Judicial Nominations In the Internet Age 114
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.'"
Re:Most of my writings are long gone. (Score:5, Informative)
Don't be so certain they are completely gone. Google, The Internet Archive [archive.org], and other crawlers may or may not have saved that information in some form that is accessible. Now with Twitter being archived by the Library of Congress and the never-ending FB account, the age of discarded information is slowly disappearing.
Re:Most of my writings are long gone. (Score:4, Informative)
I have posts from BBSes in 1988-91 that are now archived on google. How did they get there? Well the BBS was connected to a nationwide network, so the posts were distributed all across North America (and probably Europe too). While most of those copies disappeared when BBSes died out, some anal retentive BBS Sys-op kept all of his files. He sold or gave his ~10-year-collection of ancient 1980s/90s posts to Google. And now my posts are archived for everyone to see.
That taught me a valuable lesson - not everything disappears. So now I only post under fake names. I doubt I'll ever be a political appointee, but the future is always surprising. If I ever do have that kind of job where ALL my life's work becomes relevant, and people start digging through the web, I don't want some ancient Slashdot or Usenet posts to come back and haunt me.
Re:Time to change the policy (Score:3, Informative)
So fuck working for the general public. Anyone who might be nominated has other, lucrative options.
Most of the public are, let's be kind, drooling pieces of shit. No wonder people who can screw over such willfully ignorant and stupid people do so.
The victims don't deserve better. Sucks for us (I won't say "the rest of us"), but the few people with an IQ over room temperature do have the tools to thrive no matter who is master.
Re:The tragic merge of of private / professional l (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, shit. You can.
Fucking Live Journal. I thought I deleted that when I was 17.