Techdirt

Let's be clear: CBS/Paramount, like many corporate U.S. media outlets, initially responded to the threat of authoritarian rule by kissing Republican ass in a bid to curry favor. CBS management has long made it clear that access and ad engagement are significantly more important than the truth. But the company's looming acquisition by Skydance has [...]

With all the conversations we've had in the past few months about the decline of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the leadership, or lack thereof, of RFK Jr. and Donald Trump, you might have been left with the impression that everything at HHS is broken beyond repair. But that's not entirely [...]

A federal appeals court just delivered yet another reality check to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's transparently retaliatory investigation into Media Matters - and the timing couldn't be better, given that the FTC just opened its own bullshit investigation into the same organization for the same supposed crime": reporting factual information that made Elon Musk [...]

Reports that prominent American national security officialsuseda freely available encrypted messaging app, coupled with the rise of authoritarian policies around the world, have led to a surge in interest inencrypted appslike Signal and WhatsApp. These apps prevent anyone, including the government and the app companies themselves, from reading messages they intercept. The spotlight on encrypted [...]

Here's yet another worrying development in the world of privately-owned security cameras. Flock Safety has made aggressive in-roads in both the private and public sector, something aided greatly by the company's ability to blend the two. Much like Ring before it, Flock is pitching cheap cameras with local law enforcement buy-in, nudging residents towards leaving [...]

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Picture this: You're a researcher who has spent years developing a grant proposal, gone through layers of expert review, and received National Science Foundation (NSF) approval. Then some kid barely out of college - whose main qualification appears to be founding a company that puts ads on the blockchain - logs into a Zoom meeting, [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is PB&J with a straightforward reaction to one of the more stunning details about oppressive laws pushing people out of Idaho: TWO-FUCKING-THIRDS of the doctors have left already?!?! In second place, it's an anonymous comment about the apparent decline in support for free speech among [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, there was something of a spat between Donald Trump and Twitter. Trump announced a panel to study anti-conservative bias" on social media, and went on some crazy Twitter tirades that raised complicated content moderation questions, and we wrote about what a mess the whole thing was. Then, Trump [...]

There's a great deal that is absurd about copyright law in America, but its most basic absurdity remains the length of time for which the copyright monopoly applies. The length of copyright protection a work gets depends on a number of factors. Was the work published before or after 1978? Was it renewed, if the [...]

When NPR sued Donald Trump Tuesday, it had an easy argument to go with. Normally, in First Amendment retaliation cases against the government, you have to pull together a bunch of disparate strands to prove the retaliatory intent of the actions. But as NPR noted in its filing, and as Justice Scalia once wrote about [...]

Elon Musk may claim he's leaving the government, but regardless of whether he or anyone DOGE leaves the damage has been done, and their potential legal exposure to it remains. And with this decision earlier this week, some of the litigation pursuing it made headway. As we've written before, Judge Chutkan has had Musk and [...]

Any bit of data that isn't nailed down by court precedent will apparently find its way into the hands of the US government. For years, the DEA has been data mining traveler data in hopes of finding people carrying around too much" cash. This effort has been such a windfall for the DOJ that the [...]

Remember Liberation Day"? The day when Trump launched those apparently freedom-loving taxes on all Americans by declaring war on global commerce so hard that we were even planning on taxing penguins on uninhabited islands? Well, some of you might recall that the Constitution distributes power, and doesn't give it all to the President. And Trump's [...]

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Hey, if we have to be fair (and we don't), we can trace some of this intranational movement to policies that predate the current shitshow we're somehow expected to believe is the host to the Leader of the Free World. A patchwork of marijuana legalization laws has led directly to law enforcement camping out on [...]

So you might recall that Republicans recently have been making a gigantic stink about how the $42.5 billion in broadband grants included in the infrastructure bill hadn't actually connected anybody yet. I pointed out in detail why things have been admittedly slow; a big reason being that we had to completely remap broadband access after [...]

We recently talked about Donald Trump's foray into medicine when he declared, sans any actual evidence of course, that autism cannot possibly be caused by anything other than some external source. It was an admittedly odd stance to take for someone who seems to care so deeply about genetics in other areas, but Donald Trump [...]

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 [...]

What the fuck is going on at the Pentagon? We've talked about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's apparent penchant for exposing attack plans over unsecure, easily hacked messaging apps. But there was also a bit of a scandal in April, when three of his top aides were fired as part of a leak" investigation. And now, [...]

That summation greatly oversimplifies things, but if all you're going to read is a headline, it will have to do. We'll dig in deeper into the Fifth Circuit's second attempt to handle content moderation vis-a-vis public libraries, but first, we'll take a look back to what happened last year. In middle of book ban bills [...]

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced this week that he's barring visas for foreign nationals who censor Americans," declaring that free speech is among the most cherished rights we enjoy as Americans." This is yet another example of the most censorial administration falsely wrapping itself in the cloak of free speech warriors" to defend censorship. [...]

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The critics are out there, saying things like Techdirt is alarmist!" and Trump stuff is normal!" and Tim Cushing's posts have too many typos!" Well, here's some news for the haters: everything I said a month ago is actually true, except now it has the weight of the gold standard of identification dragging it down, [...]

U.S. wireless providers are, it should go without saying, very shitty when it comes to consumer privacy and security. After decades of mindless deregulation and competition-killing consolidation, there's less serious regulatory oversight or competitive pressure than ever for these companies to try harder. As a result, companies like T-Mobile have been hacked five times in [...]

