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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 [...]

This is who we are now. We are the country that makes people who aren't white leave the country because they're not white. And this is according to this administration's own press release, which celebrates the fact that we're now the inverse of the words engraved at the Statue of Liberty's base, which read: Give [...]

A San Francisco supervisor hasproposedthat police and other city agencies should have no financial consequences for breaking a landmark surveillance oversight law. In 2019, organizations from across the city worked together to help passthat law, which required law enforcement to get the approval of democratically elected officials before they bought and used new spying technologies.Bit [...]

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It's not enough to go after the worst of the worst." It was never a sustainable effort, what with migrants committing fewer crimes than natural citizens. The attempt to rid the country of as many non-white people as possible under Trump always had to go bigger. It has become ICE raiding swap meets and Home [...]

Right wing activism organizations posing as consumer rights groups are trying to make it illegal for the federal government to try and help poor, rural Americans afford broadband," is a sentence I just had to write. Quick background: the $8 billion FCC Universal Service Fund (USF) applies a small surcharge on traditional phone lines to [...]

I'm sure all of you beautiful people thought we were collectively done with former Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters. After he resigned abruptly in late September, nearly in mid-screed mandating that public schools hold a moment of silence for slain conservative operative Charlie Kirk and mandating a chapter of Turning Point USA at all public high [...]

We've long explored how powerful regional broadband monopolies have dominated America, resulting in spotty access, high prices, slow speeds, and terrible customer service. We've also long discussed how the U.S. government has done little to actually fix the problem, ranging from outright coddling monopolies (Trump) to performative fixes (the Biden FCC) that don't take aim [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Elon Musk's SpaceX has taken money directly from Chinese investors, according to previously sealed testimony, raising new questions about foreign ownership interests in one of the United States' most important military contractors. The recent testimony, coming from a SpaceX insider during a court case, marks the [...]

So let me get this straight. The same administration that claims fentanyl is such a dire threat that it justifies sweeping tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China is simultaneously pulling federal agents off drug interdiction duties to chase undocumented landscapers in Pennsylvania. The same political movement that built its base partly on QAnon fantasies about [...]

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A brief-ish history of events leading up to this point: Kilmar Abrego Garcia was one of hundreds of migrants rounded up by ICE, denied of their due process rights, and dumped into an infamous torture prison in El Salvador, a country overseen by a man who claims he's the world's coolest dictator." Abrego Garcia, however, [...]

Just so you know: it's not normal for your country's voice communications networks to be completely hijacked by scammers and marketers, rendering it almost unusable. That's literally not something people in most serious countries have to deal with. Yet we've largely normalized the fact that Americans are so inundated with unwanted scams and bullshit that [...]

The rush to blame video games for all the world's ills is, of course, nothing new. While some of the more novel examples of this blame-game include current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson's claim that video games are the reason the Medicaid is abused (yes, seriously), this nonsense is more commonly trotted out whenever [...]

A lot has happened since last week when my post about Des Moines (IA) school superintendent Ian Roberts being arrested by ICE first hit the front page here at Techdirt. A lot of new information has come to light, almost all of it obtained by Des Moines Register journalists, which indicates the arrested man may [...]

Support us on Patreon We've written a lot about how AI can empower users when employed the right way, but how this is difficult when a few giant tech firms control the technology. One company that is trying to move in a different direction is DuckDuckGo with its Duck.ai offering. This week, DuckDuckGo founder and [...]

Once again, we're reminded why age verification systems are fundamentally broken when it comes to privacy and security. Discord has disclosed that one of its third-party customer service providers was breached, exposing user data, including government-issued photo IDs, from users who had appealed age determinations. Data potentially accessed by the hack includes things like names, [...]

It would be something of an understatement to say that Alphabet, Google's holding company, is big and successful. Some Wall Street analysts are even predicting it could become the world's most valuable corporation. Of course, even for business giants, enough is never enough. They always want more: more money, more power. As part of that [...]

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It seems like years ago, but the Trump administration got itself sued earlier this very year by the state of California for commandeering California's National Guard to shut down anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. Trump justified this by declaring the city to be under siege, even though (1) most violence was being committed by law [...]

It's super curious how the folks most vocal about being cancelled or having their Conservative viewpoints silenced" now own or control most major U.S. media companies. Almost as if their claims of being silenced have always been a bullshit ploy to dominate the discourse on the back of something other than the quality of their [...]

As we discussed last week, Ryan Walters resigned from his position as the state Superintendent of Oklahoma and the mood across the state was sad and sour as a result. Okay, while it's very funny that Oklahoma businesses hosted celebration parties for Walters' resignation while I can't even hazard a guess at who my own [...]

The European Union Council isonce again debatingits controversial message scanning proposal, aka Chat Control," that would lead to the scanning of private conversations of billions of people. Chat Control, which EFFhas strongly opposedsince it wasfirst introducedin 2022, keeps being mildly tweaked and pushed by one Council presidency after another. Chat Control is a dangerous legislative [...]

Stephen Miller justcalleda federal judge's enforcement of constitutional law legal insurrection." Let that sink in. A Deputy White House Chief of Staff-one of the most powerful people in the executive branch-declared that judicial review of presidential power is rebellion against the United States government. A Trump-appointed judge carefully reviewed the facts, applied the relevant statutes, [...]

I have a simple question for Senator Ted Cruz: Who was president in 2018? How about 2020? I ask because Cruz just released a bombshell" report claiming that the Biden administration converted" CISA into the Thought Police." There's just one tiny problem with this narrative: Cruz's own report shows that everything he's mad about started [...]

