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Computers, Privacy, and the Constitution
February 2, 2021, 3:15pm EST
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Next office hour will be tomorrow, Wednesday, 15:30-17:30 EST, at
https://pad.moglen.us/p/OfficeHour The office hour will also be
conducted by video-conference. Look on the pad tomorrow for the
videoserver link.
1. Constitutional History Informs Constitutional Interpretation Somehow
The balance between "originalism" and lunacy, balanced by the balance
between "the living Constitution" and "the arbitrary Constitution."
How to investigate original meanings without being ruled by the dead
hand of Alexander Hamilton.
In the recorded lecture you mentioned our task is to understand why
words are, rather than what words are. I agree with this approach but
sometimes wonder if we don’t fall in the trap of anachronisms. It
strikes me that in order to understands why words are we must assume
that we can know why they are to begin with. Can we?
No, history is an imperfect art, as law is. We work in the
humanities, and we interpret what we think we know in order to reach
beliefs about why we know it. But imperfection is not a barrier to
the achievement of better justice and the abatement of evident
injustice. So, as Scott Fitzgerald says, we beat on, like boats
against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
I'm not a fan of originalism for a few reasons but one is that its
advocates seem particularly susceptible to the Motte-and-bailey
fallacy. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy: 'a
form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two
positions which share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the
"motte") and one much more controversial (the "bailey"). The arguer
advances the controversial position, but when challenged, they insist
that they are only advancing the more modest position.'). This makes
it hard to have a good-faith discussion about the topic with someone -
the form of "originalism" they may defend is not the same as the form
you see in SCOTUS opinions. What's the best way to bridge this gap?
In order to have a better conversation? Lawyers use words
purposively, so if you can explain the purpose of the bridge (to go
along with the architectural metaphor of castellation) I can better
answer you.
Not so much a question but a thought: I think I would agree that we
are not being ruled by the dead hand of AH as evidenced by the fact
that the people of the 18th century didn’t even know or imagine what
todays technology is or could be - so understandably there must be
some deviation from the intent of the people of the 18th century,
while we are still bound by history in the fact that we interpret a
document written in the 18th century at all. Part of this reminds me
of the government being constrained by their own devices. We, the
people, are constrained/bound/following history all while still
transforming it.
Yes, I think that's an idea lying parallel to the idea I was
expressing myself in laying out the theory of constitution-reading in
use here.
I'm intrigued and mostly convinced by the idea that the 'Living
Constitution' v. 'Originalism' split is as you said a 'confection'. I
feel like most serious judges see it that way too, but that it
survives because for at least the last 40-50 years it's a reasonably
accurate litmus test for certain political viewpoints and a useful
smokescreen that keeps judges from directly handling those
viewpoints. Will the split only go away when it becomes a much less
accurate litmus test?
And when the acidity of the solution in which judicial
appointments are soaked is better titrated.
2. Sentence-Focused Reading
How to read the Bill of Rights like a human historian.
As mentioned in the lecture, sentence focused reading in to
understanding constitution makes sense as the grammatical structure is
implicit in our effort to make sentences which retain our ideas but
doesn't this in a sense lend itself to the originalist approach of
interpretation?
Well, an originalist would be well-advised to try to read as the
writers wrote, but the essence of originalism isn't fidelity to
language, though it claims to be. The essence of originalism is a
willingness to live with a less relevant constitution in order to
avoid the messy "political" claims of the present. My point precisely
is that this is not a theory of constitutional interpretation, it's a
theory of constitutional stability.
Putting aside the follies of clause-by-clause constitutional analysis,
given today's courts, do you think the strongest case for a revised
theory of the Fourth Amendment protection lies in the word 'secure'?
In a Part Four article from Bruce Schneier, he mentions Jed
Rubenfeld's offering of a 'security' test as an alternative to the
focus on expectations of privacy in Katz. I feel like the potential of
that test might get closer to the real idea underlying the Fourth
Amendment as explored in the lecture because it might help broaden the
focus on what kinds of general practices invade the security we
feel. Or would this just substitute one test for another without
changing our relationship to the state?
