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How do you comply with a law that prohibits collecting personal information from children under 13? If you said by not collecting personal information from children under 13," congratulations, you understand the law better than Louisiana's Attorney General. The state of Louisiana has filed a lawsuit against Roblox that includes what might be one of [...]

Late last year, eight major U.S. telecoms were the victim ofa massive intrusion by Chinese hackerswho managed tospy 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, apparentlydidn't [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Erin McCanlies was listening to the radio one morning in April when she heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to find the cause of autism by September. The secretary of Health and Human Services said he believed an environmental toxin was responsible for the dramatic increase [...]

Is throwing a sandwich at someone a felony? Well, that all depends on a few factors. The most important considerations are these: What would normally be rhetorical questions were answered in Washington, D.C. recently. A (now-former) DOJ employee allegedly (well, the video makes it pretty clear there's nothing alleged" about it) threw a sandwich at [...]

Trump's quest to stress-test every line in the Constitution continues apace, with his declaration that the government now owns 10% of Intel looking like nothing but a great, big, gigantic taking. Of course, it is also terrible policy. While there are sometimes compelling arguments that companies should be in public hands, like for utilities, where [...]

Last week, FBI agents raided the home of John Bolton-former National Security Advisor, lifelong Republican, and one of the most establishment figures in American foreign policy. His crime? Writing a book critical of Donald Trump and opposing the president's surrender summit with Vladimir Putin. The justification? A national security investigation in search of classified records"-the [...]

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You may recall that Donald Trump and his supporters have insisted that he's the free speech" President. His first day in office this term, he issued an executive order restoring free speech" saying that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of [...]

With Fox being Fox, and CBS having just paid Trump a $16 million bribe and now owned by Trump's friends the Ellison family, there's little worry that either network will be doing serious journalism anytime soon. So Trump, over the weekend, redirected his ire at the remaining two big four" broadcasters, ABC and NBC, for [...]

The volume of stories about Ryan Walters, State Superintendent of Oklahoma, seems to be increasing. Walters is a Christian Nationalist by name, though the first of those words goes against all of what I learned about Christianity as a Catholic minor and curious adult. While he certainly wants to inject bibles into public schools for [...]

Not content to rewrite American history to better serve white people, the Trump administration is now rewriting world history on the fly by recasting terminal human rights violators as not all that bad, actually" and adding stuff to other human rights reports just because some MAGA people had some bad experiences in a few select [...]

The rushed integration of half-cooked automation into the already broken U.S. journalism industry simply isn't going very well. There's been just countless examples where affluent media owners rushed to embrace automation and LLMs (usually to cut corners and undermine labor) with disastrous impact, resulting in lots of plagiarism, completely false headlines, and a giant, completely [...]

Even though Trump says it's about the crime rates, it's not actually about the crime rates. Just like he used the hallucination that the entirety of Los Angeles was under siege by violent" protesters to justify sending in the troops, the reality was that any violence was contained to a few small blocks in the [...]

Full disclosure: I am on the Bluesky board. Bluesky made a major statement last week when it announced that it would be geoblocking Mississippi IP addresses from accessing its site-making it the first major social media platform to completely block access from a US state. Unlike tech giants with vast resources, we're a small team [...]

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The man who never expected to be the public face of the Trump administration's shotgun approach to deportation is, yet again, being given a set of untenable options and expected to pick one of them. And when he refused to accept the bad choice they gave him, they arrested him this morning at his mandated [...]

Ideally, the U.S. public is supposed to be able to comment on government policy proceedings, and the government is supposed to listen to that input. Of course it doesn't really work that way: for years we've noted how U.S. regulatory comment proceedings are full of bots and fake comments from industries trying to game regulators, [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Heart of Dawn with a comment about the idea that ICE and the Trump administration are stupid: You don't abduct people and put them in concentration camps (foreign or domestic) by simply doing something stupid. Don't let their gross incompetence fool you. They are [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, a judge forbade a Facebook user being sued by a cop from publishing the cop's name on social media, the DC police union was suing to block the release of the names of officers involved in shootings, and we wrote about how Section 230 protects the ability of [...]

When the Techdirt community has had to hear so much about a single state's education superintendent, you know something has gone horribly wrong. The horribly wrong in this case is Ryan Walters of Oklahoma. Walters appears to be doing some sort of combo-impression of Joseph McCarthy mixed with Donald Trump. In his role running Oklahoma [...]

This is the final piece in aseries of poststhat 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 [...]

Earlier this year, an Army helicopter collided with a passenger plane over the Potomac River in Washington, DC. All sixty-seven people aboard both vehicles were killed. While the FAA focused its investigation on the failures that led to this mid-air collision, local investigators in Virginia were somehow far more concerned about identifying who had leaked [...]

The White House's recently-unveiled AI Action Plan" wages war on so-called woke AI"-including large language models (LLMs) that provide information inconsistent with the administration's views on climate change, gender, and other issues. It also targets measures designed to mitigate the generation of racial and gender biased content and evenhate speech. The reproduction of this bias [...]

In theory, the nice thing about having a Supreme Court is that it provides some level of legal certainty. You know how the system works: lower courts make decisions based on law and precedent, parties can appeal, and eventually the highest court issues careful, reasoned opinions that other courts can follow. It's not a perfect [...]

