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This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Online influencer Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist who has millions of young male followers, was facing allegations of sex trafficking women in three countries when he and his brother left their home in Romania to visit the United States. The Tates will be free, Trump is [...]

First, let's dispense with the theater: the question of whether DOGE still exists" as a formal entity completely misses the point. The always-misleadingly-named Department of Government Efficiency" was never really about efficiency. It was Elon Musk's excuse to gain access to the federal government's fundamental systems and wreak havoc, Twitter-style-smashing anything that got in his [...]

Current Third Circuit Appeals Court judge and former Trump lawyer Emil Bove made it clear - on more than one occasion - that DOJ lawyers should tell the courts fuck you" if they tried to shut down any anti-migrant operations. That message apparently reached several receptive ears. Earlier this year, a federal judge ordered the [...]

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If you've been following along, you know why independent voices matter right now. The administration has been attacking institutions left and right. News orgs, law firms, philanthropic funders, universities, you name it. Many are capitulating. But not us. Someone needs to step up and keep doing this work without flinching and without compromising. That's where [...]

Last election season you might recall that the Trump administration lied repeatedly and pretended to be really interested in reining in corporate power and shoring up antitrust reform. And while this line was propped up by a lot of useful idiots (like Matt Stoller) who insisted there was common cause to be made with fascists, [...]

I suppose we might all be tiring of the whole the leopard you voted for eventually comes to eat your face" cliche at this point, but when the allegory fits you have to use it. And in this case, it fits so well that it would be comical if not for just how heartbreaking this [...]

One can never predict how a court will rule after oral argument. But I do fear that in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment we are on the precipice of getting yet another major copyright decision from the Supreme Court where the words First Amendment" are not uttered even once-unless, of course, someone like Justice [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: Break our laws, [...]

Last week I wrote about how the US Patent and Trademark Office is pushing a rule change that would effectively neuter the inter partes review (IPR) system that reviews already granted patents to make sure they weren't granted by mistake. Patent tolls and other abusers of the patent system have been screaming about this system [...]

For weeks, we've been told the threat posed by the trafficking of illegal drugs is indistinguishable from an outright declaration of war on the United States by foreign drug cartels. Trump and his toadies insist traffickers are bringing drugs across the border to kill" Americans, which would be an entirely self-defeating business plan no self-respecting [...]

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It was never enough to simply expel migrants as quickly as possible for the Trump administration. A massive conglomerate of federal officers was incapable of hitting Trump advisor Stephen Miller's 3,000 arrests per day quota, no matter how many rights it violated. Any pretense of only going after migrants with criminal records was discarded during [...]

Not content with just filing baseless lawsuits against media companies who say mean things about our historically unpopular president, the Trump administration has unveiled a new lazy wrinkle in its war on journalism and free speech. The White House unveiled a new section of its website last week that claims to be tracking media outlets [...]

A California judge ordered the end of a dragnet law enforcement program that surveilled the electrical smart meter data of thousands of Sacramento residents. The Sacramento County Superior Courtruledthat the surveillance program run by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and police violated a state privacy statute, which bars the disclosure of residents' electrical usage [...]

What a difference a near-decade makes. Back in 2017, the main concerns raised by New York City's Civilian Complaint Review Board was that officers were routinely violating the right to record police officers. Sure, there wasn't nearly as much precedent to rely on then (and we're still waiting for the Supreme Court to make this [...]

Remember when you thoughtage verification laws couldn't get any worse? Well, lawmakers inWisconsin,Michigan, andbeyondare about to blow you away. It's unfortunately no longer enough to force websites to check your government-issued ID before you can access certain content, because politicians have now discovered that people are using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to protect their privacy [...]

Twenty years ago, John Jonik released one of the best political cartoons ever regarding attempts to censor and control the internet. In it, a character dressed up as Uncle Sam is placing a gift box labeled Control of Internet Speech" on a counter. Behind it, a man dressed in a suit, labeled Corporate Media" is [...]

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The Trump administration just lies and lies and lies. Those in charge assume they can just bluster their way past the system of checks and balances. For everything else, there's AI generated memes depicting Trump taking a shit on the people he serves. Win-win, I guess. But things haven't exactly been running smoothly for Trump's [...]

Hoping to repay corporate America's feckless support of authoritarianism, the Trump administration is once again attempting to illegally ban all state and federal oversight of corporate power. Both via executive order, and by withholding already awarded grants from states that refuse to play along. The Trump administration has already done generational damage to federal consumer [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about how fascism is happening live on TV: Trump's supporters, like Trump himself, if being honest (ha!) will reply, I don't care, I want this to happen." They've never cared about the Constitution except as a weapon to be used [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, Portland, Maine passed a facial recognition ban that said the city can fire employees who violate it, which might have been useful in Seattle where a police detective took Clearview for a spin and possibly violated local laws. The FBI pulled another one of its manufacture-a-terrorist schemes, and [...]

In all of our conversations surrounding RFK Jr.'s appointment to lead HHS and the legitimization of his anti-vaxxer beliefs as a result, we have understandably been hyper-focused on measles. The reason for that is mostly that this is as stark an example of just how stupid and horrible anti-vaccination misinformation is combined with the horror [...]

Until very recently the only member of Congress excused from not having moved to impeach Trump was Rep. Grijalva, because until someone swore her in there was nothing she could officially do. But for everyone else already sworn into this 119th Congress, there was no excuse. There is no excuse. The refusal to act, to [...]

