Judicial Nominations In the Internet Age 114
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the accounting-for-your-every-tweet dept.
from the accounting-for-your-every-tweet dept.
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:Looking back at my Internet history... (Score:2, Interesting)
As an example, it's my impression that if Tea Bagger^H^H^H^H^H^HParty backed radical right wing Republicans are in power, it won't matter what the person said or did in the past (i.e. a reflection of the person), as long as they spout the uber republican mantras now. If a nominee says they think Roe versus Wade was wrong, they will vote for them. If they say "born again", they will vote for them to get in. In other words, I think the principle that people make their selections and then look for ways to justify them will hold true no matter how much information people have on the subject. The internet just allows like minded people to group together and reinforce their opinions. If you are democrat or republican, you will look at web sites that agree with your thinking. So the only way the internet has damaged democracy is by making it too easy to create schisms.
If anyone has read the Dorsai series, the internet acts the same way as the proposed diaspora of people from earth will look like. For those that haven't read this sci-fi series, all the ultra religious Christians will go to one world, the Muslims to another, the mystics to another, the agnostics to another, the various political (but moderate religious) leanings to each of their own. All so they can finally make a world the way they think it should be. (The Dorsai by the way were a group of individualists who managed to settle a planet that had no great wealth of natural resources, and so, had to hire themselves out as mercenaries in order to earn money to buy off world goods... eventually becoming the best soldiers anywhere... much like the Ghurkas [wikipedia.org].) The internet is similar as people will not generally visit sites taking positions outside their own beliefs.
Re:Most of my writings are long gone. (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally I'd like to see some legislation that requires deletion of posts, tweets and other public data if either the email used to post them or the account used to post them is inactive for 10 years or more. This notion of preserving every post from 20 fucking years ago is pretty silly and at least in the case of usenet it is impossible to get rid of because Google makes it nigh impossible to delete the entire posting history associated with an email address.
Re:The tragic merge of of private / professional l (Score:5, Interesting)
You're not really following good privacy practices right now.
It looks like you have a Google Code profile under a different username. That username is also your AIM name, which is listed under your Slashdot profile. It doesn't show up in a Google search as being associated with your Slashdot username...yet. I assume that if you ever finish somenewlang, and want to show it to a prospective employer, that you would need to delete your current account---and hope they don't check the Internet archives!---and create a new account under a different name, so that your Google Code account would not be associated with your Slashdot username.
In any case, once they have "TehZorroness" as a potential alias, they can find you with user accounts on torrent sites and over here admitting you smoke pot. Nothing I care about, but nothing you want an employer to see, either. And I haven't even gotten past the first page of results. So don't bang on us for using Facebook.
Re:Looking back at my Internet history... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well , it's a combination of both :
- You work your ass off trying to earn money
- I sit and watch TV or internet all day, and then I suck the cash out of your wallet to pay my bills (food stamps, housing, doctors' bills, welfare, and other free stuff).
- You lose your legs in a work accident
- You get some money , but it doesn't cover your medical costs at all , it barely covers your loss of income .
Really : i pay quite a lot of taxes , which i would expect to go to those who need it , but those people barely get anything from it ( i have a grandmother who worked her whole live , while also raising 4 kinds on her own , and she barely gets enough from her pension to live by ).
Instead it goes to people who know how to game the system.
So , it's a good idea in theory , but the problem is it can easily be abused , which results in the taxpayer paying too much , and those in need getting too little.
Offcourse , I'm talking from my own country's perspective ( Belgium ) . In some other European countries , like Sweden , it's a lot better ( you pay a little more taxpayes , but the medical care is a whole lot better ) .