While a state court in Connecticut may be fine with you tweeting from the courtroom via your phone, you might not be allowed to bring your smartphone into federal courtrooms at all. Apparently the Administrative Office of the Courts is arguing that smartphones should be banned completely from federal court houses, because they might hide bombs. Really? I mean, can't we at least have a TSA style grope and scan before we write off all smartphones? David Kravets, the author of the article linked above, highlights how different federal courthouses seem to take very different views on technology these days:

At the District of Columbia federal courthouse, which is home to the lower courts and the U.S. Court of Appeals, I had to check my cellphone at the door two weeks ago. And in the Los Angeles federal courthouse, I was ordered, by a judge, to turn off the Wi-Fi signal emitted from my HTC Evo in December.

But in San Francisco, the judiciary allows Wi-Fi connected computing inside its courtrooms, from either a cellphone or a computer. Live blogging or tweeting is commonplace there.

That is the status quo with the ongoing Barry Bonds criminal trial in San Francisco. What’s more, the San Francisco federal courthouse even provides free Wi-Fi in many courtrooms.

It seems like that's going significantly overboard to claim that we should ban all smartphones just because some people might misuse them.

It's been somewhat amusing watching as various folks overreacted to the rise of cameraphones over the past few years, with some companies banning them entirely, and a few clueless industry analysts insisting that they were just a fad that should be banned from any workplace. However, as cameraphones have become much more common, it seems that this mass hysteria is, thankfully, dying down. Over in Connecticut, they've even backed down on a rule that banned cameraphones in the court room. You're still not allowed to use them, but the courts realized now that nearly every mobile phone is a cameraphone, that it was becoming ridiculously time consuming to stop everyone from entering the courthouse, and make them tag and bag every mobile phone for storage and later pickup. Apparently, the lines to get into the courthouse were getting rather long.