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There are a few thousand military troops in Los Angeles now, thanks to Trump's Martial Plan. Local law enforcement officials pointed out they had the situation under control, what with most of the violence (what there was of it that isn't police violence) limited to a few blocks in downtown LA. The rollout of National [...]

Here's a fun corporate governance puzzle for you. Suppose you're a foreign company trying to buy an American steel producer. The previous administration blocked your deal. The current president promised during his campaign to block it too, saying he'd stop it instantaneously. Absolutely." How do you get the deal approved? If you guessed write the [...]

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Using statistics to lie is so commonplace, it's hardly worth noting. But the DHS can't even be bothered to use statistics to lie. Instead, it just repeats the lie and uses this lie to engage in circular reasoning. Washington Post columnist Philip Bump angered ICE by asking a simple question: why are so many ICE [...]

Republicans are currently trying to force through a massive and cruel new legislation package that will impose historic cuts in public services to the benefit of the nation's richest assholes. The bill will add $3.8 trillion to the deficit over a decade and includes an unlimited number of major hand outs to the wealthiest individuals [...]

There's an old joke that dog and cat owners may be familiar with that goes something like this. What is the difference between dogs and cats? With a dog, you give it a comfortable place to live, give it lots of love and attention, feed it food and water, and it therefore assumes you must [...]

The Trump Administration(s) aren't simply content to declare satire dead. Trump's reappearance in the Oval Office demands we dig up the corpse and desecrate it. And while we're desecrating that corpse, why not desecrate a few national landmarks? That's the pitch from the National Park Service under Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. Spring-boarding off Trump's revisionist [...]

Support us on Patreon This week, we've got a cross-post episode of Mike's appearance on Kevin Williamson's How The World Works podcast. Kevin conducted a wide-ranging interview that covers some of the earliest days of Techdirt, the blog's evolution, and many of the important topics we cover today - and you can listen to the [...]

I'm going to say something that will make many of you deeply uncomfortable: our culture has confused ironic detachment with intelligence. We've mistaken cynicism for sophistication, distance for depth, and the refusal to commit to anything for wisdom itself. This is killing us. Not metaphorically. Not in some abstract cultural sense. It is literally destroying [...]

The cops are rioting and the military is swarming. That's how things are going in Los Angeles, despite anything resembling a violent protest" being confined to a few blocks near federal buildings in the downtown area. ICE, meanwhile, continues to carry out Trump's mass deportation plans by acting like drug cartel members. Agents wear masks, [...]

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The Supreme Court just gave the Trump administration a green light to traffic humans to random countries around the world-including war zones where migrants face torture, slavery, or death. And they did so while offering literally zero explanation for why this is legal or constitutional. In a shadow docket ruling yesterday, the Court stayed a [...]

When last we checked it with the feckless execs at CBS/Paramount, they were preparing to pay Donald Trump tens of millions of dollars to settle a completely bogus lawsuit designed to bully the media giant into compliance. CBS desperately wants the Trump administration to sign off on their pointless $8 billion merger with Skydance. Trump [...]

By now, it is common knowledge that RFK Jr. had a brain worm that consumed a portion of his brain. It's actually not as rare or crazy as it sounds at first blush, mind you, but it's also not terribly common in the United States. And, at the end of the day, a worm ate [...]

After months of what can only be described as government kidnapping, Mahmoud Khalil is finally out of detention and released on bail. The Columbia grad student and green card holder was detained by ICE for the heinous crime of participating in pro-Palestinian protests-or as Marco Rubio apparently sees it, having opinions Rubio doesn't like. It [...]

What a surprise. The most intellectually dishonest people in the nation still have the biggest bullhorns. That's why a regular-ass drug raid that occurred in Tucson, Arizona somehow makes headlines in New York City. Here's the New York Post, disingenuously reporting the (Arizona) news: A massive raid on a suspected cartel member found in Arizona [...]

The normalization of authoritarianism is happening in real time in federal courtrooms. While district court judges try to apply actual legal standards to Trump's near constant attempts to find ever more constitutional crises to create, appeals courts are busy treating the wholesale dismantling of constitutional constraints as just another political disagreement. Take, for example, what's [...]

This was never an issue before, but it's suddenly an issue now that ICE has gone full Gestapo to keep up with Trump's mass deportation demands. ICE's tactics - unmarked vehicles, masked officers, and untargeted raids of any place that might contain foreigners - have earned it all the criticism and hatred it now faces. [...]

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The case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia (who we now find out, via his lawyer, prefers to be called Kilmar Abrego) keeps getting more and more bizarre. After being accidentally" shipped to El Salvador - despite a judge's order directly barring such a move - the Trump regime has spent months (1) denying that they could [...]

Back in early 2024 Amazon announced that Prime Video customers (who already pay $140 per year) would be charged $3 extra every month just to avoid ads that didn't previously exist. It was just the latest example of enshittification" in a streaming sector all out of original ideas, desperate to provide Wall Street with impossible [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about ICE arresting Brad Lander: Republicans keep saying no one is above the law, but they keep referring only to other people and not themselves. They don't need warrants. They don't need to provide due process. They get to assault [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the killing of George Floyd and subsequent protests were having an impact, with one court citing the incident in denying immunity to officers in another case, more schools moving to end contracts with cops, and Minneapolis city council voting unanimously to disband its police department. Meanwhile, Devin Nunes's [...]

A couple of weeks back, we discussed famed southern convenience store chain Buc-ee's and its penchant for initiating all kinds of trademark related threats and lawsuits. While we talk about this sort of thing a lot around here, the company's actions have been particularly silly. When taken in sum total, you're left with the idea [...]

This series of posts explores how we can rethink the intersection of AI, creativity, and policy. From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the risks of stifling innovation, each post addresses a different piece of the AI puzzle. Together, they advocate for a more balanced, forward-thinking approach that acknowledges the potential [...]

