Supreme Court Shrugs Off Opportunity To Save The First Amendment From The Fifth Circuit’s Antipathy
The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in the case of independent journalist Priscilla Villarreal, who was arrested in Laredo, Texas, after asking police questions about a Border Patrol officer’s suicide. The Fifth Circuit, after multiple reviews, upheld qualified immunity for the officers despite clear First Amendment violations. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent warned that the Court’s inaction threatens press freedom by emboldening retaliatory arrests. The decision leaves the journalists without a remedy and signals the Court’s reluctance to confront qualified‑immunity defenses.
Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Techdirt’s weekly roundup highlighted the most insightful and funniest reader comments, ranging from a security analysis of the White House’s new app to sharp legal critiques of the Murthy ruling. The editorial spotlight featured a deep dive into Virginia’s controversial...
Minnesota Kicks Off Legal Battle With Trump Administration To Hold ICE Shooters Accountable
Minnesota prosecutors have filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department to compel the release of evidence in three ICE shootings that left two civilians dead and one wounded. The Trump administration has repeatedly...
Senators Ask Tulsi Gabbard To Tell Americans That VPN Use Might Subject Them To Domestic Surveillance
A group of progressive senators and two representatives wrote to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard warning that commercial VPN use could inadvertently expose Americans to domestic surveillance, as encrypted traffic may be classified as foreign. The letter cites billions...
The Trump Administration Is Trying To Steal $21 BIllion Earmarked For Better Broadband
The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allocated $42.5 billion for state broadband grants. The Trump administration has rewritten NTIA guidance, stripping affordability provisions and steering billions toward satellite operators Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. As a result, $21 billion in “non‑deployment”...
Meta Caves To The MPAA Over Instagram’s Use Of ‘PG-13,’ Ending A Dispute That Was Silly From The Start
Meta has reached a settlement with the Motion Picture Association, agreeing to stop calling its Instagram Teen Account moderation "PG-13" and to add a disclaimer clarifying the distinction from movie ratings. The company will continue using the same age‑appropriate filters,...
Federal Cyber Experts Thought Microsoft’s Cloud Was “A Pile Of Shit.” They Approved It Anyway.
In late 2024 FedRAMP granted its cybersecurity seal to Microsoft’s Government Community Cloud High (GCC High) even though internal reviewers called the product “a pile of shit” due to missing security documentation. The agency cited a “buyer beware” notice and the...
Copyright Industry Continues Its Efforts To Ban VPNs
The European copyright lobby is intensifying legal attacks on virtual private networks (VPNs) across the EU, with Denmark’s draft law, French court orders, and a Spanish ruling all targeting VPN providers. In France, courts have compelled major services such as...
DOJ Admits ICE Has Engaged In Illegal Courthouse Arrests For Most Of The Past Year
The Department of Justice filed a March 24 letter admitting that the May 2025 ICE memorandum never applied to immigration‑court arrests, effectively labeling those actions illegal. The admission overturns the administration’s long‑standing claim that courthouse arrests were authorized by policy. It...
Brendan Carr Ignores The Law, Rubber Stamps More Right Wing Media Consolidation, Then Lies About It
The FCC, led by Chairman Brendan Carr, approved Nexstar Media Group’s $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna in a closed‑door vote, allowing the combined entity to reach 54.5 % of U.S. television households—well above the 39 % cap that previously limited market concentration. The...
Weeks After Denouncing Government Censorship On Rogan, Zuckerberg Texted Elon Musk Offering To Take Down Content For DOGE
In a January 10, 2025 interview with Joe Rogan, Mark Zuckerberg portrayed himself as a defender of free expression, claiming Meta resisted Biden administration pressure to remove content. Less than a month later, on February 3, he texted Elon Musk—then...
Hey, Game Devs: The ‘Placeholder Assets’ Excuse For Using AI Is Running Really Thin
Pearl Abyss faced criticism after players identified AI‑generated artwork in the newly released AAA title *Crimson Desert*. The studio publicly apologized, acknowledging the lack of disclosure and pledging a comprehensive audit to replace the offending assets. Developers said upcoming patches...
