In many ways, this is similar to the CyberTipline for CSAM that requires websites to report details if they come across child sexual abuse material. But, CSAM is strict liability content for which there is no 1st Amendment protection. Demanding that anything even remotely referencing an illegal drug transaction be sent to the DEA will sweep up a ton of perfectly protected speech.

Worse, it will lead to massive overreporting of useless leads. I’ve mentioned just recently that we get a ton of attempted spam comments here at Techdirt, over a million in just the last six months alone. A decent percentage of these appear to be pushing what are likely to be illegal drugs. Now, we catch the vast majority of these in the spam filter, and they never reach the site. And, I don’t think a mere spam comment alone would reach the level of knowledge necessary to trigger this law, but the point is that there’s potential that our lawyers would warn us that to protect ourselves from potentially ruinous liability for failing to report these spam messages to the DEA, they’d recommend we basically flood the DEA with a bunch of the spam messages we received just to avoid the risk of liability.