> The Supreme Court is an openly — even proudly — technophobic institution. Cameras are forbidden, which means there are no images or videos from high-profile cases, and briefs and other legal filings only recently became available at the court’s website.

Not an auspicious beginning to start this off wrong. The opposition to cameras has nothing to do with the Justices being "technophobic" (after all, video cameras have been common place throughout the Justices adult lives). It's about the possibility of oral arguments becoming part of the 24/7 soundbite news cycle.

As to the website, the slow adoption of electronic filing has been driven more by the fact that it creates a duplicate set of procedures. You still need a paper system, so that e.g. prisoners can file cert petitions on paper. So you have to add the electronic system on top of that.

As to the article's substantive points, I think the premise that the "Supreme Court justices lack an understanding of what technology means" is incorrect. For example, Riley v. California, published four years ago, recognized that cell phone searches could result in searches of materials not on the cell phone--such as photos stored on the cloud. Going back a lot further, it's hard to read Justice Stevens' 1997 opinion in Reno v. ACLU (which struck down most of the Communications Decency Act), and conclude that he didn't understand the salient aspects of how the Internet works: https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/supreme-court-decision-r....

The whole analysis of Olmdstead and Smith v. Maryland is also confused:

> Nearly 40 years later, in 1967, seven Supreme Court justices echoed Brandeis’s thinking in a decision that overturned the ruling in the Olmstead case. But in the intervening years, Taft’s interpretation was the law of the land, which meant that wiretapping without a warrant was legal.

The Olmdstead case was not based on the Justices failing to understand the implications of phone technology: by 1928 a third of Americans had phones in their households, and Justice Taft who wrote the majority opinion had grown up with telegrams and used telephones for most of his adult life. The difference between Olmdstead and Smith v. Maryland was intervening decades of liberal 4th amendment precedent that expanded it far beyond its plain text.[1]

Likewise with Scalia and Jones (the GPS case). The 4th amendment is not a general "privacy" protection. It doesn't use that word or anything like it. It addresses "searches and seizures." Lots of people want to read it broadly to prohibit government tracking, but even those people have to admit that you have to do a bit of clever lawyering to argue that e.g. taking pictures of license plates is a "search" or "seizure" of "persons, houses, papers, [or] effects." In Jones, Scalia focused on attachment of a GPS device to the defendant's car, because physical trespass onto the defendant's private property (i.e., his effects) was an easy basis for finding the existence of an illegal search. That provided a basis for deciding that case that didn't requiring buying into broader theories of the fourth amendment.[2]

[1] I personally think Olmstead was right and Smith v. Maryland was wrongly decided. Under modern 4th amendment jurisprudence, something is protected under the 4th amendment if you have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in that thing. In 1928, your phone calls were transmitted in the clear on the wires; anyone at the phone company could listen to your calls. It was objectively unreasonable to consider phone calls private.

[2] http://lawandlibertyblog.com/nyujll/2014/6/3/how-long-is-too... ("Proponents of the mosaic theory argue that at some point enough individual data collections, compiled and analyzed together, become a Fourth Amendment search.").