Imagine a leading American technology firm, the engine of thousands of jobs and critical innovation, besieged by a patent lawsuit. Typical enough, but this time there is a twist: The plaintiff is a shell company with no assets and no products, yet it litigates with the inexhaustible resources of a global superpower. The American company [...]

The abyss. The darkness. The meaningless void that life rebels against. It stares at us. Nietzsche warned about this moment-when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. When the frameworks that make meaning possible collapse, when the principles that make reasoning together conceivable dissolve, when words lose their moorings to [...]

The BBC is now voluntarily suppressing criticism of Donald Trump before it airs-and the reason is obvious: Trump threatened to sue them into oblivion, and they blinked. Historian Rutger Bregman revealed this week that the BBC commissioned a public lecture from him last month, recorded it, then quietly cut a single sentence before broadcast. The [...]

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This isn't as surprising as it should be. After all, we're talking about Emil Bove, who was elevated from being Trump's personal lawyer to a spot in the Third Circuit Appeals Court for his loyalty to the MAGA Cause. Emil Bove did at least spend some time as a government prosecutor, which is more than [...]

We've documented in detail how the whole AT&T->Time Warner->Warner Brothers Discovery merger processhas been a pointless mess, resulting in no limits of layoffs and damage to the underlying brands. What was supposed to be a gambit by these companies to dominate streaming TV, wound up being a very expensive act of seppuku byover-compensated executivesclearlyout of [...]

Trump's war on Chicago appears destined to end in a whimper. While he kicked off his invasion of Chicago with memes and a call to arrest J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson, his out of control federal agents have reportedly begun to leave the area. That suburban ICE facility you've heard so much about? Assistant [...]

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 sponsored Spotlight episode of Ctrl-Alt-Speech, host Ben Whitelaw [...]

Yes, as I already wrote about, the indictment against James Comey was already thrown out due to Halligan's improper appointment, but it's also worth covering how badly she fucked up even if she had been appointed legally. These cases were destined for the dustbin no matter what, because Halligan had no idea what she was [...]

Mark Kelly-former Navy combat pilot, astronaut, sitting United States Senator-stated a simple legal fact on video: members of the US military can refuse illegal orders. Not as opinion. Not as political positioning. As established law codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and affirmed at Nuremberg when I was following orders" was rejected as [...]

The US Patent Office is about to gut the only effective tool we have for killing bad patents-and they're doing it by administrative fiat, without Congress, in a way that would make patent trolling easier than it's been in over a decade. They need to hear from you by Tuesday, December 2nd, or this may [...]

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The DOJ continues to shed talent as those who actually care about doing the job right are either quitting or being fired for refusing to be Trump's vindictive blunt force objects. The problem with shedding this much talent is that you need to replace it with someone capable of fogging a mirror while also being [...]

Trump's right wing billionaire friend Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby son, David) recentlyacquired CBSand likelyco-ownership of TikTok. Like Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, the goal isn't really subtle: rich, thin-skinned right wingers want to own the entirety of U.S. new and old media, then convert it into a giant propaganda and lazy infotainment bullhorn thatblows [...]

We've talked a lot about measles throughout this year, which is particularly frustrating given that America officially eliminated this disease from its endemic state back in 2000. How we got here is a very simple story: too many people refused to vaccinate themselves and/or their children, giving the virus a foothold which it had been [...]

If you've been following thewave of age-gating lawssweepingacross the countryandthe globe, you've probably noticed that lawmakers, tech companies, and advocates all seem to be using different terms for what sounds like the same thing. Age verification, age assurance, age estimation, age gating-they get thrown around interchangeably, but they technically mean different things. And those differences [...]

CNN, like most U.S. cable news networks, professes to provide users access to journalism. Instead, what you'll most consistently find is a sort of generic, ad-slathered, center-right, corporatist drivel with the rough edges (read: truth) sanded off like a Ken doll's genitals to avoid offense. View from nowhere" journalism that doesn't inform so much as [...]

Last week's dismissal of the FTC's antitrust case against Meta-combined with the earlier limited remedies in the Google search case-demonstrates something that should be obvious by now: antitrust is a pathetically weak tool for increasing competition in digital markets. This isn't an argument against competition. Competition in digital markets matters, desperately. But antitrust enforcement is [...]

Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino has already made a name for himself during Trump's second administration. He began making this name by engaging in an unapproved sweep of the area he controlled in California as Trump was still waiting to be sworn in. Then he was sent to Chicago by a vengeful Trump who wanted [...]

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For the last few years, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and their allies have spent considerable energy attacking both academic researchers studying disinformation and the trust & safety teams at social media platforms working to identify and remove coordinated inauthentic behavior-particularly foreign influence operations. They've insisted that any attempt to study and limit such operations is [...]

Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we've noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector isfalling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV. That has involved chasing pointless growth for growth's sake" megamergers, imposing bottomless price hikes and newannoying restrictions on customers,undermining labor, and cutting corners on product quality in [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is David with a comment about Trump's freakout after Democrats told soldiers not to follow illegal orders: What everyone appears to overlook Trump's tantrum here clearly shows that he is perfectly aware that orders he puts out and plans to put out in future are [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we featured a guest post about the many problems with the idea of upload filters, while Poland was trying to get them excluded from the EU Copyright Directive. Twitch was continuing to trip over itself in response to its DMCA apocalypse, and we dug into just how bad [...]

I knew this was coming but this still is absolutely maddening. In all of our coverage of RFK Jr., particularly since his vile appointment and confirmation as head of Health and Human Services, it's been abundantly clear that he's an anti-vaxxer. While that may seem obvious to most of our readers, it's important to note [...]