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Comment by claudiusd | Hacker News Reader

You're missing the point that Levison makes his last paragraph: "courts must not be allowed to consider matters of great importance under the shroud of secrecy, lest we find ourselves summarily deprived of meaningful due process".

His argument was that he could not find appropriate legal representation because of the gag order, and that the DOJ would not cooperate in kind with his legal team once assembled. Do you think his delays were too long given these constraints and the fact that he has a company to run?

If I have sympathy for Levison it's because he was intimidated into laying aside his moral beliefs. It could happen to any of us.

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His argument was that he could not find appropriate legal representation because of the gag order

If true this would be, by itself, a really really big deal. But the article doesn't seem to say that. It says he couldn't find a lawyer willing to take on his case, but he talked with "a dozen." Lawyers are the best people to ask for recommendations to other lawyers.

I imagine the conversation went something like, "I need counsel but I'm not allowed to tell you what for." What lawyer would want to be retained under those conditions.

As a software developer, I become "that computer guy" to everyone in my family. Which means I know everything about everything wrt computers.

Is this true in your experience? Do you think it's a good idea to have your run of the mill web developer creating device drivers for your embedded device?

Why then, do you think it was enough for him to simply speak with "dozens of lawyers" rather than finding one that had both knowledge and experience dealing with the specific area of the law dealing with this issue?

Lawyers are how you find references to other lawyers.

> courts must not be allowed to consider matters of great importance under the shroud of secrecy

That's his opinion, and nothing more.

As it turns out there are many great reasons for allowing courts to consider things under a shroud of secrecy.

E.g. deliberations about a warrant to search the home of an accused pedophile. The accused is innocent until proven guilty so the court would have a strong interest in not making such a warrant public (and in fact we screw this up too much already with sex-related cases IMHO).

Or in embezzlement cases, having a completely public deliberation about warrants would tip off the crooks ripping off the taxpayers into avoiding the very means of communication intended to be wiretapped.

Secret proceedings are very different. Not being able to tell somebody you need a lawyer is very different from not having court records published until later. It is disingenuous to imply they are the same.

> Not being able to tell somebody you need a lawyer is very different from not having court records published until later. It is disingenuous to imply they are the same.

Where in any of those gag orders was Levison forbidden from obtaining an attorney, or telling people he was retaining an attorney?

If you can't tell your attorney why you need him and under what conditions the case will be prosecuted, then you don't have representation. You have instead, a repressive feudal system of serfhood.

There are many possibilities between completely secret and completely public.

In the case of sex offence cases, it's common for the accused to get name suppression, so that only those present in court are aware of their identity. It's still a public trial, involving a jury of citizens.

A FISA-type court /could/ operate in a way where a jury made up of members of the public were involved in making the decisions, while being bound by the normal rules of secrecy that require them to not talk about the case outside of the court.

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