He may not be a member of the computer-owning public. The article refers to him as "Senior U.S. District Judge Henry Coke Morgan Jr.". Senior status is not a title like Senior Engineer[1]. Rather, it means that he is actually semi-retired: He is paid his pension and travel expenses and has discretion over which cases to take. For example, there is one judge that is basically retired and lives on Cape Cod. However, he occasionally holds court down there in order to handle traffic cases for those caught speeding on federal land so that they don't have to go up to Boston. Judges on Senior status often decide to not do sentencing and they pretty much universally decline to hear Child Porn cases.
There is some fraction of Senior Status judges who don't use Outlook or Gmail but rather have their secretaries print their emails, they handwrite the responses, and their secretaries type up their emails and send them.
Considering all of this and the fact that he was born in 1935[2], he may genuinely believe that if he has a home computer that infection with viruses and weird pop-ups is inevitable.
Sources:
[1] a talk given at the Haystack Observatory by the Clerk of Court for the District of Massachusetts
Edit:
Of course, this isn't the majority of judges by any means. Many of them are comfortable writing opinions from their iPad while at an airport. Also, consider Scalia's opinion in Riley v. California, which this opinion would seem to directly contradict (once I can actually find the pdf...)
I was involved in a drawn out litigation over discovery once as a technical SME. Our attorney and the rest of us were very nearly held in contempt for not producing material.
Turns out the judge, in whose chambers there was a picture of him on an all-American football team in the 1960s, was dumbfounded that a DVD could contain 80,000 emails and about 30,000 other documents. The opposing counsel, equally aged, agreed.
We were literally saved by lunch -- we were able to track down the judges clerk and get her to translate.
Hi, I found your comment by ctrl+f for 1935 (and 80, 81: his current age).
Yep, I agree. While I hesitate to participate in age-based discrimination, my gut feeling on this is that he simply isn't qualified to make a ruling about the nature of digital privacy.
>Edit: Of course, this isn't the majority of judges by any means. Many of them are comfortable writing opinions from their iPad while at an airport. Also, consider Scalia's opinion in Riley v. California, which this opinion would seem to directly contradict (once I can actually find the pdf...)
He may not be a member of the computer-owning public. The article refers to him as "Senior U.S. District Judge Henry Coke Morgan Jr.". Senior status is not a title like Senior Engineer[1]. Rather, it means that he is actually semi-retired: He is paid his pension and travel expenses and has discretion over which cases to take. For example, there is one judge that is basically retired and lives on Cape Cod. However, he occasionally holds court down there in order to handle traffic cases for those caught speeding on federal land so that they don't have to go up to Boston. Judges on Senior status often decide to not do sentencing and they pretty much universally decline to hear Child Porn cases.
There is some fraction of Senior Status judges who don't use Outlook or Gmail but rather have their secretaries print their emails, they handwrite the responses, and their secretaries type up their emails and send them.
Considering all of this and the fact that he was born in 1935[2], he may genuinely believe that if he has a home computer that infection with viruses and weird pop-ups is inevitable.
Sources:
[1] a talk given at the Haystack Observatory by the Clerk of Court for the District of Massachusetts
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Coke_Morgan,_Jr.
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Edit: Of course, this isn't the majority of judges by any means. Many of them are comfortable writing opinions from their iPad while at an airport. Also, consider Scalia's opinion in Riley v. California, which this opinion would seem to directly contradict (once I can actually find the pdf...)