
Clever piece of code exposes hidden changes to Supreme Court opinions - adelevie
http://gigaom.com/2014/06/12/clever-piece-of-code-exposes-hidden-changes-to-supreme-court-opinions/
======
konklone
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

      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-
is...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/us/final-word-on-us-law-isnt-supreme-
court-keeps-editing.html)

[http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/rlazarus/docs/articles/La...](http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/rlazarus/docs/articles/LazarusRichardTheNonFinalityOfSupremeCourtOpinionsFullVersion21May14.pdf)

------
ww520
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
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.

~~~
jacquesm
> official versions will be indicated by a published MD5 hash

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.

[http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-
ca/](http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/)

~~~
heroprotagonist
Although MD5 has known collision issues, using an MD5 collision to alter the
text of the document in a specific manner is highly unlikely. This is not as
trivial as simply generating some random bits of data that result in the same
signature when hashed.

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)

~~~
jacquesm
I know it is not trivial but to start off with a known broken hash would be a
big mistake in my opinion. There have been some pretty impressive demos
regarding this.

[http://cryptography.hyperlink.cz/MD5_collisions.html](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'.

------
hyperliner
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
_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
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
Or, perhaps more plausibly: confirmable voting makes it much more tractable
for corrupt candidates to buy votes.

~~~
PeterisP
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.

~~~
mogrim
Even "ordinary" elections have a similar risk to Crimea in some parts of the
world - if I lived in the Basque Country in Spain, and voted for the
(mainstream, right wing) Partido Popular I wouldn't necessarily want that to
be published.

------
rmchugh
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
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.

------
charonn0
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
Well, opencongress.org goes a long way already.

~~~
davidmooreppf
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).

------
stagas
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%B...](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CE%BA%CF%8C%CF%84%CE%BF%CF%82)

------
rdrdss23
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...

~~~
rayiner
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.

~~~
rdrdss23
Well that's a lot more reasonable - but it seems like they should just hold
off on publishing the thing till they finish editing it. The system seems a
bit sloppy

~~~
rayiner
A Supreme Court opinion has several functions: 1) it resolves a real live
dispute between two parties; 2) it gives guidance to the other federal courts;
3) it serves as a statement of the law to the public.

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.

------
thinkcomp
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...](http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/download.html?id=34312001&z=c27f9aca)

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.O.pdf)
[http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/sites/ca1/files/01-13-90016.J.pd...](http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/sites/ca1/files/01-13-90016.J.pdf)

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
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
The OED is pretty widely regarded as an authority when it comes to defining
terms. It doesn't tend to change very much over time for any given term, which
is important, in contrast to a wiki.

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.

------
andrewfong
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
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.

------
WhoBeI
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.

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

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comrh
Another victory for opendata! Great project.

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JOnAgain
Back to paper.

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grecy
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.

------
fiatjaf
"Node, an application written in JavaScript"

