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If you think back to Brendan Carr's first tenure as a regular Commissioner at the FCC, he was constantly warning about FCC overreach." We couldn't have privacy rules or net neutrality rules protecting consumers from Comcast, he said, because that would be an extremist abuse of government authority. In fact, any oversight of shitty telecom [...]

We chronicled the implosion of the company Nikola and the fall from grace of its CEO, Trevor Milton, for years. If you don't recall the story, Nikola was built to develop over the road trucks with a hydrogen propulsion system. In 2020, in a bid to gain more investment and boost confidence of current investors, [...]

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 round-up of the latest news in online [...]

The Anchorage Police Department (APD) has concluded its three-month trial of Axon's Draft One, an AI system that uses audio from body-worn cameras to write narrative police reports for officers-and has decided not to retain the technology. Axon touts this technology as force multiplying," claiming itcuts in halfthe amount of time officers usually spend writing [...]

Walled Culture has been following closelyItaly's poorly designed Piracy Shieldsystem. Back in December we reported how copyright companies used their access to the Piracy Shield system to order Italian Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to all of Google Drive for the entire country, and how malicious actors could similarly use that unchecked power [...]

Will the third time be the charm? Let's hope so. This charmless act of hatred masquerading as for the children" legislating has been struck down again by the same federal court that tried to kill it off the first time. In late December 2023, an Iowa federal court told the state there was little chance [...]

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There's a fundamental problem with Donald Trump's new trade policy: it fails a test that actual 5th graders can pass. I know this because I tried explaining his Liberation Day" trade plan to one last night. Here's how that conversation went: Imagine you want to buy a toy at a store which costs $50. You [...]

Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr isn't really interested in doing his actual job as head of the FCC. He's not interested in protecting consumers or markets from notoriously shitty telecom monopolies. He's not interested in protecting consumers or markets from harmful consolidation. He's not interested in addressing the fact the telecom industry just saw the [...]

Rockstar Games and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive, have been telling us who they are for years. And who they are, for our purposes, amounts to a game developer that both absolutely hates any leaked information about its games and one that has been perfectly willing to go to war with its own modding community. [...]

Moral panics come and go, but stupid legislation is forever. At least until the Supreme Court steps in. This week on Otherwise Objectionable, my podcast series about Section 230, we talk about how the moral panic over porn" online, including Senator James Exon's infamous blue binder of internet porn, caused the Senate to pass a [...]

We've noted more times than I can't count that the push to ban TikTok was never really about protecting American privacy. If that were true, we would pass a real privacy law and craft serious penalties for companies and executives that play fast and loose with sensitive American data. It was never really about propaganda. [...]

Once again, several Senators appear poised to gut one of the most important laws protecting internet users -Section 230 (47 U.S.C. 230). Don't be fooled - many of Section 230's detractors claim that this critical law only protects big tech. The reality is that Section 230 provides limited protection for all platforms, though the [...]

Donald Trump has decided he can't do immigration enforcement without doing war crimes. That's where we're at now as a country: under the thumb of someone exercising executive war powers to remove anyone looking faintly Mexican from the country under the extremely dubious theory that the people rounded up by ICE are all members of [...]

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Remember Mike Waltz? The National Security Advisor who's spent the last few weeks demonstrating his profound inability to handle basic security? First, there was the illegal Signal chat where he accidentally added a journalist while discussing potential war crimes. Then we learned about his completely exposed Venmo contacts and leaked passwords. And now, in a [...]

Last October,Trump sued CBSclaiming (falsely) that a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris had been deceitfully edited" to her benefit (they simply shortened some of her answers for brevity, as news outlets often do). AsMike explored in a post at the time, the lawsuit was utterly baseless, and tramples the First Amendment, editorial discretion, and [...]

The measles outbreak is not going away and RFK Jr. is making it worse. There is no need for equivocation in that statement. The facts are plain for all to see. Through a combination of half-hearted statements on getting the MMR vaccine followed up first by a pivot to nutrition, then another pivot to purposeful [...]

The White House Correspondents Association has justcapitulatedto pressure from the Trump administration by removing comedian Amber Ruffin from its annual dinner. Their stated reason? To ensure the focus is not on the politics of division." This seemingly minor capitulation reveals something profound about how democracy dies-not through dramatic confrontation, but through a thousand small surrenders [...]

Support us on Patreon If you're a Techdirt reader, you're probably familiar with Senator Ron Wyden. In January, he released his new book It Takes Chutzpah, offering up a call for political boldness that feels even more relevant with every day that passes. This week, Senator Wyden joins Mike on the podcast to talk about [...]

Remember when government officials discussing sensitive information over unsecured channels was treated as a national crisis worthy of endless investigations? Apparently, those days are over. While Hillary Clinton's email server spawned years of investigations and Attorney General Pam Bondi is still trying to rehash it, the White House wants us to simply forget about top [...]

Anything that doesn't jibe with Donald Trump's white male-centric worldview must go. Whatever is deemed woke" - no matter its basis in factual history - must be excised. If tossing aside DEI means pretending blacks, women, and other non-white, non-male people never contributed anything to this country, so be it. If stroking off the far [...]

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The U.S. government just demonstrated exactly why due process matters. In what should be a shocking admission, the Trump administration revealed in court that it had made a bit of an oopsie (they call it an administrative error") - one that resulted in trafficking a Maryland father with protected legal status to a Salvadoran prison. [...]

We've long noted how the 2021 infrastructure bill included $42.5 billion for broadband dubbed the Broadband, Equity, Access And Deployment (BEAD) program. Managed by the NTIA and individual states, we've also noted how this money has taken a long time to get to the states for some good reasons. Namely they wanted to avoid the [...]

