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 […]
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 […]
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