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, […]
We recently noted how U.S. telecom giant Verizon was more than happy to kiss Trump’s ass in exchange for FCC approval of its $20 billion merger with Frontier. That included quickly kowtowing to the administration’s demands that it do its best to be more racist and sexist. For its part, Verizon counterpart AT&T claims it’s […]
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 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 […]
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