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Former FCC Chair Ajit Pai seems to have forgotten the First Amendment in his rush to support the TikTok ban. In a recent Fox Business interview, Pai stumbled through a series of perplexing statements, leaving us wondering if he’s ever actually read the bill he’s defending.
And look, we’ve criticized Pai a lot here on Techdirt over the years, but I’ve always thought that he had a firm grasp of the...
One of the primary reasons U.S. consumers pay some of the highest prices in the developed world for mobile data is because U.S. regulators — from both parties — routinely sign off on “growth for growth’s sake” mergers that reduce competition, lower product quality, raise prices, and trigger waves upon waves of layoffs. Usually under the pretense of “amazing new synergies” and job growth.
Yet...
We may not have Supreme Court precedent (yet!), but a number of cases handled by appellate circuits all over the nation have made it resoundingly clear: there’s a First Amendment right to film police officers.
Of course, lawmakers caping for cops have done their best to make this act more difficult. Multiple attempts have been made to create a protective area around cops (the bigger the better!)...
Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere, you’ve likely caught wind of a rap beef that has taken the internet by storm. I won’t pretend to be enough of a pop culture expert to have any idea why both Drake and Kendrick Lamar have been lobbing frequent shots at each other in the form of diss tracks over the past couple of months, but it’s been fascinating to see how, and why, some have...
There was a bit of news in the world of decentralized social media over the past few weeks. It kicked off with the announcement that Jack Dorsey had left the board of Bluesky. This was followed by an interview Jack gave to Mike Solana where he explained his thinking on all of this. There was also a flurry of talk claiming (misleadingly) that Jack had endorsed ExTwitter.
As with many things...
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, this sort of thing would require a warrant. I...
The Complete 2024 Penetration Testing...
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 would be problematic. But, now we have a bipartisan attempt to repeal it outright...
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. Congress then proposed a solution: it would...
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 typically requires the defendant to publish the information widely rather than just...