Handicapping the US Supreme Court: Can We Get Rich by Forceful Browsing?

Presented at DEF CON 19 (2011), Aug. 6, 2011, 6:30 p.m. (20 minutes).

Using only script-kiddie skills, it may be possible to handicap the outcome of decisions of national importance. This talk presents a walk-though of a project to make more accurate predictions of US Supreme Court case outcomes. That could be a useful thing, if you had something at stake. Conventional techniques for predicting outcomes rely on legal expertise and knowledge of the policy issues at stake in a case and the justices' voting records. Forget all that: we're going to see what we can do with perl and XML transcripts of oral arguments. It's only 20 minutes of your life, but it might equip you to astound your lawyer friends, or make some canny investments.

Presenters:

• Foofus
  For nearly fifteen years, Foofus has worked in network security, spending most of that time leading the charming and intelligent foofus.net team of penetration testers. Prior research has dealt with software security and trust relationships between systems in large networked environments. In more recent times, Foofus has been enjoying law school, and in particular, finding ways to apply hacker techniques to legal studies.

Links:

• https://defcon.org/html/defcon-19/dc-19-speakers.html#Foofus
• https://infocon.org/cons/DEF CON/DEF CON 19/DEF CON 19 video and slides/DEF CON 19 - Foofus - Handicapping the US Supreme Court Can We Get Rich by Forceful Browsing - Video and Slides.mp4 (Video and Slides)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU8SG-Tdzgg