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Kash Patel, FBI Director, is not very good at his job. There are plenty of examples to demonstrate that notion, from him apparently completely misunderstanding the purpose and protections of the 2nd Amendment and Minnesota gun laws (whatever your thoughts on gun rights might generally be), to his gathering of barely trained castoffs to serve [...]

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. As the operations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement have intensified over the past year, politicians and journalists alike have begun referring to ICE as a paramilitary force." Rep. John Mannion, a New York Democrat, called ICE apersonal paramilitary unitof [...]

Support us on Patreon On a recent episode of our other podcast, Ctrl-Alt-Speech, Mike was joined by guest host Konstantinos Komaitis for a far-reaching discussion about online speech. One point that was briefly raised in that discussion was the question of whether AI tools are good or bad for user agency, and since Mike and [...]

The administration's racist goon squads have absolutely been steamrolling the Constitution since Trump's return to office. When ICE et al started roving throughout the nation looking for anyone non-white enough to be foreign, all rights were considered expendable. The DHS made swift work of the Fifth, Sixth, and 14th Amendments by denying arrestees due process [...]

For years, we watched Silicon Valley executives perform elaborate corporate theater about values" and belonging" and bringing your whole self to work." If you were skeptical that any of that was real, well, congrats. Aaron Zamost, a longtime tech communications exec, has a piece in the NY Times that should be required reading for anyone [...]

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No doubt this will be spun as some form of Minnesota-specific obstruction, but until that happens, let's just appreciate the fact that not all cops are willing to be appendages of the Trump administration's bigoted migrant purge. Here are the details, courtesy of Minnesota Public Radio: MPR News has learned that the police chief in [...]

So foryearswe pointed out how the trend of news websites killing off their comment section (usually because they were too cheap or lazy to creatively manage them) was counterproductive. One, it killed off a lot of local community value and engagement created within your own properties. Two, it outsourced anything vaguely resembling functional conversation with [...]

In any war, information is power. Be it kinetic wars, cyberwarfare, or information wars, data is everything. And since RFK Jr. has clearly declared war on vaccines in America, it's not a huge surprise that he is looking to control information about vaccines. Or, as it turns out, simply sweep that information away. Nearly half [...]

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem last weekposted a photoof the arrest of Nekima Levy Armstrong, one of three activists who had entered a St. Paul, Minn. church to confront a pastor who also serves as acting field director of the St. Paul Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office. A short while later, the White [...]

Let's just clear the air right up front: this is just the government mugging Somalis because they're currently at the top of Trump's shitlist. Prior to last month's escalation (and subsequent murder) because some white MAGA shitbird became famous for supposedly uncovering a whole lot of Somali-based fraud in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it's possible ICE would [...]

Remember last summer when everyone was freaking out about the explosion of AI-generated child sexual abuse material? The New York Times ran a piece in July with the headline A.I.-Generated Images of Child Sexual Abuse Are Flooding the Internet." NCMEC put out a blog post calling the numbers an alarming increase" and a wake-up call." [...]

Trump's going to win the election he lost, no matter what he has to do to make that happen. Surrounding himself with a better set of sycophants this time around has really allowed him to gain some ground in his be the despot you wish to see in the world" efforts. His top appointees are [...]

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We called bullshit when Republicans tried to order websites to carry content. We're calling bullshit now when Democrats are trying to do the same. We spent years explaining to politicians across both parties why the government can't dictate how private platforms moderate content. During the Biden admin, GOP governors seemed most aggressive about trying to [...]

We've long noted how the 2021 infrastructure bill included$42.5 billion for broadbandgrants dubbed the Broadband, Equity, Access And Deployment (BEAD) program. The program wasn't without its warts, but it had the potential to be truly transformative for U.S. broadband access. But Republicans illegally rewrote the program to redirect money away from stuff like affordable, gigabit, [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Raphael with a comment about Trump demanding billions from the IRS: This reminds me, Trump loves to rant and rave about how poorly and dysfunctionally the countries of origin of many migrant to the USA are run, and how bad things look like there. [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2021, we looked at the future of net neutrality under the new interim FCC boss, and at how broadband monopolies continued to get money for networks they never fully deployed. Twitter got immunity from a banned user's lawsuit thanks to Section 230, while dozens of human rights groups were [...]

Last week, a federal magistrate judge told the DOJ it could not arrest journalist Don Lemon. The DOJ appealed and lost that appeal too. The legal system said no. So the DOJ arrested him anyway. On January 18th, protesters interrupted services at a Minnesota church after discovering its pastor leads a nearby ICE field office. [...]

Long before generative AI, copyright holders warned that new technologies for reading and analyzing information would destroy creativity. Internet search engines, they argued, were infringement machines-tools that copied copyrighted works at scale without permission. As they had with earlier information technologies like the photocopier and the VCR, copyright owners sued. Courts disagreed. They recognized that [...]

If you've been napping, Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison and his nepobaby son David hired an unqualified troll named Bari Weiss to run" CBS News. And by run" CBS news, I mean destroy what little journalism was left at the media giant andcreate an alternate-reality safe space for radical right wing billionaire extremists. While pretending to [...]

We've been running our annual public domain game jam for eight years now, and as far as game jams go, it's always been on the long side of the scale with a full month for people to work on their games. A lot of jams are much shorter, and that's worth keeping in mind today [...]

A couple weeks ago, in the wake of the murder of Renee Good, we wrote about border czar" Tom Homan's ridiculous TV comments suggesting that if Democrats didn't stop calling ICE & CBP murderers for murdering people, that they'd just be forced to murder again. Now that that has happened, with the murder of Alex [...]