It's an improvement. Like much of the thinking of Jed
Rubenfeld, it partakes of cleverness without real contact with
practicality. Jed, like many a Yale law professor, is extremely smart
in an ineffectual way. But with some real knowledge and precise
intentions behind it, I too think this is the best way to go. I'll
try two weeks from now to work it out as best I can, and it still
falls calamitously short.
Thanks, looking forward to more then!
As the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution in a context where they
could not foresee the world we live in now, history is important to
understand their initial intention. But can we also think that grammar
and English language have a history too and the sentences written back
then might not have the same (grammatical and semantic) meaning as we
read it today?
Yes, or words, like"search" and "seizure" could have changed
meanings utterly, which is even more important than the possibility
that we use commas differently, or---pace Donald Trump---tend to
eschew random capitalization. As to those differences, my point is
that we are trying to read 18th century language in an 18th century
way in order to find MEANINGS rather than denotations, by
interpretation placed atop our reading, which can then be placed in
dialogue with circumstances. That's a different kind of stretch in
some places than in others, which is why Part Four is a tragedy and
Part One is a comedy, for example.
I see, thank you!!
3. Yes, Reasonableness is a Circular Standard
Why that doesn't mean what it seems to mean.
What sort of guideposts do courts use when analyzing society's
expectations? That seems so broad and amorphous to me—much harder than
a 'reasonable man' analysis from Torts. How do we prevent it from
being a one-way ratchet towards less privacy?
That's the right question, undoubtedly. In order to answer it
persuasively, we have to have two perspectives. Consider the Eighth
Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, which I
discussed in the talk. It won't do to say that 18th century
understandings of the 17th century root of the phrase---which appears
in the English (statutory) Bill of Rights in 1690, in response to the
conduct of criminal justice under James II before 1688---are
irrelevant now, but the lunatic originalism that I was criticizing in
Bob Bork as a student is obviously inadmissible. The "evolving
standards of decency" approach that Thurgood Marshall and Bill Brennan
attached to their view on capital punishment, is an effort to present
something that is neither entirely about then or about now, but about
some process of change that can be described with responsible rigor,
and that nonetheless provides flexibility in the meaning of cruelty
and novelty. The same approach, which is far more difficult with
respect to the reasonableness of forms of insecurity in persons,
houses, papers and effects, has to be followed here. The Court needs
to do more than say "you didn't have a reasonable expectation of
privacy, so you lose, and from now on everyone loses," just as it
cannot hope to analogize every case to phenomena of searching known in
1790. Indeed, as I said and as we will explore further over the next
two weeks, the very meaning of the words "search" and "seize" are
different than they were in the 18th century, so our theory of
constitutional evolution here has to be even more powerful and subtle
than the one explaining the evolution of our ideas of cruelty in
punishment.
What is the ideal standard for privacy in the context of warrants? It
seems that any measure of privacy "expectation" is unuseful because of
the extent of control that intelligence bodies have over the
infrastructure of surveillance. Informed expectations can no longer be
grounded in instinctive concepts of private vs public, they're largely
a product of whatever restraint that states and private entities
exercise. If this is the case, should the guidepost change from the
reasonable expectation of privacy to the reasonable, informed desire
of privacy?
No, because that will give people unequal rights based on their
level of knowledge or articulation. "Expectation" is supposed to be
some form of objective entity, unvarying sufficiently to give
something like "Equal Justice Under Law," as it says on the pediment
of the building. That's not the way the 4th A worked out in the late
20th century, but I think the reasons for that failure are contingent,
not essential.
I'm struggling to understand how one creates a more subjective
standard than the other. "Expectations," in a sense of what one
anticipates, varies with an individual's general awareness and past
interactions with law enforcement, for example. However, we still
create a single, constructive standard for what one reasonably
anticipates ("expects") being private or public. I don't see why we
couldn't just as easily (or just as challengingly) construct a single
level of reasonable desired privacy. Why not say that an informed and
reasonable person would want generalized privacy protections akin to
climate change/environmental regulation, so that should be the
standard we apply when assessing warrants?
Because warrants are not issued based on the wishes of those
they are served on, perhaps?
