Clever piece of code exposes hidden changes to Supreme Court opinions
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
The NYT spent a whole high-profile article highlighting the issue of a silently shifting court record. This completely removes the "silently".
The Supreme Court has been quietly revising its decisions
years after they were issued, altering the law of the land
without public notice. The revisions include “truly
substantive changes in factual statements and legal
reasoning,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at
Harvard and the author of a new study examining the
phenomenon.
http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/rlazarus/docs/articles/La...
It's time to adopt the ideas we've learned in CS to other professions.
Whoever solves that problem will be a very wealthy individual, but, like many organizational people-problems, it may be intractable from a technology perspective.
From what I know, the content management sector has a problem of being too generic, trying to handle any form of content, including digital media content, which has very different requirement than documents. Version management is low in the requirement list. Also indexing and searching are a big part of the requirements, which lead to the emphasis on OCR and different format conversion. Archiving and document retention are pretty big with emphasis on the compliance with the various laws. This leads to bloated products that the customers find hard to use and hard to fit into their process and workflow.
I heard of effort by law firms trying to implement content management systems but couldn't because of diverging requirement. At the end just threw the printed PDF into the system and called it for the day.
I heard of contract version management system, just to track the changes to the text of a contract, which was pretty successful because of focused effort. Contract can have numerous versions during negotiation and small changes can have huge impact.
What we need is a system with a small well defined feature set focusing only on the version control of text documents. Outsource the format conversion, OCR, index and search work to other systems.
As that tool is successful, people will start thinking, "I sure wish I could do that with my [Word docs, Photoshop files, video files, etc]," and they start looking. Then they find Content Management and think they've found the perfect solution (and it really does sound good on paper).
But there are three fundamental problems: Unlike the contract management system, you generally don't use the CMS to create or edit documents[1], so you always have a point of impedance between the authoring and the management. Now you are relying on people to "do the right thing", and the right thing isn't the easiest thing.
The next problem is managing versions of the documents gets ugly and confusing pretty quickly. Most file formats we use today don't diff well, so the benefits of e.g. seeing just the changes from v2 to v3 are hard-to-impossible to implement.
The final problem is the content lifecycle of most documents is very fluid. Whereas a contract has a well-known lifecycle with a point in time that it is DONE (e.g. the contract is signed) and a well-known set of approvers (companies generally understand their money-spending approval process well), most documents people interact with follow very ad hoc processes. Invariable, people try to build formal processes out of those ad hoc processes, and people get frustrated. Given the first problem (authoring outside of management), people can easily make an end-run around the tool, perhaps putting a document into it only when they absolutely have to.
Anyway, I could go on for a long time, but my take-away from my experience in content management is to solve small, well-defined problems and forget about the siren's call of "all our documents managed in bliss" because it won't happen.
1. Like contract management, web content management tends to be more successful, because the authoring environment is usually the management environment.
When nailing down an RFP proposal, for example, the technology is the easy part. Distributed ownership of documents, or people changing the wrong version is the hard part. (And drives me nuts!)
Qualifications like these are highly, highly problematic when you don't actually enumerate what they are.
But, decisions are fixed entities, a decision is made by the court and handed down, stat. The decision doesn't change, a court can sit again and make a new decision (eg rescinding or amending the former decision) but the former decision still stands, as is, as the decision that was made.
If post-facto amendments aren't substantive then they're unnecessary, if they are substantive then they shouldn't be made without the court sitting and issuing a further decision. Seems logically that amendments should never be made; clarifications might be issued later but the decision as handed down to the parties in the proceedings should stand unaltered.
We'll get court opinions stored in version control when we get a generation of judges that grew up with word processors with integrated version control. As it stands, version control isn't even well-implemented in mainstream word processors.
Maybe we should be teaching version control first when we introduce students to word processing. If they know they can always go back to an earlier version and compare changes, they might be more willing to explore and learn faster.
> Even within the tech industry, tooling moves at a glacial pace.
Oh the irony...
That would be proof positive to me that they have no intention of leaving the documents unchanged. MD5 has been unusable as tamper-proof signature for a long time now.
In the use case where you want to change the document for your own purposes without leaving evidence that you've tampered with it, you would not be searching for just a single other file which generates the same hash value. You would be looking for another file which results in the same value when hashed, has the same format (text is easy, I suppose, but it's conceivable they could switch to a binary format at some point), makes grammatical and syntactical sense, and also contains the desired content that you are looking for (or some approximate.. the 'exact' desired content would result in a different hash in most scenarios).
That said, I agree that there are better hashing algorithms out there. Multiple signatures from several common hash functions could be provided for quick confirmation purposes while still making it relatively easy to validate quickly.
