organizations before sponsoring that anti-LGBTQ+ legislatures have supported.
  
  HB 1834 and its companion bill SB 5708, regulating "addictive feeds", are still moving forward, and I'll have a lot more to say about those in a later post. For now, my followup mail to Appropriations about HB 1834 goes into detail about why I'm opposed to the current version. AG Brown has really been pushing this bill on Instagram, so it wouldn't surprise me if the House advances it, but he's clearly heard the feedback that the current version is hostile to LGBTQ+ people so it'll be interesting to see how it evolves.

Whew, that's a lot of text. If you want even more text, here's the links to all of my testimony (and in some cases followon mail).

And for a quick intermission from all the text, here's a picture of aurora, taken from Snoqualamie Point on February 4.

There are several other important privacy bills out there that I haven't spent much time on. HB 2303 (preventing non-consensual microchipping of employees), SB 5906 (keeping ICE out of schools, daycares, universities, hospitals, and more without a warrant), and a couple of others are all important too! But this post is long enough already so I'll skip the details on those.

As well as all the testifying, I've also been facilitating weekly meetings of the Washington Privacy Organizers email list, amd tracking most of these bills for Washington Indivisible Legislative Action. And needless to say I've been experimenting with activism on decentralized social networks like Blacksky and Mastodon. There have been some some very encouraging results on that front that I'm really forward to looking up once I get the time.

What next?

For surviving bills, the next step is for the Rules committee to approve them for a floor vote. Once they get placed on the floor calendar, there's still no guarantee that they'll get a vote. Bills have to pass the "house of origin" by February 17 or they're dead for the session (unless they're marked as NTIB). So the next eight days are going to involved a lot of behind-the-scenes negotiating between legislators and lobbyists – with advocacy groups and grassroots activists also trying to get legislators to hear their perspectives.

After that, bills cross over to the opposite house (bills that passed the House go to a Senate committee, and vice versa) and the timelines get even more crunched. Bills have to get out of the opposite house policy committee by February 25, the fiscal committee by March 2, and get passed by the opposite house by March 6 (unless they're marked as NTIB, of course).

On bills where there have been amendments in the opposite house, the House and Senate enter a complicated dance where they can each vote on whether to accept each others' version. In 2023, for example, the House agreed to accept the Senate's stronger version of My Health My Data. If that doesn't happen, they go to a negotiating committee that tries to come up with a version that both houses vote on. This happened in 2020, when at the last minute the committee came up with a version of the weak facial recognition bill that both houses, by now exhausted, voted to pass.⁴ Sometimes, though, the committee throws their hands up in despair, and the bill dies. This also happened in 2020, when we stopped the second attempt by former Sen. Reuven Carlyle (D-Amazon) to twist arms and pass the Bad Washington Privacy Act.

Things can get pretty intense, and sometimes confusing, at the end of the session. A couple of examples I've written about elsewhere:

• In 2021, a few days after the Bad Washington Privacy Act had missed its cutoff for to be passed by both houses, it was suddenly marked as NTIB – so it wasn't dead yet. not long after I published The Clock Ticks Down on the Bad Washington Privacy Act on my previous blog, Carlyle reportedly tried to hold another bill with funding for eviction protection hostage as part of his "negotiating." It didn't work. The Bad Washington Privacy Act failed for the third time, and Carlyle announced he'd be retiring after the next session.
• The situation is … fluid and It ain’t over till it’s over, on wa-privacy.net from 2022, discuss an even weirder situation where a bill that should have been long dead suddenly came back to life with a very different version threw away a lot of the improvements it had made, leaving it a lot more like ... the Bad Washington Privacy Act! Meanwhile the previous year's version of the Bad Washington Privacy Act, (which had been in the X-file) suddenly came back to life yet again, with a "secret amendment" that nobody except for legislators and tech lobbyists was allowed to see. Carlyle convinced the the House Ways & Means committee to call a snap hearing, but it wound up getting cancelled it after every single signin was CON, leaving only Consumer Reports supporting it. How embarrassing! Even then Carlyle didn't give up, but eventually he threw in the towel⁵, and the Bad Washington Privacy Act failed yet again.

This year, the session ends on March 12. Who knows what drama (and potential shenanigans) are in store over the next thirty days?

Stay tuned!

Notes

¹ Although technically this isn't an update since it's my first post of the session here. I had hoped to get a preview post up the first week but once I realized how many hearings I'd be testifying in (and how many bills I'd have to read, and how detailed my written testimony would be) that fantasy went out the window. Oh well, better late than never. Please consider this article a belated session preview as well as an update.

² NTIB exists to address a real problem: final budget negotiations occur very late in the session, so there can be situations where interactions between the overall budget and the bill's fiscal note are significant enough that it makes sense to defer consideration until after the budget is nailed down. That said, it can also be used as the basis for shenanigans to revive bills that should be dead. Sen. Reuven Carlyle used it to bring the Bad Washington Privacy Act came back to life in 2021, and then he did it again with a different bill in 2022 – at the time I joked that NTIB stood for "Necessary to Implement Big Tech's Agenda."

The criteria for when a bill should be NTIB are very fuzzy. I once asked a very experienced lobbyist about this and he shrugged his shoulders and said "bills are NTIB when leadership wants them to be NTIB." From an organizing perspective, who best to target in a hypothetical campaign to make a bill NTIB? That's probably not likely to be an issue this session, but then again this is #waleg so you never know.

³ A "companion bill" has the same original text as a bill in the other chamber, although might wind up amended differently. This is a useful legislative maneuver in various situations. For the Driver Privacy Act, we had heard in early January that SB 6002 was going to be the main vehicle; the HB 2332 companion allowed the House Civil Rights & Judiciary committee to hold a hearing on it early in the session (right after the SB 6002 hearing). HB 2332 was also a potentially-useful backup in case SB 6002 seemed like it was having problems getting out of committee in the Senate, but it wound up not needed for that purpose, so is now probably dead for the session.

⁴ And then Gov. Inslee line-item vetoed the thing I had described as the best feature of the bill! Of course it wasn't personal, he strongly opposed any attempts to seriously regulate facial recognition and other automated decision technologies, but I'm still miffed about it six years later.

⁵ News that Carlyle was giving up was initially reported by a reporter who is not well known in Washington in a paywalled publication that most legislators didn't have access to. For a while nobody was quite sure what was going on ... I talked with Rep. Gerry Pollet later that evening at a Wallingford Indivisible meeting, and he was concerned that it might still go forward, so we had an action ready to go if needed. Fortunately I then heard from a couple people that it really was true, so we didn't launch the action, although we waited till the end of the session to actually celebrate.

Here's an excerpt from It ain’t over till it’s over that illustrates how complex the situation was. The original HB 1850 had some promise, but it died in Appropriations (or so it seemed). The reincarnated substitute, 2SHB 1850, was hilariously bad; it included a tax that hadn't been heard by the Finance committee, a budget of $0, and a committee (described in the committee discussion as a "Star Chamber") that could dismiss cases against tech companies who violated the law without even holding a hearing. Appropriations passed it anyhow. So we had to advocate against it – a challenge because everybody was used to thinking of HB 1850 as a promising bill. Meanwhile the Bad Washington Privacy Act (SB 5062), which had been dead since the previous year, also suddenly resurfaced with a new secret amendment that only tech lobbyists and legislators were allowed to see, rumored to be a segment of 2SHB 1850 act which would lead to a weird hybrid.

It can be hard to keep track of all the different bills and which are good, bad, or indifferent, so I was experimenting with using emojis to help everybody (including me!) tell them apart. Reviews were mixed.

Fortunately it didn't happen. Whew.