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Editor's Note: As I was getting this article ready to publish, a judge granted California a Temporary Restraining Order against the deployment of the National Guard. We'll have a separate write up of that later. When the Secretary of Homeland Security announces that federal forces will remain in an American city until they liberate" it [...]

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 round-up of the latest news in online [...]

As you'll likely recall, in late 2023, Elon Musk told advertisers to go fuck yourself" and don't advertise" in response to a question about advertisers feeling uncomfortable placing their brands next to the kind of content that Musk was promoting via the ExTwitter algorithm. But the full context of the quote is interesting in retrospect: [...]

Palantir has never had a great reputation. Even before it teamed up with Trump to create a massive, abusable database of American residents' information, it was working with forward-looking cop shops, that wanted similar massive, abusable databases of their own, even if those were limited to surveilling people in their own jurisdictions. The company is [...]

Today we need to examine something that reveals the machinery of authoritarian propaganda with surgical precision: how a handful of violent incidents across a few city blocks in Los Angeles was transformed into a crisis" justifying the deployment of federal troops against American citizens. And how easily that transformation succeeded. I write this from Los [...]

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We've written a few times about the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University grad student who was one of the first people detained by ICE and told he was being kicked out of the country solely because Marco Rubio said he doesn't belong here. No due process. No hearing. Just Rubio's arbitrary say-so. A [...]

We've noted many times that there are two major reasons the U.S. doesn't have a functional privacy law for the modern internet era. One, we're too corrupt and greedy to do the right thing, causing us to prioritize making money over literally everything else - including public safety. And two, the government long ago realized [...]

While the Justin Baldoni legal fight with Blake Lively is still going on, one half of the dispute has been thrown in the dumpster... for now. If you're not up on the case, here is the TL;DR version. Baldoni and Lively costarred in the movie It Ends With Us. Lively filed a claim of workplace [...]

I already wrote about the GOP's bloodthirsty desire to use the military on Americans. They manufactured a nonsense crisis" by over-aggressively sending in ICE agents to grab people off the streets, leading to protests, which were focused on provoking protestors into violence, which would then be used to justify an even more violent crackdown. Given [...]

The Trump administration on June 4, 2025,announced travel restrictionstargeting 19 countries in Africa and Asia, including many of the world's poorest nations. All travel is banned from 12 of these countries, with partial restrictions on travel from the rest. The presidential proclamation, entitled Restricting the Entry of Foreign Nationals to Protect the United States from [...]

On the latest episode of the always excellent The Bugle" podcast, comedian Alice Fraser amusingly describes the horror of what's happening in Los Angeles the following way: So let's just clarify: this is arguably unlawful deployment of military force to enforce peace on peaceful protests over illegal arrests of illegal immigrants. Here's what actually happening [...]

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We're just supposed to assume that the masked person brandishing a gun and ordering us to get into an unmarked vehicle is a federal agent, rather than a criminal. We're just supposed to buy into this new, hideous version of immigration enforcement that utilizes military gear, long guns, and a complete lack of identification as [...]

After spending election season whining that the program was taking too long, Republicans have been introducing massive new changes to a $42.5 billion infrastructure bill broadband grant program (BEAD) that not only don't serve the public interest, but could also introduce years of potential new delays. Their changes are twofold: one, they want to strip [...]

As RFK Jr. has presided over the decimation of the Health & Human Services department he runs, along with HHS' child agencies, his anti-vaxxer stance has shown through. And, really, his appointment, confirmation, and subsequent actions should fully put to bed any question of the utility of congressional approval of cabinet positions. During those hearings, [...]

U.S. consumer protection (or what's left of it after several devastating Supreme Court rulings and Trump executive orders) is on life support. But one bright spot continues to be the right to repair" movement, which is working to fight repair monopolies and make it cheaper and easier to repair the tech you own. Washington state [...]

Support us on Patreon Way, way back during the SOPA/PIPA fight, a very important part of the resistance against the bills was coming from infrastructure operators who explained how they were technically incoherent and dangerous. One prominent group was the Internet Infrastructure Coalition, co-founded by Christian Dawson. Today, with legislative amnesia setting in and new [...]

Appeasing bullies never works. Not only does it reveal your willingness to abandon principles, but bullies will never be satisfied - they'll always demand more. Columbia University is learning this lesson the hard way. The school quickly caved to Trump's demands to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests and discipline faculty. Meanwhile, Harvard stood up and [...]

The only laws the Trump Administration respects are the laws it gets to inflict on others. The rule of law, however, doesn't mean the laws don't apply to those who make the rules. And yet, here we are, seeing another flagrant refusal to comply with oversight laws just because the DHS and ICE feel they [...]

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We've noted how Republicans are busy screwing up the infrastructure bill's $42.5 billion BEAD broadband grant program. After performatively whining that the program wasn't moving quickly enough for their liking during the election season, the GOP announced it would be significantly slowing fund dispersal just to make life harder on poor people and to throw [...]

This weekend, Donald Trump pulled off something that's happened exactly once before in US history: federalizing a state's National Guard over the state governor's objections without invoking the Insurrection Act. And he did it to deal with what the LAPD itself described as peaceful protests that were under control." The constitutional implications here are important. [...]

How's your Monday going? Well, buckle up. The day ain't over yet. No sooner had California Governor Gavin Newsom announced the state would be suing Trump over his illegal deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles to do whatever it is they're supposed to do when deployed illegally than the Defense Department turned Pete [...]

Trump is setting the stage for martial law. Again. The reasons for his latest move are directly tied to the actions of his administration and, more specifically, the most visible arm of his anti-migrant policies. ICE has been problematic for years, but it took two non-consecutive Trump administrations to turn it into the cartoonish supervillain [...]

