Judge Brings Shame on North Dakota

A judge in North Dakota recently ruled that sharing the details of public queries (in this case, running host -l on a DNS server connected to the public Internet or simply doing a WHOIS lookup) is illegal in that state. This was just a civil case, but it could be used as a precedent in the on-going criminal case. It is clear that the judge has little knowledge of how the Internet works, and was not willing to have an expert witness explain it to him, as he dismissed an "authentication" argument. Internet-related court cases are becoming more and more common, so I suggest that the good people of North Dakota ask for new judges before it's too late.