Jurisdiction is all about enforcement, really. And I sincerely doubt that Google will topple to the severe taunting of the French. I mean...what are they going to do? Back out of the conflict at the last minute? Join the Nazis? What?
I'm glad we can agree that the newspapers did a bad job of telling us even half the story. And I think we all came to conclusions based on their faulty representation of 1/3 of it. There's a lesson to be learned here, but I'm sure it's one we've learned before and always forget: don't trust the news, even from a reputable source such as a Slashdot comment.;)
For what it's worth, Kerry has submitted some bills over the course of his Senate career. However, every single one of them was of one of two forms: (1) "Let's name this Vietnam remembrance week!" and (2) "Let's save the whales by passing a law we have no authority to pass nor possibility of enforcing!"
We had to choose between a two-faced pussy and a poor-spoken redneck. And America is big on our rednecks.
Agreed. Here at W&M we're big on Bill of Rights Law, and we have a separate journal for it which is very well-respected. It's a lot easier to be taken seriously as a good specialty law review than a good part of a run-of-the-mill law review. (Not implying anything negative about any law review journal at all, just stating the facts.)
I'll be interested to see what you write about all this, as it goes far deeper than Caballes and, even within Caballes, the analysis runs far deeper than TFA would have a person believe.
Interesting. Note that New Mexico ranks No. 1 by virtue of the warheads stored at the Kirtland Underground Munitions Storage Complex at Kirtland Air Force Base. These include about 1,400 retired ICBM and short-range attack missile warheads awaiting dismantlement.... meaning that half of NM's are in storage awaiting dismantlement, whereas most of ND's are in silos awaiting launch. But obviously they've shifted them around a bit - damn pork-barrel spending, if you ask me.;)
The point, for those in the audience such as yourself who have clearly missed it entirely, is that my opinion is exactly as valid as that expressed in this article and exactly as binding a law.
Russia may have more in numbers (something I don't know the veracity of but will accept for the sake of argument), but the US has more over nuclear power. The best part is several of the states, particularly North Dakota and probably Utah and Colorado as well, are home to enough missile silos that any one of them seceding from the Union would become the world's third-strongest nuclear nation. Of course, the US wouldn't exactly hand over the launch codes to a seceding state, so that's kind of irrelevant, but interesting nonetheless.;)
Most textualists at least consider something called "original understanding," and look at things like the Federalist Papers, dictionaries from 1790, and so forth in deciding what the Constitution means. What they refuse to do is look at what's convenient right now.
I have read Lawrence v. Texas, and although I don't remember the language, the Scalia/Thomas dissent says in essence that no fundamental right was infringed by the Texas statute. When it comes to the Constitution, they were correct, personal beliefs aside. Scalia has indeed written in other cases contrary to his personal belief, on the basis that his personal belief is his but not the Constitution's. That's why he's interesting - because he will go against anyone in the world, including himself.
YANAL, but YACS (you are correct, sir). In order for a question to get to the jury, there must be a disputed, material fact. If your complaint (as in the motion starting the lawsuit) states no claim, it can be dismissed right off, but it's safe to say that SCO has crafted a valid complaint. So now the danger to SCO is summary judgment, which is a process where one side (here, defendant IBM) makes a motion for summary judgment and the court decides whether to grant it.
Summary judgment works like this: on the basis of all the pleadings and evidence the court has so far, is there a dispute to a material fact? If not, then the undisputed material facts will form the basis for the court's ruling as a matter of law, sans jury. SCO has to create a dispute as to a material fact, and then it can get to the jury.
It sounds to me like the judge is getting impatient with SCO.
What can/cannot be done is spelled out in the US PATRIOT act.
But what the Patriot Act itself can and cannot do is spelled out in the US Constitution. Lower courts have already decided that parts of the Patriot Act are bogus - if the government bothers to appeal, it's likely to lose on 4th and 14th amendment grounds. Now, I haven't read the entire Patriot Act, but I know that not all of it is evil. We just need the Court to trim the evil parts for us. (Don't expect Congress to do so - even the Democrats and Bush-haters in Congress are big fans of the "more power for the federal government" Patriot Act.)
Re-read what I said. I defined "reasonable" as having some likelihood of being fruitful. If the chances are 0, it's unreasonable to perform the search.