(Edit: Also, since you are concerned: I am not the downvoter)
http://cryptography.hyperlink.cz/MD5_collisions.html
A collision in under a minute would seem to me to qualify as 'broken' for all practical purposes of this particular has function for the purpose of proving a document was not modified after it was signed.
That that minute is still a substantial number of cycles is not too relevant given the importance of the documents that are being modified, it counts as a 'non-expense'.
Once this is done, you can explicitly blacklist the offending chain and get on with life.
(For anyone who isn't familiar with the reference, here's a primer: https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/ZZ9wDbLDr3A )
If only we could get a transcript of legislators' or government officials' conversations with influence groups...
If you can prove you voted a certain way, that's a big problem in itself.
The thinking is that even if someone has managed to compromise, say, your laptop (e.g. through a specially constructed virus) to secretly switch your vote to a different party, then they'd also need to be able to compromise your phone too to persuade an entirely different piece of software to also report your vote back to you wrongly. Not impossible, but a much harder task (especially as you'd need to manage to do it for everyone, or else there'll be a big outcry from the large number of people who notice a discrepancy).
Being able to prove you voted that way during that time period doesn't really matter, as the system already allows you vote as many times as you like, with only the last one being counted. (i.e. if someone tries to coerce you, or buy your vote, you simply vote their way, and then, when they head off to the next person, log back in again and vote the way you originally wanted.)
The most common current method worldwide for "vote buying" seems to be done by large regional employers organizing voting as such for their employees (time schedules, transportation, lunch/party after voting), sometimes that can be very effective as strategic voting (i.e., bussing large numbers of voters to a different district). If the votes would be actually verifiable, then even without any illegal violence it'd simply mean near-permanent unemployment in that town for "wrong-party" people.
And that's about ordinary elections. For a different example, the recent referendum for Crimea joining Russia, according to their official results, had ~32000 people voting against. I'm not informed about what's happening in Crimea now, but I'm very sure that if I was one of them, I wouldn't want that vote to be verifiable - the hypothetical risks far outweigh any possible benefits.
I think it depends on the ability you have to defend yourself against either, either as an individual or as a society.
It's so effective that the first thing people do when they want to rig votes is to try to take away the paper and/or the observers, sometimes with threats of violence.
If people want quick results, while retaining the benefits of paper ballots with a proven provenance, we have the easy solution: Electronic voting where the machine prints out what you vote for, and ask the voter to confirm what was printed is what they voted on, and have the voter put that printed receipt in an urn like before. Then you can have near instant results from the machines, and can still more slowly verify a sufficiently large random sample of urns of paper receipts to ensure the numbers match.
It, at least as described, doesn't in any way allow to verify if that vote was counted as you intended, it's a proper closed vote with all the related assumptions about trust and need to physically monitor the voting and counting to prevent fraud.
It's a solid idea. The problem is there's so much fiddly data-munging work, so it's a lot of effort to run such a tool.
[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CE%BA%CF%8C%CF%84%CE%B...
And you can't really sue the guys...
The Supreme Court has a whole protocol for this: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinions.aspx ("Caution: These electronic opinions may contain computer-generated errors or other deviations from the official printed slip opinion pamphlets. Moreover, a slip opinion is replaced within a few months by a paginated version of the case in the preliminary print, and--one year after the issuance of that print--by the final version of the case in a U. S. Reports bound volume. In case of discrepancies between the print and electronic versions of a slip opinion, the print version controls. In case of discrepancies between the slip opinion and any later official version of the opinion, the later version controls.")
The GigaOm article is garbage: "Supreme Court opinions are the law of the land, and so it’s a problem when the Justices change the words of the decisions without telling anyone." They're trying to generate page-views by making it sound like the Justices are going back and changing the official record, and are being thwarted by a coder who swoops in to save the day.
In reality, what you have is a tool to see what changes between the "release candidate" and the "Gold Master." Still interesting, even without the manufactured drama.
The vast amount of legal, scholarly and media attention to an opinion happens on release day. When words change after release day, the public deserves to be immediately clued in to that -- even if many/most of them end up being typographical.
If the supreme court need to make changes it should be shown as a omnibus document with the changes indicated and I trust the justices will look at the revised motions and vote on all! the amended judgements.
If they don't they should be impeached for malfeasance in public office and replaced.
There's a non-binding vote in conference, and at that point the majority chooses a justice to write the draft opinion. The justice who write the opinion circulates it among the justices for recommended edits. That basically becomes the slip opinion.
Other justices can write concurring or dissenting opinions as they wish. The justices and change their mind at any point until their judgement is officially handed down. So (at least in my understanding, someone please educate me if I'm wrong) there is no vote on the majority opinion itself, but rather on the case and the general points of law.
Therefore there's no reason the other justices would feel the need to vote on revisions.
But as stated, it's well-known and well-documented that these opinions aren't finalized and what we see at first is just a draft. Frankly there's no one to blame but ourselves and the media for thinking otherwise. I don't really have any problem with this behavior - as the NYT noted the changes are noted, just not as publicly as they should be.
