Students mine Supreme Court judge’s data
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Law professor Joel Reidenberg (left) wanted to show his Fordham University class how easy its is to mine private information online.
So he suggested to his students that they dig around to see what they could find about him.
It worked. Really well. So Reidenberg thought it’d be equally interesting and instructive to try another target — US Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.
He was inspired by Scalia’s reported statement, “Every single datum about my life is private?
“That’s silly.”
Result?
Reidenberg students ferreted out Scalia’s home address, the value of his home, his home phone number, the movies he likes, his food preferences, his wife’s personal e-mail address, and “photos of his lovely grandchildren, says Above the Law.
“And his views are summed up at greater length here by privacy expert and GW Law Professor Dan Solove,” says the story.
But Scalia apparently doesn’t believe in practising what he preaches.
“We checked in with the Justice to see how he felt about his online information being aggregated and mined by the professor and his 15 students,” says the story, quoting Scalia’s response in, “all its scathing glory,” to wit »»»
I stand by my remark at the Institute of American and Talmudic Law conference that it is silly to think that every single datum about my life is private. I was referring, of course, to whether every single datum about my life deserves privacy protection in law.
It is not a rare phenomenon that what is legal may also be quite irresponsible. That appears in the First Amendment context all the time. What can be said often should not be said. Prof. Reidenberg’s exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment.
“Since he was not teaching a course in judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any,” Scalia adds.
(Cheers, Yauba on Twitter)
Above the Law – Justice Scalia Responds to Fordham Privacy Invasion!, April 29, 2009
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May 2nd, 2009 at 2:01 pm
“Prof. Reidenbergâs exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment”
Prof. Reidenbergâs exercise is an example of perfectly legal, proof OF YOUR abominably poor judgment!!
If you practiced privacy protection, as most of the folks who read P2Pnet do, I doubt
that the students would have found as much on you as they did!! This should be
a wake up call to all you in “power” that if you open your mouth online,
someone is bound to shove your foot in there!!
May 2nd, 2009 at 10:40 pm
What about mining RIAA and MPAA shmucks and posting that to Wikileaks?
May 3rd, 2009 at 1:55 am
That’s silly NO1UNO – I don’t care how much you try to protect yourself, the things reportedly found by these students is incredibly easy to ferret out. Especially when you already have the persons name and occupation to begin your search.
May 3rd, 2009 at 5:44 am
Justice Scalia’s response was dead-on, well stated, and not even close to what could be deemed “scathing”. Furthermore, anyone who bothered to click and read the original article would probably find it clear that Justice Scalia does not believe all datum is, nor needs to be, completely secret. He did not seem to be surprised in the least about the data collected by the students.
May 3rd, 2009 at 1:35 pm
@Nuihc, no argument here, they will find things about me out here I’m sure
But how much compared to NOT practicing a little privacy??
May 4th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
I think more to the point would have been mining data that is NOT generally available to the public and is PRESUMED to be private, such as knowing how many calls he placed to his granchildren on weekly basis, or perhaps the family prescriptions that are filled online being scrutinized or what sort of things his Tivo records in the wee hours on the playboy channel. This kind of information could be gotten by mining on a different level, but not by the average joe or even necessarily the more talented joe, but perhaps by an institution in charge of conveying such data, and is probably more the type of privacy protection law appllicable sort of detail.
May 5th, 2009 at 1:12 am
Voxeo:
How so?
So now our “privacy”-fetish is to be founded on some vagueness about what’s “generally expected to be public?”
My ass.
Bottom line (and this has been true for years), is that NOTHING that leaves your brain is “private” ever again, nor has it ever been.
“They” (somebody) know where you live.
“They” know exactly how often you buy cofee, what brand it is, and probably know more about it than YOU do.
We just don’t think about that, because we believe it’s a different “they” in each case.
The thing of it is (and I can already tell this is gonna raise some hackles here): the way you guys define “privacy” gives the whole thing a bad name. You get excited over whether “they” know whether you searched for Lesbian porn or something, but you probably never raised an eyebrow when a different (and significantly more powerful) “they” decided to track you from birth to death.
There wouldn’t BE any such thing as “identity theft” if people didn’t have an “identity” in the legal sense of the term.