Of all the bill of rights, this balance between original understanding
and flexibility in the face of new realities seems most important to
the Fourth Amendment: the surveillance technologies of today are so
qualitatively different than that of the founding—much more it seems
to me so than guns, means of distributing one's ideas, mores on what
is cruel and unusual, et cetera. Perhaps that goes without saying in a
class about these issues, though. When you say that circularity of the
reasonableness inquiry "doesn't mean to mean what it seems to mean,"
what do you mean?
Ah, that's the secret, I guess. I mean that if we have an
historical theory of reasonableness, showing how it is composed over
time from past understandings and new experiences, if we can give
content to "reasonable" that doesn't depend on polling data, we can
avoid the circularity implicit in common law process applied to the
idea. As was said above on the pad, this isn't like the "reasonable"
"man" as a vehicle for running over the plaintiff in a torts case. We
are asking how much security of self human beings will have in a world
of the parasite and the possibility of perfected big data despotism,
ala the CCP's view of the Chinese peoples' future. That's not a
matter of counting tweets or taking phone polls, and we need to have a
method of reasoning about it which is as sophisticated and sensitive
as the problem itself.
I see, thank you! That makes much more sense. Is this sort of
methodology associated with any justice or justices in particular? Or
is it more widely adopted? Obviously the supreme court does not
conduct opinion polls, but do they perform the kind of historically
informed analysis you describe here, or is this what we wish they
would do? I'll have to re-read the cases with an eye towards this.
You will find that an interesting process. Over the next weeks,
I will be trying to help you.
Would the task to define 'reasonableness' be similar to the one to
define 'legitimate'? At the end of the day, will judges always have a
considerable degree of discretion in the application of the
reasonableness test to the facts of individual cases?
As I tell my first-year class, I don't think the word
"legitimacy" has any meaning at all, it is---in Felix Cohen's
sense---pure transcendental nonsense.. With respect to its use in the
Fourth Amendment, I think "unreasonable" can be saved from that fate,
but unfortunately that's not enough.
4. The Political Economy of Thuggery
Our localism, our federalism, our traditions of criminal procedure,
why warrants are what it's all about.
I found the concept of warrants as a temporary conscription of local
officials to engage in state thuggery very interesting. To me, that
idea is borne out by the fact that the highest-thuggery situations in
modern policing are those with very little inherent warrant
protection. I'm thinking specifically of traffic stops in Ferguson,
and similar situations. Am I understanding your point?
Once society has large-scale public paramilitary forces to do
all its work, equipped with deadly force and capable of publicly
kneeling on a man's neck until he dies or shooting a woman multiple
times in her bed while she's sleeping, the political economy of
thuggery is utterly transformed. The transformation of those
conditions, which alters the meaning of the Fourth Amedment completely
in the 20th century, resulted in fundamental changes in both
directions: Mapp v. Ohio applied the federal constitutional
limitations (and the judicial power of counter-enforcement) to all the
empowered local systems of policing, but Terry v, Ohio also
established the fundamental unimportance of the warrant in the
policeman's life on the street, where "articulable suspicion" is the
line of reasonableness thereafter, rather than probable cause. Now we
layer on that unstable outcome a new transformative stage, in which
"search" and "seizure" are newly defined and the balances of power are
unrecognizable. Under this weight, I will submit over the next two
weeks, the Fourth Amendment breaks and becomes mostly useless.
Got it, thank you! Does this lead us to thinking about federal and
state law enforcement somewhat differently, in that local cops are
mostly the ones "on the beat" taking advantage of Terry stops,
conducting "community policing," etc while the FBI conducts their
investigations in a targeted manner from afar? At the same time,
though, it seems federal law enforcement has played the role of
"secret police—" the FBI's activities during COINTELPRO against civil
rights groups feels like to what 'secret police' would get up to.
Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment settles this for us, by
imposing the same standards of due process and equal protection on
everyone. Without Mapp, the despotism of the FBI in the Hoover Era
goes unchecked, even though they are the ones whose actions were
always constrained, because the cases are made elsewhere, and the
constitutional rules must then be uniformly applied. Am I responding
to your question, or did I misunderstand?
Yes, you are. I would be interested to read more about the historical
development of American policing itself, is there anything you
recommend on the topic?