And if you are making revision you need to publish the actual changes not just slip out a new version ie para A3 delete last sentence and replace with "foo bar".
Dont they cover that at "judging school" to quote the E L wisty aka the late Peter Cook
2. After they're finally published in U.S. Reports, any changes are published as proper errata. However, the 'post on the website' is of a draft that's after the ruling but much, much before publication.
All this article is about tracking the changes that get made before the U.S. reports version is published, and the 'slip' version is essentially described as "this is a pre-release draft, read if you want but the following publications may be different and that will be binding, not this one". If you read a draft of a novel, do you expect the released version to include an errata of things that were changed from that draft?
Certainly when I have been involved in formal parliamentary style work we would never publish a draft.
For (1), you want to publish immediately, because the parties have already waited a long time to get the dispute resolved. For (2), you want to publish quickly, because the federal Courts of Appeal need to implement the new guidance in other cases, and may be holding cases that pose the same question pending the Supreme Court's resolution. For (3), you want to have enough time to polish something, because it will be referenced for decades to come.
The system of publishing a bench opinion, a slip opinion, and a final published opinion reflects these conflicting needs.
The SCOTUS website itself is excruciatingly clear about these points:
You actually can. Well, you can't "sue" them, but you can impeach and remove them. It's simply never actually happened before.
Because Congress has never passed a law preventing it?
> That's like if Congress started changing laws without telling anyone...
Except they do tell people. Quietly, and inconsistently, but they do tell them.
Having said that, I expect such stupidity to be debated in committee by the end of next week.
You might want to read up on past Congresses since the 113th is actually pretty tame compared to quite a few of the others. Speaker O'Neil could get quite vicious and he wasn't even the most powerful Speaker.
There's a difference between legislating what the Supreme Court can write in their decisions and legislating the manner in which the Supreme Court must publicize its decisions and changes to them.
And the issue, to be clear, here is the latter, not the former.
The most obvious The elastic clause of Article I, Section 8 (insofar as las specifying the manner of publication of Supreme Court decisions are "necessary and proper" for carrying into execution the judicial power specified in Art. III), and, additionally (for most decisions) the appellate jurisdiction clause of Article III, Section 2 (which limits the court in such cases to operate "under such regulations as Congress shall make".)
Anyway, I never argued Congress could make such a law anyway, I argued that they hadn't (thus the current behavior wasn't illegal), and that there was a substantial difference between regulating what the Court can write in a decision (substance) -- which someone suggested would be ridiculous -- and regulating how the Court must publicize decisions (process). I didn't say that either restriction would necessary be within the power of Congress, just that they were substantially different things.
For the reasons cited earlier in this post, I suspect that the kind of regulations that would be relevant to this discussion on process would be within Congress power, but that's somewhat beside the point. I mean, if Congress can't make a law regulating the process, that would be an even stronger form of the "Congress hasn't made a law" reason for it not being illegal.
" ...You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anyone or anything.' But the plans were on display...' o n display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.' `That's the display department.' `With a torch.' `Ah, well the lights had probably gone.' `So had the stairs.' `But look you found the notice didn't you?' `Yes,' said Arthur, `yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard".'
But, by all means, vote for a D or an R this November because, yeah; they'll change things.
He still refuses to admit that he made any sort of mistake.
I filed a Motion for Reconsideration, which you can find here:
http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/download.html?id=34312001&z...
Other judges refuse to cite wiki citations at all. When I brought the issue to the attention of the First Circuit as misconduct, they dismissed it, carefully refusing to use the word "wiki" in their public Orders because that might admit that judges cite wikis whenever they feel like it. I appealed; they refused to use "wiki" in the Order once again. Instead, they refer to an "on-line source."
http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/sites/ca1/files/01-13-90016.O.pd... http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/sites/ca1/files/01-13-90016.J.pd...
Wiki citations can be edited by anyone, including adverse parties, during or after proceedings, presenting the exact same problem as silent edits in opinions after they have already been issued. Whenever there is a better source they should never be cited. The behavior of Judge Collings, the First Circuit, and the Supreme Court does not inspire much confidence in the Courts.
Your concern about changes seems valid. Maybe this could be solved by actually copying the original cited material so the original could be viewed later by interested parties? I'd hate to make the entire Internet off-limits to legal authorities just because of the potential for change.
In my particular case, the wiki had three different definitions for "non-fiction" all written by different anonymous authors, all of which change frequently. perma.cc is a project to image hyperlink citations, but it doesn't stop judges from just screwing up.
There's basically no consistency whatsoever. Courts don't even write their case numbers the same way from district to district, let alone format their opinions the same.
We can review them... We have the technology.
We've always been at war with Eurasia.