In this case, the judge wasn’t injured on the job, her child was murdered by a would be assassin. How many software engineers have that problem?
Is that an honest question?
Lots.
We like to think that software engineering is a totally run-of-the-mill occupation, but even with the most basic imagination I can think of scenarios where a software engineer would be threatened by kidnapping/torture/murder/blackmail.
Not all software developers are making web-apps for the next big startup, some of them are working on extremely secret, extremely secure, extremely influential, and extremely deadly software, often times employed by extremely powerful entities.
In the judicial situation, you have a specific unstable/desperate person focusing their anger at Judge X. A judge is a symbol of the state, control, and of a specific matter.
The person doesn't accept responsibility for his actions and holds Judge X specifically accountable for his loss of freedom/income/family/etc. In this modern world, you add on the dimension of unstable politically motived disturbed individuals goaded on by various means. We're fortunate as a society in that disturbed people tend to be disorganized and ineffective, but I think that things are changing that make some of these individuals more dangerous.
I’m sure judges and politicians are at higher risk of retribution, no doubt about it. I only argue we’re not immune as engineers and tech founders. Someone who’s deeply disturbed can direct their blame on anyone remotely involved in their life.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10101469
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6946909
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160505/00383034349/fbi-h...
All data should be equally protected, lest we fall into the all animals are equal except some are more equal fallacy.
More likely than...? It would really help understand what you're thinking if you'd finish the sentence.
And I hope you aren't thinking "your average person". If we passed a law to address median risk disparities in all the places we could, essentially everything that isn't mandatory would be forbidden.
Was mostly responding to the parent comment of "You shouldn't get special privileges because you work for the government."
Maybe some people should get protection or consideration because of their occupation. Didn't mean to say that federal judges should have more than another occupation or situation that we may want to compare against.
Thanks for pointing out that I could have communicated more effectively, though.!
The New Jersey statute itself is arguably vague with respect to what constitutes "risk" and an intent to cause harm. Such arbitrary laws give law enforcement and prosecutors significant discretion and open the door for abuse to such an extent that I could see this being used to violate peoples' First Amendment rights. Another unconstitutional law out of New Jersey, color me shocked. :o
The public should be able to hold peaceful protests and hold public officials accountable.
That should not extend to people's private homes. You want to protest a public official, go protest at their office.
Why drag their family, the neighborhood into it?
Or is that somehow different? If they're politically influential - why, exactly?
I commented about this experience more in depth on reddit[1] and also brought up that federal judges have the US Marshals Service to protect them, and our state judges have county sheriff departments to protect them.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/newjersey/comments/jxvote/governor_...
So it's hard to say "first class citizens" isn't the right term. Maybe "rulers"?
Those jobs are, but regular people have dangerous stalkers, are subject to harassment at their homes, or just want the peace of mind of some extra privacy, too.
No one's arguing that judges shouldn't have protection, it's just that the same protections should be available to everybody else. Limiting these projections to judges & police officers only really helps marketers and sleazy peoplesearch websites, etc.
It's so far away from being risky, in fact, that having people in the field intentionally lying means I think they are lying for a specific reason and I think people should be concerned about that.
[0]https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/16921-judges-face-threats-w...
For example, pass a law making the distribution of PII unlawful if the intent of the distribution is to cause violence or unrest. The law itself would cover everyone evenly.
With a few sentence enhancement clauses, the same statute that protects everyone equally can add additional terms of incarceration or mandatory minimums for judges and law enforcement.
The key flaw of this theory is the dependance on law enforcement practice.
Such law abridges what somebody says, and thus cannot be made.
"Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment include obscenity (as determined by the Miller test), fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, and regulation of commercial speech such as advertising."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...
These exceptions are given. What’s your point?
I used the term first class citizens because people in power tend to grant themselves more of it over time or have privileges (official or unofficial) which benefit them, and not just to protect them. For example, how often do you hear about police being given a ticket? Many laws explicitly except the people in Congress as well.
Equal protection under the law and freedom of speech.
It's a terrible story being told here and I am saddened by her loss but this judge and you, and I, and everyone else are peers.
Judges may be interesting and special for brief periods of time while they adjudicate on their bench but out in the world they are normal people just like everyone else. If privacy laws are inadequate for them then they are inadequate for all of us.
I can't imagine a situation where I would know, much less disseminate, the address of a judge but that is without any question speech protected by the first amendment.
Are you saying that a judge's address is not free speech" in this post-Enlightenment (unenlightened?) period.
I do not think it is clear that publishing a judge's address is the kind of speech that is necessarily protected by the 1st Amendment, and certainly not the kind that would have been considered inherently worthy of protection around when the 1st Amendment was written. And I suspect the claim that it is "without question" is a naive one.
That said, I agree with you. As Judge Salas says herself in this article, this is about the foundations of democracy. Peerage is certainly that too.
Also, since prosecutors and police are covered by this law, we need to think of this as mostly relating to law enforcement. They are the vast majority of this population.
Meanwhile, privacy is obviously an area that needs 21st century attention. We should at least get a reason why we don't get these protections too. Extending their rights to privacy separately from everyone else doesn't sit right with me.
The reality is that certain types of people are in fact more important than others. POTUS gets secret service protection -- something that most citizens won't get.
Does a federal judge deserve extra protection under the law than an average citizen? Probably. It's just a question of how much -- precisely for the reasons given in the article.
Now whether or not we should all have that right may be a question worth asking, but it seems pretty certain that federal judges are worthy of this kind of protection.
