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For years, the DHS has been expanding its intrusive surveillance of anyone attempting to enter this country. (It has also expanded this to include people leaving the country.) The current onboarding procedure for US entry includes demands for account passwords and deep dives into devices carried by migrants, visitors, asylum seekers, and anyone else CBP [...]

There are two major reasons that the U.S. doesn't pass an internet-era privacy law or regulate data brokers despitea parade of dangerous scandals. One, lobbied by a vast web of interconnected industries with unlimited budgets, Congressis too corrupt to do its job. Two, the U.S. government is disincentivized to do anything because it exploits this [...]

It's no secret that Nintendo is among the most draconian actors when it comes to intellectual property. Techdirt is rife with posts on the various ways the company has been a royal and overreaching pain in the ass on anything with even the most modest concern over copyrights, trademarks, or patents. From attempting to unmask [...]

It's not enough to simply go after anyone looking kinda Venezuelan these days. DHS components have an unquenchable thirst for arrest stats, especially now that Trump's second Oval Office stay has removed any remaining discretion and restraint from border control actions. Installing Trump supplicant Kristi Noem to the top spot in the DHS has only [...]

In a brazen attempt to avoid oversight, Elon Musk's DOGE team is now trying to audit" the very agency tasked with auditing them. On Friday, NOTUS reported that DOGE officials showed up at the Government Accountability Office - Congress's independent watchdog - to attempt their signature hostile takeover routine. There's just one small problem: DOGE [...]

President Trump's attack on public broadcasting has attracted plenty of deserved attention, but there's a far more technical, far more insidious policy change in the offing-one that will take away Americans' right to unencumbered access to our publicly owned airwaves. The FCC is quietlycontemplatinga fundamental restructuring ofallbroadcasting in the United States, via a new DRM-based [...]

They may claim they care about the children, but the Republican push for age verification laws, book bans, and the general censorship of anything not specifically straight and (preferably) white is all about preventing adults from accessing content these lawmakers don't personally care for. The kids are merely useful leverage for legislators pushing for the [...]

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Since the start of the Trump administration, many of our biggest concerns about how MAGA would attack free speech have not only proven true, but have turned out to be understated. Nearly all parts of the administration are seeking to silence critical speech. Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed free speech warriors" who signed the infamous Harper's Letter [...]

Telecom lobbyists have been working overtime for decades in theUSandEU, trying to get policymakers to support the idea of Big Tech" paying Big Telecom" billions of additional dollars for no coherent reason. It's what started the net neutrality wars. More recently, it has evolved into claims that we need to tax streaming companies to help [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about Stephen Miller suggesting the suspension of habeas corpus: Remember: Once they suspend the civil rights of non-citizens, they'll only ever need to declare someone a non-citizen to justify black-bagging an American citizen off the street and sending [...]

We're nearing the end of 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, Best Visuals, Best Adaptation, and the honorable mentions, and this week we're looking at the winner of Best Digital Game: Cocoanut Hotel by [...]

If you're from Texas or its surrounding states, you've probably heard of Buc-ee's. The gas station and convenience store chain is a staple of the area and has a well-known branded logo that looks like this. I recently came across a settlement that was the result of a trademark suit Buc-ee's initiated back in November [...]

The Supreme Court has delivered a clear rebuke to the Trump administration's attempt to weaponize the Alien Enemies Act, issuing a slightly more detailed ruling that follows up on last month's midnight emergency order. That emergency ruling came as the administration was literally loading detainees onto buses headed to airports, racing to deport them before [...]

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is back in the Senate. Sponsors are claiming-again-that the latest version won't censor online content. It isn't true. This bill still sets up a censorship regime disguised as a duty of care," and it will do what previous versions threatened: suppress lawful, important speech online, especially for young people. [...]

The festival of bad ideas continues. Despite facial recognition having proven over and over again it's not really the solution to speedy ID verification that far too many people think it is, government agencies (along with retailers, sports arenas, and bored billionaires) seem to believe the real problem is that there just hasn't been enough [...]

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We mentioned recently that the only remaining Democratic commissioner at the FCC (and the only remaining Dem commissioner across both the FCC and FTC since Trump illegally fired the Democratic FTC Commissioners) has started calling out FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr's attacks on free speech. In a speech yesterday, she went even further: calling out the [...]

Earlier this month we noted how Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr thinks he can have it both ways. Carr desperately wants to please dear leader, and be part of Trump's mindless quest to dismantle most U.S. corporate oversight and regulatory independence. Yet at the same time he wants to bully companies for not being racist [...]

Fresh off of his Mother's Day swim in a literal shit creek, RFK Jr. sat before House and Senate committees to answer questions about the impact of the proposed Trump budget on Health and Human Services (HHS), the cuts that have and are proposed further for HHS, and an explanation for why some programs are [...]

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 [...]

For the last hundred years or so, the prevailing dogma has been that copyright is an unalloyed good, and that more of it is better. Whether that was ever true is one question, but it is certainly not the case since we entered the digital era, for reasons explained at length in Walled Culture the [...]

You might recall that the first Trump DOJ and FCC cobbled together a dumb planto cover up the problems created by their rubber stamping of the competition-eroding T-Mobile and Sprint merger: they'd help Dish Network create a new 5G network out of vibes and twine. As we noted back in 2019, the entire gambit was [...]

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey apparently thinks he gets to be editor-in-chief of every social media platform. In his latest attack on free speech rights, Bailey has announced a first-in-the-nation rule" that would force social media companies to let users choose third-party content moderators rather than using the platforms' own moderation systems. There's just one [...]

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Maybe Clearview got it all wrong. Scraping the web for tens of billions of records for free sounds like a good business model, but that model only works if you can keep the malodorous funk of your work from soaking into your reputation. Clearview's tactics have gotten it banned, fined, and sued and it doesn't [...]

We've well documented by now how the AT&T->Warner Brothers->Discovery series of mergers were among some of the most destructive and pointless business deals" ever conceived by modern man. The mergers resulted in bottomless layoffs, the closure of numerous valuable and popular brands and shows, and much worse product as incompetent, fail-upward executives shifted the company's [...]

Though we haven't discussed the lawsuit between Palword creator PocketPair and Nintendo and The Pokemon Co. so far this year, this turd of a suit is still going on. To the uninitiated, Palworld has long been described as Pokemon with guns". Due to that, lots of folks thought that PocketPair would eventually get sued by [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

With the How to Hack from Beginner to Ethical Hacking Bundle, you'll learn how to diagnose different kinds of cybersecurity attacks and how to defeat them. You'll practice all the skills and techniques in real-time using an ethical hacking lab so you can put your learning to the test. Courses cover basic scripts and beginner [...]

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 [...]

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) [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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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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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it's processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch - whatever your needs are. The tools within this suite have [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]