9 ms·

Clever piece of code exposes hidden changes to Supreme Court opinions

321 points by adelevie 12y ago

konklone 12y ago
I think this is such a great example of a small bit of tech that completely changes the dynamic of how we understand the Court's work. The NYT spent a whole high-profile article highlighting the issue of a silently shifting court record. This completely removes the "silently".
- panarky 12y ago
  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.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/us/final-word-on-us-law-isnt-supreme-court-keeps-editing.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/us/final-word-on-us-law-is... http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/rlazarus/docs/articles/LazarusRichardTheNonFinalityOfSupremeCourtOpinionsFullVersion21May14.pdf http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/rlazarus/docs/articles/La...
comrh 12y ago
Another victory for opendata! Great project.
rdrdss23 12y ago
Holy shit. How is this not highly illegal? That's like if Congress started changing laws without telling anyone... And you can't really sue the guys...
- konklone 12y ago
  This is the NYT article that drew a lot of attention to the practice: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/us/final-word-on-us-law-isnt-supreme-court-keeps-editing.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/us/final-word-on-us-law-is...
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Holy shit. How is this not highly illegal? 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.
  - AaronFriel 12y ago
    I would be floored, completely bewildered, and stupefied beyond belief if any Congress other than the 113th thought they had the ability to legislate what the Supreme Court can write in its decisions. Having said that, I expect such stupidity to be debated in committee by the end of next week.
    - sp332 12y ago
      rdrdss23 asked "How is this not highly illegal?" and the simple answer dragonwriter gave is: because there's no law against it.
    - protomyth 12y ago
      "any Congress other than the 113th" 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.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > I would be floored, completely bewildered, and stupefied beyond belief if any Congress other than the 113th thought they had the ability to legislate what the Supreme Court can write in its decisions. 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.
      - mikecb 12y ago
        Your argument might be stronger if it suggested a source of authority for Congress to pass such a law.
- vilhelm_s 12y ago
  The opinions published immediately after the announcement of a decision are marked as draft and subject to change. They then undergo editing, until the official final version gets published in the U.S. Reports. (The NYT article describes this).
- rayiner 12y ago
  It's because the slip opinion (the one posted on the court's website) is not canonical. The canonical version is what's published in the U.S. Reports. The Supreme Court has a whole protocol for this: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinions.aspx 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.
  - konklone 12y ago
    It's much more important than that. Yes, the protocol says it's only for errors/deviations. In practice, the changes can be more substantial. 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.
    - walshemj 12y ago
      Quite its "the words on the paper" I once spent an hour discussing with colleagues on a business committee (plus getting expert opinions from two officials) as to the exact meaning of "the" in a motion - to rule a motion in or out. 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.
- Zelphyr 12y ago
  Yet more proof that our laws are increasingly becoming meaningless. The people at the top don't care about them but they expect us to. But, by all means, vote for a D or an R this November because, yeah; they'll change things.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- saraid216 12y ago
  > And you can't really sue the guys... You actually can. Well, you can't "sue" them, but you can impeach and remove them. It's simply never actually happened before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Chase#Impeachment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Chase#Impeachment
rmchugh 12y ago
Nice piece of work. It would be cool if you could OCR the text out of the pdfs (perhaps using ocrad.js) and push the text in as a GitHub commit. In that way, you would have a full history of all changes to a document.
- jahewson 12y ago
  The text is already embedded in the PDF files so there's no need for OCR - you won't see high-quality results with Ocrad either.
andrewfong 12y ago
If you're interested in this, you may also want to check out https://www.courtlistener.com/ https://www.courtlistener.com/, a service that regularly crawls court websites for opinions. Not sure if they show multiple versions though.
- thinkcomp 12y ago
  CourtListener sometimes has multiple versions depending on the particular court and the case. Many courts will post opinions, correct typos (and who knows what else), and then re-post them later, as new opinions or just edits. 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.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
thinkcomp 12y ago
In my case against Ben Mezrich, Judge Collings cited WikiAnswers (wiki.answers.com) to define the term non-fiction. Except that he cited a page on WikiAnswers that was off by one character from the page he intended to cite. I didn't know this, and assumed he'd just made everything up, since nothing matched what he quoted. It took me over a year--after appealing based in part on his error--to accidentally realize that the link was bad. 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=c27f9aca 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.pdf 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.pdf 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.
