There are things you can and can’t do when setting up checkpoints. If it’s DUI enforcement, you can talk to drivers and see if they seem intoxicated. If it’s near a border, you can stop every vehicle to search for undocumented immigrants or contraband. What you can’t do, however, is just set up a checkpoint […]
While democracy burns, corporate America is busy checking the wind direction. Google renames the Gulf of Mexico to flatter a wannabe autocrat’s ego. Business leaders draft contingency plans for the end of constitutional government. And the Democratic Party, funded by these same genuflecting corporations, responds with all the urgency of someone scheduling a dental cleaning. This isn’t […]
Way back in the far more innocent times of 2012, we covered a brief but tense dispute between Google and Iran over the lack of a label for the Persian Gulf on Google Maps. Ostensibly so as not to upset anyone about the name of that body of water, given that there was some dispute […]
Last July, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals appeared to have shut the door on constitutional discussions of geofence warrants. These so-called warrants operate from a point of ignorance. Investigators have no idea who they’re looking for. So, they ask Google to do some of the work for them. Casting a small dragnet around a […]
Given that there does not seem to have been a single thing Trump has done since entering office that has been legal, nor has his lackey Musk (or is it Trump that’s the lackey…?), there is not a single thing that doesn’t require litigation to challenge and enjoin. But we’re starting to see the floodgates […]
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Here’s a story about being wrong. Not just regular wrong — we’re all wrong sometimes! — but spectacularly, publicly, “I’m going to double down again and again and again on this obviously false thing even after being corrected” wrong. This week, Elon Musk stood in the Oval Office at the White House and was finally […]
Since his appointment by Trump in 2017, the FCC’s Brendan Carr has never stood up to telecom giants on any issue of substance to consumers. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about the company’s destruction of net neutrality, privacy violations, bullshit hidden fees, or its technically unnecessary usage caps, there’s nothing a company like Comcast […]
It’s always interesting to me to see companies identify what they see as a threat by looking at what type of content they attempt to DMCA or otherwise disappear. When actual direct and flagrant wholesale copying of a digital product occurs, you can understand why the takedowns are issued. We might still want to argue […]
Terumo Cardiovascular, a company that makes six-figure medical equipment used in heart surgeries, is apparently keen on attracting the ire of the “right to repair” movement. But given the Trump administration’s assault on state and federal consumer protection, it’s not clear they’ll face many meaningful repercussions for it. In a letter obtained by 404 Media, […]
Billionaires are already deleting parts of our government, as well as various safety mechanisms on the internet that sought to minimize hate and abuse. Do we also want them to be able to rewrite our understanding of the First Amendment? Steve Wynn’s latest Supreme Court petition represents a dangerous escalation in the ongoing assault on […]
Late last fall, a number of Norfolk, Virginia residents — with the assistance of the Institute for Justice (IJ) — sued the city for blanketing Norfolk with nearly 200 automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) provided by Flock Safety. Flock Safety made its first inroads with the private market, selling plate readers to gated communities and […]
Another day, another computer system for DOGE to unlawfully access. This time it is the one running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the latest to be unlawfully shut down. Bloomberg is reporting that this time the DOGE bros incursion into the systems came with some sort of MOU, which did a few things […]
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It turns out that when you let the world’s richest man take over significant portions of the federal government, some people might get nervous. Who knew? Last week we wrote about how some staunch conservatives were finally admitting that Elon’s takeover of the government represented a constitutional crisis. Then earlier this week, we showed how […]
We’ve long noted how absurd it is that scammers, debt collectors, and greedy telemarketers have ruined our voice communications networks. We’ve somehow just normalized it. We’ve also noted how a big reason our robocall problem never gets fixed is because Congress and regulators routinely fixate on scammers and not on the “legit” companies like debt collectors that use […]
Techdirt has been writing about India’s huge Aadhaar database of biometrics, which assigns a unique 12-digit number to all Indian citizens, for a decade now. The system was introduced to make it easier for people in India to access key government services by authenticating their identity, but there were soon plans to allow businesses to […]
“Wake up, Neo. The Matrix has you.” These words marked a cultural moment—one that captured our collective anxiety about reality itself. The Matrix wasn’t just a movie about robots and kung fu. It was a story about questioning the systems of power and control that shape our understanding of the world. The red pill became a powerful metaphor for choosing difficult […]
If cops aren’t going to follow the law or the Constitution, I don’t know why we’re expecting them to adhere to end user agreements. It’s not just the fake social media profiles officers and investigators use. It’s also the tech they deploy. No matter how well facial recognition tech may perform, it’s still problematic. And […]
There have been legitimate debates about whether the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act — which makes it a criminal act for US entities to bribe foreign government officials — sometimes creates gray areas in international business. For example, over a decade ago, the Walmart Mexico case highlighted how Walmart payments to “speed up” permitting to build […]
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