Their life is more important to protect from particular threats than everyone else's, because they're in a position where we expect them to make rulings based on their expertise and judgment rather than their fear or concern for popularity, and because they are more frequently in a position to garner someone's resentment or hatred than most of us are.
Just because we're all equal in the eyes of God doesn't mean our society should pretend the world isn't complex.
And yea, if a Dr is so scared of contracting a disease in a profession specifically putting them in this situation, they should also quit their job. Certain jobs require a strong stomach for risk. Don’t take it if you can’t handle it.
Also let’s not forget she not only didn’t teach her son to check who’s at the door before opening it, she can also very easily defend herself using her second amendment rights. Just like the rest of us.
I'm not talking about that - and I have no problem if judges (or anyone else) have extra bodyguards or special limousines.
I can say anything I like about the president. The same is true for these judges. The equal protection I am speaking of is not what kind of armor their car has, but what I am, and am not, allowed to say to or about them.
There's little reason to say that "X judge lives at Y address" is equivalently deserving of protection. We might choose to protect your saying so out of an abundance of caution, to avoid a slippery slope whereby we restrict too much speech. But the idea they're equivalently valuable things to protect in their own right needs a serious defense.
Investigative journalism revealing corruption.
It might not be the address per se but it will be similarly identifying and revealing information about a persons day to day life. This information would be communicated both while reporting the story, between reporters and other sources, etc., as well as exposed in the journalistic product itself.
Or, given five seconds of thought, that was the first, obvious thing that came to mind.
You mean like grocery delivery drivers and cashiers?
What about virologists? Or what about all of the PhD students in Field X, where X is not virology but some other thing that will be at the focal point of the next crisis but which everyone today thinks is unnecessary and figures we should stop over-produce PhDs for? 12 months ago you could probably come to a place like HN, complain that you can't find a good paying job with your phd in coronaviruses, and be told that academia is a pyramid scheme, that no one owes you anything and you should just learn to code and go work on a labor law arbitrage product at the center of an even bigger pyramid scheme.
Since we're on a technology forum, what about the engineers who implement the software/hardware that's used to manufacture PPE, or run simulations to help design mRNA vaccines, or write firmware for the machinery and devices used to mass produce vaccines? Or even more mundane but none-the-less useful stuff like designing and implementing intuitive UX for no-contact payment methods?
Anyways, what's the point of drawing this line between "useful resource" and "everyone else"? What if the role of government were to treat humans citizens with natural rights that should be protected by law, instead of as economic resources to be deployed?
Also, have you asked any essential workers how they feel about being treated as a useful resource? Instead of, you know, a human with natural and legal rights?
Perhaps judges don't need special treatment. Maybe, perhaps, personal privacy is incredibly important component of human dignity.
For their protection, and the stability and security of our society.
"The federal government has a responsibility to protect all federal judges because our safety is foundational to our great democracy"
Indeed it is. It's not just about likelihood of an attack occurring. It's about potential consequences. Killing judges is destabilizing... both directly and via reaction. They are an actually weakening to the governing system as a whole.
We do actually have totally separate ways of protecting elected officials, including unique laws. They are, essentially, "first class citizens." It's because attacks are likely and because the consequences of such attacks are dangerous.
That said, I sympathize with the OP. Separate laws for the specific protection of certain classes of citizens is well... also relevant to the foundations of democracies. Why can't these protections^ be extended to everyone?
"“Daniel’s Law,” which prohibits the distribution of personal information, including home addresses and phone numbers, for judges, prosecutors and law enforcement personnel."
If we didn't provide special protections for judges, 1/2 of them would be dead.
Organized Crime is a very powerful thing, they kill people all the time for a lot less and witness intimidation is rampant.
Judges take on a much greater responsibility than most others.
If there's an opportunity for 'equity' in this special equation, it may be for those who provide testimony in the courts protections. Because they are not protected nearly as well, they are easy targets:
"a study of witnesses appearing in criminal courts in Bronx County, New York revealed that 36 percent of witnesses had been directly threatened; among those who had not been threatened directly, 57 percent feared reprisals" [1]
Imagine if people weren't afraid of retribution against gangs and organized criminals, the world would be a different place.
[1] https://cops.usdoj.gov/RIC/Publications/cops-p112-pub.pdf
Why such unfairness?
Because the world is full of bad actors and crazies dreaming of killing the POTUS, and it pays off in the long run to not have the president killed off in that fashion.
It's not exactly black and white.
Also, the difference here is that the items you describe for the president are proactive measures based on credible threats. Not all judges have credible threats against them. This also wouldn't be a proactive measure - it's just a piece of paper.
Shoot someone who took a jab at you 6 times with a strong suspicion and history of racist motive ?
1) You're a private citizen: death sentence. Hundreds of thousands to millions in damages to be paid. And you can be DAMN sure nobody's will ever grant you any kind of clemency.
2) You're a police officer: Not only do you go free, you don't have to pay any damages and the incident is stricken from your record ... You MAY be asked to resign if protests get too bad.
If by some magic, there are damages to be paid, they will not be extracted from the perpetrators of the crime.
This, and worse, is what these protections will also be used for. Defending law enforcement personnel from the consequences of their own mistakes, their own racism, from attacking their ex-girlfriends or ex-wives, ...
These folks can be systematically targeted because of their job, which is much harder to protect yourself against. I understand your thought process, but it seems unfair to not provide basic protections to people working on our behalf.
I’m probably more likely to choke on a pretzel.
Just because you feel there is no risk of a disgruntled person targeting you, doesn't mean that there are other people who don't have risk in other jobs (like doctors or managers).