Raging about data leaks, even at SCOTUS, misses the point

July 26, 2022

 Weird headline today: Chief Justice John Roberts, if I didn't find this hard to believe from our nation's top judicial officer, almost complaining? - to the public? about the leak of the draft Dobbs decision, and how the leak impacted his internal politicking on the Supreme Court to get someone else to support upholding the Roe v. Wade decision.

This is weird, because as far as the leak of the draft decision goes, it's not like the Supreme Court was robbed like Mitt Romney of his tax returns. It was an internal leak. 

And all I can say from my own personal experience is that when I was leading organizations - clubs and so on - when something like this happened I was very careful not to offload that responsibility and/or blame on the public who received that breach of information security and so on. 

At the end of the day, it was somebody at the Supreme Court who had access to the draft decision who decided to leak the draft, because of their own moral compunction - and that is an internal matter from the perspective of Chief Justice Roberts, or at least it should be. 

In fact, this comment can be generalized. Raging about data leaks misses the point. Take this Assange case too, for example, ostensibly also about leaked documents. In both these cases, no one is focusing enough attention on the fact that there were employees of these institutions on the inside that were disgusted enough over the actions of the institutions at which they worked that they made a choice to expose that which they saw as wrongdoing. We can distinguish this from data hacks and data theft. The most important consideration for me when I see that an institution or organization experienced a data leak, is, what are they doing to fix themselves internally, not even in terms of data security, but in terms of morale. If I could give Chief Justice Roberts any advice here, I would say to him to consider that a human being under SCOTUS's employ made a choice to leak this draft decision, and he should consider, to the degree of his responsibility, what that says about morale at the Court vis-a-vis its decisions. Blaming the public or just raging about it is not the way.