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A lot has happened since last week when my post about Des Moines (IA) school superintendent Ian Roberts being arrested by ICE first hit the front page here at Techdirt. A lot of new information has come to light, almost all of it obtained by Des Moines Register journalists, which indicates the arrested man may […]

Support us on Patreon » We’ve written a lot about how AI can empower users when employed the right way, but how this is difficult when a few giant tech firms control the technology. One company that is trying to move in a different direction is DuckDuckGo with its Duck.ai offering. This week, DuckDuckGo founder and […]

Once again, we’re reminded why age verification systems are fundamentally broken when it comes to privacy and security. Discord has disclosed that one of its third-party customer service providers was breached, exposing user data, including government-issued photo IDs, from users who had appealed age determinations. Data potentially accessed by the hack includes things like names, […]

It would be something of an understatement to say that Alphabet, Google’s holding company, is big and successful. Some Wall Street analysts are even predicting it could become the world’s most valuable corporation. Of course, even for business giants, enough is never enough. They always want more: more money, more power. As part of that […]

Achieve picture perfection with Adobe Photoshop Elements 2025. You can create with stylish effects and templates, and be creative on the go. With the magic of AI and automation behind the scenes, it’s never been easier to fix flaws, fine-tune specific areas, and add motion to quickly bring your vision to life. Get a 3-year […]

It seems like years ago, but the Trump administration got itself sued earlier this very year by the state of California for commandeering California’s National Guard to shut down anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. Trump justified this by declaring the city to be under siege, even though (1) most violence was being committed by law […]

It’s super curious how the folks most vocal about being cancelled or having their “Conservative viewpoints silenced” now own or control most major U.S. media companies. Almost as if their claims of being silenced have always been a bullshit ploy to dominate the discourse on the back of something other than the quality of their […]

As we discussed last week, Ryan Walters resigned from his position as the state Superintendent of Oklahoma and the mood across the state was sad and sour as a result. Okay, while it’s very funny that Oklahoma businesses hosted celebration parties for Walters’ resignation while I can’t even hazard a guess at who my own […]

The European Union Council is once again debating its controversial message scanning proposal, aka “Chat Control,” that would lead to the scanning of private conversations of billions of people. Chat Control, which EFF has strongly opposed since it was first introduced in 2022, keeps being mildly tweaked and pushed by one Council presidency after another. Chat Control is a dangerous legislative […]

Stephen Miller just called a federal judge’s enforcement of constitutional law “legal insurrection.” Let that sink in. A Deputy White House Chief of Staff—one of the most powerful people in the executive branch—declared that judicial review of presidential power is rebellion against the United States government. A Trump-appointed judge carefully reviewed the facts, applied the relevant statutes, […]

I have a simple question for Senator Ted Cruz: Who was president in 2018? How about 2020? I ask because Cruz just released a “bombshell” report claiming that the Biden administration “converted” CISA into “the Thought Police.” There’s just one tiny problem with this narrative: Cruz’s own report shows that everything he’s mad about started […]

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This administration is so comfortable with its power and so self-assured in its actions that it can’t even be bothered to engage in basic operational security. This dates all the way back to Trump’s first term, when the president casually (and unofficially) declassified information by posting it to Twitter, routinely refused to attend national security […]

Brendan Carr has received ample attention for his recent failed attempt to ban a comedian and trample the First Amendment, something he’s facing several fledgling investigations over. But that disaster class in shitty governance shouldn’t overshadow all the other, terrible things Carr has been up to. Like last week, when Carr announced he’d be killing […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment on our post about DOGE’s “efficiency theater”: I voted for this!” —person whose taxes and cost of living and rent are all going up In second place, it’s a double-winning anonymous comment that also takes second place over on the […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, a court slowed Trump’s roll on the TikTok ban because the DOJ couldn’t show any actual national security threat. Meanwhile, the attacks on Section 230 were coming in waves, with a stupid new bill from Joe Manchin and John Cornyn quickly followed by two more anti-Section 230 bills, […]

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. After a fight with a Black student in a St. Louis suburb left a white student badly injured in March 2024, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey blamed their school district for unsafe conditions, even though the incident occurred after classes and more than a half-mile from […]

Around 10 PM on Monday, September 30th, 2025, federal agents surrounded an apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. ICE, Border Patrol, FBI, ATF—a multi-agency operation targeting suspected members of the Tren de Aragua gang. What happened next should be the biggest story in America. Pertissue Fisher came out to the hallway of her apartment […]

The Hatch Act of 1939 is a beautiful piece of legislation. It disallows all kinds of things, like bribing voters with jobs to vote a certain way, as well as limiting any campaign activity by federal workers. Another thing it does is to prohibit partisan political activity in the course of a staff member’s federal […]

For years now, the MAGA crowd has been absolutely convinced that the Biden administration engaged in the most egregious censorship campaign in American history. They’ve waved around the Murthy v. Missouri case as proof that Biden officials illegally pressured tech companies to remove content (even as the Supreme Court concluded there wasn’t even enough evidence […]