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A startling government surveillance program that involved government investigators embedded in AT&T offices was accidentally released in response to an FOIA request (seeking documents about something else entirely) more than a decade ago. But, since 2013, there's still plenty that's unknown about the DEA's Hemisphere program. What's known is this: the DEA was able to [...]

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Dear Senator Schumer: There is no question that you are a dedicated public servant. You believe in our democracy. You believe in the norms that maintain it. You believe in its mission of bringing us together to promote the general welfare. There are many, many favorable things that can be said about you, your service, [...]

Just so we're very clear up front: despite a lot of bullshit to the contrary, the Trump administration is completely dismantling whatever's left of U.S. consumer protection and corporate oversight. That's not hyperbole; between recent Supreme Court rulings, Trump executive orders, and the actions of radical agency bosses like Brendan Carr, they're not being at [...]

I guess this is going to become a theme for who knows how long. For reasons I cannot begin to understand, the Trump administration's distaste for any criticism of itself, as well as any politics it does not agree with, is resulting in many in corporate America folding into alignment with those desires. Whether it's [...]

The second episode of Otherwise Objectionable, my new podcast series all about Section 230, is now out: The Dawn of the Internet. This week, I talk to a bunch of folks (including one of the first friends I ever met online) about what the internet was actually like in the early days, before Section 230, [...]

Donald Trump has proudlyshown offhis new spoil of war-the Declaration of Independence. A document, which to me, has so much meaning and importance. Well, I'm quite upset about it. Not because I believe such a document should never leave the National Archives. Historical artifacts can and sometimes should travel for legitimate purposes. But what unsettles [...]

One of the darker threads of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is how complex copyright enforcement systems can be abused, for example by sendingDigital Millennium Copyright Act(DMCA) takedown requests for material that is perfectly legal. A recent post on the Public Citizen blog offersan extreme example of this blight. Here's the summary [...]

Shooting the messenger is still the preferred tactic for short-sighted entities that have been embarrassed on main by having their own carelessness publicly exposed. Two articles on Databreaches.net (run by Dissent Doe) covered the discovery and eventual consequences of a ransomware attack on HCRG Care Group, a UK-based private healthcare provider. The ransom demanded by [...]

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In an unprecedented move that flatly violates federal law, Donald Trump on Tuesday fired both Democratic commissioners from the Federal Trade Commission - Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya. The illegal purge represents a direct assault on the independence of the consumer protection agency. While presidents have always wielded influence over independent agencies through their [...]

It's best to view Elon Musk's DOGE as an attack. While right wing propaganda (and gullible media outlets and politicians) frame DOGE as a cost saving" effort at improving government efficiency," that's just flimsy-ass cover for its real purpose: the dismantling of corporate oversight, environmental guard rails, consumer protection, civil rights, and the social safety [...]

The enshittification of Roku's streaming service, by which the company seeks the exact pinpoint at which it can extract the most amount of money from its customers without fostering a mass exodus of those same customers, continues. While Roku is not alone in the world of streaming services descending into this muck, it has been [...]

California legislators have begun debating a bill (A.B. 412) that would require AI developers to track and disclose every registered copyrighted work used in AI training. At first glance, this might sound like a reasonable step toward transparency. But it's an impossible standard that could crush small AI startups and developers while giving big tech [...]

Support us on Patreon We recently announced the launch of Otherwise Objectionable, a brand new documentary podcast hosted by Mike in partnership with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, covering the history - and the vital importance - of Section 230. This week, we're featuring the entire debut episode right here on the Techdirt Podcast. Check it [...]

When faced with a difficult technology policy challenge, policymakers can respond in one of two ways: with careful analysis of what's technically possible, or by demanding Silicon Valley simply wave a magic wand and make all problems disappear. Romania has chosen... the latter. The backstory here is pretty straightforward: A Russian-supporting candidate leveraged TikTok to [...]

I honestly don't understand this compunction to break things that are already working fine. Axon makes body cameras (and Tasers!), but it simply wasn't enough to equip cops with cameras and cop shops with expensive service contracts. No, the company insisted the way forward was dropping AI into existing tech so robots could start doing [...]

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It took exactly three days for Trump to prove that Judge Beryl Howell's Alice in Wonderland" comparison wasn't just apt, but prescient. After the judge blocked his executive order attempting to destroy Perkins Coie for representing his political opponents, Trump has now issued an almost identical order targeting another major law firm, Paul Weiss. Because [...]

There are more than $42.5 billion in broadband grantsheaded to the statescourtesy of the 2021 infrastructure bill. The GOP voted against the bill, but have repeatedly turned around andtaken credit for its looming benefitsamong our broadly misinformed electorate. And,as we long predicted, they're now redrafting key components of the program to the direct benefit of [...]

While the number of trademark dispute stories in the alcohol industry has slowed down compared to where it was five years ago, they certainly haven't gone away entirely. While many past stories were a matter of brewery on brewery trademark violence, owing largely to the creative manner in which craft breweries name and trade dress [...]

Late last month, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced arequest for public commenton so-called tech censorship." America has a vibrant and successful market-driven system for content moderation, enabled by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which allows platforms to set their own rules, while users decide where to engage. That's why conversation on [...]

The DHS and its main anti-immigration component, ICE, have always been big fans of social media surveillance. This has been part of the so-called enhanced screening" protocols for several years now, deployed against foreign residents upon arrival in this nation, whether at border crossings or international airports where they're just flying in for a short-term [...]

It's no secret that Russia has taken advantage of the Internet's global reach and low distribution costs to flood the online world with huge quantities of propaganda (as have other nations): Techdirt has been writing about Putin's troll army for a decade now. Russian organizations like the Internet Research Agency have been paying large numbers [...]

