Other gaffes -- in addition to Justice Sonia Sotomayor's Netflix error -- include Justice Antonin Scalia not knowing that HBO is a cable television channel, Justice Stephen Breyer making repeated references to “phonograph records,” and Justice Anthony Kennedy suggesting in a software patent case that a given chunk of computer code could be written by "any computer group of people sitting around a coffee shop" over a weekend. In a case regarding police searches of cellphones without warrants, Chief Justice John Roberts sharply questioned a lawyer who had assumed that many people carry more than one cellphone, demonstrating an evident lack of awareness that alarmed privacy experts.
Chasms in technological knowledge aren’t just found in the body of aging Supreme Court justices, but throughout government everywhere. During an April hearing to reinstate California CIO Carlos Ramos, Sen. Darrell Steinberg struggled to form a pertinent question as he referenced “mainframe” systems, and stretched the outer bounds of his computer knowledge as he attempted to differentiate between the concepts of software and hardware.