I need to say something that will be deeply uncomfortable for many of you: if you have friends, family, or colleagues defending what's happening right now, their old sane selves may not be coming back. Let me be specific about what I mean. This week, Donald Trump postedexplicit orderson Truth Social directing federal law enforcement [...]

It has never been about removing dangerous criminals - the worst of the worst" - from the United States. Under Donald Trump, immigration enforcement has been about removing immigrants from the country. Period. That's the whole thing. (And, apparently the only immigrants welcome to seek shelter in the US are those of the whiter variety [...]

Disclosure: I am on the board of Bluesky and am inherently biased. Adjust your skepticism of what I write on this topic accordingly. It seems a bit odd: when something is supposedly dying or irrelevant, journalists can't stop writing about it. Consider the curious case of Bluesky, which, according to various pundits, is a failed [...]

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As Mike Masnick noted late last week while covering yet another extremely disturbing development in the ongoing horror show that is our current government, the Trump Administration isn't fucking around. It wants to destroy America so it can have the only kind of America it's willing to put up with: one it can rule, rather [...]

Late last year, eight major U.S. telecoms were the victim ofa massive intrusion by Chinese hackerswho managed to spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year. The Salt Typhoon" hack was so severe, the intruders spent a year rooting around the ISP networkseven after discovery. AT&T and Verizon, two of the compromised companies, [...]

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 [...]

Back in May, we talked about a change that Nintendo made to its EULA that essentially amounted to We'll brick your console if we don't like how you use it." Now, Nintendo will tell you that the changes were done to protect the company from the threat of piracy. The problem is that's not what [...]

What may be one of the U.S. Supreme Court's most important and far-reaching rulings in decades dropped in late May 2025 in an order that probably didn't get a second - or even first - glance from most Americans. But thisnot-quite-two-page ruling, as technical and procedural as they come, potentially rewrites a major principle of [...]

One recurring theme of our head-first rushed adoption of AI" is that half-cooked automation routinely reflects the often shitty natures of the companies or individuals installing it. Health insurance companies with a history of being crooks implement Medicare rejection AI with a 90% error rate. Incompetent media company executives implement half-cooked AI" that plagiarizes, undercuts [...]

Brazil's Supreme Court appears close to ruling that social media companies should be liable for content hosted on their platforms-a move that appears to represent a significant departure from the country's pioneering Marco Civil internet law. While this approach has obvious appeal to people frustrated with platform failures, it's likely to backfire in ways that [...]

At some point, there's supposed to 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines added to a volatile mix that already includes peaceful protesters, some not-so-peaceful protesters, definitely-not-peaceful peace officers, and a large migrant community already on edge. Piled on top of this is mindless, harmful rhetoric steadily flowing from the mouths of Donald Trump, Secretary [...]

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I'm old enough to remember Republicans claiming that any lawsuit against a Republican was lawfare" and political persecution. But, as with so many things in the modern MAGA GOP, the reason they said such things was because, given the chance, they would totally seek to engage in actual political persecution and lawfare against anyone who [...]

For years we've noted how this country's corrupt inability to protect consumer security, regulate data brokers, or pass even a baseline privacy law was going to have increasingly deadly consequences. Endless signs have been there; from stalkers abusing app and cell phone data to pursue their victims, to right wing extremists using data broker data [...]

Here we go again. We have talked for years now about famed burger chain In-N-Out and its strategic, and very bullshit, practice of opening up pop-up locations in countries where it does not, and does not appear to plan to, have any real brick and mortar presence. This sort of trademark tourism is not unheard [...]

This is a combo piece with the first half written by law student Elizabeth Grossman about her take on the recent FTC moral panic about the internet, and the second part being some additional commentary and notes from her professor, Jess Miers. The FTC is fanning the flames of a moral panic. On June 4, [...]

Support us on Patreon In a world awash with misinformation and disinformation, those who spread and benefit from the chaos have worked hard to brand fact-checking and counterspeech as a form of censorship - and it's a worryingly effective tactic. But there's one type of counterspeech that is very hard to evade: mockery and satire. [...]

Let's talk about constitutional hypocrisy so brazen, so comprehensive, so morally bankrupt that it would be laughable if it weren't so dangerous to the republic. I've learned something about modern Republicans that crystallizes everything wrong with our current political moment: they care more about the constitutionality of Biden's student debt forgiveness than they do about [...]

When a federal judge ruled last week that Marco Rubio can't just declare that the US can detain green card holder Mahmoud Khalil based on the Secretary of State's vibes check" assessment of his political beliefs, you might think Khalil would finally be free to return to his family. You'd be wrong. The DOJ has [...]

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For a brief moment, it looked like real life was finally having an effect on Trump's immigrants are inherently evil" fantasies. There was a brief window, last week, where Trump indicated he'd roll back some of his deportation goons because it was going too far. The fact that this moment of realization has arrived at [...]

Never one to miss an opportunity to exploit the presidency for a quick and tacky buck, the Trump administration is getting into the cell phone business. Well, sort of: the Trump administration is launching a lazy new MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) that piggybacks on existing wireless networks with an added perk: a fake-gold $500 [...]

It's one of those things I don't discuss on main. I'm not really sure why. Maybe it was my strict religious upbringing, which made discussing anything outside of preferred interpretations of the Bible sacrilegious, if not actually blasphemous. Or maybe it was a concern about being a bit outside of the mainstream, which might result [...]

The second most frustrating aspect of RFK Jr.'s performance as the head of Health and Human Services has been just how predictable the actions he's taken are. When you start with a simple premise, that Kennedy is a vehement anti-vaxxer, the view that measles is less harmful than the MMR vaccine makes sense. The appointment [...]