There is no good one-volume history of American policing, so we
are in the world of monographs and general histories. If you're
serious about the project, talk to me in office hours or send email
and we'll build a reading list. (Too bad my bibliographies are in the
office I can't go to: this is one of the ways in which the epidemic
makes me a worse teacher.)
5. Private Complicity With Searching and Seizing
Why the tar and the feathers. Why subpoenas work.
What's the standard to determine the scope of individual privacy in
which the government cannot interfere without having a warrant? For
instance, since you're in the public sphere walking on the street,
security cameras do not violate the 4th Amendment?
Government cameras? With or without facial recognition software
behind them? Used for what purpose, beyond the creation of evidence
in criminal process? Your question needs refinement to have specific
answers, or to suggest specific areas of inquiry for us.
Government cameras. In the event of a crime, those records would be
checked if the suspect's around. With or without facial recognition.
But each of those variables will wind up affecting our analysis.
That's why common law constitutionalism works the way it does.
After seizing a cellphone with a valid warrant, can the police force
the person to enter his passcode to access the phone content? If the
warrant doesn't "warrant" this type of access, wouldn't that
restriction make the warrant meaningless given the wide use of phones
in crimes?
No. Hence all the cases. And why would you carry an object
your face can unlock without a passcode, I wonder. (Indeed, of
course, I wonder why you are carrying such an inherently insecure
device at all, but apparently there's no point wondering.)
So, is the content of a phone more private than one's home? Is this
the reason you can't be forced to unlock it?
I don't think so. But you might suspect that from the cases.
Regarding some articles on PART FOUR, to defend a controversial
Internet pornography law in court, the Justice Department has demanded
search logs from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and America Online. I am
curious that can I reject Google, Microsoft or Yahoo to collect my
searching records and our digital data ex ante, so as to prevent them
from providing my data to third parties and to governmental
departments?
That depends on the data. But if you are wondering that, why
don't you wonder why it's about stopping them, instead of starting
yourself down the road of not needing them?
I use duckduckgo now. Also, if I searched some key words for
curiosity rather than attempting to commit a crime, how can they
distinguish them? On this, a thought: Venmo is not a very secure
app. A few years ago, in tracking down a terrorist group known as
"Idek", they would suspend the accounts of everyone who typed into the
message bar on a tranasction "idek," which is slang for "I don't even
know." In this case, at least, committing a crime was not properly
distinguished from other intentions.
what do you mean by "secure"? they're probably not particularly secure
as far as things go, sure, but that sort of extremely coarse filter
says to me that they're kind of paying lip service to the idea of
blocking illegal transactions (i've heard other reports of where
certain words will get your transaction and account at least
temporarily suspended). this sort of extremely naive censorship is
absurd (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem is a
somewhat-well-known issue that venmo 100% would have been aware of) I
believe Venmo also has an extremely sensitive trigger finger because
they are subject to all kinds of banking/financial service
regulations—and most importantly don't want to violate OFAC sanctions,
for which I think there is strict liability. I guess what I was
saying was that this seems more like a cover-your-ass thing that they
don't have much interest in actually solving. Theoretically those
using the "idek" keyword probably are not talking about the terrorist
group (those involved would likely disguise it better)? but who knows
BTW: Several articles under Government Subpoenas for Search Records
(of Part Four) are unaccessible.
You could either replace the links with ones that work (it's a
wiki, after all, and you can edit) or you can tell me.
Great, I will replace the links.
To my understanding, customs officials can search our laptop without
reasonable suspicion at airports. If the data is stored in cloud
storage and accessible via that laptop and internet browsers, do
customs officials can search the data? Unlike data stored in laptops,
the data stored in the cloud did not "physically" in airports.
Why do you carry a laptop across a border in searchable
condition? I would never do that.
So is the alternative to obtain a new laptop whenever traveling
abroad? Some law firms provide their attorneys with temporary phones
and computers when traveling to China, but still seems excessive. In
any case, is TSA legally able to search data?
No, that's quite unnecessary for this purpose. Making it
impossible for them or you to open the laptop's storage on the border
without having to throw the laptop away thereafter is trivial.
