Supreme Ignorance

Say it ain’t so…

Net neutrality?

File sharing?

Privacy?

The limits of copyright in a digital world?

And lots more.

New technologies tend to move faster than the law, which causes all sorts of conflicts.

Fortunately, we have the Supreme Court to sort all this out.

Don’t count on it!

And don’t count on any intelligent decisions coming out of this bunch – at least not as it relates to high tech.

The Inquisitr.com has released some terrifying information:

In a recent case before the court related to texting, it turns out the members of the Court don’t have the vaguest idea what the whole thing is all about:

During oral arguments today in the case City of Ontario v. Quon, which considers whether police officers had an expectation of privacy in personal (and sexually explicit) text messages sent on pagers issued to them by the city, the justices of the Supreme Court at times seemed to struggle with the technology involved.

The first sign was about midway through the argument, when Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. – who is known to write out his opinions in long hand with pen and paper instead of a computer – asked what the difference was “between email and a pager?”

But wait, there’s more!

At one point, Justice Anthony Kennedy asked what would happen if a text message was sent to an officer at the same time he was sending one to someone else.

“Does it say: ‘Your call is important to us, and we will get back to you?’” Kennedy asked.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrangled a bit with the idea of a service provider.

“You mean (the text) doesn’t go right to me?” he asked.

Then he asked whether they can be printed out in hard copy.

“Could Quon print these spicy little conversations and send them to his buddies?” Scalia asked.

Oy, indeed.

Now, there is no excuse for this kind of ignorance in 2010. None.

The Founding Fathers of this country, the people who wrote the Constitution that these folks are supposed to be interpreting were in fact on the very cutting edge of new technologies of the 18th Century. Benjamin Franklin was the Bill Gates of his time.  Thomas Jefferson was a scientist as well as a lawyer.

This kind of ignorance is not just unacceptable, it is downright dangerous in a world in which the underpinnings of a ‘free press’ are more related to Facebook than ink and typeface.

Perhaps as he casts about for a new Justice for the Court, President Obama would do well to look at more MIT grads, and fewer grads of Harvard Law. Clearly, we have enough of those.

And there is no law that says a member of the Court must be a lawyer.