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Comment by THansenite | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don't know how I feel about this. I keep a journal where I can get thoughts out of my head so I can move on. Like the article, its nothing I'd really be ashamed of, but I see it as a kind of personal therapy where I can dump my thoughts. I write with the assumption they are my private thoughts and even I don't have any plans on going back and rereading. I know I'm not a CEO, but even I wouldn't want my private thoughts brought into a courtroom that I never thought would see the light of day.

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Yeah, the Framers of the constitution felt the same as you and the 5th amendment used to apply to your belongings as well so a diary you wrote couldn't be used against you.

> your belongings as well so a diary you wrote couldn't be used against you

What's the history around this? And don't these protections only relate to criminal proceedings?

edit: seems the parent is referring to the historical entity of the mere evidence rule which isn't the same as saying that the Framers believed a certain interpretation for the 4/5th amendments.

The right against self-incrimination is limited in civil trials. Additionally, unlike criminal trials where a jury will be instructed that a defendant's refusal to answer cannot be construed as evidence, there is no such instruction in civil trials, and it is common to argue that a refusal to answer indicates hiding something.

Could you share links about this? When it turned into a different interpretation?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_evidence_rule

(4th and 5th overlap here but I generally just cite the 5th as the reason why the 4th applies is because of the 5th)

This is the angle I think is going to matter for everyone reading.

A growing share of operators I work with use ChatGPT and Claude the way Brockman used a private journal: to think out loud, draft messy first thoughts, vent about colleagues, work through hard decisions. They treat the chat window as an extension of the inside of their head.

It's not. Every prompt is logged on the vendor side and is discoverable in litigation. Most enterprise buyers I deal with have not connected this dot. Their company's policy on email retention is rigorous; their policy on AI chat retention is "default settings, whatever those are."

Brockman's diary being read aloud in court is going to do for AI chat history what email did for casual workplace correspondence twenty years ago. People are going to start writing as if a lawyer might read it eventually. And the thoughtful internal candor that kept companies honest is going to migrate somewhere even less discoverable, or stop happening at all.

The simple solution is to "not write your private thoughts on someone else's loaned paper".

Keep your personal life to personal paper and personal devices. Don't write your life out onto something subject to discovery by someone else's legal department.

The key is that your personal private papers may be subject to discovery via your employer, your life, and more.

Especially if you're a C-level exec.

Policies about document and media handling are important if you're up where discovery is an active possibility. Or "have nothing to hide."

The only reason this diary hit the discovery towers was because he wrote and kept it on the company laptop. If he didn't, this would have never come to light.

Carry two phones, carry two laptops.

You have options:

- Don't write it down.

- Delete it before you're subpoenaed.

- Mail it to your attorney.

- Write it in a contrived and confusing way

i knew i should have learnt how to write klingon or drow as a teen.

It will be interpreted by the opposing counsel however they want

Claude, rewrite this diary entry as a new episode of my Pokemon x Megaman fanfic. Replace disagreements with scenes of steamy action and write the whole thing in iambic pentameter.

Mailing a thing to your attorney does not make it secret.

People treat attorney-client privilege like it's the seal of the confessional or something, but it's much more limited than you might expect.

And it is not there to protect you it is there to protect the lawyer which incidentally might protect you. It's to ensure that a vigorous defense is not compromised.

I can understand what you are going for here, but I feel it is a slippery slope along the lines of police saying, "why can't I search your house if you have nothing to hide?" Orwellian oversight leads to stifling creativity because you know people are watching. I like that I can 'speak freely' in my journal since they are my personal thoughts.

Have you considered shredding the journal pages after?

I had a boss who took his notes on loose-leaf notebook paper and would weed the notebook frequently. He had been involved in litigation in the past.

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