Yeah, there's the overt cruelty. There's the murder of protesters. The chasing of day laborers across Home Depot parking lots. The snatching and separation of children from parents. The day-in, day-out portrayal of migrants as filthy leeches from shithole" countries by [vomits] the Commander-in-Chief. Then there's everything surrounding it. The camping out at immigration courts [...]

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Back in May, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt offered what might be the single most audacious statement of the Trump era-and that's saying something: I think everybody - the American public believe it's absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency. Anyway, in unrelated news, Donald Trump just [...]

According to new data from the US Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), streaming video subscription prices jumped a whopping 29 percent year over year. That's compared to the 2.7 percent jump in consumer costs seen more generally across other goods and services. Of course BLS doesn't explain why streaming video prices are [...]

I've been talking about the Stop Killing Games movement for some time now, so important is its mission to me. This collection of volunteers focused on video game and cultural preservation is attempting to whip up public support for legislation to achieve those goals. Currently focused in the EU, the campaign is built primarily on [...]

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderations Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice - or go straight to the RSS feed. In this week's roundup of the latest news in online [...]

We always knew the narrative was false. The administration's insistence that Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) was somehow an international menace always rang hollow - just another way to disappear brown people into an El Salvadoran torture prison. For months, it's been clear the intelligence doesn't back the claims made by the deliberately stupid [...]

History never repeats exactly the same, which is how it can be hard to recognize when it is indeed repeating-too many little things may be different the second time around for subsequent events to be a perfect twin of the previous. But it's the big things that often reappear in similar ways that are meaningful. [...]

This week, a major trial kicked off in Los Angeles in which hundreds of families sued Meta, TikTok, Snap, and YouTube, accusing the companies of intentionally designing their products to be addictive (though Snap and TikTok both settled on the eve of the trial) . From the Guardian: For the first time, a huge group [...]

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Let's open with a joke: Mr. Bovino said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents were probably more experienced at handling young people than any domestic law enforcement agency." I will say unequivocally that we are experts in dealing with children," he said. Not because we want to be, but because we have [...]

Last year we reported how Verizon executives happily agreed to be more racist and sexist in exchange for Trump DOJ and FCC approval of their $20 billion merger with telecom giant Frontier Communications. Verizon embarrassingly said they'd cull race and gender equality initiatives, and try harder moving forward to protect downtrodden white people from the [...]

The travesty that is RFK Jr. in charge of American health and what he's done to the CDC's ACIP committee for vaccines continues to be visited upon all of us. It's really important to keep in mind that during his confirmation hearings, Kennedy lied repeatedly about his stance on vaccines. Supposedly serious senators, like Bill [...]

Minneapolis is once again the focus of debates about violence involving law enforcement after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killedRenee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother, in her car. The incident quickly prompted dueling narratives. Trump administration officialsdefended the shooting as justified, whilelocal officials condemnedit. The shooting will also likely promptrenewed scrutiny of [...]

We've covered how there'sa real push afootto implement statewide right to repair" laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. Unfortunately, whileall fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado,California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed [...]

This nation is filled with loudmouths who claim the Second Amendment ensures the rest of the amendments are protected. There are a lot of gun owners who bristle at any hint of gun control, even as they insist they might be the only thing protecting us from a hostile government. This noise gets a lot [...]

There's a line buried in Adam Serwer's recent Atlantic piece on the Minneapolis resistance to ICE that deserves to be pulled out, examined, and posted on every lamppost in America: The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they're the ones who are alone. Read that again. It [...]

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First off, there's a chance my headline (which went through several iterations) undersells what's actually going on here. What's detailed below is yet another jaw-dropping act of executive hubris, with the DOJ again deciding it can do whatever the hell it wants when a judge dares to tell it no." A little background: it was [...]

Our shitty autocrats are nothing if not predictable. As we just got done noting, the Trump administration and their right wing extremist billionaire friend have joined forces to wage war on Netflix's attempted acquisition of Warner Brothers. Larry wants Warner Brothers (and CNN) as part of his obvious effort to build a new autocrat-friendly propaganda [...]

Before you read this post, I want you to try to recall the stupidest thing you've ever heard someone say. Go ahead and hold that memory in the back of your head. Perhaps by now you're tiring of all of these posts on America's measles problem that we've endured for over a year now. This [...]

ICE has been invading U.S. cities, targeting,surveilling,harassing,assaulting,detaining, andtorturingpeople who are undocumented immigrants. They also havetargeted peoplewithwork permits,asylum seekers,permanent residents(people holding green cards"),naturalized citizens, andeven citizens by birth.ICE has spenthundreds of millions of dollars on surveillance technologyto spy on anyone-and potentially everyone-in the United States. It can be hard to imagine how to defend oneself against [...]

You might recall how Republicans (with help from Democrats) suffered a three year embolism over the national security, privacy, and propaganda problems inherent with TikTok - only to turn around and let Trump sell the platform to his technofascist billionaire friends. Who are now already hard at work preparing to do all of the stuff [...]

Unexpected, but in the most delightful sense of the word - the sort of thing we've rarely seen since January 2025. Gregory Bovino has been removed from his role as Border Patrol commander at large" and will return to his former job in El Centro, California, where he is expected to retire soon, according to [...]

Disclosure: I'm on the board of Bluesky, which was inspired by my Protocols, Not Platforms" paper. But this post isn't about Bluesky the app. It's about the underlying protocol and what it enables for anyone who wants to build technology (even competitive to Bluesky) that actually respects users. Last month, I helped release the Resonant [...]

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The thing with an invasion is that it makes enemies of everyone being invaded, even those who may nominally support the end goal. Law enforcement officers and officials are no exception, especially when they see the invading force creating problems they shouldn't be expected to solve. Trump has treated multiple American cities like war zones. [...]