Disposable hardware is useful for a different purpose, which is when
you carry a laptop into a state without the rule of law and capable of
making implants while you are there that will work against you if you
bring the laptop home. That's why I began the project of de-Chroming
Chromebooks, to have superb dirt-cheap hardware that could run free
software securely inside China, and be left in the hotel wastebasket,
with no bits in it, on the way out of the country. But avoiding
border searches is much simpler. As to the law, why would you not
assume that even US law does not protect you? You know that the law
of no other state protects you under those circumstances, so why
bother making legal distinctions when what you need is something that
works everywhere, because every border has two sides.
6. Shoshana Zuboff's "Other Coup"
For those who want to talk about modern day problems of public and
private power, the smartest writer who just can't write short has
plenty to say.
My understanding of Shoshana's article was essentially that the
intermingling of public and private power have created this coup of
misinformation that has inevitably become a threat to democracy. How
then, can the government protect it's citizens (as it is their duty in
a sense as we spoke about last week) from misinformation? I am
wondering how can one tiptoe around the 1st amendment, in order to
uphold the 4th?
One wouldn't, in my view, given that as I see it the First
Amendment is full of promise and the Fourth is mostly and tragically
obsolete. But I don't see the conflict. She's not writing about
search and seizure or surveillance at all here. She is asking how
government can achieve a positive duty, which is to protect democratic
self-government against her "epistemic chaos." That raises the
central issue I will try to address in Part One: what is the
CONSTRUCTIVE responsibility of government in ensuring that there is no
law that abridges our expressive and intellectual liberties? On that
basis, I will ask whether the immunization of a small number of
powerful entities from legal responsibility (as in section 230 of the
"Communication Decency Act" is an unconstitutional interference with
the freedom of expression.
Zuboff writes of the fourth and final stage of an 'epistemic coup:'
'The machines know, and the systems decide, directed and sustained by
the illegitimate authority and anti-democratic power of private
surveillance capital.' I understand stage three (epistemic chaos,
where we are now), but I have a hard time understanding what the
fourth stage looks like, and how that is distinct from stage three. I
think I may need to reread her 'You are Now Remotely Controlled'
piece. But if anyone has any insight, it would be much appreciated.
Consider yourself Uighur in Xinjiang. Did that help?
Yes. So it is state power exercised with the benefit of this total
information access attained by private surveillance capitlaists, or
similar. When I first read the phrase, I thought it more referred to a
state where we are controlled in a meaningful sense by private
technologists, but without state intervention.
Zuboff states: we may have democracy, or we may have surveillance
society, but we cannot have both. A democratic surveillance society is
an existential and political impossibility. Do you think this is an
either/or?
I am teaching a course about that, and you are in it.
In my understanding, a surveillance society is one with authoritarian
tendencies, which is, of course, at odds with a democratic
system. However, while extreme surveillance is a threat to democratic
institutions, I don't think one necessitates the complete destruction
of the other, creating, as Zuboff puts it, an existential
impossibility.
But perhaps her point is not essentialist but historical or
evolutionary: such a state is no longer in a position to defend
democracy against itself and its successors, nor can democractic
forces fight effectively the transformation of the society, so
eventually democracy loses. If that's what she means, what do you
think?
I think that's the clearer take. Democratic forces cannot fight the
transformation of a society characterized with enormous information
asymmetry by virtue of surveillance. I agree that the monopolization
of knowledge, or the epistemic coup, as Zuboff describes it, expedites
this process and weakens any plausible democratic response. Though, it
makes me wonder if there's a 'point of no return.' If we were able to
snap our fingers and scale back the surveillance society, is its
effect on democracy reversible? At what point, if any, does it become
irreversible?
7. Other Questions
How did we get lost in the 17th century and whatever else is top of
your mind.
How have people waiting in line for airport security typically
reacted to the card that you handed them, raising the reasonableness
question?
I think you can probably hypothesize every form of reaction I
received, across the spectrum of hostility, indifference, support, and
an effort not to notice me. But all of that ended seventeen years
ago, because I no longer saw the point of the effort.
