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Judicial Nominations In the Internet Age
Hugh Pickens writes "Chris Good writes in the Atlantic that nominees to the Supreme Court and other high-profile positions are required to provide the Judiciary Committee with everything they've ever written or said publicly, to the best of their abilities within reason. Thanks to the Internet, the last major judicial nominee reported out by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ninth Circuit nominee Goodwin Liu, included links to YouTube videos of lectures and talks he gave, 573 pages of public writings, news articles about him, syllabi from courses he taught, and statements about legal issues. Even so, Liu was admonished for failing to fully disclose his writings and public speeches to senators, including appearances at such occasions as brown bag lunches and alumni gatherings. 'In preparing my original submission, I made a good-faith effort to track down all of my publications and speeches over the years,' wrote Liu. 'I checked my personal calendar, I performed a variety of electronic searches, and I searched my memory to produce the original list. But I have since realized that those efforts were not sufficient.' Not so long ago, entire news articles in local papers could go wholly unnoticed, by both the nominee and committee members and staff, but not so in the era of the Internet. 'Imagine what will happen when, decades from now, a president nominates someone to the Supreme Court who had access to Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook at the age of 15.'"
I've been posting regularly on boards since I was 13. /dev/null, sometimes along with the message board they were on.
Most of those posts are long gone to
I think this is another case of technology not keeping up with technology.
...I'm just glad that I'll never be nominated for an appointment to any US government position.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Some things never change. Some things you never do, regardless of the methods available.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I mean you can search the usenet archives on Google Groups. I know I have and have found stuff I wrote 20 years ago. (Man, hard to believe I've been on the net for 20 years.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
It seems to me that what's going to have to happen is that people are going to have to get over the idea that they can actually review every statement a nominee has ever made, get over the idea that people should be automata who never say anything possibly embarrassing (and thus that it even makes sense to want to review everything they've ever written), and get over the idea that there's some absolute bright line between the public and private life.
While we're doing that for the Supreme Court, maybe we should also do it for other random jobs. It's idiotic to check every Facebook a job candidate has ever made to see if they've failed to toe the line at all times. Doing that favors worthless nonentities.
These pretenses are technologically obsolete, and people need to deal with that.
Make it illegal for anyone to delete anything. Or even easier - make speech illegal. Burn books, shut down schools, and cut out tongues. If the government can't know everything, then the masses must know nothing.
Whenever you post anything publicly online, assume Congress will see it 20 years from now.
That's my attitude anyway. (Except when I post as an Anonymous Coward.)
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Whatever it takes to bring transparency to authority. It helps to assure that those who want it are better qualified. It can shame the authorities to be more just in judging the faults of others.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Maybe Slashdot covered this whole story and I missed it. Odd it wouldn't have it's own submission.
http://gawker.com/5529322/racist-harvard-law-email-the-cat-fight-that-turned-into-a-national-scandal-updated
Anything you say can and will be used against you. Period.
Since I am going to go into the law profession, I better keep all my wall posts on record. Heaven's forbid if I keep a wall post from when I was 17 about how I am happy obama got elected or a forum debate when I was 15 about Bush.
a president nominates someone to the Supreme Court who had access to Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook at the age of 15.
This is why it is important to realize that everyone has multiple lives: private, public, serious, fun, sexual, intimate, bigoted, religious, etc...
It is not enough to inquire about a person's character. People have many characters. The characters or personae overlap somewhat, but not greatly.
Consider the English judicial court. The lawyers and judges put on ceremonial robes and wigs to specifically separate their lives, personalities, and past histories outside of the courtroom from the current business inside the courtroom.
Consider the thousands of women who have posed for men's magazines. Millions of men use their images for sexual projection ('wanking' for all you insensitive UK sods). Thousands of men have found themselves in the situation where they are working with women that they masturbated to, and felt an intimate connection for a ten second window. Only a serious jerk would dig up the old magazines or internet erotic photos and flash them to the other co-workers. Porn is a separate realm: what is in the stroke rag or porn film stays there. The woman that you work with is not the same woman whose picture is in the magazine, even if it is the same person. One person; multiple personae. Simple Puritan brains can't handle this concept. But,hell, you mastered C language and Linux APIs, you can master real-world sophistication also.
