While we're still struggling with this stuff down here in the US, the Canadian Supreme Court made a huge decision earlier today, saying that the government must get a warrant to demand your information from an internet provider. In other words, your…
Look, we already know that Wil Wheaton is awesome (and I don't just say that because he's admitted to being a big Techdirt fan). He has consistently been awesome to fans, building up true connections with those fans by being more open, human and awesome…
Most of the discussion on the fight around net neutrality has focused on the big broadband providers, and to a lesser extent, the big tech companies. Unfortunately, that leaves out who will almost certainly be most impacted by all of this: the end users…
On Monday morning, we wrote about John Oliver's brilliant report on net neutrality, which ended with a stirring "call to action" for internet commenters to tell the FCC why it should preserve a free and open internet. If you somehow missed it, here'…
You know how fads are. They just get boring so fast. Take violence, for instance. Blaming video games for real-world violence is so yesterday. We need a forward-thinker, some kind of super-genius who can bring us into a new era of blaming video games…
Laura Poitras and James Risen have released another NSA document at the New York Times, this one detailing the agency's addition of faces to its haystacks. The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications…
After NBC confirmed Ed Snowden's earlier claims that he had tried to make use of internal channels to question NSA surveillance programs, James Clapper released a single email from Snowden to the legal department at the NSA, which they claim shows he…
It should be clear by now that Apple sees most of us as the proverbial unwashed masses and is on something of a mission to immolate immoral thought patterns by trying to put everyone's head in the collective sand. That seems to be the only explanation…
We've discussed moral rights here a few times in the past. These rights -- which focus on things like attribution and making sure artwork is not damaged, denigrated or destroyed -- are generally not recognized in the US. They're much more popular in…
Glenn Greenwald spends the last third of his excellent new book, "No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State", exposing the mentality and function of pseudo-journalists like David Gregory, who are in fact better understood…
It's been quite a while since we've had much news about the TSA's nudie scanners, other than the admission by one TSA employee that they, you know, don't work to do anything other than show people being naked. Yes, the federal government's oddly belated…
So we already wrote about how the House completely watered down the USA Freedom Act to the point that it really does very little, leading basically all of the civil liberties community to withdraw their support for the bill. If you want to know a little…
As we've discussed a few times, NY's Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, has been trying to go on a fishing expedition through Airbnb's records, looking for what he calls "illegal hotels." Of course, he's more or less admitted that he's doing this…
Having already gone through antitrust investigations in both the US and in Europe, without facing any serious penalties (and having regulators more or less recognize that Google wasn't doing anything anti-competitive), it appears that Google's angry…
Last month, we noted that Russia had passed a new law that required bloggers to registers, and included a variety of other restrictions on their speech as well. A few weeks later, Putin signed the law. Now the Russian government is getting ready to…
