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Updated 2025-08-05 23:31
Trump Administration’s Targeting Of International Students Jeopardizes Free Speech And Privacy Online
The federal government is usingsocial media surveillancetotargetstudent visa holders living in the United States foronline speechthe Trump administration disfavors. The administration has initiated this new program, called Catch and Revoke," in an effort to revoke visas, and it appears to be a cross-agency collaboration between the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and [...]
Effective Accelerationism Is Just Technological Authoritarianism With A Smile
Behind effective accelerationism's techno-optimist smile lies a familiar and dangerous impulse: subordinating human dignity to a technological imperative framed as inevitable. Theeffective accelerationismmovement (e/acc) presents itself as an enlightened embrace of technological progress, especially artificial general intelligence. Led by figures likeGuillaume Verdonand embraced by venture capitalists likeMarc Andreessen, the movement claims humanity faces a binary [...]
Why The Fuck Are Democrats Helping Build MAGA’s Censorship Machine With KOSA?
The Trump administration is methodically implementing every element of Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 censorship playbook, and Democratic leadership's response is... to help them? Earlier today, Chuck Schumer and Richard Blumenthal joined MAGA Republicans to reintroduce the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) - a bill that Heritage itself has proudly proclaimed as central to its strategy [...]
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DOJ Declares Victory In The War On Drugs, Claims 250 Million Lives Have Been Saved By Fentanyl Seizures
Our long national nightmare is over. More lives have been saved than have possibly ever lived. And that's just since earlier this year. Using the same drug math that turns a couple of kilos into something with tens of millions of dollars of street value," Attorney General Pam Bondi publicly claimed Trump's return to office [...]
Ted Cruz Proudly Makes Broadband Shittier And Homework Harder For U.S. School Kids
Last year the Biden FCC passed a new rule providing portable Wi-Fi hotspots to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, theruleallowed schools to leverage the FCC's E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses, making it easier for kids who lack broadband (or can't afford broadband) [...]
RFK Jr. Takes His Grandkids For A Mother’s Day Swim In A River Of Human Shit
Look, folks, I have to admit that I'm running out of ways to open these posts about RFK Jr., so let's just do this quickly. He's a vaccine skeptic with a ton of bad ideas on public health policy, is letting the current measles outbreak expand for no good reason, has promised to have the [...]
The House GOP Quietly Slipped In An AI Law That Would Accidentally Ban GOP’s Favorite ‘Save The Children’ Laws
Buried in the House GOP's massive budget reconciliation bill is a seemingly simple provision about AI regulation. The idea appears straightforward enough: stop states from regulating AI companies for the next decade. To do this, they quietly added language preventing states from regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems." This is, [...]
Techdirt Podcast Episode 418: The Elonification Of Government
Support us on Patreon We've written a lot about how understanding the playbook Elon Musk used at Twitter is key to understanding his current playbook with DOGE. The people who literally wrote the book on said playbook are New York Times journalists Ryan Mac and Kate Conger (the latter of whom joined the podcast last [...]
Meta Threatens To Pull Facebook And Instagram Out Of Nigeria Over $290 Million Fine Imposed For Violation Of Local Privacy Laws
It's hardly a secret that Meta is an unpleasant company. That's reflected both in terms of what happens behind closed doors, and its actions in the market. Some of its attempts to bully nations or even large economic blocks are well documented. But its threats outside Western markets are just as reprehensible, though less well [...]
Hasan Piker Just Gave His Millions Of Followers A Masterclass In What Not To Do When Detained By CBP
Progressive streamer Hasan Piker's recent detention by CBP at the Chicago airport has generated widespread outrage - and rightfully so. No US citizen should be interrogated about their political beliefs when re-entering their own country. But while CBP's behavior was egregious, Piker's response was potentially even more dangerous: he chose to engage in a two-hour [...]
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NSO Group Owes Meta $167 Million In Damages For Using WhatsApp Servers To Deliver Malware
We'll have to see if NSO Group has this sort of cash just laying around. Seems unlikely, what with its financial backers pulling out in response to a steady stream of negative headlines, as well as the company considering exiting the highly-profitable offensive malware market. Sure, this will be appealed and NSO will try to [...]
