Mike Masnick

1 week ago | techdirt.com | Mike Masnick

Hamilton Vagi, head of Papua New Guinea’s National Cyber Security Centre, apparently never learned the first rule of trying to bury embarrassing information: threatening journalists just makes them dig in harder. And quite often leads to Streisanding the very information you were hoping would go away. Back in February, DDoSecrets published around a million emails from Papua New Guinea’s Mineral Resources Authority. The response was… crickets.

1 week ago | techdirt.com | Mike Masnick

When five Supreme Court Justices recuse themselves from a single case, that’s news. When they do it because most of them have book deals with the same publisher, that’s potentially a problem. Last week’s Monday order list included this unusual admission: five Justices recused from Baker v. Coates, a silly plagiarism case involving Ta-Nehisi Coates (that both lower courts dismissed). The reason?

2 weeks ago | techdirt.com | Mike Masnick

Eight men were put on a plane from Texas, bound for South Sudan — a country the State Department warns Americans not to travel to because of “crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict.” None of these men were from South Sudan. The Trump administration shipped them there anyway, in direct violation of a federal court order.

2 weeks ago | techdirt.com | Mike Masnick

The timing here is incredible. The very same day that the FTC’s “public inquiry” into “big tech censorship” closes, that very same FTC opens an investigation not into “big tech,” but rather Media Matters. Yes, the very same Media Matters that Elon Musk has been trying to silence through the censorial abuse of the court systems in multiple countries because the non-profit dared to… write an article showing ads from big companies appearing next to neo-Nazi content on ExTwitter.

2 weeks ago | techdirt.com | Mike Masnick

DHS announced yesterday that Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, stripping the university of its Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification. The timing is particularly brazen: around the same time, a federal judge in California had blocked DHS from a separate scheme to mass-revoke thousands of student visas based on fifteen minutes of review. This isn’t incompetence. It’s blatant, authoritarian retaliation.