We see this also in the peculiar American obsession for destroying people's careers over the presence of molecules of marijuana in their urine. What a weird obsession! 'You are the purity of your piss!'. When people are stoned they are not the same personae as when they are sober. Both conditions are valid. But have their place. The only valid reason to destroy a person's career over their intoxicational preference is if (and only if) they are uncontrollably intoxicated in a situation where they are supposed to be sober. Outside of that, different drugs make different personae. Only fascists refuse to accept this.
These politicians digging into the judge candidate's background and demanding every brain fart of the candidate's past are all assholes. They are transparent chickenshit party hacks of a corrupt and bankrupt political system. They have some minor importance now, but they won't in future. All they will have then is the eternal hatred and contempt of the people trying to live with the consequences of their stupidity.
What if we knew what our priveleged ruling class actually believes?
Maybe the person who can't justify what their views on niggers and kykes that they posted on MySpace (when they were 18 or 48, both are adults) isn't someone we want on the bench?
We may think we have all these multiple lives, but in truth there isn't anything separating them except for our own ability to compartmentalize them. We have but one life.
I fail to see what you are trying to say. What do you mean by 'some things'?
I was actually having the same conversation with one of my coworkers last night. The subject: Facebook. There used to be a day and age in America where you lived a professional life, and a private life, and there was little overlap.
Really, as long as the work is being done, it does not matter at all what I do in my left-over UNSOLD time. However, thanks to facebook, your friends are not the only ones who can pry into your private life. These days, employers look into all of the details of your personal life to judge you, instead of judging you based on your ability to actually work.
In the end, it doesn't matter. I don't have a facebook, and no one is going to stop me from smoking joints in my spare (unsold) time.
a president nominates someone to the Supreme Court who had access to Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook at the age of 15
Imagine the decisions
Judge: Lk srsly Ur nt mi frnd. Eym in ur hws crappin in ur shews.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not in most of the world they don't.
And just how does your employer get at your facebook posts anyway? Did you 'friend' your boss?
You're not really following good privacy practices right now.
It looks like you have a Google Code profile under a different username. That username is also your AIM name, which is listed under your Slashdot profile. It doesn't show up in a Google search as being associated with your Slashdot username...yet. I assume that if you ever finish somenewlang, and want to show it to a prospective employer, that you would need to delete your current account---and hope they don't check the Internet archives!---and create a new account under a different name, so that your Google Code account would not be associated with your Slashdot username.
In any case, once they have "TehZorroness" as a potential alias, they can find you with user accounts on torrent sites and over here admitting you smoke pot. Nothing I care about, but nothing you want an employer to see, either. And I haven't even gotten past the first page of results. So don't bang on us for using Facebook.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Fortunately, I don't have a name and a picture yet. I have a Facebook. Can you find mine?
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
In the United States, you have to be 18 years old to decide whether or not to possibly damage your future life by smoking. Additionally, except for some serious cases, we have a juvenile court record which is sealed for life, because at one time people recognized a young person might make mistakes which should not affect them when they are adults.
But, as Chris Good points out, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, Web sites, etc. might end up following people for the rest of their lives.
Is it reasonable for a judge being confirmed in 2050 to have this denied via public opinion because he/she had a Facebook video of themselves with a group of friends doing something stupid when they were 15? Or 12?
What about pictures taken via a Web-cam attached to a laptop which was lent to them by their public school?
What about archived video from one of the thousands of cameras placed in public places in most larger US cities?
-Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
Oh, shit. You can.
Fucking Live Journal. I thought I deleted that when I was 17.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
So who can take the time to examine the 60,000 pages of materials that a person might have created from the age of 15 onwards?
Then right after reading each creation one would need to study the context in which it was made.
Panels will never have enough hours to do even a crude examination of such compilations. Worse yet how could the mind contain such an inquiry and then compare it to others who have applied for the same positions.
