Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s 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 2025 report 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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