Sorry, Affordable, Evenly Deployed Fiber Optic Broadband Is Illegal Now Under Our Shitty, Ignorant Government
The Trump administration has illegally declared the Digital Equity Act of 2021 racist and unconstitutional," and called for it to be dismantled. The grant program had been helping push affordable fiber optic broadband into communities long neglected regions by regional telecom monopolies, be they minority, low-income, rural, suburban, or urban. It's the latest effort by [...]
Trump’s Plan For Tracking Costs Of Large Natural Disasters At NOAA: The Ostrich Routine
The nightmare that is Elon Musk's DOGE cuts continues. The program, originally billed as a method for identifying all kinds of waste, fraud, and abuse within government spending, has shown itself to be more about giving Musk's DOGE kiddos access to all kinds of data they shouldn't have and something of a creative writing exercise [...]
DOJ Lawyers Work For Justice & The Constitution — Not The White House
In the 1970s, President Richard Nixontried to fire the Department of Justiceprosecutorleading an investigationinto the president's involvement in wiretapping the Democratic National Committee's headquarters. Since then, the DOJ has generally been run asan impartial law enforcement agency, separated from the executive office and partisan politics. Those guardrails are now being severely tested under the Trump [...]
The Copyright Office Issues A Largely Disappointing Report On AI Training, And Once Again A Major Fair Use Analysis Inexplicably Ignores The First Amendment
As this post explains, we have issues with the third installment of the Copyright Office's report on AI. The rest of this post discusses them, but we note here that, while the report is due criticism, the criticism does not warrant or justify the firing of Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter from her duly-appointed position. [...]
With Courts Repeatedly Telling Trump Migrants Have Rights, Stephen Miller Suggests It’s Time To Suspend Habeas Corpus
The mass renditioning of migrants hasn't gone exactly as planned. Sure, it's resulted in extreme amounts of stupid cruelty, which is very much on-brand for Trump administrations, but the mass deportation efforts have also met with considerable resistance from federal court judges. The administration hoped to keep the courts from doing anything to protect migrants [...]
Trump Fires Nation’s Top Librarian Over Made-Up Culture War Claims
The Trump administration last week fired one of the most respected librarians in America because she allegedly put inappropriate books" in a library that basically gets copies of nearly all books and doesn't even allow children to check out books. Carla Hayden, the astoundingly effective Librarian of Congress for the past nine years, was abruptly [...]
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DHS Proudly Declares It Might Arrest Congressional Reps For Doing Their Oversight Job, Settles For Arresting The Local Mayor
You can believe any version of this story you want, but there's no version that makes ICE and the DHS look like heroes protecting themselves from an actual threat. Let's first take a look at the local reporting from where ICE is putting boots on the ground: Newark, New Jersey. Three House of Representatives members [...]
Garmin CEO Hints More Paywalls And Enshittification Are Coming, Falsely Claims Users Love It
We recently noted how device maker Garmin had decided to follow in the footsteps of Google's Fitbit, and begin putting basic features behind an annoying subscription paywall to goose revenues. Garmin's new premium" Garmin+ tiertakes several features users already enjoyed for free, put them behind a $7 per month paywall, and called it innovation. Users [...]
Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
This week, we've got a double winner taking first place for both insightful and funny. It's Strawb with a comment about Darren Beattie embracing the Twitter Files playbook: Trump: We will stop waste, fraud and abuse in the goverment!" Beattie: Starts a project that wastes government time and money, and creates a fraudulent narrative that [...]
Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Honorable Mentions
This is a brief detour in our series of posts about the winners of this year's public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929! We've already covered the Best Remix, Best Deep Cut, and Best Visuals, and Best Adaptation, but before we move on to the last two categories (Best Analog Game and Best Digital [...]
New US Surgeon General Nominee Is RFK Jr.’s Favorite ‘Wellness Influencer’
The state of American health is in crisis at the moment due to a confluence of things entirely created by the current administration. Putting RFK Jr. in charge of Health and Human Services (HHS) never felt like anything other than a move designed to troll Trump's detractors and it shows. As the measles outbreak that [...]