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This administration is so comfortable with its power and so self-assured in its actions that it can't even be bothered to engage in basic operational security. This dates all the way back to Trump's first term, when the president casually (and unofficially) declassified information by posting it to Twitter, routinely refused to attend national security [...]

Brendan Carr has received ample attention for his recent failed attempt to ban a comedian and trample the First Amendment, something he's facing several fledgling investigations over. But that disaster class in shitty governance shouldn't overshadow all the other, terrible things Carr has been up to. Like last week, when Carr announced he'd be killing [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment on our post about DOGE's efficiency theater": I voted for this!" -person whose taxes and cost of living and rent are all going up In second place, it's a double-winning anonymous comment that also takes second place over on the [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, a court slowed Trump's roll on the TikTok ban because the DOJ couldn't show any actual national security threat. Meanwhile, the attacks on Section 230 were coming in waves, with a stupid new bill from Joe Manchin and John Cornyn quickly followed by two more anti-Section 230 bills, [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. After a fight with a Black student in a St. Louis suburb left a white student badly injured in March 2024, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey blamed their school district for unsafe conditions, even though the incident occurred after classes and more than a half-mile from [...]

Around 10 PM on Monday, September 30th, 2025, federal agents surrounded an apartment building in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood. ICE, Border Patrol, FBI, ATF-a multi-agency operation targeting suspected members of the Tren de Aragua gang. What happened next should be the biggest story in America. Pertissue Fisher came out to the hallway of her apartment [...]

The Hatch Act of 1939 is a beautiful piece of legislation. It disallows all kinds of things, like bribing voters with jobs to vote a certain way, as well as limiting any campaign activity by federal workers. Another thing it does is to prohibit partisan political activity in the course of a staff member's federal [...]

For years now, the MAGA crowd has been absolutely convinced that the Biden administration engaged in the most egregious censorship campaign in American history. They've waved around the Murthy v. Missouri case as proof that Biden officials illegally pressured tech companies to remove content (even as the Supreme Court concluded there wasn't even enough evidence [...]

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ICE just isn't getting the job done. Despite the masked men swarming everywhere to arrest every Mexican-looking person in sight, the agency still can't meet the 3,000 arrests per day quota that White House advisor Stephen Miller has stated is merely the baseline for his expectations. The main reason for this is that we're running [...]

This is, as they say, why we can't have nice things. This week Senator Ron Wyden - one of the few U.S. Senators who takes public and consumer privacy seriously - attempted to pass two bills that would have expanded privacy laws that currently only apply to government employees. S.2850, or Protecting Americans from Doxing [...]

The United States will celebrate the250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the country's founding document, in 2026. Twenty years later, America will celebrate the 250th anniversary ofPresident George Washington's Farewell Address,which was published on Sept. 19, 1796. The two documents are the bookends of the American Revolution. That revolution began with the inspirational language [...]

I'll start with this: I am certainly not fully politically aligned with Senator Bill Cassidy, but I have typically found him to be genuine and intelligent. Points of disagreement aside, he doesn't strike me as a grifter or psychopath, which is unfortunately quite rare amongst government these days. He is a doctor, specifically a gastroenterologist, [...]

Automation undeniably has some useful applications. But the folks hyping modern AI" have not only dramatically overstated its capabilities, many of them generally view these tools as a way to lazily cut corners or undermine labor. There's also a weird innovation cult that has arisen around managers and LLM use, resulting in the mandatory use [...]

Well, that didn't last long. Remember back in August when we reported that the UK had supposedly backed down" from its dangerous demand that Apple create encryption backdoors? Remember how the Trump administration (mainly Tulsi Gabbard and JD Vance) went around patting themselves on the back for tough-arming the UK into acquiescence? At the time, [...]

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God, what I wouldn't give for another Nixon administration. Sure, it was corrupt and built from the ground up to punish the opposing party for being the opposing party. But that administration was limited and restrained by things like competent oversight, a functioning court system that wasn't constantly undermined by five justices who want to [...]

ABC and Disney's attempt to please our dim idiot king by banning a critical comedian didn't go all that well. The company managed to lose 1.7 million streaming subscribers as customers voted with their wallets to punish the company for taking a giant dump on the First Amendment. This latest effort, you'll recall, came on [...]

Back in 2023, Trader Joe's, the famous grocery chain, decided to sue its own employee union for trademark infringement. At issue was the merchandise that Trader Joe's United sold on its website, which all include a logo for the union that is a modified version of the Trader Joe's logo. Here's an example: Compared with [...]

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 [...]

I actually wrote this article yesterday before the government shutdown happened so I don't really discuss that, but it sounds like we may end up going through all this again if the Trump regime goes through with its plans to use the shutdown to fire a bunch more people who are important, but who no [...]

I've spentconsiderable timelately documenting how America's corporate elite have transformed themselves into the exact cartoon villains that Marxists always claimed they were-groveling before authoritarian power, paying tribute to criminal regimes, abandoning every principle they've spent decades claiming to represent. But criticism without constructive alternatives is just intellectual masturbation, so let me offer some practical guidance [...]

We've spent plenty of time talking about various people who are failing to meet this moment, but I will say that a number of district court judges have really been stepping up. The latest example is Reagan-appointed conservative Judge William Young (who had previously-somewhat sarcastically-mocked the Supreme Court's ridiculous abuse of the shadow docket), who [...]