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Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Federal judges in the Western District of Washington had unanimously appointed Roger Rogoff to be the Justice Department’s top official there, filling a vacancy that the president has never addressed. But the Trump administration has largely defied attempts by federal judges to fill vacancies, leading to Mr. Rogoff’s […]

Just last week we had the story of the Trump DOJ issuing very questionable subpoenas of NY Times journalists while trying to track down who leaked information to those reporters regarding the potentially catastrophic security flaws of the “gift” 747 plane he received from Qatar. As we noted in that original post, this appeared to […]

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on […]

Will Elon Musk actually face legal consequences for illegally paying voters in an attempt to interfere in an election? We’re at least one step closer to finding out. Back during the 2024 Presidential election, he got away with offering $1 million to a “random” (not actually random) voter who would sign his petition in an […]

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No punishment is too vindictive. No cruelty is too small. The administration that is openly seeking to create a white Christian nationalist autocracy will do whatever it can to expel as many non-white people from this nation as possible. Trump and his cabinet members constantly claim the country has been overrun by dangerous foreign migrants, […]

Earlier this year FCC boss Brendan Carr launched a series of fake investigations into ABC because the network (1) hosted Democratic Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico on The View, (2) aired comedians who made fun of the president and his wife, and (3) occasionally engaged in journalism critical of Trump corruption. The details of these […]

If you’re not a particular kind of sports fan, a certain trademark dispute may have escaped your attention. The Chicago Bears quarterback is Caleb Williams and he’s pretty great. He also has acquired a nickname: “Iceman.” This nickname has become so associated with him that it is even referenced on Williams’ appearance on the cover […]

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Frank Ssekamwa says the United States presented his country with an impossible choice. If it accepted the terms of a new health agreement, Uganda would have to give the U.S. access to the data of millions of his fellow citizens — a decision he worries would […]

In 1978, the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that regulates unfair or deceptive advertising, proposed limiting TV ads for sugary foods on programs targeted at children. The Washington Post’s editorial board scoffed that the plan would “turn the agency into a great national nanny.” Congress clipped the agency’s wings, and “kidvid” entered history as a […]

We spent a few years pointing out the ridiculousness of the whole “TikTok ban” moral panic, and the fact that all of the “concerns” magically melted away after Trump became president and then effectively gifted a controlling stake to some of his friends should raise some pretty big questions. However, most people seem to have […]

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The Trump administration’s continual trend towards maximum awfulness means that every report seems to be “I’ve got bad news and I’ve got worse news.” What was already bad has become even worse now that more of the administration’s actions have been exposed during court proceedings. Last July, the Trump administration unilaterally decided ICE should have […]

Last month I wrote a feature for The Verge exploring how Republicans had hijacked the Biden-era infrastructure bill to redirect billions of dollars away from next-generation fiber, and instead funnel it into the pockets of billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos — in exchange for congested, expensive, satellite broadband service they’d already planned to deploy. […]

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Concerns surrounding young people’s screen time are widespread. Australia became the first country to ban social media for users under 16 in December 2025, and Denmark, France and the U.K. have since announced similar restrictions to begin this year. In the U.S., as of mid-2026, more than 30 […]

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on […]

We’ve written in the past that people online often get way too excited about theoretical pending “discovery” in frivolous lawsuits filed by bad actors. Because while there are certainly a few cases where (1) a frivolous case even reaches discovery and (2) some elements of that discovery are revealed to the public, in the vast […]

You’d think that watching multiple lawyers get caught red-handed using AI to file briefs full of made-up citations would cause everyone in the legal profession — especially prosecutors — to double-check their own. You would, of course, be wrong. And the latest offender is not just some random lawyer. It’s the DOJ itself, which cited […]

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Former DHS head Kristi Noem got permanently sidelined for being unable to do two impossible things at once: be the anti-migrant hardliner Trump appointed her to be and massage the message when shit went sideways. Two murders in less than a month in Minneapolis may have made plenty of administration figures secretly happy, but once […]

You might recall how the press and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers suffered a four-year embolism about the purported privacy and national security threat of TikTok, before “fixing” the problem by ultimately offloading TikTok to Trump’s billionaire friends. You know, the exact sort of authoritarian-friendly people keen on doing everything critics had previously accused ByteDance […]

Walled Culture the book (digital versions available free) is about the incompatibility of the traditional copyright system with the digital world, and its failure to reward creators fairly. That raises the question of what might replace it, and the book’s last chapter offers one solution in the form of true fans. These are people who love […]

Reversing course, Flock Safety—the surveillance technology vendor most known for its extensive network of automated license plate readers—has announced that it will end a pilot for its acoustic gunshot detection devices to identify signs of “human distress.” In October 2025, EFF warned the public that Flock was rolling out a new feature called “Distress Detection” that would be deployed through their […]

You may recall that at the end of last year and very beginning of this year there was a big story over Elon Musk’s LLM tool Grok being willing to produce non-consensual images of people (including children) in bikinis or otherwise stripped down in objectifying ways. Elon played into and promoted this “trend” at one […]

The Trump administration continues to pretend migrants don’t have due process rights. It does this despite racking up nearly 10,000 rulings to the contrary — losing in roughly 90% of the petitions brought by ICE detainees. While the Fifth Circuit continues to play coy about the 14th Amendment’s existence, the rest of nation’s courts have […]

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Earlier this year “Border Czar” Tom Homan, with an apparently straight face, told the media that if Democrats didn’t stop calling ICE murderers for the murders they committed, then they would have no choice but to murder more people. A few weeks later, when ICE did murder another person, he doubled down and blamed people […]

Paramount has been forced to pause consummation of its controversial $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers after a state antitrust lawsuit resulted in the courts granting a 14-day restraining order. There’s a not insubstantial chance that the pause could prove fatal for the deal. California and eleven other states last week filed an antitrust lawsuit […]

There is no shortage of examples of Major League Baseball attempting to wield overly broad trademarks its obtained to bully others, nor examples of MLB attempting to stretch its trademark rights much further than they go. MLB opposed a trademark for a Brooklyn burger joint on behalf of the Dodgers, a team that hadn’t played […]