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We're all familiar with what grand juries should be able to do to the proverbial ham sandwich. But in Washington DC - the unwilling host of Donald Trump's martial law test run - federal prosecutors can't even get an indictment to stick the person throwing the sandwich. Federal prosecutors on Tuesday were unable to persuade [...]

The rushed integration of half-cooked automation into the already broken U.S. journalism industry simply isn't going very well. There have been justcountless exampleswhere affluent media ownersrushed to embrace automationand LLMs (usually to cut corners and undermine labor) withdisastrous impact, resulting inlots of plagiarism, completelyfalse headlines, and a giant, completely avoidable mess. As U.S. news outlets [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is BernardoVerda passing along a quote about a specific speech issue that has (ridiculously) been put back up for discussion: In second place, it's MrWilson with a comment about the ousting of the CDC Director for not being aligned with the president's agenda": It makes [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the Secret Service joined the list of law enforcement agencies using data brokers to dodge warrant requirements for location data, much like the CPB was still doing via a broker being investigated by congress, while other agencies were throwing tax dollars at junk science - but at least [...]

When people use the term Orwellian," it's not a good sign. It usually characterizes an action, an individual or a society that is suppressing freedom, particularly the freedom of expression. It can also describe something perverted by tyrannical power. It's a term used primarily to describe the present, but whose implications inevitably connect to both [...]

There's a particular kind of person who cheers when the president deploys military forces against American cities over the objections of their elected leaders. They call themselves patriots. They wrap themselves in the flag while applauding the systematic demolition of everything that flag once represented. They claim to love America while celebrating the transformation of [...]

The CDC has plunged into chaos. Dr. Susan Monarez, the newly minted CDC Director, a role she held for a matter of mere weeks, has been fired by the Trump administration. We actually wrote about Monarez previously, as she was engaged with both the CDC team that was the target of an attempted mass shooting [...]

Congress has absolutely zero constitutional authority to investigate a private website for its editorial decisions. Zero. None. This is First Amendment 101. Yet House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and Cybersecurity Subcommittee Chairwoman Nancy Mace have decided otherwise. In a letter to Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander, these two Republicans are demanding that Wikipedia hand [...]

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Trump's desire to punish, oust, and eject anyone who isn't white and/or MAGA enough from this country means the preferred outlets for his aggression are running out of manpower. Tons of federal officers have already been rerouted to immigration enforcement, leaving those left with the unenviable task of actually catching the kinds of criminals Trump [...]

Back in 2021, Congress passed both the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the infrastructure bill. While getting the latter right has taken a lot of time (causing no limit of whining by election-season Republicans and some segments of the abundance" set), ARPA has already funded a lot of amazing stuff, from local community centers [...]

I'm starting to think that American is suffering from some sort of collective amnesia. Look, whatever your opinions on how the government handled the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in its early days, I would hope we can all agree that it sucked. Think the government was far too restrictive, or lacked nuance in how it put [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. It was early morning on April 1 when Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar, got a panicked message from his son. Halimi's name had just appeared in a viral post on X, shared by none other than the site's owner and the world's richest man, [...]

If you've read about the sudden appearance of age verification across the internet in the UK and thought it would never happen in the U.S., take note: many politicians want the same or even more strict laws.As of July 1st,South DakotaandWyomingenacted laws requiring any website that hosts any sexual content to implement age verification measures.These [...]

So I've noted how Republicans are rewriting the 2021 infrastructure bill (they voted against) to ensure that billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded broadband grants wind up in the back pocket of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos (and their low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband ventures, Starlink and Project Kuiper). I've also explained in detail why that's [...]

It's no secret that most publishers (though not us!) hate ad blockers. The idea that ad blockers are illegal or an attack on free speech" get trotted out every so often, and they're always silly. You should have control over how your own browser on your own computer works. That's an important freedom. And that [...]

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This was pretty much inevitable. While the Trump's band of bigots struggled mightily to expel brown people from this country, the rest of his sycophants are doing everything they can to prevent non-white foreigners from entering the country. It's counterproductive, especially when the end goal is at least 3,000 ICE arrests per day. If you [...]

During Trump 1.0, his FCCtook at absolute hatchetto media ownership limits. Those limits, built on the back of decades of bipartisan collaboration, prohibited local broadcasters and media from growing too large, trampling smaller (and more diversely-owned) competitors underfoot. The result of their destruction has been a rise inlocal news deserts, a lot of right wing [...]

One of the more frustrating things about content streaming has been how quickly we went from having a conversation about cord-cutting to the realization that all of the streaming services that enabled said cord-cutting have morphed into the very cable providers that people wanted to escape. You can see this in a variety of ways. [...]

In what may be the least surprising news in the world of copyright and the internet, Anthropic just agreed to settle the copyright lawsuit that everyone's been watching, but not for the reasons most people think. This isn't about AI training being found to infringe copyright-in fact, Anthropic won on that issue. Instead, it's about [...]

Support us on Patreon The goal of Bluesky and the ATProtocol, and of the push for protocols over platforms in general, has always been to see more people building their own communities in a modular fashion. One of the most interesting projects demonstrating this potential is Blacksky, created by Rudy Fraser, which started as a [...]

Eight months ago, those of us actually paying attention-not just scrolling outrage bait about Biden's age or the latest campus controversy, but genuinely tracking the systematic preparation for authoritarian rule-warned that Trump represented an existential threat to democratic governance. We were diagnosed with Trump Derangement Syndrome." The reasonable people explained, with infinite patience, that we [...]

Here's how things are going in Washington D.C. ever since some former DOGE employee known as Big Balls" got his ass handed to him by a couple of teenagers during an alleged failed carjacking: Now thatone of DOGE's dipshits was almost carjacked, Trump thinks it's time tofederalize the policing of Washington, DC.Utilizing the same racist [...]