Gavin Newsom Is Normalizing Trump’s Constitutional Violations
Gavin Newsom's rightward shift represents not just a strategic miscalculation but a profound moral abdication based on a fundamental misunderstanding of both democratic principles and political reality. Newsom appears to haveconvinced himselfthat the path to defeating Trumpism lies in adopting its language, accepting its framing, and finding common ground" with an administration actively dismantling constitutional [...]
Judge To ICE: No, You Can’t Actually Kidnap Students For Writing Op-Eds
Correction/Update: In this original article, I included a quote from DHS that I thought was in response to today's order, which implied DHS believed they could still detain Ozturk, but it appears it was in response to the earlier ruling on Wednesday when she was first ordered to be transferred. We have removed that quote [...]
IRS-ICE Immigrant Data Sharing Agreement Betrays Data Privacy And Taxpayers’ Trust
In an unprecedented move, the U.S. Department of Treasury and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recentlyreached an agreementallowing the IRS to share with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) taxpayer information of certain immigrants. The redacted 15-pagememorandum of understanding(MOU) was exposed in a court case,Centro de Trabajadores Unidos v. Bessent, which seeks to prevent [...]
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Nassau County Legislators Want To Create A Moving 15-Foot Halo For Its Officers
Oh, so we're still doing this, huh. Despite pretty much every effort of this type being rejected by courts as, shall we say, constitutionally-improbable, legislators continue to believe that cops should be protected from the people they serve by laws that allow them to violate the rights of the people they serve. Here's the latest [...]
Trump Using Pointless, Shitty Tariffs To Bully Countries Into Coddling Elon Musk’s Starlink
By now most sentient people realize Trump's tariffs are a mindlessly descructive gambit that's going to decimate inventory, drive smaller companies out of business, and significantly drive up costs for American consumers. There's bottomless evidence that the clumsy effort to bully the planet was concocted by imbeciles, and most countries have justifiably told the Trump [...]
RFK Jr.’s Measles Policy: Deaths Are Expected And It’s The Victim’s Fault
I've ranted and raved enough about how RFK Jr. and his Health and Human Services department are completely fucking up the response to the current measles outbreak enough that I'm confident you all don't need me to rehash the entire thing in this opening. We can leave it at this: we're probably going to lose [...]
DOGE Aide Who Helped Gut CFPB Was Warned About Potential Conflicts Of Interest
This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Last month, a Department of Government Efficiency aide at the nation's consumer watchdog agency was told by ethics attorneys that he held stock in companies that employees are forbidden from owning - and was advised not to participate in any actions that could benefit him personally, [...]
Greek Authorities Fail In Their Attempt To Make VPN Founder Personally Responsible For The Action Of An Unknown User
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are not a privacy panacea, but they do empower Internet users in important ways. Proof of that can be found in the constant attempts by governments around the world to control who can use VPNs and for what purpose, most recently in Italy and Brazil. Hackread reports on another such move [...]
Intelligence Community Demolishes Trump’s Venezuelan ‘Invasion’ Claims In Record Time… Almost Like They Want Us To Know He’s Lying
The Intelligence Community just demonstrated, in spectacular fashion, exactly how badly Donald Trump and his ODNI chief Tulsi Gabbard misrepresented the laughable supposed invasion" of the US by Venezuelan gangs. And they did it by responding to a Freedom of Information Act request in what may be record time - just six business days. For [...]
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Here’s Everything Trump Is Doing To Protect Bad Cops, Make Things Worse For Crime Victims
Trump was never about law and order. He cozied up to cops and praised police brutality, but when push came to literal shove, he sat back and watched his supporters attack law enforcement officers and commit federal crimes for the sole purpose of destroying democracy itself. Now that he's back in office, he's back to [...]