Turns Out That Advertisers Not Wanting To Fund Neo-Nazi-Adjacent Content Isn’t An Antitrust Violation
A federal judge dismissed X Corp's antitrust lawsuit against advertisers and the GARM coalition, ruling the claim lacked any antitrust injury. The court clarified that antitrust law protects competition, not individual competitors, and that advertisers’ choice to avoid extremist content...
FBI Tells Senate It’s Still Bypassing 4th Amendment By Purchasing Location Data From Third Parties
The FBI continues to acquire bulk location information from commercial data brokers, sidestepping the warrant requirement established by the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision. Agency officials, including Acting Deputy Director Kash Patel, argue the practice complies with the Constitution and the...
Blocking The Internet Archive Won’t Stop AI, But It Will Erase The Web’s Historical Record
The New York Times has begun blocking the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine from crawling its site, citing concerns that AI firms are scraping its content for training models. Other major publishers, including The Guardian, are following suit, threatening to cut off a vital...
Brendan Carr Tries To ‘Ban’ All Foreign Routers In Lazy, Legally Dubious Shakedown
The FCC, led by Chairman Brendan Carr, announced that all routers manufactured abroad will be placed on its “covered list,” effectively requiring conditional approval before they can be sold in the United States. Approval must come from the Department of...
An Open Training Set For AI Goes Global
The French startup Pleias has expanded its Common Corpus, an open‑source multilingual training dataset, to over 2.267 trillion tokens. The collection now covers more than 30 languages, with eight languages exceeding 10 billion tokens each, and includes government, scientific, cultural, web, and...
ALPR Tech Now Preventing Parents From Enrolling Their Kids In School
Thomson Reuters Clear is marketing an AI‑assisted license‑plate reader (ALPR) tool to school districts for residency verification. In an Illinois district, the system flagged a parent’s vehicle as residing outside the district, leading officials to deny the child’s enrollment despite...
‘Merger Synergies’: CBS News Fires Workers, Shutters 100 Year Old CBS Radio
CBS News, now owned by Larry Ellison after his 2025 acquisition, announced a 6% workforce reduction, cutting roughly 60 employees, and the shutdown of the century‑old CBS News Radio service. Management framed the moves as a strategic realignment to address...
Trump Administration Tries To Rein In RFK Jr. As A Midterms Liability
The Trump administration is moving to curb Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.'s controversial public‑health agenda as the 2026 midterm elections approach. White House officials have imposed tighter oversight of HHS, citing disorganization, a delayed measles response, and backlash over mental‑health grant...
What Does The Viral Afroman Trial Have to Do with Section 230?
A jury recently cleared rapper Afroman of defamation, confirming that his viral songs mocking a police raid were protected speech. The case underscores Section 230's role in shielding platforms like YouTube and TikTok from liability for user‑generated content. Without that...
A Model For HHS: New Mexico Measles Outbreak Was Curtailed With Mass Vaccination Campaign
New Mexico curtailed a measles outbreak with a coordinated mass‑vaccination effort, ending with only 99 cases compared with Texas’s 762. The state saw a 55 % surge in MMR vaccinations from January to September, driven by data‑driven targeting, mobile clinics, and...
Rep. Finke Was Right: Age-Gating Isn’t About Kids, It’s About Control
Rep. Leigh Finke testified against Minnesota’s HF1434, a sweeping age‑verification bill that would force websites to collect government IDs or biometric data for any content deemed “harmful to minors.” The legislation’s definition of harmful speech is broad enough to encompass...
Australia’s Teen Social Media Ban Is Just Training A Generation In The Art Of The Workaround
Australia’s under‑16 social‑media ban, introduced as a child‑safety measure, has produced only a marginal decline in teen usage according to Qustodio data. Most adolescents who were active on TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat before the law continue to access these platforms,...
The Government Uses Targeted Advertising to Track Your Location. Here’s What We Need to Do.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) confirmed it has leveraged location data harvested from the online advertising ecosystem, specifically real‑time bidding (RTB) streams, to track individuals’ phones. The practice builds on a broader government reliance on data brokers and SDKs that...
The Jehovah’s Witnesses Are Back Abusing Copyright Law To Unmask Their Critics. Again.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is representing an anonymous Jehovah’s Witness researcher, J. Doe, whose JWS Library site was targeted by DMCA subpoenas from the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. The organization has a documented history of filing 72 copyright...
