None of that surprises me. Courts run on internal trust.
Not really. All of those are policy and procedure weaknesses. The technical infrastructure is about as secure as it can be. The most likely culprit is going to be someone with access that really didn’t need it or someone with legitimate need access that decided to pull a Snowden.
Dollars to donuts that several teams have gone through the user list with their Least Privilege Access clubs and thinned the ranks considerably.
It was not surprising yo me either. In fact it was exactly what I predicted in this thread back in May.
Your, “I would be shocked to learn there are any serious issues,” was directly in response to my comment about document control policy.
We have now learned that the document control policy was out of date and full of holes.
If it was a Court employee, or someone who had access to an employee’s home, that person was able to act with impunity because of inadequate security with respect to the movement of hard copy documents from the Court to home, the absence of mechanisms to track print jobs on Court printers and copiers, and other gaps in security or policies.
But implementing and enforcing rigorous IT security policies and procedures are as much a part of cybersecurity as the “technical infrastructure.” The human interface is often the weak point in IT security, and it’s disingenuous to claim a system is secure based only on the hardware and software. It doesn’t do any good to design the world’s most secure bank vault if the tellers keep the combination on a sticky note by the door.
You are correct I misunderstood and was focusing entirely on the technical aspect of the issue. Apologies.
Probably 90% of the time…
I remain surprised that it seems like a lot of the legal world seems to be buying the pearl-clutching from the SCOTUS. They’ve been giving an enormous amount of access to the media and advocacy groups on internal court negotiations througout most of the Roberts Court. And it doesn’t take a legal genius to figure out that the reasoning on rulings like Dobbs is extremely motivated and has been carefully engineered to allow the conservatives to craft the precedent they want.
It’s been obvious for a while that on very high profile cases the justices act like legislators angling each other including using the media to sway opinions. All they had before the leak was the faintest sliver of plausible deniability, and apparently to a lot of the media that follows legal issues they’ve somehow managed to maintain it even after this ruling and the leak.
Some more detail just landed regarding this. It does not answer the question in the OP but more fuel for the fire:
That was pretty obvious from the start.
Certainly it was speculated but now it seems verified and lends more credence that it was leaked by the conservative side of the court.
That strongly suggests someone on the conservative side of things, who was worried about it getting watered down.
Seems like the Deep State = the right.
a body of people, typically influential members of government agencies or the military, believed to be involved in the secret manipulation or control of government policy.