Think about that, and pick your battles.
Once it’s “out there”, it’s not “private”, nor should you have any expectation that it is.
And getting all paranoid about some 4k textfile related to flash videos just makes you look nutty.
There, I’ve probably alienated everybody again (smirk)
May 5th, 2009 at 1:15 am
The biggest leaks are the organizations which HAVE to “know” stuff about you in order to even be able to deal with them at all.
I wonder — Jon: those Email addresses the blog says “will not be published”? What do you do with them?
I’m not insinuating you do anything with them, but if they’re optional, why even have them otherwise?
Maybe it’s a tacit acknowledgment that sometimes there is a *need* for information about your user-base?
Nah, I’m just being a complete patsy to actually believe that!
May 5th, 2009 at 8:03 am
@ Henry:
“those Email addresses the blog says âwill not be publishedâ? What do you do with them?”"
You need wonder no more. The email addies are used for the newsletter. And that’s all.
Cheers!
May 6th, 2009 at 12:16 am
NEWSLETTER?
I didn’t get a newsletter!!!!!
(Sniff!)
Seriously — why didn’t I know about this??????
May 6th, 2009 at 7:57 am
Did you check the box to opt in for a newsletter when you registered?
Cheers!
May 9th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Quote: “NEWSLETTER? I didnât get a newsletter!!!!!
BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA- HA! ROTFLMAO! Thanks Henry, I needed that!
and re the rest of the privacy-”fetish” thing:
I generally agree with you that once its out there its out there; Admittedly I didn’t take the time to carefully consider my word choice in the way of expressing what would be “expected to be” private. I was referring mostly to the effectiveness of the demonstration of data collection by the students and was attempting to underscore the fact that there is some information that one has to have a higher level of privilege to access, and that perhaps the fairness issue which is basically at hand is that an average Joe doesn’t have the same tools at his disposal to combat an entity which might use such leverage to perhaps influence, extort, or otherwise subject him to duress, which is where a law might even the field a bit to prevent the society from getting trampled by the corporate machine. I suppose a more accurate description would be to call it information that we “currently suffer from the illusion that it is private.”
I am not so concerned about the sordid details of what might be discovered about me should anyone go digging; I would likely suffer the most if my MOTHER should find out things that I prefer she didn’t know rather than the powers that be, but then again I haven’t really made a whole lot of noise that would be likely to get their attention. From taking a closer look at the founding documents, it would seem that the US was built around the idea of protecting individuals from suffering at the hands of tyranny so that we could all benefit from the same potential for happiness without it being the sole propriety of a powerful few. The danger here is that current events would indicate that the legal system is not seeing the distinction between a corporation as an institution with rights and an idividual with rights, which in weighing them equally, the corporate power is likely to come out on top simply by having more resources at its disposal by design. This to me undermines the entire concept. Privacy concerns, as well as the idea of copyright and intellectual property are issues at the forefront of this power struggle in terms of what should be…. I guess “FAIR” is the word I’m looking for, though it may seem trite.
Students digging up innocuous mostly public information for anyone who cares to look is a bit different from say the following example: Your name is Michael Brown and you are 26 years old, and there happens to be a different michael brown who might be associated with some whistle blowing on a telecom company and suddenly the fbi or even the local police kicking in the door at your aunt’s house on Thanksgiving because the GPS on your cell phone told them where to look. It is generally stated that an accused has the right to face their accuser in a court of law, but that only seems to work efficiently when both parties have equal power, either one on one or corp to corp. Otherwise things get muddied.
Lets say for example a student had a friend who was a janitor that cleaned the courthouse after hours and could coerce that friend into granting him access long enough to plant a listening device in the Judges quarters. If then an anonymous student produced a transcript (however edited for prudence, but accurate enough to prove a point) of a conversation that was conducted in the judges chambers, that might that be analogous to what concerns most people a little bit more than pics of the grandkids – the fact that it was spoken out loud doesn’t negate the concept that it was designed to be communicated to only certain people within a closed environment that was *not transparently exposed to the scrutiny of others* If the students were able to make that Judge feel as helpless as one must feel when dealing with a faceless opponent who clearly has access to you in a way that you do not have access to THEM… well that would have been a more effective demonstration of the problem I think.