- thothamon 12y ago
  I'd have to agree that randomly finding something on the Internet proves little. However, for a definition of a term like "non-fiction," you're not necessarily looking for an authority, but rather just something that makes sense. (Even if you found a definition in Webster's, it carries no legal weight at all. Nor does WikiAnswers.) 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.
  - thinkcomp 12y ago
JOnAgain 12y ago
Back to paper.
ww520 12y ago
It would be a good idea to put the legal documents in a version control system. Then all the revisions can be tracked. It's time to adopt the ideas we've learned in CS to other professions.
- rayiner 12y ago
  In the future I imagine this will be the case, and official versions will be indicated by a published MD5 hash, etc. As for why it hasn't happened already . . . why does the web still run on JavaScript, a language that was obsolete the day it was designed two decades ago? Even within the tech industry, tooling moves at a glacial pace. 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.
  - lavamantis 12y ago
    In an ironic twist, this tool uses Node - which is based on JavaScript (the allegedly obsolete two-decade-old language).
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - rayiner 12y ago
      Nothing allegedly about it.
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    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.
  - Perseids 12y ago
    > In the future I imagine [...] MD5 hash > Even within the tech industry, tooling moves at a glacial pace. Oh the irony...
hyperliner 12y ago
This reminded me of an idea somebody else had of publishing everybody's votes in a federal or state election to the web. Everybody would get a unique, secret key right after voting with your voting choices. The machine would publish that key and the vote, but not your identity. You would then be able to, in the privacy of your own home, confirm that your vote has not been altered, while keeping your vote secret unless you choose to make your secret key public. Assuming enough people found discrepancies, a major revolt could be created in the event of the elections officials altering results in closely contested elections. If only we could get a transcript of legislators' or government officials' conversations with influence groups...
- CamperBob2 12y ago
  This reminded me of an idea somebody else had of publishing everybody's votes in a federal or state election to the web. Everybody would get a unique, secret key right after voting with your voting choices. The machine would publish that key and the vote, but not your identity. You would then be able to, in the privacy of your own home, confirm that your vote has not been altered, while keeping your vote secret unless you choose to make your secret key public. If you can prove you voted a certain way, that's a big problem in itself.
  - gknoy 12y ago
    For those that wonder why: Imagine organized crime saying things like, "You will prove to us that you voted this way, or we will burn down your house".
    - tptacek 12y ago
      Or, perhaps more plausibly: confirmable voting makes it much more tractable for corrupt candidates to buy votes.
      - PeterisP 12y ago
        Actually, when talking about possibilities for election fraud in contested places, threats seem much more common and plausible than simple votes-for-cash trade. It's more widespread in places with less democratic traditions, but USA history has also a fair share of examples. 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.
fiatjaf 12y ago
"Node, an application written in JavaScript"
charonn0 12y ago
There is so much potential in applying version control to legal and legislative documents. Imagine being able to git blame a bill in Congress.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Well, opencongress.org goes a long way already.
  - davidmooreppf 12y ago
    David w/ the Participatory Politics Foundation here, we created & ran OpenCongress from 2007-2013, and now it lives with the Sunlight Foundation. I wrote about version control for legislation here on OC Blog in May 2012: http://goo.gl/Ll2rDs http://goo.gl/Ll2rDs. I still think it's possible on a site like OpenCongress or GovTrack, it's possible on GitHub, and this non-profit is working on it directly w/ their MADISON platform for text annotation: http://opengovfoundation.org http://opengovfoundation.org.
- danohuiginn 12y ago
  Stefan Wehrmeyer tried this for Germany: http://okfnlabs.org/blog/2012/12/13/bundesgit-german-laws-on-github.html http://okfnlabs.org/blog/2012/12/13/bundesgit-german-laws-on... 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.
grecy 12y ago
That strikes me as eerily similar once again to 1984. The government retro-actively changes recorded history when it suits. We've always been at war with Eurasia.
Fando 12y ago
Amazing. An effective and simple way of increasing transparency and maybe even accountability. Great work!
WhoBeI 12y ago
This smells of mitigation and not patch. Simply require the supreme court to publish all their opinions, rulings and changes so that they are available to the public. We can review them... We have the technology.
stagas 12y ago
Interesting acronym, SCOTUS, in Greek[0] means darkness, blindness, obscurity. [0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CE%BA%CF%8C%CF%84%CE%BF%CF%82 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CE%BA%CF%8C%CF%84%CE%B...

