Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery With Daily Postings Since 2002
MuckRock: “Not long ago, I did a routine check-in on a project I hadn’t thought about in a while: a Data Liberation Project repo that scrapes and archives Transportation Security Administration (TSA) traveler complaints. It was supposed to be a quick check-in—just restart the scraper GitHub had paused for inactivity. No big deal. I’d just …
Via Jason Kottke – The Unbreaking team is starting to publish “clear and rigorously cited explanations of what’s happening to our government and why it matters”. Their first three are on Medicaid, Transgender Healthcare, and Equality at Work.
CNET: “Most router manufacturers collect some form of data about you. Here’s what you need to know. Your W-Fi router is responsible for conveying nearly 100% of your internet traffic. That’s a lot of data — enough to make privacy a concern when picking one out. So, how do you know if your router is …
The New York Times [no paywall]: “Fearing the loss of federal funding, the nation’s largest anti-sexual-violence organization has barred its crisis hotline staff from pointing people to resources that might violate President Trump’s executive orders to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. The organization, RAINN (the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network) has removed more …
The New York Times [no paywall]: “The decision by nine of America’s biggest law firms to “bend the knee” to President Trump drew condemnation among lawyers across the political spectrum, including from attorneys inside the firms who quit or launched resistance campaigns. Others have chosen a less career-limiting form of rebellion. That would be offering …
The Atlantic [no paywall] – Russell Vought is advancing a radical ideological project decades in the making. “The opening act of Donald Trump’s second term was defined by the theatrical dismantling of much of the federal government by Elon Musk and his group of tech-savvy demolitionists. Everywhere you looked in those first 100 days, it …
CensorTrace – “Following the 2025 U.S. presidential inauguration, changes were made to the content available on certain public government websites and platforms. This website is an automated tool designed to monitor the removal of webpages from major U.S. government websites. It uses publicly available data from the Internet Archive to compare sitemaps from before and …
The New York Times – no paywall: Stephen I. Vladeck,professor of law at Georgetown and writes the One First weekly Supreme Court newsletter. It is often difficult to persuade anyone other than lawyers to care about the more technical, procedural minutiae of Supreme Court decisions. But Thursday’s oral argument in three Supreme Court cases challenging …
404 Media no paywall – “Flock, the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company whose cameras are installed in more than 5,000 communities in the U.S., is building a product that will use people lookup tools, data brokers, and data breaches to “jump from LPR [license plate reader] to person,” allowing police to much more easily …
Data is Plural: “The Deportation Data Project, run by a team of academics and lawyers, “collects and posts public, anonymized U.S. government immigration enforcement datasets.” These include data from border apprehensions, deportations, Title 42 expulsions, ICE arrests and detentions, ICE-operated flights, and more. Some of the data files come directly from the government, while others …
CRS Legal Sidebar – The Alien Enemy Act: History and Potential Use to Remove Members of International Criminal Cartels, Updated April 2, 2025: On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order (E.O.) declaring a national emergency pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to address the threat to U.S. national security …
EFF: “Encrypted chat apps like Signal and WhatsApp are one of the best ways to keep your digital conversations as private as possible. But if you’re not careful with how those conversations are backed up, you can accidentally undermine your privacy. When a conversation is properly encrypted end-to-end, it means that the contents of those …
