Creator1

After the Supreme Court struck down Chevron, suggesting that courts should defer technical and other issues to federal agencies. The idea here is that The Supreme Court is filled with people who have spent a majority of their professional lives indoors, reading books, about law. As impressive as that may seem, it’s unlikely that they’ve spent the required time to become climate experts, or air quality experts, or cyber security experts, you get the point.

What this ruling does, is says courts should rely on their own interpretation of ambiguous laws, rather than deferring to federal agencies. This unfortunately leads to situations like the one being seen in New Mexico. A case where multiple state attorney generals have sued Elon Musk and DOGE for their insecure, unprofessional, and dangerous handling access to government systems. In the initial request, the attorney’s begged Judge Chutkan to place a temporary ban on DOGE actors from being granted access to federal systems over the weekend. To which the judge didn’t understand the issue, why this had to be done before Friday on Valentines Day.

This highlights exactly why judges trained as attorneys should not be making decisions that likely should have had a cyber security expert representing the government. The state attorneys tried (in my opinion unsuccessfully) to present the idea that with IT systems, once it’s compromised, there is no easy ‘uncompromising’ it. If someone is granted access to (reads, writes, modifies, copies, prints, etc.) any data in a government system, it is very difficult or impossible to ensure that the system is 100% secure, that the data is still protected, and U.S. Citizens privacy rights were not violated. I can say as a data privacy expert, I can say you’re rights as a U.S. Person were violated by DOGE. The state attorneys showed multiple statements and past events proving that this group works on the weekend and planned to access government systems. Judge Chutkan still felt that this was not enough to grant a temporary three day pause and ensure your data was protected.

The case is still continuing, but this is just one case of many where a judge is going to be asked to give ruling without context to the importance or seriousness of issues. Perhaps the best course of action is to make becoming an attorney just a certification like a CPA, CISSP (or whatever you want) for a cybersecurity expert, a nurse, a real estate agent, etc. I understand that lawyers have to take a bar in most states, but most states also require graduating from a law school. In an overturned Chevron world, I feel this leaves judges wildly unprepared to utilize common sense in these rulings. We will see the consequences certainly on a data privacy front, but also on a personal liberties, health, transportation, and immigration issues.