There's a certain poetry to Tesla executives discovering that trade wars are, in fact, not good and easy to win. Last week, someone at Tesla sent a detailed letter to the US Trade Representative essentially begging for relief from the very policies their CEO has been championing as he destroys the traditional institutions of government. [...]

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Well that was fast. We were just talking about RFK Jr.'s recent comments on the measles outbreak in several southern states, mainly Texas, and how those comments were dangerous. The HHS Secretary, while not specifically denouncing the MMR vaccine, suggested that malnourishment was to blame for severe illnesses and death within the outbreak. But he's [...]

For years, more ham-fisted printer manufacturers have waged a not-so-subtle war on consumers by blocking the ability to use cheaper, third-party printer cartridges. HP and Canon have both been particularly obnoxious on this front, and continue to engage in the practice despite a growing pile of assorted lawsuits. Brother has historically been one of the [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Rocky with a reply to an unhinged comment about the debunked" Steele Dossier funded by Hillary Clinton": What's funny here is that you don't actually know the origin of said dossier or you have conveniently excised that knowledge from your brain, just like do [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the DOJ ended up with a mistrial in its first attempt to prosecute an accused leaker, and also proposed some Section 230 reform ideas that were even dumber than expected, while Match.com was also getting on the anti-230 bandwagon. FBI Director Chris Wray was pitching weakened encryption at [...]

As we've been following along to some degree with the whole Blake Lively versus Justin Baldoni legal mess, the more recent stories have been about Baldoni's attempt to go after protected creative speech in a Deadpool movie, the choice of waging a PR war before the trial even starts, and the Streisand Effect nature to [...]

When 1,700 people pack a room at SXSW (with hundreds more relegated to overflow spaces) to hear about a decentralized social media protocol, it's clear something interesting is happening. The crowd that showed up for my conversation with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber this week wasn't just there for another social media platform - they were [...]

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) now exists in name only. Not only did Trump's band of Musk-led pillagers dismantle the infrastructure side of the agency by disbanding the CISA group investigating a massive China-based hack of US phone systems, but the administration terminated ongoing election security and disinformation-thwarting efforts by the agency roughly [...]

I'm old enough to rememberwhen age verification bills were pitchedas a way to save the kids from porn' and shield them from other vague dangers lurking in the digital world (like...the transgender"). We havelongcautionedabout thedangersoftheselaws, and pointed outwhy they are likely to fail. While they may be well-intentioned, the growing proliferation of age verification schemes [...]

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During the great TikTok moral panic of 2022-2025 we noted repeatedly how it was very weird for the public, press, and lawmakers to singularly hyperventilate about the privacy and propaganda impacts of one specific Chinese-owned app while just completely refusing to do anything about the much broader problems that TikTok (and a thousand other companies) [...]

Elon Musk's companies aren't having the best couple of weeks, it seems. ExTwitter suffered from several outages this week, some lengthy, while Musk claimed that it was the result of a DDoS attack and hinted that Ukraine might be to blame. The story of SpaceX thus far in 2025 has mostly been one filled with [...]

The big deal today is Democrats' threatened capitulation to the GOP on the continuing resolution to keep the government open-but entirely on Trump's terms, no matter who it bankrupts (hello, DC police and fire departments!). But the larger point made here stands, because the cowardice on display in this budget showdown is the cowardice that [...]

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 [...]

Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg, for giving me yet another exhibit in my museum of those who fail to understand the Streisand Effect. Meta is so desperate to silence a former employee's book that it's doing everything possible to ensure maximum publicity for the allegations within it. You might think that a company like Meta would [...]

If there's anything guaranteed to increase the number of leaks emanating from an entity, it's letting people know you're trying to track down leakers. The public sector knows this. The private sector knows this. And yet, the same thing happens again and again: a deterrent appears and everyone treats it like an instigator. Even Trump [...]

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Generally speaking, if a judge says this to you, your client is unlikely to succeed in their case: This may be amusing in Alice in Wonderland' where the Queen of Hearts yells Off with their heads!' at annoying subjects... but this cannot be the reality we are living under." That was Judge Beryl Howell yesterday, [...]

Last month U.S. oligarch Jeff Bezos gutted what was left of the paper's op-ed section, declaring that they'd only publish pieces that supported personal liberties and free markets" (read: kinder to right wing, corporatist ideals). As Mike noted at the time, it was an obvious trampling of editorial discretion by billionaire owner Jeff Bezos that [...]

As tech advances, the law mutates. In some cases (Riley, Carpenter) we get more protections. In other cases, we get fewer protections. This case dates back to 2022. Christopher Poller was a suspect Waterbury, Connecticut police officers were seeking to arrest. While surveilling his residence, officers approached his parked car. Poller wasn't in it at [...]

At a moment when it feels like everyone is racing to reform" Section 230, while fundamentally misunderstanding the law, and often in pursuit of conflicting goals, it's more important than ever that people actually learn about Section 230. To that end, we're excited that the first episode of the new podcast series I'm doing with [...]

It's not like we need any more of this sort of thing. COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) pretty much deters any app maker or social media service from catering to a very underage crowd. Compliance is difficult, if not impossible. But, all the same, it has deterred plenty of the worst developers in the [...]

Let's stipulate something before we dive into this post so that there is no misunderstanding: the rise of the anti-vax movement did not begin with Donald Trump's foray into American politics. It's been around since well before 2016, slowly but surely gaining momentum among a strange combination of West Coast liberal elites and a certain [...]

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The people have spoken. And by people," I mean Elon Musk." Trump is now buying into the batshit crazy that is the current Musk/Cybertruck discourse. This, of course, leaves the nominal VP plenty of time to get into long personal arguments with critics on Twitter. But it leaves the head DOGE free to bend Trump's [...]