How do you comply with a law that prohibits collecting personal information from children under 13? If you said by not collecting personal information from children under 13," congratulations, you understand the law better than Louisiana's Attorney General. The state of Louisiana has filed a lawsuit against Roblox that includes what might be one of [...]

Late last year, eight major U.S. telecoms were the victim ofa massive intrusion by Chinese hackerswho managed tospy on public U.S. officials for more than a year. The Salt Typhoon" hack was so severe, the intruders spent a year rooting around the ISP networkseven after discovery. AT&T and Verizon, two of the compromised companies, apparentlydidn't [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Erin McCanlies was listening to the radio one morning in April when she heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to find the cause of autism by September. The secretary of Health and Human Services said he believed an environmental toxin was responsible for the dramatic increase [...]

Is throwing a sandwich at someone a felony? Well, that all depends on a few factors. The most important considerations are these: What would normally be rhetorical questions were answered in Washington, D.C. recently. A (now-former) DOJ employee allegedly (well, the video makes it pretty clear there's nothing alleged" about it) threw a sandwich at [...]

Trump's quest to stress-test every line in the Constitution continues apace, with his declaration that the government now owns 10% of Intel looking like nothing but a great, big, gigantic taking. Of course, it is also terrible policy. While there are sometimes compelling arguments that companies should be in public hands, like for utilities, where [...]

Last week, FBI agents raided the home of John Bolton-former National Security Advisor, lifelong Republican, and one of the most establishment figures in American foreign policy. His crime? Writing a book critical of Donald Trump and opposing the president's surrender summit with Vladimir Putin. The justification? A national security investigation in search of classified records"-the [...]

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You may recall that Donald Trump and his supporters have insisted that he's the free speech" President. His first day in office this term, he issued an executive order restoring free speech" saying that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of [...]

With Fox being Fox, and CBS having just paid Trump a $16 million bribe and now owned by Trump's friends the Ellison family, there's little worry that either network will be doing serious journalism anytime soon. So Trump, over the weekend, redirected his ire at the remaining two big four" broadcasters, ABC and NBC, for [...]

The volume of stories about Ryan Walters, State Superintendent of Oklahoma, seems to be increasing. Walters is a Christian Nationalist by name, though the first of those words goes against all of what I learned about Christianity as a Catholic minor and curious adult. While he certainly wants to inject bibles into public schools for [...]

Not content to rewrite American history to better serve white people, the Trump administration is now rewriting world history on the fly by recasting terminal human rights violators as not all that bad, actually" and adding stuff to other human rights reports just because some MAGA people had some bad experiences in a few select [...]

The rushed integration of half-cooked automation into the already broken U.S. journalism industry simply isn't going very well. There's been just countless examples where affluent media owners rushed to embrace automation and LLMs (usually to cut corners and undermine labor) with disastrous impact, resulting in lots of plagiarism, completely false headlines, and a giant, completely [...]

Even though Trump says it's about the crime rates, it's not actually about the crime rates. Just like he used the hallucination that the entirety of Los Angeles was under siege by violent" protesters to justify sending in the troops, the reality was that any violence was contained to a few small blocks in the [...]

Full disclosure: I am on the Bluesky board. Bluesky made a major statement last week when it announced that it would be geoblocking Mississippi IP addresses from accessing its site-making it the first major social media platform to completely block access from a US state. Unlike tech giants with vast resources, we're a small team [...]

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The man who never expected to be the public face of the Trump administration's shotgun approach to deportation is, yet again, being given a set of untenable options and expected to pick one of them. And when he refused to accept the bad choice they gave him, they arrested him this morning at his mandated [...]

Ideally, the U.S. public is supposed to be able to comment on government policy proceedings, and the government is supposed to listen to that input. Of course it doesn't really work that way: for years we've noted how U.S. regulatory comment proceedings are full of bots and fake comments from industries trying to game regulators, [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Heart of Dawn with a comment about the idea that ICE and the Trump administration are stupid: You don't abduct people and put them in concentration camps (foreign or domestic) by simply doing something stupid. Don't let their gross incompetence fool you. They are [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, a judge forbade a Facebook user being sued by a cop from publishing the cop's name on social media, the DC police union was suing to block the release of the names of officers involved in shootings, and we wrote about how Section 230 protects the ability of [...]

When the Techdirt community has had to hear so much about a single state's education superintendent, you know something has gone horribly wrong. The horribly wrong in this case is Ryan Walters of Oklahoma. Walters appears to be doing some sort of combo-impression of Joseph McCarthy mixed with Donald Trump. In his role running Oklahoma [...]

This is the final piece in aseries of poststhat explores how we can rethink the intersection of AI, creativity, and policy. From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the risks of stifling innovation, each post addresses a different piece of the AI puzzle. Together, they advocate for a more balanced, forward-thinking [...]

Earlier this year, an Army helicopter collided with a passenger plane over the Potomac River in Washington, DC. All sixty-seven people aboard both vehicles were killed. While the FAA focused its investigation on the failures that led to this mid-air collision, local investigators in Virginia were somehow far more concerned about identifying who had leaked [...]

The White House's recently-unveiled AI Action Plan" wages war on so-called woke AI"-including large language models (LLMs) that provide information inconsistent with the administration's views on climate change, gender, and other issues. It also targets measures designed to mitigate the generation of racial and gender biased content and evenhate speech. The reproduction of this bias [...]

In theory, the nice thing about having a Supreme Court is that it provides some level of legal certainty. You know how the system works: lower courts make decisions based on law and precedent, parties can appeal, and eventually the highest court issues careful, reasoned opinions that other courts can follow. It's not a perfect [...]