321 points by adelevie 12y ago

I think this is such a great example of a small bit of tech that completely changes the dynamic of how we understand the Court's work. The NYT spent a whole high-profile article highlighting the issue of a silently shifting court record. This completely removes the "silently".

panarky 12y ago
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.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/us/final-word-on-us-law-isnt-supreme-court-keeps-editing.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/us/final-word-on-us-law-is... http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/rlazarus/docs/articles/LazarusRichardTheNonFinalityOfSupremeCourtOpinionsFullVersion21May14.pdf http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/rlazarus/docs/articles/La...

comrh 12y ago

Another victory for opendata! Great project.

rdrdss23 12y ago

Holy shit. How is this not highly illegal? That's like if Congress started changing laws without telling anyone... And you can't really sue the guys...

konklone 12y ago
This is the NYT article that drew a lot of attention to the practice: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/us/final-word-on-us-law-isnt-supreme-court-keeps-editing.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/us/final-word-on-us-law-is...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
dragonwriter 12y ago
> Holy shit. How is this not highly illegal? 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.
- AaronFriel 12y ago
  I would be floored, completely bewildered, and stupefied beyond belief if any Congress other than the 113th thought they had the ability to legislate what the Supreme Court can write in its decisions. Having said that, I expect such stupidity to be debated in committee by the end of next week.
  - sp332 12y ago
    rdrdss23 asked "How is this not highly illegal?" and the simple answer dragonwriter gave is: because there's no law against it.
  - protomyth 12y ago
    "any Congress other than the 113th" 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.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > I would be floored, completely bewildered, and stupefied beyond belief if any Congress other than the 113th thought they had the ability to legislate what the Supreme Court can write in its decisions. 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.
    - mikecb 12y ago
      Your argument might be stronger if it suggested a source of authority for Congress to pass such a law.
vilhelm_s 12y ago
The opinions published immediately after the announcement of a decision are marked as draft and subject to change. They then undergo editing, until the official final version gets published in the U.S. Reports. (The NYT article describes this).
rayiner 12y ago
It's because the slip opinion (the one posted on the court's website) is not canonical. The canonical version is what's published in the U.S. Reports. The Supreme Court has a whole protocol for this: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinions.aspx 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.
- konklone 12y ago
  It's much more important than that. Yes, the protocol says it's only for errors/deviations. In practice, the changes can be more substantial. 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.
  - walshemj 12y ago
    Quite its "the words on the paper" I once spent an hour discussing with colleagues on a business committee (plus getting expert opinions from two officials) as to the exact meaning of "the" in a motion - to rule a motion in or out. 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.
Zelphyr 12y ago
Yet more proof that our laws are increasingly becoming meaningless. The people at the top don't care about them but they expect us to. But, by all means, vote for a D or an R this November because, yeah; they'll change things.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
saraid216 12y ago
> And you can't really sue the guys... You actually can. Well, you can't "sue" them, but you can impeach and remove them. It's simply never actually happened before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Chase#Impeachment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Chase#Impeachment

rmchugh 12y ago

Nice piece of work. It would be cool if you could OCR the text out of the pdfs (perhaps using ocrad.js) and push the text in as a GitHub commit. In that way, you would have a full history of all changes to a document.

jahewson 12y ago
The text is already embedded in the PDF files so there's no need for OCR - you won't see high-quality results with Ocrad either.

andrewfong 12y ago

If you're interested in this, you may also want to check out https://www.courtlistener.com/ https://www.courtlistener.com/, a service that regularly crawls court websites for opinions. Not sure if they show multiple versions though.

thinkcomp 12y ago
CourtListener sometimes has multiple versions depending on the particular court and the case. Many courts will post opinions, correct typos (and who knows what else), and then re-post them later, as new opinions or just edits. 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.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

thinkcomp 12y ago

In my case against Ben Mezrich, Judge Collings cited WikiAnswers (wiki.answers.com) to define the term non-fiction. Except that he cited a page on WikiAnswers that was off by one character from the page he intended to cite. I didn't know this, and assumed he'd just made everything up, since nothing matched what he quoted. It took me over a year--after appealing based in part on his error--to accidentally realize that the link was bad. 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=c27f9aca 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.pdf 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.pdf 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.