I think he's trying to say that you should never put in writing anything you wouldn't want on the front page of the New York Times.
I was busy poking into three dimensional, animated carbon units..
you'd figure some of these public sector douchebags need to finish an entire jug of spoiled milk before pronouncing it unfit for consumption.
When the Facebook era of justices come along, we'll have to face reality and accept that our authority figures are not and cannot be 100% chaste pillars of virtue. That, or we'll just leave the jobs open indefinitely. Considering where the far-right's going with their ideology, I don't feel comfortable ruling out permanent vacancies as the answer.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Nominees should ignore unreasonable requirements.
Every single one of my friends and I have resigned ourselves to the fact that we can NEVER run for public office thanks to our many AIM, vent, and forum conversations.
I've been very interested in politics since I was 15 or 16 or so (23 now). Around the same point, I realised that, while not likely, it was still entirely possible that I might end up in a position where something I wrote on the internet will bite me in the arse 10+ years later. Since that realisation, I've been generally trying to keep myself from writing anything too embarrassing, or political on the internet. Still, I find it amusing, in the theoretically incredibly unlikely event I end up as Prime Minister or something important, people combing over posts I made on a Pokemon message board when I was 12. Or protesting that I supported something silly when I was 14. (OMG, look at this, the PM posted some weird pro-British Empire stuff when he was 14, he must be a closet racist!)
So yeah, for the past 6 or 7 years, most of the stuff I've posted has been gaming related, or generally politically neutral. There are a few wild things from when I was 12-15, and I'm sure I've slipped up and posted something stupid since then.
Oh, shit. You can.
Fucking Live Journal. I thought I deleted that when I was 17.
I think you've just made the point of this thread.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
> We all have said things we regret later. So we're ALL disqualified for the job, if you hold to that standard.
No we're not. You see, when the only way to meet the standard is to cheat, only cheaters will meet the standard.
And there usually is a good enough cheater to "meet" the standard. We just pay for it later.
If we're lucky, they cheat in ways that benefit us. But don't count on that.
" 'Imagine what will happen when, decades from now, a president nominates someone to the Supreme Court who had access to Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook at the age of 15."
This could work in alot of people's favor...
When applying as the Head of the Agriculture Department...
"As you can plainly see, I had several successful Farmville farms at age 15."
THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!! eventually.
I have tried to keep track of what I have written since grade (not grad) school. That said, I am CERTAIN that I could not come up with everything even if I could spend $100,000 and my life depended upon it. It would be like trying to figure out every time I made a pass at a woman. Most of the time, she might not have even noticed, and other times I might not have thought I made one.
Smoking pot and being active on piratebay is the least of it Albert, it's all the stuff directly listed on your domain ;-o
I wonder if a potential employer would be interested in apparent connections to civil disobedience groups (http://towel.nukelol.com/cd/), opinions on the Westwood police force (http://towel.nukelol.com/pigs/) or maybe just your thoughts towards Amanda? (http://towel.nukelol.com/stuff/amanda_pics/amanda)
At least the Internet Archive haven't stored all this yet, Mr Brown. Although there are some dubious writings from 2007 there.
As a 17 years old that has been posting here and in other forums and blogs for years now and who don't smoke much pot or use torrents much anymore, I always have posted here non-anonymously using my real name partly because many of the problems with HR looking at personal lives deserves to be fixed properly. In fact, I have been writing on Reddit that "HR needs to get in the habit of directly responding to postings employees make in public instead of firing (whether positive or negative)" exactly to fix one of the problems. And the merge of personal and professional life isn't always a bad thing.
It is growing unreasonable for an individual to recall what the the internet can remember.
"that nominees to the Supreme Court and other high profile positions are [1]required to provide the Judiciary Committee with everything they've ever written or said publicly, to the best of their abilities within reason."
Well "within reason" is going to be selective. Not filtered in a bad way but clearly a subset.
No individual that has been active in or around the modern internet will be able to provide an exhaustive history of all his or her interactions.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Actually, I am 16 years old now, I made a mistake in the original posting.