How can I join your office hour via video conference? Hi you look on
the pad tomorrow for the videoserver link. You mean the link in the
main page? It gives me this warning: "Your connection is not private"
Then I can't move forward.On most browsers there is a way to continue
past that screen, typically a button on the page that says something
like "advanced options" or similar. See if you can change the initial
"https://" to just "http://" (without the 's')Yay! Thanks for "s"
adjustment, it works! (No advanced options, interestingly)
That's because this part of the advice consisted of using the
HTTP protocol, instead of secure HTTP, which is https. By not using
secure connection, you keep your browser from complaining that the
identity certificate used for HTTPS connection was signed by me,
instead of by some identity controlling entity. Long discussion we
don't need to have right now, but the advice you received will always
solve that problem.
Why isn't US v. Carpenter listed as a case in the Theory of Part Four?
I'm not sure why that isn't obvious. Can you help me understand
the question better?
I guess I see Carpenter as the latest major case addressing the 4th
Amendment's application to government surveillance technology, which
the cases for Theory all revolve around. I wondered the same; while
Carpenter does not deal with surveillance as directly as some of the
others, GPS technology contributes to surveillance, so I also thought
it would be relevant. Maybe it's that Carpenter is really a serious
step away from Katz' reasonable expectation test and towards something
better, with more fidelity to the full 4A guaranty?
Or just a narrow punt? Yes, maybe just that. But at any rate,
have we established why it is there or not there? Does that matter?
I don't think Carpenter will go undiscussed, but if I've made a
cataloguing error about where to place it, let's add it to the
section. (It's a wiki, you can edit every page.)
I'm not confident enough to diagnose a cataloguing error here. But I'm
very happy to add it to the wiki.
I must have missed this—what are you referring to when you say 'the
parasite with the mind of a god?'
A phrase I use to express the condition in which we now live
commensally with a digital organism that metabolizes human behavioral
information and secretes hormones that produce more "engagement," that
is, behavior data. This digital organism---whose organs are Alphabet,
Facebook, Twitter, Tencent, Alibaba, and their kin and
components---now possess detailed data about the behavior of billions
of human beings, moment to moment, and a synoptic view of the largest
patterns in human behavior that are not visible to any other people or
entities in the biosphere. The only word that human beings have ever
had for this absolute knowledge, from the smallest to the largest, is
"the mind of God." So we have now created and live with, as I say in
my current writings and speakings, a species-wide nervous system in
which dwells the parasite with the mind of god. Those who took last
term's course are familiar with this idea, perhaps tediously so. You
could listen to audio from last term, or, more sort-of tersely, my
talk at Re:publica 2019 in Berlin:
https://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2019/may/07/-moglen-at-republica19/
I will check that out—thank you. Perhaps it answers my next question:
does the digital organism or its human creators really "understand"
our information in a meaningful way, or do they have data but not
knowldge?
Today, tomorrow, or the day after? All of this is, as I said
elsewhere, After the End of Forgetting.
It seems to me (especially at facebook) that much of the 'feed' is
generated by machine learning algorithms doing their own thing with
potentially little human oversight.
The parasite doesn't need human oversight. I think you're not
yet tediously aware of my underlying point.
Also, wasn't/isn't Palantir's big product a sort of centralized hub
for the government to access, in one convenient place, all of this
information collected in disparate repositories and held by different
custodians? Does that make them a parasite on the parasite with the
mind of a god?
Roughly, yes: another organ. A threat actor with access to the
parasite's biology. What you like...
What was Robert Bork's response to your question regarding cruel and
unusual punishment?
To ask who I was and to throw me out since I was not enrolled.
Not his finest moment, that great intellectual feaster. He had a
narrow and authoritarian side, as well as more charming ones, and I
brought it out on that occasion.
One question which lingered from last week. What was Moxie
Marlinspikes reasoning to prefer centralization to a federated system?
Moxie thinks that a centralized service can respond to security
problems and add features to improve usability immediately, affecting
everyone, which federated services cannot. This is right The question
is how to balance that value against disadvantages and benefits of
federation. As to that, I think he's wrong. But it's a wonderful
disagreement so long as we are doing both.
I am not sure if you have heard; however, a lot of Columbia students
have expressed their distain with how Columbia has handled COVID
etc. Some complaints are Zoom fatigue, lack of a reading week, and
strict adherence to a curve during this pandemic. Do you think
students could benefit from this style of teaching as an option?
