There was more contention than usual prior to the most recent reauthorization of Section 702 surveillance powers. The blame for the multiple fights leading up to a clean renewal lies entirely at the feet of the FBI, which has constantly abused its access to NSA collections to perform warrantless searches targeting US persons’ communications. Normally, […]
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Section 230, the legal backbone of the internet, is under attack again. This time, it is from a bipartisan pair of legislators who seem to fundamentally misunderstand how the law works and what the consequences of repealing it would be. We’ve talked about plenty of attempts to reform Section 230, and why all of them […]
Long before TikTok histrionics took root, you might recall that numerous members of Congress spent numerous years freaking about another Chinese company: Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei. The argument, made without much in the way of public evidence, was that Huawei was systematically using its network gear to spy on Americans at a massive scale. […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson, with a comment on our post about ChatGPT and privacy rights in Europe, specifically in response to someone who raised the issue of “false light” torts: False light is a privacy tort in the US. We’re talking about Europe. But also, false light […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, there was a legal fight over whether it’s protected speech to flash your headlights to warn of hidden cops. We looked at how little the FCC had done to police wireless location data scandals, and how it was doubling down on bogus claims about broadband availability, as well […]
Here we go again. Back in February, the FTC wanted to dive back into its battle with Microsoft over its acquisition of Activision Blizzard due to Microsoft announcing thousands of jobs worth of layoffs, including many developers from Activision Blizzard. When the FTC had asked for an injunction to block the sale, Microsoft made two […]
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 round-up of the latest news in online […]
Mobile phones are currently banned in all Australian state schools and many Catholic and independent schools around the country. This is part of a global trend over more than a decade to restrict phone use in schools. Australian governments say banning mobile phones will reduce distractions in class, allow students to focus on learning, improve student wellbeing and reduce cyberbullying. But previous research has […]
No matter how you might feel about constitutional rights or which ones are your favorites, the fact remains that it’s often people with the least amount of cultural cachet and/or the most to lose who make the best case law. And so it is here, where we’re dealing with a sex offender who tried to […]
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“Do you now, or have you ever, worked with TikTok to help defend its rights?” That McCarthyism-esque question is apparently being asked by members of Congress to organizations that have been working with TikTok to defend its Constitutional rights. Does anyone think it’s right for Congress to threaten to punish organizations from working with TikTok? […]
By now it’s been made fairly clear that the bedazzling wonderment that is “AI” doesn’t come cheap. Story after story have highlighted how the technology consumes massive amounts of electricity and water, and we’re not really adapting to keep pace. This is also occurring alongside a destabilizing climate crisis that’s already putting a capacity and […]
This didn’t go the way anyone (other than cops and their unions) wanted it to, but first let’s acknowledge the fact that the city of Denver is actually trying to make things better for both cops and the people they serve. Here’s how that’s going: In its first three months, STAR handled 350 calls — […]
We’ve been talking a lot about video game mods recently, typically not for happy reasons. There is a spectrum out there when it comes to how developers and publishers react to organic modding communities that spring up around their games. On one end of the spectrum, typically inhabited by larger companies, are those that somehow […]
As California (and possibly Congress) are, again, revisiting instituting link taxes in the US, it’s worth highlighting that our prediction about the Canadian link tax has now been shown to be correct. It didn’t harm Meta one bit to remove news. The entire premise behind these link taxes/bargaining codes is that social media gets “so […]
Israeli malware manufacturer NSO Group spent years making good money selling to bad people. Its only concern for the longest time was how long it would take nearby autocrats and totalitarians to start targeting Israeli citizens. To be fair, the Israeli government shares at least some of the blame. Surrounded by entities that would love […]
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Holding social media companies solely responsible for the mental health challenges faced by today’s youth is not only misguided—it’s dangerous. Misdiagnosing the problem means your solutions are going to be actively harmful. I know that, these days especially, it seems that the thing everyone across the political aisle seems to agree on is that the […]
Before the Biden FCC restored net neutrality, there was concern that the new net neutrality rules weren’t as tough as the ones discarded by the Trump administration. While the draft rules did require ISPs be transparent about the limits of your broadband connection, and barred big ISPs from blocking or throttling competitors, there were concerns […]
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