And I'm not anthropomorphizing the computer. Someone has to write that code - and it essentially becomes that person's actions when the computer performs them. To analogize to the case the article is talking about, the dog's actions in searching the defendant/respondent's trunk were really the deliberate actions of the police force. At some point along the way, a human being takes responsibility for the methods and results of the tool, and that includes software.
The spell-checker analogy has solid grounding - if the person who wrote the program made a mistake, for example by excluding common words like "privity" from the dictionary or by failing to recognize acceptable suffixes to words, then the program will make mistakes. You indeed can't hold the software responsible, but you can hold its creators responsible for those mistakes.
You're right that I shouldn't attack random lawyers I don't know, but I did want to make sure that people reading the comments understand that this article does not reflect the court's opinion, and it was underhanded at best to not at least give the name of the case. When you write a program, you at least tell your end users the system requirements and a list of features, even if they won't understand the entire list.
You can graduate law school without passing Con Law. Generally speaking, your GPA is what matters, and it's perfectly possible to take enough techno-law classes to make up for a D or F in one class. Moreover, there are a million and one styles of teaching and evaluating Con Law students, and not all of them demand a solid foundation in making analogies to court opinions. But I promise you, this in no way alleviates the difficulty of attaining a law degree relative to an undergraduate degree - I graduated summa cum laude in 6 semesters without attending class more than 25% of the time, but in law school thus far I've not missed a class.
That's true [that not every lawyer is a Constitutional Law scholar] (and sometimes I wonder if our USSC justices would fit this description). But Con. Law is, from my understanding, a requirement in law school -- at least, the ones I'm aware of.
Constitutional Law is indeed a requirement for ABA accreditation of a law school. I assure you that all of our Supreme Court justices are brilliant Constitutional Law scholars - the problem is that a few of them focus more on functionalism than on the text, and that's where we run into problems like "I thought 'shall not be infringed' was pretty clear, WTF did you do to my rights?"
As I point out in other comments to this article, the court here seems to have held pretty narrowly, accepting a search "performed on the exterior."
If your comment/note gets published, let me know the cite so I can read it. I'd be interested to actually read some quality legal writing on the topic. Oh, and please don't rely on spell-check to help you decide between dessert and desert.
Actually, tech-friendly has nothing to do with it. I suspect Bush is likely to appoint people more like Scalia than Ginsburg, which is a good thing. Scalia is a textualist, which is what we want - those are the guys who read the document and tell you "You know what, it may really suck that people can burn flags, but it says here that we can't stop them." (not a direct quote, but it expresses his opinion in one such case)
Presume for a minute that the software and hardware were perfect in every way, meaning there is a 0% chance of security breach, false positive, false negative, delay of packet delivery, lost packet, etc. (Everyone here on Slashdot knows that anything below about 95% for these is impossible to achieve, but presume it's 0%.)
Your original question is too broad. Privacy is a very big concept. Let's limit ourselves to "unreasonable search and seizure." And ignore "seizure" for now, because seizure is going to give us more of a headache than it's worth, and, as I will show you, we can dispose of the matter under the "search" side. We all know that, when Word underlines a word as being misspelled, it has performed a search of the spelling dictionary and come up dry, and therefore not returned any results. But it has still performed a search. We know that.
Now, what determines if the search is reasonable? It's reasonable when the entity performing the search knows beforehand that there is a reasonable likelihood of finding what it's looking for. Even if you define "reasonable likelihood" as "anything greater than 0%," the packets of the innocent have a 0% chance of containing anything illegal and therefore scanning those packets constitutes an unreasonable search. And the packets whose chance of containing illegal data (however that is defined) is greater than 0% are impossible to identify, because you don't know which packets they are without searching them first and knowing who is innocent before you begin.
Therefore, a machine indeed can violate your right to be protected from unreasonable search and seizure.
Of course the democrat in me says this is all Bush's fault. OOO he makes me so mad!
Bush is responsible for the article's poorly-crafted analogy with no legally binding effect on anyone whatsoever? Methinks Bush's only connection to the article is the incorrect choice of the word "dessert" instead of "desert" in its (idiotic and sentimental) closing.
Now, the libertarian (note the lowercase ell) in me will tell you this: every bad thing about Bush, Kerry agreed with anyhow.
Don't defend random lawyers whom you don't know. As I have pointed out in other comments on this story, you can tell he's a wannabe because he's writing articles like this without even mentioning the actual name of the case, much less carefully citing authority for what he is trying to say, as he'd be required to if he were a good enough writer to have an article published in a scholarly law review journal.
