All posts by Rand Simberg

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Last Week’s Ruling

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In his inimitable way, Mark Steyn explains:

The way the DC “legislature” wrote the Anti-SLAPP law it’s unclear whether a denial of an anti-SLAPP motion is appealable. So my co-defendants would like the Court of Appeals to rule on the question. They could have ruled on it way back last autumn when the denial of the motion to dismiss the original complaint was appealed, but by then Michael E Mann, whose original complaint was as poorly constructed as his hockey stick, had filed his amended complaint, so the Court of Appeals ruled that it was moot. If you’re wondering what “it” is in that last clause, “it” is any combination of: a) the original complaint; b) the original motion to dismiss the original complaint; c) the original denial of the original motion to dismiss the original complaint; d) the original appeal of the original denial of the original motion to dismiss the original complaint; e) the original appeal of whether the original appeal of the original denial of the original motion to dismiss the original complaint is appealable; or f) a gluten-free chia-seed bagel three days past its sell-by date left under the judges’ desk.

Or something.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Technology Law

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…will soon be reshaped by people who don’t use email:

as Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Parker Higgins convincingly argues, it’s not the justices’ lack of personal experience with technology that’s the problem; it’s their tendency to not understand how people use it. Returning to Justice Roberts’s concerns about villains with two phones: if he is in fact unaware of how common that behavior is – he certainly didn’t watch Breaking Bad – then that suggests a major gap in his understanding of society.

This lack of basic understanding is alarming, because the supreme court is really the only branch of power poised to confront one of the great challenges of our time: catching up our laws to the pace of innovation, defending our privacy against the sprint of surveillance. The NSA is “training more cyberwarriors” as fast as it can, but our elected representatives move at a snail’s pace when it comes to the internet. The US Congress has proven itself unable to pass even the most uncontroversial proposals, let alone comprehensive NSA reforms: the legislative branch can’t even get its act together long enough to pass an update our primary email privacy law, which was written in 1986 – before the World Wide Web had been invented.

So the future of our privacy, of our technology – these problems land at the feet of a handful of tech-unsavvy judges.

Kind of scary.