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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a word of warning: many teenagers are wantonly breaking the law every day by reading news sites on the web because the Department of Justice's weird implementation of vague laws has left a number of media outlets with odd age-based legal prohibitions for their web sites.

It's hard to beat the headline the EFF uses: "Are You A Teenager Who Reads News Online? According to the Justice Department, You May Be a Criminal." The organization, a non-profit focused on protecting online rights, looked at the posted terms of service for a number of media sites and evaluated their stated prohibitions against what the law actually says. It explains:

As we’ve explained previously, in multiple cases the DOJ has taken the position that a violation of a website’s Terms of Service or an employer’s Terms of Use policy can be treated as a criminal act. And the House Judiciary Committee has floated a proposal that makes the DOJ’s position law, making it a crime to access a website for any “impermissible purpose.” For a number of reasons, including the requirements of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, many news sites have terms of service that prohibit minors from using their interactive services and sometimes even visiting their websites.

There are four broad categories into which media websites fall. In order to best serve the public, we've added some of our favorite sites to the list compiled by the EFF. For quick reference, each category has been identified with an image showing which members of Shaquille O'Neal's family can read the sites. (Image by Reuters, with some edits.)