Not all lawyers understand Constitutional Law. Don't assume otherwise. Remember, this is a profession where "99% [of them] create a bad reputation for the other 1%."
You know that the article writer is a hack because he's trying to write legal analysis and doing it outside of law review journals. And you know he's really bad because not only does not not cite any authority whatsoever in his article, but he doesn't even give the actual name of the case. He just says that a case about Caballes was decided by the Supreme Court last month. Lawyers are precise. Good lawyers are precise and correct. This guy is neither.
In case anyone is wondering, the actual case is Illinois v. Caballes, 73 U.S.L.W. 4111. It's not in the US Reports yet, apparently. The Lexis cite is 2005 U.S. LEXIS 769.
Lexis' short synopsis of the case and the Supreme Court's holding is: The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari on the question of whether the Fourth Amendment required reasonable, articulable suspicion to justify using a drug-detection dog to sniff a vehicle during a legitimate traffic stop. The state trial court concluded that the duration of the stop was entirely justified by the traffic offense and the ordinary inquiries incident to such a stop. The state supreme court concluded that because the canine sniff was performed without any specific and articulable facts to suggest drug activity, the use of the dog unjustifiably enlarged the scope of a routine traffic stop into a drug investigation. The U.S. Supreme Court held that the use of a well-trained narcotics-detection dog--one that did not expose noncontraband items that otherwise would have remained hidden from public view--during a lawful traffic stop, generally did not implicate legitimate privacy interests. The dog sniff was performed on the exterior of respondent's car while he was lawfully seized for a traffic violation. Any intrusion on respondent's privacy expectations did not rise to the level of a constitutionally cognizable infringement.
My personal and immediate thought on this is that the closest analogy to the Internet acceptable to the Court would be if you can tell from an IP packet header ("performed on the exterior") that its contents are suspect, then you can open it up for inspection. However, my opinion is exactly as binding on anyone's behavior as is the article - specifically, it isn't at all.
Isn't it sad that, on the one occasion when people actually take the time to RTFA before posting comments about it, TFA is so wrong that their comments end up being even more uninformed and inflammatory than when they don't RTFA in the first place?
As I've written in other comments on this article, the (weak and probably faulty) analogy is being made by the article, not by the Supreme Court. Thank you for recognizing that and wording your comment accordingly. (I'm not going to go into the substance of your comment, but only wanted to thank you for not pointing the finger at the Court just yet.:)
The article is not even persuasive authority to a court. It's an amateur interpretation of a court decision that attempts to make an analogy. As you point out, the analogy is very weak. Since it is not even in a law review journal, nobody in the legal field is going to pay an iota of attention to it, and no court will care about it.
Now, if the courts did extend the analogy as the article makes it sound has already been done, it would be a real blow to the Constitution, notwithstanding the Anonymous Coward sibling to this comment. What that sibling fails to recognize is that deciding that Internet traffic is not among the "persons, houses, papers, and effects" made safe from "unreasonable searches and seizures" by the Fourth Amendment is itself a blow to the Constitution, because it's the equivalent of saying that the Constitution is of little to no effect in the 21st century.
Personally, I don't see the Supreme Court making the leap that the article thinks it already has. The Rehnquist Court has gone back to the text of the Constitution more than any Court since 1937, when FDR scared the Court into acceding to his wishes and giving Congress and the Presidency more power than the Constitution allows (and then giving the Presidency much of Congress's power for good measure). They have been working their way backwards and, as Justice Scalia put it, have to tear the house that was built apart, piece by piece.
Kerry would have had absolutely zero effect on this decision whatsoever, but it doesn't surprise me in the least that someone who wishes to make that connection would himself not have clue one about the Constitution.
Amendment 3: No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
It's not necessarily that they don't understand technology, but rather that they (meaning the Supreme Court) do everything they can to forge opinions that will be reasonably applicable to a variety of situations, so that people don't end up appealing fifty slightly different but analogous cases to the Court.
The dog search metaphor may or may not be as obvious to a court as it is to the article's author. Time will tell as this decision is applied in the lower federal courts, until someone appeals one of those decisions up again and gets it either explicitly applied, explicitly limited, or explicitly overruled.
I nominate Jesus. Not only would this show the world that FreeBSD has turned around from its evil, dying state, but also it will represent that, having died between 1998 and today, it is born again.