Last week, Republican FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington abruptly announced that he would be stepping down from the FCC. Simington gave all of two-days notice of his departure, which was odd not only because of the short notice, but because it delays Trump Republicans from getting a voting majority allowing them to actually do anything real. [...]

Remember when TikTok was supposedly an urgent national security threat that required emergency legislation? Funny how that emergency" keeps getting 75-day extensions. Trump is reportedly about to hit the snooze button on TikTok enforcement for the third time, extending a deadline that was supposedly so urgent that Congress had to rush through legislation ignoring basic [...]

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As ICE continues to engage in a mass deportation program that more closely resembles a mass kidnapping program, communities have literally taken to the streets to chase ICE and their law enforcement enablers out of town. Rolling in looking like some sort of cartel death squad just isn't intimidating enough anymore. And if you can't [...]

Despite the ongoing fake promise of populism," so far Trump 2.0 has proven to be a bonanza for telecom giants seeking to get even bigger. As usual that means higher broadband prices and shittier broadband service are just over the horizon. As a reward for promising to be more racist, Verizon recently saw its $20 [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side MrWilson with a comment about a Republican school superintendent bemoaning that parents would opt their kids out of understanding American history": Another accusation-confession. Walters has opted the state of Oklahoma out of understanding American history. In second place, it's Professor Ronny with a simple comment [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, while many in the media were hedging their bets and wringing their hands in their coverage of the rapidly escalating protests over the murder of George Floyd, I was proud that we ran an appropriately uncompromising take from our own Tim Cushing: Let The Motherfucker Burn. In a [...]

There are many stupid things about copyright law today, and one of them is how copyright law applies to characters. Because it shouldn't, at least not in the ways it does. Copyright can legitimately apply to expression, which is why it can restrict you from copying, for example, a book or movie, because those are [...]

The most telling detail in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia saga isn't what the DOJ is claiming - it's what a federal prosecutor refused to do. Ben Schrader, a 15-year veteran of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Nashville and chief of the criminal division, abruptly resigned rather than put his name on the indictment the Trump [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica, along with The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Cazadores de Fake News.Republished under ProPublica'sCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. The Trump administration knew that the vast majority of the 238 Venezuelan immigrants it sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador in mid-March had not been convicted of crimes in the United [...]

When you specifically ask a judge for something, get exactly what you requested, then immediately start whining about how burdensome your own suggestion is - well, that's not legal strategy. That's performance art. Worse: having a senior Justice Department official claim that the solution that the DOJ itself requested is being unfairly imposed on the [...]

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Welcome to the expanded panopticon, American citizens. Thanks to a very small percentage of your fellow Americans, the president, whom a minority of the general public returned to power, is throwing millions at a private contractor to gather as much data on US citizens as possible for reasons it has left unstated. That private contractor [...]

We've long written about One America News (OAN), the right wing propaganda mill pretending to be cable news journalism. The news" outlet,originally funded and proposed by AT&T, traffics in no limit of dangerous conspiracy theories and authoritarian fan fiction, ranging from fake election conspiracies to the false claim that COVIDwas created in a North Carolina [...]

It was a couple of weeks ago when I was stupidly watching one cable news channel or another when I witnessed some GOP talking head say that Donald Trump likes to build a team of competing viewpoints that fight with one another as a way of producing the best results. I think it was Scott [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under ProPublica'sCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. When Thomas Fugate graduated from college last year with a degree in politics, he celebrated in a social media post about the exciting opportunities that lay beyond campus life in Texas. Onward and upward!" he wrote, with an emoji of a rocket shooting into space. His [...]

This is a cross post from Prof. Eric Goldman's blog, mostly written by Prof. Jess Miers, with additional commentary at the end from Eric. Two things can be true: Non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) is a serious and gendered harm. And, the Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks Act,'' [...]

This is delicious. Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma have tried to bend the education system to their will. And now they're finding out it won't be bent quite as easy as they thought. First, let's take a look at the backstory here, which is steeped in the sort of stupidity we've come to expect from the [...]

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Generally speaking, if a judge begins an order - in a case where hundreds of men were illegally renditioned to a Salvadoran concentration camp directly against that judge's orders - by talking about Franz Kafka's The Trial, you'd think that the judge is going to go hard against the government. Instead, Judge James Boasberg delivers [...]

During peak COVID lockdowns in 2021, New York State passeda lawrequiring that big ISPs (with over 20k users) offer low-income residents 25 Mbps broadband for $15. It wasn't a huge ask. It costs major ISPs little to nothing to provide that speed over modern fiber networks, but the broadband industry sued anyway. Without success: the [...]

It's time for yet another reminder that HHS Secretary RFK Jr. is an incapable leader at odds with the scientists who actually know what they're talking about. At the CDC specifically, we recently discussed the government's decision to do away with the team that was helping to identify, track, and remediate elevated levels of lead [...]

While U.S. consumer protection is generallyan historic hot mess right now, the right to repair" movement - making it easier and cheaper to repair the things you own - continues to make steady inroads thanks to widespread, bipartisan annoyance at giant companies trying to monopolize repair in creative and obnoxious ways. Washington State just became [...]

Here we go again with the party of the rule of law." The rule of law doesn't apply to the Trump Administration. It only applies to the victims of its vindictive policies. But the least it could do is get some basic facts straight before talking out of its ass about whatever new fascist scheme [...]

If asked, do you think corporate America would prefer to hire (1) lawyers who fight, or (2) lawyers who immediately surrender, I think you'd know the answer. And now we have some fairly unambiguous empirical data to support what the answer is. Oracle's Larry Ellison loves Trump. Morgan Stanley contributed one of their top execs [...]