As HHS and RFK Jr. continue to bumble their way towards making America less healthy, while saying they're doing the opposite of course, measles cases are still on the rise. The rate of new cases appears to be slowing somewhat, assuming we think the data coming out of the CDC these days is accurate. Given [...]

When your local police department buys one piece of surveillance equipment, you can easily expect that the company that sold it will try to upsell them on additional tools and upgrades. At the end of the day, public safety vendors are tech companies, and their representatives are salespeople using all the tricks from the marketing [...]

The destructive force that is DOGE still somehow manages to exist, despite it not being (depending on which claim is made and when) an official federal agency and/or overseen by anyone specifically identifiable as the head of DOGE. Until recently, everyone - including Donald Trump - knew (and said as much in public) that DOGE [...]

Federal judges don't normally punctuate their rulings with multiple exclamation points while invoking the Founding Fathers. But then again, no president before has issued executive orders targeting law firms for the clients they represent and the cases they take. In the last week, two George W. Bush-appointed conservative judges delivered brutal constitutional smackdowns of Trump's [...]

The useful lie that alleged Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members are engaging in coordinated violence inside the United States at the direction of the Venezuelan government has been debunked so often it's hardly worth rehashing. Oddly enough, the debunking has come from the federal government, rather than investigative journalists or transparency groups or any [...]

Splunk is a powerful data platform used to gather information from multiple sources and index it for efficient access. You can then use collected data to create visualizations, analytics, and a variety of automated and security-related functions. With its web-style interface, Splunk is easy to use and is utilized by many companies worldwide.The 2025 Complete [...]

The Trump administration has managed to achieve a remarkable legal double standard: ask a court for a specific remedy to address your own violations of an injunction, get exactly what you asked for, then ask for a do-over, and when you don't get it, immediately run to the Supreme Court claiming that remedy is an [...]

If you've been around a while you might recall that Verizon used to be utterly obnoxious when it came to absolutely everything about using your mobile phone. Once upon a time, the company banned you from even using third-party apps (including basics like GPS), forcing you to use extremely shitty Verizon apps. It also used [...]

Here we go again. Late last year we talked about how revisions Japan made to copyright law within the country, predominantly as a gift to the manga and anime industries, was resulting in some absurd arrests. Specifically, the law was amended to pull copyright issues from the civil realm and into a criminal offense, which [...]

Hamilton Vagi, head of Papua New Guinea's National Cyber Security Centre, apparently never learned the first rule of trying to bury embarrassing information: threatening journalists just makes them dig in harder. And quite often leads to Streisanding the very information you were hoping would go away. Back in February, DDoSecrets published around a million emails [...]

Support us on Patreon In something of a followup to our last episode about Elon Musk's playbook, today we're digging deeper into the comparison between Washington and Silicon Valley and what it tells us about DOGE. Johns Hopkins International Affairs professor Henry Farrell has been looking specifically at the concept of blitzscaling", and this week [...]

For much of the 20th century, young Americans were seen as free speech's fiercest defenders. But now, young Americans are growing more skeptical of free speech. According to a March 2025report by The Future of Free Speech, a nonpartisan think tank where I am executive director, support among 18- to 34-year-olds for allowing controversial or [...]

When five Supreme Court Justices recuse themselves from a single case, that's news. When they do it because most of them have book deals with the same publisher, that's potentially a problem. Last week's Monday order list included this unusual admission: five Justices recused from Baker v. Coates, a silly plagiarism case involving Ta-Nehisi Coates [...]

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Earlier this month, the federal government - multiple wings of it - went apeshit when dealing with routine oversight of ICE detention facilities. Three New Jersey Congressional reps (of the federal variety) made an unannounced visit to inspect an ICE detention center run by inappropriately gleeful private prison contractor, GeoGroup. As the Congressional reps tried [...]

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 weresimply looking to save money. The real reason the program was killed, of [...]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about the head of ICE saying journalists should stop asking questions about ICE officers. In first place, it's Justinfinity with a comment about the fear of officers being targeted: That's especially wild when held up next to the very common [...]

We've now arrived at 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, the honorable mentions, and the Best Digital Game. Today, we wrap things up with a look at [...]

We talked about the celebrity fight du jour between actors Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively when it started, as it seemed for all the world like your typical Streisand Effect story. What began as a workplace harassment complaint of sorts, with Lively initially alleging several instances of inappropriate workplace behavior by Baldoni, has now exploded [...]

Eight men were put on a plane from Texas, bound for South Sudan - a country the State Department warns Americans not to travel to because of crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict." None of these men were from South Sudan. The Trump administration shipped them there anyway, in direct violation of a federal court order. [...]

The timing here is incredible. The very same day that the FTC's public inquiry" into big tech censorship" closes, that very same FTC opens an investigation not into big tech," but rather Media Matters. Yes, the very same Media Matters that Elon Musk has been trying to silence through the censorial abuse of the court [...]

This is exactly what it looks like: the actions of an administration infested by vindictive thugs. Former South Dakota governor and current DHS boss Kristi Noem returned to South Dakota to get her ego stroked a bit by Dakota State University in Madison, South Dakota. While Noem was picking up a fake degree and presumably [...]

Lawmakers continue to propose new bills that would require social media companies and app stores to segment users by age and obtain parental consent for minors. Laws like Utah's newApp Store Accountability Actand an identically namedpiece of federal legislationare being pushed across the country. Other bills, such as theRhode Island Social Media Regulation Act, would [...]

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