Judge Richard Posner is indisputably one of the most renowned jurists of the modern era, and deservedly so. Even he gets things wrong , though, and when he does, well, I’ll let Cory Doctorow explain further:

Speaking at a Georgetown law cybercrime conference, 7th circuit judge Richard Posner made a series of conscience-shocking, technologically illiterate statements about privacy that baffle and infuriate, starting with: “if the NSA wants to vacuum all the trillions of bits of information that are crawling through the electronic worldwide networks, I think that’s fine.”

Posner went on to say that privacy is “mainly about trying to improve your social and business opportunities by concealing the sorts of bad activities that would cause other people not to want to deal with you.”

On the idea of default full-disk encryption, he added “I’m shocked at the thought that a company would be permitted to manufacture an electronic product that the government would not be able to search.” Continue reading →