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The number of assaults on ICE officers was always going to increase. There's no way it wouldn't, not when ICE was sending out a task force composed of multiple federal law enforcement agencies daily to multiple locations in the United States, hoping to finally hit the baseline number of 3,000 arrests per day by Stephen [...]

In a rare win for U.S. consumer privacy, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuithas ruled unanimouslyagainst T-Mobile and its subsidiary Sprint, upholding (for now) a $92 million 2020 FCC fine against the company for selling sensitive wireless customer location data without consumer consent. For decades now major wireless companies have [...]

As you will recall, a single gunmen opened fire on a CDC campus in Atlanta earlier this month, claiming to have been injured by COVID vaccines. The rhetoric he had used prior to the shooting closely aligned with what RFK Jr. had been spouting for years. While Kennedy took nearly a day to even publicly [...]

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. This is the second of our special episodes for the [...]

The UK government has reportedly backed down from its dangerous demand that Apple build encryption backdoors, following pressure from the Trump administration. But the secretive nature of this mutually beneficial" agreement should make us deeply suspicious about what was actually traded away. The UK government has backed down on a controversial demand for Apple to [...]

The Trump administration has been described as many things, none of them good. What no one will ever accuse it of being is competent." Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants, most of them known only for waving the MAGA flag when not hosting shows on Fox or podcasts celebrating the debut of American fascism. Case [...]

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Senator Amy Klobuchar is one of the top Democrats in the Senate. She could be fighting to protect democracy against fascists. She could be working on a new, better vision for Americans. But instead, she's focused on breaking the internet. And now we know why: someone made a stupid satirical video about her, and her [...]

I don't mean to harp on this, but a central promise of the Trump administration during the last election season was that a second Trump term would take aim at big tech," protect the little guy, rein in corporate power, and even continue the legacy of antitrust enforcers like Lina Khan." The press was filled [...]

If you're tired of Techdirt posts about RFK Jr.'s inability to competently lead HHS, I'm tired of him leading that organization, so too bad. The problem is that RFK Jr. represents something of a national health emergency, one that is multi-faceted. The most obvious bucket of fuckery in which he is operating is, of course, [...]

During the last year of the Trump administration, there was this weird period where the Bill Barr DOJ decided that it could destroy the internet. It came out of Donald Trump declaring that Section 230 was bad for whatever reason Donald Trump thinks anything is bad, and telling his Attorney General to do something about [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. A New York business frozen out of its checking account. A Georgia chemotherapy patient denied a credit card refund after a product dispute. A New Jersey service member defrauded out of their savings. These consumers - along with hundreds of others - reached out to their [...]

Petty thugs. That's all ICE is. Masked officers too cowardly to show their faces and too aware they're in the wrong to dare approach judges with warrant requests. Even ICE's lawyers are doing what they can to keep themselves from being added to the permanent record. Idiots are running the agencies and assholes are staffing [...]

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When I was in DC last week, everyone seemed to be talking about the brewing drama at the Department of Justice's antitrust division. The HPE/Juniper merger settlement had raised eyebrows, two senior officials had been fired, and rumors were swirling about political interference playing a role in ending what had appeared to be a decently [...]

There are $42.5billionin broadband grants that are headed to the states thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill most Republicans voted against (yetroutinely try to take credit for among their constituents). But Republicans, despite a supposed feud between Trump and Elon Musk, have been rewriting the grant program's guidance toeliminate provisions ensuring the resulting broadband is [...]

We've already demonstrated over the course of plenty of posts that RFK Jr. is wildly incapable of running Health and Human Services. The fact that he was even nominated for a role in managing American health is absolutely bonkers, but that a Senate filled with supposed grown adults voted to confirm his appointment to HHS [...]

Back in 2023 we wrote about how regional Polish rail company and a train manufacturer NEWAG had taken to using DRM to lock down trains that are repaired by independent technicians, in a bid to both monopolize - and drive up the costs of repair. This kind of effort to monopolize repair is common across [...]

Support us on Patreon As we've been thinking and writing about the intersection of democracy and technology, especially burgeoning AI technology, we always come back to the core issues of user control and user freedom. Recently, Chris Riley of the Data Transfer Initiative wrote an excellent piece for Tech Policy Press about the need for [...]

Since it's easier to jump people who aren't criminals than to actually track down criminals, ICE - especially in certain parts of the country - is sending its masked officers to hang around courtrooms and arrest people who are just trying to follow the rules to gain permanent residence in the United States. This tactic [...]

Here we go again. Whenever policy makers insist that there's some nerd harder" solution to tricky societal problems, actual experts have to spend a ridiculous amount of time explaining basic realities to them. Sometimes those are realities about the technology. And sometimes it's realities about the technology. This time it's age verification's turn. Steve Bellovin-one [...]

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Suck it up, shitbirds. You're the beneficiaries of full-throated support from a megalomaniac who has just untied the purse strings and dumped pretty much everything in it into ICE's back pocket. ICE is on its way to becoming the largest law enforcement recipient of federal tax dollars, and yet the head of its controlling entity [...]

U.S. media mergers always follow the same trajectory. Pre-merger, executives promise all manner of amazing synergies and deal benefits. Post-merger, not only to those benefits generally never arrive, the debt from the acquisition spree usually results in significant layoffs, lower quality product, and higher rates for consumers. The Time Warner Discovery disaster was the poster [...]