What's all this jabber about politicians and magistrates being out of touch? Who says Guam won't, in fact, capsize? I mean, you can't know to a certainty that a dystopian future where micro-chips are systematically implanted amongst an oblivious populace is not on the horizon?
And who says our exalted Supreme Court needs to know the difference between a pager and an e-mail? Why should we worry when Justice Anthony Kennedy wonders about the basic functions of a cell phone, asking if his phone will auto-respond with, 'your call is important to us, and we will get back to you" if you text him while he's texting you? Well...wait. Actually that does worry us.
It's one thing to not be a tech-wizard, but another to fail to understand the basic activities of most peoples' everyday lives. Apparently a curious exchange occurred in the Supreme Court yesterday over a case involving the degree of privacy police officers should be afforded for their state-issued pagers. (Yes: state-isued pagers) Among the other brain-busters that baffled our Supreme Justices was Samuel Alito's uncertainty about being able to delete text messages. Upon receiving a "yes," Justice Alito responded: "Are you sure about your answer on deletion?"
I'll summarize (in a way a Supreme Court judge could understand):
The supreme court justices may be stuck in amber, but they each have a whole cadre of twenty-something clerks who are all up on the latest tech and pop culture. Usually when they are asking questions like that, they are making a point to the other justices.
For example, the question about deleting texts is pretty legitimate in this case because the boss got the list of the text messages from the phone company and while you can delete messages from your phone, once the message has been sent, there is no way of deleting the message from the phone companies' servers where your boss can get at them if you have no right of privacy.
If Justice Roberts meant "What's the difference in privacy rights between an email and a message sent via pager?", posed to the other justices, that would be legitimate. If that's what he meant, you would think the Chief Justice would be able to articulate it.
Yes. Again, this gets down to the facts of the case. The police officers were told that their email was not private and may be monitored, but that if they paid for text messages beyond the ones they got for free under the city's service plan, the text messages would be considered private. This is a pretty critical issue in the case since the plaintiffs relied on this statement with regard to text messages. Robert's question goes to why the police department would treat email and text messaging differently, so it is a legitimate question.
A Supreme Court hearing is a lot of back and forth, hypothetical arguments. They were conjecturing about different forms of communication because privacy in different forms has usually been decided by a previous Court.
Roberts knows the difference. Alito and Kennedy, I'm not so sure.
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