Slashdot Mirror
Jurisdiction is all about enforcement, really. And I sincerely doubt that Google will topple to the severe taunting of the French. I mean...what are they going to do? Back out of the conflict at the last minute? Join the Nazis? What?
I'm glad we can agree that the newspapers did a bad job of telling us even half the story. And I think we all came to conclusions based on their faulty representation of 1/3 of it. There's a lesson to be learned here, but I'm sure it's one we've learned before and always forget: don't trust the news, even from a reputable source such as a Slashdot comment. ;)
For what it's worth, Kerry has submitted some bills over the course of his Senate career. However, every single one of them was of one of two forms: (1) "Let's name this Vietnam remembrance week!" and (2) "Let's save the whales by passing a law we have no authority to pass nor possibility of enforcing!"
We had to choose between a two-faced pussy and a poor-spoken redneck. And America is big on our rednecks.
Agreed. Here at W&M we're big on Bill of Rights Law, and we have a separate journal for it which is very well-respected. It's a lot easier to be taken seriously as a good specialty law review than a good part of a run-of-the-mill law review. (Not implying anything negative about any law review journal at all, just stating the facts.)
I'll be interested to see what you write about all this, as it goes far deeper than Caballes and, even within Caballes, the analysis runs far deeper than TFA would have a person believe.
Interesting. Note that New Mexico ranks No. 1 by virtue of the warheads stored at the Kirtland Underground Munitions Storage Complex at Kirtland Air Force Base. These include about 1,400 retired ICBM and short-range attack missile warheads awaiting dismantlement. ... meaning that half of NM's are in storage awaiting dismantlement, whereas most of ND's are in silos awaiting launch. But obviously they've shifted them around a bit - damn pork-barrel spending, if you ask me. ;)
Which Review?
The point, for those in the audience such as yourself who have clearly missed it entirely, is that my opinion is exactly as valid as that expressed in this article and exactly as binding a law.
Russia may have more in numbers (something I don't know the veracity of but will accept for the sake of argument), but the US has more over nuclear power. The best part is several of the states, particularly North Dakota and probably Utah and Colorado as well, are home to enough missile silos that any one of them seceding from the Union would become the world's third-strongest nuclear nation. Of course, the US wouldn't exactly hand over the launch codes to a seceding state, so that's kind of irrelevant, but interesting nonetheless. ;)
Most textualists at least consider something called "original understanding," and look at things like the Federalist Papers, dictionaries from 1790, and so forth in deciding what the Constitution means. What they refuse to do is look at what's convenient right now.
I have read Lawrence v. Texas, and although I don't remember the language, the Scalia/Thomas dissent says in essence that no fundamental right was infringed by the Texas statute. When it comes to the Constitution, they were correct, personal beliefs aside. Scalia has indeed written in other cases contrary to his personal belief, on the basis that his personal belief is his but not the Constitution's. That's why he's interesting - because he will go against anyone in the world, including himself.
YANAL, but YACS (you are correct, sir). In order for a question to get to the jury, there must be a disputed, material fact. If your complaint (as in the motion starting the lawsuit) states no claim, it can be dismissed right off, but it's safe to say that SCO has crafted a valid complaint. So now the danger to SCO is summary judgment, which is a process where one side (here, defendant IBM) makes a motion for summary judgment and the court decides whether to grant it.
Summary judgment works like this: on the basis of all the pleadings and evidence the court has so far, is there a dispute to a material fact? If not, then the undisputed material facts will form the basis for the court's ruling as a matter of law, sans jury. SCO has to create a dispute as to a material fact, and then it can get to the jury.
It sounds to me like the judge is getting impatient with SCO.
What can/cannot be done is spelled out in the US PATRIOT act.
But what the Patriot Act itself can and cannot do is spelled out in the US Constitution. Lower courts have already decided that parts of the Patriot Act are bogus - if the government bothers to appeal, it's likely to lose on 4th and 14th amendment grounds. Now, I haven't read the entire Patriot Act, but I know that not all of it is evil. We just need the Court to trim the evil parts for us. (Don't expect Congress to do so - even the Democrats and Bush-haters in Congress are big fans of the "more power for the federal government" Patriot Act.)
Re-read what I said. I defined "reasonable" as having some likelihood of being fruitful. If the chances are 0, it's unreasonable to perform the search.