A whole new level of constitutional wtf-ness has emerged from the Indiana state Appeals Court. Here's how John Wesley Hall sums it up on FourthAmendment.com: If you're riding a bus and drugs are found on one, are all subject to search. The answer can't be yes, but it is here. Exactly. The answer cannot be [...]

It appears that Mariah Carey got a very late Christmas present this year. Several years ago, Carey was sued by Andy Stone over Carey's hit holiday song, All I Want For Christmas Is You. The whole lawsuit was a complete mess. The fact it was filed in a Louisana court made no sense. The suit [...]

Imagine you had pretty much unlimited power over the government and wanted to save taxpayers' money. You could: Or you could do what Elon Musk did with DOGE: declare everything wasteful, start firing people at random, and claim you're saving billions through pure destruction. It's long been clear that Elon has never considered Chesterton's Fence [...]

Thefootageis hard to watch-not because it's shocking, but because it isn't. Because we've seen this coming. Because we'vewrittenit down. Because it's what happens when performance fully replaces governance, and people are asked to believe that DOGE" and efficiency" and Musk" now constitute anew political grammar. Rep. Victoria Spartz stands in front of her constituents at [...]

America's largest law firms are facing an existential choice that will define not just their legacies, but potentially the future of constitutional democracy: fight against clearly unconstitutional executive orders designed to destroy the ability of anyone to fight back, or surrender to authoritarianism. While that might sound hyperbolic, the evidence shows that it's absolutely true. [...]

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There is a disquieting update to my last post about a district court victory in Does 1-26 v. Musk that had enjoined DOGE, given its likely unconstitutional exercise of power, particularly in the context of its dismemberment of USAID. The Fourth Circuit has now stayed enforcement of that injunction, which raises a few issues worth [...]

The FCC runs an $8 billion federal subsidy program to help bring phone and broadband services to lower income homes and schools called theUniversal Service Fund. Started by Reagan and expanded by Bush Jr., the program was historically a bipartisan thing, until the extremist Trump administration came to town. Driven by a fake right wing [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is frankcox with a comment about the horrifying abduction of Rumeysa Ozturk: Masked abductors? The people doing this are obviously ashamed of themselves because they are wearing masks to prevent anyone from identifying them. That adds another level of terror to this sort of thing. [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the pandemic news continued. Some people were attempting to leverage it to call for longer patent terms, while we were calling for loosening the intellectual property reins, and the DOJ was using it to justify indefinite detention of arrested people. Libraries were looking to become pandemic broadband havens [...]

Clearview saw an opening in the facial recognition market and took full advantage of it. While most tech firms offered face-matching tech of dubious accuracy, Clearview went further, matching its AI to the billions of records it has harvested for free from the open internet. (And while this effort certainly wasn't free, it definitely was [...]

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 round-up of the latest news in online [...]

The fallout over several Trump administration officials, all of them high-ranking, discussing military operations of a sensitive nature in a Signal chat and inadvertently welcoming a journalist to that chat is ongoing. The administration's attempts to hand-wave this all away as unimportant doesn't appear to be getting much traction, thankfully. The entire episode is a [...]

Is it a flag on your porch? A sense of pride during the national anthem? A particular vision of freedom or prosperity? Perhaps it's a story you tell yourself about who we are and what we stand for. Whatever it means to you, I want you to hold that meaning close as you read what [...]

This hasn't been a good week for those who believed that Donald Trump would bring in the best, most competent" people around. Fresh off the revelation that a bunch of the top cabinet and security officials were accidentally sharing classified info with a journalist using Signal on their private phones (rather than, you know, secure [...]

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Trump - just like the last time he was in office - is still pretending his bigoted anti-immigrant policies are only in place to ensure the US can rid itself of dangerous foreign criminals. But no one really believed that last time. And with his return to the Oval Office, any pretense of fairness or [...]

If you hadn't noticed, consolidated corporate media hasn't been meeting the challenges of the current moment very well. There's generally two reasons: one, these media outlets tend to reflect the interests of generally white, older, male, right wing ownership, which broadly thinks authoritarianism is a fair price to pay for some tax cuts, deregulation, and [...]

The reemergence of measles, a disease once declared officially eradicated in the United States, didn't start with the second Trump presidential term. It didn't even begin with Trump's first term. Instead, it started through an unholy alliance between far-right, often religious groups that have pitched the vaccines as either unnecessary or dangerous combined with a [...]

You probably recall Ajit Pai, Trump's first FCC boss. Pai took a mindless hatchet to broadband consumer protection and media consolidation limits with no shortage of scandal. Like that time he turned a blind eye as the telecom industry used dead and fake people to generate fake support for shitty policies (like killing net neutrality). [...]

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) just made a move that will protect bad patents at the expense of everyone else. In amemo released February 28, the USPTO further restricted access to inter partes review, or IPR-the process Congress created to let the public challenge invalid patents without having to wage million-dollar court battles. [...]

For years, we've been hearing breathless warnings about a campus free speech crisis" from self-proclaimed free speech warriors. Their evidence? College students doing what college students have done for generations: protesting speakers they disagree with, challenging institutional policies, and yes, sometimes attempting to create heckler's vetoes. This kind of campus activism - while occasionally messy [...]

The beatings will apparently continue, whether or not morale improves. The Trump Administration's latest move from far-right towards open fascism involves, unsurprisingly, the gutting of more government components tasked with ensuring the federal government doesn't treat civil rights like privileges only afforded to those who can afford them... or anyone else willing to lick the [...]

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When the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg revealed this week that senior White House officials had accidentally added him to their Yemen bombing planning session on Signal, he did something remarkable: he actually protected operational security better than the officials themselves did. While Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others now insist Nobody was texting war plans," the [...]