thothamon 12y ago
I'd have to agree that randomly finding something on the Internet proves little. However, for a definition of a term like "non-fiction," you're not necessarily looking for an authority, but rather just something that makes sense. (Even if you found a definition in Webster's, it carries no legal weight at all. Nor does WikiAnswers.) 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.
- thinkcomp 12y ago

JOnAgain 12y ago

Back to paper.

ww520 12y ago

It would be a good idea to put the legal documents in a version control system. Then all the revisions can be tracked. It's time to adopt the ideas we've learned in CS to other professions.

rayiner 12y ago
In the future I imagine this will be the case, and official versions will be indicated by a published MD5 hash, etc. As for why it hasn't happened already . . . why does the web still run on JavaScript, a language that was obsolete the day it was designed two decades ago? Even within the tech industry, tooling moves at a glacial pace. 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.
- lavamantis 12y ago
  In an ironic twist, this tool uses Node - which is based on JavaScript (the allegedly obsolete two-decade-old language).
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - rayiner 12y ago
    Nothing allegedly about it.
- nitrogen 12y ago
  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.
- Perseids 12y ago
  > In the future I imagine [...] MD5 hash > Even within the tech industry, tooling moves at a glacial pace. Oh the irony...

hyperliner 12y ago

This reminded me of an idea somebody else had of publishing everybody's votes in a federal or state election to the web. Everybody would get a unique, secret key right after voting with your voting choices. The machine would publish that key and the vote, but not your identity. You would then be able to, in the privacy of your own home, confirm that your vote has not been altered, while keeping your vote secret unless you choose to make your secret key public. Assuming enough people found discrepancies, a major revolt could be created in the event of the elections officials altering results in closely contested elections. If only we could get a transcript of legislators' or government officials' conversations with influence groups...

CamperBob2 12y ago
This reminded me of an idea somebody else had of publishing everybody's votes in a federal or state election to the web. Everybody would get a unique, secret key right after voting with your voting choices. The machine would publish that key and the vote, but not your identity. You would then be able to, in the privacy of your own home, confirm that your vote has not been altered, while keeping your vote secret unless you choose to make your secret key public. If you can prove you voted a certain way, that's a big problem in itself.
- gknoy 12y ago
  For those that wonder why: Imagine organized crime saying things like, "You will prove to us that you voted this way, or we will burn down your house".
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Or, perhaps more plausibly: confirmable voting makes it much more tractable for corrupt candidates to buy votes.
    - PeterisP 12y ago
      Actually, when talking about possibilities for election fraud in contested places, threats seem much more common and plausible than simple votes-for-cash trade. It's more widespread in places with less democratic traditions, but USA history has also a fair share of examples. 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.

fiatjaf 12y ago

"Node, an application written in JavaScript"

charonn0 12y ago

There is so much potential in applying version control to legal and legislative documents. Imagine being able to git blame a bill in Congress.

icebraining 12y ago
Well, opencongress.org goes a long way already.
- davidmooreppf 12y ago
  David w/ the Participatory Politics Foundation here, we created & ran OpenCongress from 2007-2013, and now it lives with the Sunlight Foundation. I wrote about version control for legislation here on OC Blog in May 2012: http://goo.gl/Ll2rDs http://goo.gl/Ll2rDs. I still think it's possible on a site like OpenCongress or GovTrack, it's possible on GitHub, and this non-profit is working on it directly w/ their MADISON platform for text annotation: http://opengovfoundation.org http://opengovfoundation.org.
danohuiginn 12y ago
Stefan Wehrmeyer tried this for Germany: http://okfnlabs.org/blog/2012/12/13/bundesgit-german-laws-on-github.html http://okfnlabs.org/blog/2012/12/13/bundesgit-german-laws-on... 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.

grecy 12y ago

That strikes me as eerily similar once again to 1984. The government retro-actively changes recorded history when it suits. We've always been at war with Eurasia.

Fando 12y ago

Amazing. An effective and simple way of increasing transparency and maybe even accountability. Great work!

WhoBeI 12y ago

This smells of mitigation and not patch. Simply require the supreme court to publish all their opinions, rulings and changes so that they are available to the public. We can review them... We have the technology.

stagas 12y ago

Interesting acronym, SCOTUS, in Greek[0] means darkness, blindness, obscurity. [0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CE%BA%CF%8C%CF%84%CE%BF%CF%82 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CE%BA%CF%8C%CF%84%CE%B...