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Backpage The court found insufficient evidence to sustain 53 of 84 remaining counts against Lacey. A federal judge has acquitted Backpage co-founder Michael Lacey of dozens of counts, including a majority of those on which federal prosecutors planned to retry Lacey later this year. U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa...

Last month, I noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had repeatedly exaggerated the scientific evidence supporting face mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. Facebook attached a warning to that column, which it said was "missing context" and "could mislead people." According to an alliance o...

As we keep more and more personal data on our phones, iPhone and Android devices now have some of the most advanced encryption technology in existence to keep that information safe from prying eyes. The easiest way around that, of course, is for someone to gain access to your phone. This week, a federal court decide...

Education When schools get rid of advanced offerings, they hurt smart, underprivileged students. Seattle is getting rid of its specialized public schools in an effort to increase racial equity. Ironically, this decision may end up hurting the very students the policy change is intended to help. In 2021, Seattle Publ...

Being proved right isn't always fun. Just weeks after my warning in the March issue that our modern high-tech cars are tracking us and sharing data with manufacturers, cops, and parties unknown, came a report of soaring auto insurance premiums because of snitching vehicles. The consequences get worse from there. For...

In 2022, Seattle's City Council passed an ordinance mandating a minimum earnings floor for app-based food delivery drivers in the city. The law finally went into effect in January 2024, but so far the main result has been customers deleting their delivery apps en masse, food orders plummeting, and driver pay crateri...

Separation of powers is a core concept of America's Constitution. In the Founders' scheme, Congress, the courts, and the executive are independent branches of government, with their own roles and duties, intended to check one another. But since 1984, the Supreme Court has hamstrung its own ability to act independent...

When fast food restaurants across California have to start paying workers $20 per hour on April 1, one major chain will be exempted from the mandate—and it just so happens to have a connection to a longtime friend and donor to Gov. Gavin Newsom. Panera Bread is poised to get a boost from a bizarre clause in the fast...

Eighty-six counts of criminal activity—that's what veteran journalist and publisher Michael Lacey faced in the federal case against him, a saga kicked off by federal agents raiding his house and shutting down a website he co-founded in 2004, Backpage. A saga that has stretched on for more than five years, through mu...

Is Congress really trying to outlaw all sex work? That's what some people fear the Preventing Rampant Online Technological Exploitation and Criminal Trafficking (PROTECT) Act would mean. The bill defines "coerced consent" to include consent obtained by leveraging "economic circumstances"—which sure sounds like a goo...

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), and the Legal Action Center (LAC) are suing Ronald McDonald House Charities and its Hudson Valley chapter, for not providing discounted housing to people with felony assault convictions, a policy they say is a violation of the Fai...

Fourth Amendment Cases like this are exactly why the Fourth Amendment was adopted in the first place, wrote federal Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. The FBI violated the Fourth Amendment when its agents rifled through the contents of more than 700 safe-deposit boxes in the aftermath of a March 2021 raid, a panel of federal ...

Kate Judson is a lawyer who often deals with crimes that did not occur. As the executive director of the Wisconsin-based Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences (CIFS), her job is to examine ostensible scientific evidence to see whether it backs up prosecutors' claims. "Some people who died were classified as vict...

International students have few workable options to stay in the United States after graduating, even though most say they would like to do so. Instead, many leave and put their training to use elsewhere, depriving the U.S. economy of a skilled—and often entrepreneurial—work force. New York state could start chipping...

Mixing new technology and new laws is always a fraught business, especially if the tech in question relates to communication. Lawmakers routinely propose bills that would sweep up all sorts of First Amendment-protected speech. We've seen a lot of this with social media, and we're starting to see it with artificial i...

My favorite social-media post in recent weeks (from a Seattle-based engineer named Grant Slatton) seems esoteric, but is quite insightful: "We don't talk enough about how insane aluminum foil is. Imagine telling some ancient person we have so much abundance in our time that we use very thin metal as a disposable pap...

Space A City on Mars is a counterbalance to the growing optimism over space exploration. The subtitle of the cartoonist-biologist husband-and-wife pair Zach and Kelly Weinersmith's book A City on Mars asks, Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? The answers the couple s...