California Bill Would Require That AT&T And Comcast Make Broadband Affordable For Poor People
We've documented for decades how U.S. telecom is an uncompetitive mess dominated by politically powerful telecom monopolies that see no competition and effectively own Congress. As a result, the U.S. telecom and broadband market is an uncompetitive mess, with Americans still seeing higher prices, slower speeds, spottier access, and worse customer service than in many [...]
Fallout 1 & 2 Source Code Preserved Only Through One Person Refusing To Delete Copies Of It
It can be really amazing just how bad video game companies have been, and currently still are, when it comes to preserving the very culture that they help to create. While groups like GOG are at least attempting to pressure more developers and publishers to take efforts to preserve older games, it's simply a fact [...]
Community-Owned Networks Offering Locals Dirt Cheap Broadband After Republicans Dismantle Federal Low Income Program
Last yearTrumplicans killeda popular program that provided poor people with $30 off of their monthly broadband bill. The FCC'sAffordable Connectivity Program(ACP) was, unsurprisingly, very popular, with more than 23 million Americans benefitting at its peak. At the time, the GOP claimed they were simply looking to save money. The real reason the program was killed, [...]
Texas’s War On Abortion Is Now A War On Free Speech
Once again, the Texas legislature is coming after the most common method of safe and effective abortion today-medication abortion. Senate Bill (S.B.) 2880*seeks to prevent the sale and distribution of abortion pills-but it doesn't stop there. By restricting access to certain information online, the bill tries to keep people from learning about abortion drugs, or [...]
GOP: The IRS Should Never Target Organizations For Their Views… Until We’re In Power, Then Target Everyone
Remember the Lois Lerner scandal? For years, it was the Republican party's Exhibit A of Obama administration overreach - proof that Democrats were weaponizing the IRS to target conservative groups. The outrage was endless. The GOP-led congressional investigations were relentless. The rhetoric about threats to democracy was breathless. Funny thing about that: it turned out [...]
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Yet Again, The Data Shows Migrants Are More Law-Abiding Than US Citizens
This has always been the truth. And it has always been ignored by people like Donald Trump, who combine if it bleeds, it leads" media narratives with the always-exploitable fear of others." Whether a migrant is in this country legally or illegally, the odds of them committing criminal acts are much lower than those for [...]
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This is it: we're about to lock in our order quantity for One Billion Users, the competitive card game about running a social media network that we funded on Kickstarter last year. If you haven't yet become a backer of the campaign, you can still make a late pledge to order as many copies as [...]
Trump’s Illegal Effort To Defund Public Broadcasting Stumbles Forward
As recently noted, authoritarian assholes don't like public broadcasting. Because they don't like the idea of untethering U.S. journalism from the perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based media system. If we bolstered real independent journalism or public broadcasting, you might see journalism more interested in telling people the truth. Yuck! That's [...]
Crumbl, One Time IP Bully, Hit With Massive Copyright Infringement Suit Over Music In Social Media Posts
You may have heard a mantra that is becoming more popular these days thanks to a certain presidential administration operating as a language-destroyer. It goes: Every accusation is a confession." The idea behind it is that when someone goes all firebrand accusing others of a thing, you often find the firebrand guilty of that very [...]
Trump Administration Sets Up ‘Military Zone’ At Texas Border To Bump Up Immigration Arrest Stats
There will never be enough casual evil with this administration. Trump has already invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify the extrajudicial renditioning of Venezuelan immigrants to a maximum security prison in [checks notes] El Salvador. Claiming that the mere presence of foreign gang members is an act of war has allowed the DHS, CBP, [...]
Techdirt Podcast Episode 417: The Rise Of The Open Social Web
Support us on Patreon Though the original promise of the internet has been twisted and distorted, today we're seeing more and more people working to restore decentralization and user power online. One such person who sees the problem better than most is Flipboard founder and former Twitter board member (among many other things) Mike McCue, [...]
National Insecurity: The Trump Administration’s NATSEC Boys Just Can’t Stop Fucking Up
If you feel this nation is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyrannies of evil men, you probably should be scared shitless that the clowns are running the circus. Of course, those backing Trump aren't truly concerned about any of this, not even those running his agencies and/or repeating [...]
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