The White House Correspondents Association has just capitulated to pressure from the Trump administration by removing comedian Amber Ruffin from its annual dinner. Their stated reason? “To ensure the focus is not on the politics of division.” This seemingly minor capitulation reveals something profound about how democracy dies—not through dramatic confrontation, but through a thousand small surrenders […]
Support us on Patreon » If you’re a Techdirt reader, you’re probably familiar with Senator Ron Wyden. In January, he released his new book It Takes Chutzpah, offering up a call for political boldness that feels even more relevant with every day that passes. This week, Senator Wyden joins Mike on the podcast to talk about […]
Remember when government officials discussing sensitive information over unsecured channels was treated as a national crisis worthy of endless investigations? Apparently, those days are over. While Hillary Clinton’s email server spawned years of investigations and Attorney General Pam Bondi is still trying to rehash it, the White House wants us to simply forget about top […]
Anything that doesn’t jibe with Donald Trump’s white male-centric worldview must go. Whatever is deemed “woke” — no matter its basis in factual history — must be excised. If tossing aside DEI means pretending blacks, women, and other non-white, non-male people never contributed anything to this country, so be it. If stroking off the far […]
The Complete 2025 Penetration Testing & Ethical Hacking Training Bundle has 9 courses to help you learn to fight back against cyber threats. Courses include hands-on lessons on penetration testing for AWS, IoT, and web apps, along with hacking basics and a few certificate exam prep courses. It’s on sale for $50. Note: The Techdirt […]
The U.S. government just demonstrated exactly why due process matters. In what should be a shocking admission, the Trump administration revealed in court that it had made a bit of an oopsie (they call it an “administrative error”) — one that resulted in trafficking a Maryland father with protected legal status to a Salvadoran prison. […]
We’ve long noted how the 2021 infrastructure bill included $42.5 billion for broadband dubbed the Broadband, Equity, Access And Deployment (BEAD) program. Managed by the NTIA and individual states, we’ve also noted how this money has taken a long time to get to the states for some good reasons. Namely they wanted to avoid the […]
A whole new level of constitutional wtf-ness has emerged from the Indiana state Appeals Court. Here’s how John Wesley Hall sums it up on FourthAmendment.com: If you’re riding a bus and drugs are found on one, are all subject to search. The answer can’t be yes, but it is here. Exactly. The answer cannot be […]
It appears that Mariah Carey got a very late Christmas present this year. Several years ago, Carey was sued by Andy Stone over Carey’s hit holiday song, All I Want For Christmas Is You. The whole lawsuit was a complete mess. The fact it was filed in a Louisana court made no sense. The suit […]
Imagine you had pretty much unlimited power over the government and wanted to save taxpayers’ money. You could: Or you could do what Elon Musk did with DOGE: declare everything wasteful, start firing people at random, and claim you’re saving billions through pure destruction. It’s long been clear that Elon has never considered Chesterton’s Fence […]
The footage is hard to watch—not because it’s shocking, but because it isn’t. Because we’ve seen this coming. Because we’ve written it down. Because it’s what happens when performance fully replaces governance, and people are asked to believe that “DOGE” and “efficiency” and “Musk” now constitute a new political grammar. Rep. Victoria Spartz stands in front of her constituents at […]
America’s largest law firms are facing an existential choice that will define not just their legacies, but potentially the future of constitutional democracy: fight against clearly unconstitutional executive orders designed to destroy the ability of anyone to fight back, or surrender to authoritarianism. While that might sound hyperbolic, the evidence shows that it’s absolutely true. […]
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There is a disquieting update to my last post about a district court victory in Does 1-26 v. Musk that had enjoined DOGE, given its likely unconstitutional exercise of power, particularly in the context of its dismemberment of USAID. The Fourth Circuit has now stayed enforcement of that injunction, which raises a few issues worth […]
The FCC runs an $8 billion federal subsidy program to help bring phone and broadband services to lower income homes and schools called the Universal Service Fund. Started by Reagan and expanded by Bush Jr., the program was historically a bipartisan thing, until the extremist Trump administration came to town. Driven by a fake right wing […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is frankcox with a comment about the horrifying abduction of Rumeysa Ozturk: Masked abductors? The people doing this are obviously ashamed of themselves because they are wearing masks to prevent anyone from identifying them. That adds another level of terror to this sort of thing. […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the pandemic news continued. Some people were attempting to leverage it to call for longer patent terms, while we were calling for loosening the intellectual property reins, and the DOJ was using it to justify indefinite detention of arrested people. Libraries were looking to become pandemic broadband havens […]
Clearview saw an opening in the facial recognition market and took full advantage of it. While most tech firms offered face-matching tech of dubious accuracy, Clearview went further, matching its AI to the billions of records it has harvested for free from the open internet. (And while this effort certainly wasn’t free, it definitely was […]
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 […]
The fallout over several Trump administration officials, all of them high-ranking, discussing military operations of a sensitive nature in a Signal chat and inadvertently welcoming a journalist to that chat is ongoing. The administration’s attempts to hand-wave this all away as unimportant doesn’t appear to be getting much traction, thankfully. The entire episode is a […]
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