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The Supreme Court is an openly — even proudly — technophobic institution. Cameras are forbidden, which means there are no images or videos from high-profile cases, and briefs and other legal filings only recently became available at the court’s website. Chief Justice John Roberts argued in 2014 that these Luddite tendencies are just part of the legal system: “The courts will always be prudent whenever it comes to embracing the ‘next big thing.’” The justices — who communicate mostly on paper, rather than via email — can sometimes seem as analog as the institution they serve. There was the moment when in a 2014 case about cell phone privacy, Justice Samuel Alito asked what would happen if a suspect were carrying personal information on a “compact disc.” That same year, Justice Stephen Breyer was ribbed for spinning out an extended hypothetical about a “phonograph record store.” There are systemic reasons for the court’s reluctant approach to technology — American law is a backward-looking enterprise even outside the highest court. But regardless of why it’s happening, legal scholars say the consequences are clear: When Supreme Court justices lack an understanding of what technology means for the lives of the people affected by their decisions, they will struggle to respond effectively to technological change.
FiveThirtyEight
The State Department has quietly ended the controversial “FOIA surge” launched last October under the since-fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Capitol Hill and State Department sources tell TPM. The effort involved pulling hundreds of people from offices across the agency — including former ambassadors, former high-level leaders of bureaus and former National Security Council staff — and reassigning them largely clerical work processing Freedom of Information Act requests. An internal memo from the State Department’s Bureau of Administration dated Oct. 12 — obtained by TPM from a Capitol Hill source — described the surge as a “tax” on all bureaus within the agency. Though the State Department has insisted that the transfers were made “without regard to politics,” whistleblowers within the agency and members of Congress have aired suspicions that the transfers were politically-motivated and possibly retaliatory, pointing to the reassignment of senior officials who previously worked on refugee resettlement, the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison, and other initiatives viewed unfavorably by the Trump administration. Some of the officials were transferred to the FOIA office after the right-wing news outlet Breitbart urged Trump to get rid of them, calling them “holdover Obama loyalist bureaucrats.”
TPM
Lawmakers are eyeing changes to public records law after a national group dedicated to government transparency flooded 800 Wyoming agencies with records requests last spring. Openthebooks.com, a project of Illinois-based 501(c)(3) organization American Transparency, filed the requests to collect Wyoming data for an online repository of spending by state, local and federal governments. Its requests went to more than 800 agencies, districts, boards and other municipal and state government entities, Wyoming Liberty Group executive director Jonathan Downing said. His organization, a conservative think tank in Cheyenne, assisted Openthebooks.com with the requests. The inquiry has sparked a review of public records law by the Legislature’s Joint Corporations, Elections & Political Subdivisions Committee, even as the state implements new rules to charge its citizenry for accessing public records. Broad records requests gum up day-to-day operations for some government offices in the Equality State, particularly rural ones with only one full-time staff member, public officials told legislators on the Corporations Committee in Lander last week.
WyoFile
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