Atrios reports that they have caught the Republican hacker who’d been purlioning Democratic memos at the Senate Intel committee. Recall that according to no less an august figure than the Chair of the committee, the publication of one such purloined memo compromised the war on terror.
The Supreme Court of Florida has appointed me along with a bevy of state law luminaries to its Committee on Privacy and Court Records. You can read the Administrative Order (.pdf) and the Press Release. There is also a useful webpage with background information.
The tension between online public access to court documents and privacy raises really hard questions for which I have no ready answers. As an abstract matter it isn’t easy to say why if a record is ‘public’ in the sense of being available in the basement of a courthouse somewhere it shouldn’t also be available online for all of us who find it hard to get to that basement. On the other hand, as a realistic matter, some filings - especially pro se filings in family law cases - have lots of sensitive (and basically irrelevant) personal information that could easily enable identity theft. Putting that data online exposes people to substantial risks that it would be good to shield them from.
Florida law on procedure and on technology issues often serves as a model for South American courts, and even for other states. By addressing this issue directly, the Supreme Court is shouldering this responsibility in an admirable fashion.
Judging from the press calls I’m getting, the part of today’s order that will get people excited is the interim so-called “moratorium” (expiring not later than July 1, 2005) on the provison of certain information for posting online. But if you read the whole order, you see that the Supreme Court exempts large classes of judicial information from what it rightly calls a “limited” moratorium—so at least at first reading it is hard to see what legitimate interests will be seriously harmed by this temporary order.
In my experience, law students are generally nice people, and no more unreasonable than any other slice of the population of similar age and background. But there are exceptions.
The all-time exception occurred several years ago, when a shy quiet student from one of my classes came into my office saying she wanted advice on a personal problem. I closed the door and put on my best sympathetic face, which became increasingly difficult as she told me her story. It seems that she had been cooking in her rented apartment and ran out of cooking oil, so she dashed across the street to the store to get some more. Unfortunately, she left the wok on the lighted stove top, something caught fire, and she burned down her entire apartment, and caused serious damage to the two neighboring ones too.
Was her problem that the landlord was suing her? No (or at least, thought I, “not yet”.) Was anyone hurt? No. Were the police giving her a hard time? No. Troubles with the insurance company? No, she had no insurance. But that wasn’t the problem; no, the problem was much simpler: now that the apartment was unlivable, she’d had to move somewhere else and her ex-landlord was refusing to return her deposit.
Faced with such overweening chutzpah, all I could think to do was to shake my head ruefully and say, that while I was always happy to help students, this sounded like a job for local counsel and - alas! - I am not a member of the Florida bar. (I also resolved then and there never to join the Florida bar.)
I’m reminded of this tale because of an incident last week, the first of its kind. A student who did an independent writing project last year for me came by. As sometimes happens here, her preferred schedule leaves her one credit short of what she needs to graduate. Would I be willing to retroactively give her an extra credit for last year’s writing project?
I guess that’s less brazen than demanding back your deposit after burning down your apartment…but only just.
While I was at FSU, my interesting and charming host at FSU, Jim Rossi, asked if I couldn’t have some way to send out an e-mail when I update the blog. This turns out to be slightly more complex than I expected, but I think I’ve got a method that should work. Use this link , or look in the right margin under “Automatic Discourse”. Personally, I am using a news aggregator to read blogs now, but not everyone is up for that.
Movable Type has a feature that sends out e-mail notices. There’s even a way to give users the option of signing themselves up. But while there is standard code for users to manage their own sign-ON, there is no self-help for sign-OFF. (I started to write that this is “inexplicable” and then decided it’s probably because MT doesn’t have a challenge-response or password system to prevent folks signing others up or cancelling others.) While I’m always happy to provide functionality and gimmicks on this blog, and even to spend ridiculous amounts of time coding stuff up, I am absolutely unwilling to spend time dealing with the inevitable multitude of half-dozen people who having signed up decide they want off. It has to be a self-help system. And MT just doesn’t do that.
So the solution is to use regular mailing list software. I’ve tried to set it up so that only I can post to the list, and that any other attempt to post to it will cause a bounce or discard, but as the only way to test this properly requires some actual posts to the blog first, please treat as experimental for at least the first few days.