Techdirt Podcast Episode 446: Mike & Karl Talk AI
In this episode, host Mike Masnick and TechDirt writer Carl Bodie dissect the heated public discourse around AI, highlighting how the technology has become a flashpoint for class‑based anger and political polarization. They argue that most commentary is unnuanced, with...
A Reddit Post, An AI Hallucination, And Two Lawyers Who Never Checked Citations Walk Into A Dog Custody Case
A California appellate court exposed a bizarre chain of AI‑hallucinated legal citations that traveled from a Reddit blog post to a dog‑custody case and ultimately appeared in a signed court order. Both parties’ attorneys copied the fictitious cases without checking...
Trump Gets $10 Billion Kickback To The Treasury For Offloading TikTok To His Billionaire Buddies
The Trump administration brokered a sale of TikTok's U.S. operations to a consortium that includes Larry Ellison, Silver Lake and UAE‑controlled MGX. Investors are paying a $10 billion fee to the Treasury, with $2.5 billion already transferred. The fee is far larger...
Turns Out The DOGE Bros Who Killed Humanities Grants Are Kinda Sensitive About It
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) saw 1,477 Biden‑era grants abruptly cancelled after two junior staffers, Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh, used a simple ChatGPT prompt to flag projects as DEI‑related. Deposition videos released by plaintiff societies show the...
The IRS’s Verification System for Sharing Taxpayer Data With ICE Would Have Accepted ‘Don’t Care 12345’ as a Valid Address
A federal judge ruled the IRS violated federal law 42,695 times by handing over taxpayer addresses to ICE using a flawed TIN Matching process that only required a zip‑code pattern, not a valid address. Of the 47,289 addresses shared, 90.3%...
Roblox Rolls Out AI-Powered Real-Time Rephrasing Of Profanity Within Chat
Roblox has launched an AI‑powered feature that rephrases profanity in real‑time chat, turning blocked words into respectful equivalents while preserving the original intent. The system operates across all languages supported by Roblox’s translation tools and is limited to age‑checked users...
MAHA Institute: Nix The Entire Childhood Vaccine Schedule
The Make America Health Again (MAHA) Institute, a D.C. think tank linked to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., announced it wants to eliminate the entire U.S. childhood vaccine schedule until each shot is proven safe and effective. The group’s president, Mark Gorton, presented the stance...
Docs Expose CBP’s Use Of Ad Data To Track People’s Movements
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has been buying location data from the online advertising ecosystem, allowing the agency to track individuals' movements with minute‑level precision. The practice leverages advertising identifiers (AdIDs) that link devices to real‑time bidding markets, bypassing the...
Beavers Are Not Moose: Buc-Ee’s Sues Competitor Over Cartoon Moose Branding
Buc‑ee’s, the Texas‑based convenience‑store chain, has filed a trademark lawsuit against rival Mickey’s, alleging that the competitor’s cartoon moose mascot and red‑dominant branding infringe on Buc‑ee’s beaver mascot and visual identity. The complaint claims the logos are confusingly similar and...
EFF To Court: Don’t Make Embedding Illegal
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is urging the Fifth Circuit to keep the long‑standing server test, which holds the party controlling a server liable for infringing content, rather than shifting direct liability to those who embed links. Emmerich Newspapers argues...
37,000 Fake AI Comments Mysteriously Oppose Washington State’s Effort To Tax The Rich
Washington State opened a public comment period for a proposed millionaire tax, only to see more than 37,000 AI‑generated submissions opposing the measure. The fake entries duplicated names dozens of times, often posted late at night, inflating the appearance of...
Congressional Republicans Push Bills That Would Block Kids Access To Content For Ideological Reasons
Congressional Republicans advanced two bills—the App Store Accountability Act and the KIDS Act—that would require parental consent for minors to install apps and use direct‑messaging features. The measures expand parental control beyond the existing COPPA framework, applying to both for‑profit...
If You’re Going To Defend AI And Whine About Its Critics, You Should Probably Be Honest About Its Actual Harms
AI‑industry CEO Matt Shumer argues that large language models now generate complete code without human refinement, signaling a swift shift in software development. The article criticizes Shumer for omitting the broader harms of AI, including soaring data‑center emissions that jeopardize...