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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.
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.
That's right, and further assume that the FBI, CIA, NSA and likely your operating system vendor and the guy in Tashkent who hacked your router are seeing it right now!
om namo bhagavate vasudevaya
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.
If by "better qualified" you mean being a silver tongued bastard who has an innate ability to always say what's politically expedient.
Please note that this is not the same as being either honest or competent.
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'm less worried about Congress and more worried about the voters. Congressmen can be reasoned with, because for the most part they have embarrassing events in their lives too and can understand slips of the tongue. But not the voters. Imagine if you will:
VOTER #1: "OMG! Did you see what Senator Joe Smith posted when he was in college! Quote: Hey roomie: I am going to score some pussy tonight. Can I have the dorm from 8 to 12? thx."
VOTER #2: "Woah. He treats women like sex objects!"
VOTER #3: "Horrible. Let's protest against this womanizer."
VOTER #4: "Yeah! Girl power! Death to chavenists!"
And it spreads from there. It doesn't matter if Senator Smith is now in his 60s and does an annual walk with his wife & daughters to raise money for a breast cancer cure..... the idiot voters will skewer him for a post he made ~40 years earlier.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
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.
Their tongues become pretty tarnished when they don't think when the mic is open. Gotta watch 'em in their natural habitat. The sword of Damocles is my weapon of choice to keep authority in check. And we must be big brother, always watching them.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
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.
Follow that strategy, and you'll get Jon Stewart playing videotapes of you saying one thing and then the other. I think the biggest problem of instant retrieval of everything is just the opposite - never being allowed to change without being called a flip-flopper. Of course, there will never be consensus on when principle and determination go too far and become self-denial and stubbornness.
That's absolutely correct.
And what's even more scary is, even if he never made such a comment, everyone talking about it will put thousands of links on our search engines. It'll come back to haunt him decade after decade, because nobody verifies things are facts before passing them on.
It's especially bad as it turns out Sen. Smith was actually a judge in a cat show, and was, in preparation for a contest, scoring some of his friends' cats at his apartment to familiarise himself with the scoring system.
Naturally, of course, all the context is thrown out of the window when people want to protest something.
I'm less worried about Congress and more worried about the voters...the idiot voters will skewer him for a post he made ~40 years earlier.
Yeah, those same idiot voters who voted down Barack Obama 'cause he didn't wear his flag pin at all times and said something about "clinging to guns or religion" that was totally reasonable but a bad sound bite. Oh wait...he won? Maybe voters are smarter than that...
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
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
" '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.
I think the biggest problem of instant retrieval of everything is just the opposite - never being allowed to change without being called a flip-flopper.
Have you ever noticed how the folks accused of flip-flopping never quite seem to remember the past? It's not like they come out and say "yes, I have changed my position on this issue and here is why". They conveniently forget their past position or even claim outright they never held that position and that's when Stewart nails them.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Barak Obama won because Bush was president. The end. The Democrats could have run Jimmy Carter and still won in 2008.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Yeah, we have never elected Presidents and Congressmen whom we know to be cocaine users, adulterers, drunks, lechers, more-or-less murderers (Chappaquiddick), racists, sexists, anti-Semites, or just plain boors.
Oh wait.
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.