And I'm not anthropomorphizing the computer. Someone has to write that code - and it essentially becomes that person's actions when the computer performs them. To analogize to the case the article is talking about, the dog's actions in searching the defendant/respondent's trunk were really the deliberate actions of the police force. At some point along the way, a human being takes responsibility for the methods and results of the tool, and that includes software.
The spell-checker analogy has solid grounding - if the person who wrote the program made a mistake, for example by excluding common words like "privity" from the dictionary or by failing to recognize acceptable suffixes to words, then the program will make mistakes. You indeed can't hold the software responsible, but you can hold its creators responsible for those mistakes.
You're right that I shouldn't attack random lawyers I don't know, but I did want to make sure that people reading the comments understand that this article does not reflect the court's opinion, and it was underhanded at best to not at least give the name of the case. When you write a program, you at least tell your end users the system requirements and a list of features, even if they won't understand the entire list.
You can graduate law school without passing Con Law. Generally speaking, your GPA is what matters, and it's perfectly possible to take enough techno-law classes to make up for a D or F in one class. Moreover, there are a million and one styles of teaching and evaluating Con Law students, and not all of them demand a solid foundation in making analogies to court opinions. But I promise you, this in no way alleviates the difficulty of attaining a law degree relative to an undergraduate degree - I graduated summa cum laude in 6 semesters without attending class more than 25% of the time, but in law school thus far I've not missed a class.
That's true [that not every lawyer is a Constitutional Law scholar] (and sometimes I wonder if our USSC justices would fit this description). But Con. Law is, from my understanding, a requirement in law school -- at least, the ones I'm aware of.
Constitutional Law is indeed a requirement for ABA accreditation of a law school. I assure you that all of our Supreme Court justices are brilliant Constitutional Law scholars - the problem is that a few of them focus more on functionalism than on the text, and that's where we run into problems like "I thought 'shall not be infringed' was pretty clear, WTF did you do to my rights?"
As I point out in other comments to this article, the court here seems to have held pretty narrowly, accepting a search "performed on the exterior."
If your comment/note gets published, let me know the cite so I can read it. I'd be interested to actually read some quality legal writing on the topic. Oh, and please don't rely on spell-check to help you decide between dessert and desert.
Actually, tech-friendly has nothing to do with it. I suspect Bush is likely to appoint people more like Scalia than Ginsburg, which is a good thing. Scalia is a textualist, which is what we want - those are the guys who read the document and tell you "You know what, it may really suck that people can burn flags, but it says here that we can't stop them." (not a direct quote, but it expresses his opinion in one such case)
Presume for a minute that the software and hardware were perfect in every way, meaning there is a 0% chance of security breach, false positive, false negative, delay of packet delivery, lost packet, etc. (Everyone here on Slashdot knows that anything below about 95% for these is impossible to achieve, but presume it's 0%.)
Your original question is too broad. Privacy is a very big concept. Let's limit ourselves to "unreasonable search and seizure." And ignore "seizure" for now, because seizure is going to give us more of a headache than it's worth, and, as I will show you, we can dispose of the matter under the "search" side. We all know that, when Word underlines a word as being misspelled, it has performed a search of the spelling dictionary and come up dry, and therefore not returned any results. But it has still performed a search. We know that.
Now, what determines if the search is reasonable? It's reasonable when the entity performing the search knows beforehand that there is a reasonable likelihood of finding what it's looking for. Even if you define "reasonable likelihood" as "anything greater than 0%," the packets of the innocent have a 0% chance of containing anything illegal and therefore scanning those packets constitutes an unreasonable search. And the packets whose chance of containing illegal data (however that is defined) is greater than 0% are impossible to identify, because you don't know which packets they are without searching them first and knowing who is innocent before you begin.
Therefore, a machine indeed can violate your right to be protected from unreasonable search and seizure.
Of course the democrat in me says this is all Bush's fault. OOO he makes me so mad!
Bush is responsible for the article's poorly-crafted analogy with no legally binding effect on anyone whatsoever? Methinks Bush's only connection to the article is the incorrect choice of the word "dessert" instead of "desert" in its (idiotic and sentimental) closing.
Now, the libertarian (note the lowercase ell) in me will tell you this: every bad thing about Bush, Kerry agreed with anyhow.
Don't defend random lawyers whom you don't know. As I have pointed out in other comments on this story, you can tell he's a wannabe because he's writing articles like this without even mentioning the actual name of the case, much less carefully citing authority for what he is trying to say, as he'd be required to if he were a good enough writer to have an article published in a scholarly law review journal.