If I didn't, why would I have invented it? Over years of
thinking about how to respond to the unforeseeable occurrence I
considered inevitable, I reached certain conclusions about the
necessary pedagogical innovations. I think our collective experience
is confirming some of my conclusions and requiring the revision of
others, but I do not think the obvious improvizations adopted by
teachers and schools that didn't see this coming have shown that my
research and development was conducted on the wrong lines. What so
you think?
I think this is right - many people did not expect this and there was
a hurried attempt to find a quick solution. It is evident that the
quick solution is not the best one. Just thinking about how or what to
do to get Columbia on board.
Forget it, not happening. Zoomschool serves the purposes for
people who think the epidemic will be over soon and everything can be
forgotten as we return to "normal." It will take four more terms
before that begins to fray. Concentrate on making your own education
the best itr can be for you and don't get lost in the quicksand of
trying to overcome others' repression of cognitive dissonance in an
age of utter cognitive dissonance.
How would you approach these issues if you were a law student right
now?
As I say above. You're here now, you've paid, and the task is
to help you learn and enjoy learning as best we can. If teachers will
help, good. If they won't, do what you need to do to achieve your
learning goals and forget them.
Would you advise a prospective law student to postpone enrollment
because of the privacy violations you must accept in order to
graduate? (Zoom attendance, using Canvas, etc.)
This is not the issue of the epidemic, as to which I would
indeed say that postponement should be considered. This is the longer
term question of what to do about disrespect for privacy in learning.
About that, I would advocate that those who see the issue as one of
personal and professional concern to them should use it as a fulcrum
in the learning process. I am considering, post-epidemic, building
another teaching practice, like mt Software Freedom Law Center, which
I would use in the next and last phase of my professional life to
train a cadre of educational privacy lawyers who cut their teeth in
school-to-work, and then continue in that ptactice to make
universities and other systems pay for their sins. I think it would
be a fine version of my idea of school-to-work training practices.
There is not yet any 'educational privacy lawyers' today is there? A
part from those who work on privacy issues related to students'
educational records and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act
(FERPA)?
Do you think administration would listen if students advocated for
adoption of less invasive technologies?
No. A university official well trained in the party line told
me just before the epidemic started that of course the choice of
Canvas was permanently irrevocable. The future of this university is
understood by its present leadership to involve the data-mining of the
community for monetization and the "improvement" of the "education
experience."
(It seemed that you referenced MIT being ahead of the curve on this in
one of the previous lectures or Etherpads.)
Yes. MIT is not Columbia, indeed. Indeed, MIT is in many of
these respects unique.
I am also curious of any suggestions? It seems the zoom school problem
was not good fix and columbia couldnt care less. Thank you!
Well, I have indicated that I agree with both parts A and B.
Because your time here is limited, I therefore think that the urgent
problem is how to do as much for your learning under those conditions
as possible. Not having any truck with the popular bad answers, and
trying to instanbtiate better ones, I can do. The rest WE can do, but
I cannot do alone.
Was wondering if you could elaborate on "four more terms" above
I do not think that they will get their "normal" until 2022
fall, by which time some of the changes will have become irreversible
and the new "normal" will not be like the old "normal" in ways that
will require more long-term response. They will then be unable to
depend on the "we didn't know and we were improvising" narrative, so a
deeper intellectual reckoning will begin. Indepedent of whether my
forecast is right, have I satisfactorily explained what I am
forecasting?
I think so, thanks. was startled by the idea of zoomschool continuing
through spring of 2023
Technical question - how can I access etherpad from previous classes?
I'm also having trouble finding my journal, even though I was able to
find it via index before.
On the second, there's a search box in the upper right hand
corner. If you type your wikiname there, it will carry you. You
could also compose the URL for yourself directly:
http(s)://moglen.law.columbia.edu/wiki/ComPrivConst/YourNameJournal I
rarely bother to use links, I just type in the address bar. But
that's me. On the first, to make this easier, I'll create a ClassPads
page and keep it up to date.
Thank you very much.
How did we get lost in the 17th Century?
You took a course with someone who knows a lot about the 17th as
well as the 21st century, and add/drop period is over.
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