Not all lawyers understand Constitutional Law. Don't assume otherwise. Remember, this is a profession where "99% [of them] create a bad reputation for the other 1%."
You know that the article writer is a hack because he's trying to write legal analysis and doing it outside of law review journals. And you know he's really bad because not only does not not cite any authority whatsoever in his article, but he doesn't even give the actual name of the case. He just says that a case about Caballes was decided by the Supreme Court last month. Lawyers are precise. Good lawyers are precise and correct. This guy is neither.
In case anyone is wondering, the actual case is Illinois v. Caballes, 73 U.S.L.W. 4111. It's not in the US Reports yet, apparently. The Lexis cite is 2005 U.S. LEXIS 769.
Lexis' short synopsis of the case and the Supreme Court's holding is: The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari on the question of whether the Fourth Amendment required reasonable, articulable suspicion to justify using a drug-detection dog to sniff a vehicle during a legitimate traffic stop. The state trial court concluded that the duration of the stop was entirely justified by the traffic offense and the ordinary inquiries incident to such a stop. The state supreme court concluded that because the canine sniff was performed without any specific and articulable facts to suggest drug activity, the use of the dog unjustifiably enlarged the scope of a routine traffic stop into a drug investigation. The U.S. Supreme Court held that the use of a well-trained narcotics-detection dog--one that did not expose noncontraband items that otherwise would have remained hidden from public view--during a lawful traffic stop, generally did not implicate legitimate privacy interests. The dog sniff was performed on the exterior of respondent's car while he was lawfully seized for a traffic violation. Any intrusion on respondent's privacy expectations did not rise to the level of a constitutionally cognizable infringement.
My personal and immediate thought on this is that the closest analogy to the Internet acceptable to the Court would be if you can tell from an IP packet header ("performed on the exterior") that its contents are suspect, then you can open it up for inspection. However, my opinion is exactly as binding on anyone's behavior as is the article - specifically, it isn't at all.
Isn't it sad that, on the one occasion when people actually take the time to RTFA before posting comments about it, TFA is so wrong that their comments end up being even more uninformed and inflammatory than when they don't RTFA in the first place?
As I've written in other comments on this article, the (weak and probably faulty) analogy is being made by the article, not by the Supreme Court. Thank you for recognizing that and wording your comment accordingly. (I'm not going to go into the substance of your comment, but only wanted to thank you for not pointing the finger at the Court just yet. :)
The article is not even persuasive authority to a court. It's an amateur interpretation of a court decision that attempts to make an analogy. As you point out, the analogy is very weak. Since it is not even in a law review journal, nobody in the legal field is going to pay an iota of attention to it, and no court will care about it.
Now, if the courts did extend the analogy as the article makes it sound has already been done, it would be a real blow to the Constitution, notwithstanding the Anonymous Coward sibling to this comment. What that sibling fails to recognize is that deciding that Internet traffic is not among the "persons, houses, papers, and effects" made safe from "unreasonable searches and seizures" by the Fourth Amendment is itself a blow to the Constitution, because it's the equivalent of saying that the Constitution is of little to no effect in the 21st century.
Personally, I don't see the Supreme Court making the leap that the article thinks it already has. The Rehnquist Court has gone back to the text of the Constitution more than any Court since 1937, when FDR scared the Court into acceding to his wishes and giving Congress and the Presidency more power than the Constitution allows (and then giving the Presidency much of Congress's power for good measure). They have been working their way backwards and, as Justice Scalia put it, have to tear the house that was built apart, piece by piece.
Kerry would have had absolutely zero effect on this decision whatsoever, but it doesn't surprise me in the least that someone who wishes to make that connection would himself not have clue one about the Constitution.
Amendment 3: No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
It's not necessarily that they don't understand technology, but rather that they (meaning the Supreme Court) do everything they can to forge opinions that will be reasonably applicable to a variety of situations, so that people don't end up appealing fifty slightly different but analogous cases to the Court.
The dog search metaphor may or may not be as obvious to a court as it is to the article's author. Time will tell as this decision is applied in the lower federal courts, until someone appeals one of those decisions up again and gets it either explicitly applied, explicitly limited, or explicitly overruled.
I nominate Jesus. Not only would this show the world that FreeBSD has turned around from its evil, dying state, but also it will represent that, having died between 1998 and today, it is born again.