Government lawyers don’t understand the Internet. That’s a problem.

[Commentary] The government’s lawyers are struggling to grasp the increasingly technical cases that come before them. Both federal prosecutors and the attorneys who represent executive agencies in court are bungling lawsuits across the country because they don’t understand what they’re talking about. Too few lawyers have the skill set or the specialized knowledge to make sense of code, networks and the people who use them, and too few law schools are telling them what they need to know. “It would be enormously helpful to have a deeper bench of lawyers with technical backgrounds,” says Susan Hennessey, a Brookings Institution fellow and former National Security Agency lawyer. This situation is stymieing criminal investigations, upending innocents’ lives and making it harder to set legal boundaries around mass-surveillance programs. The result is that, when it comes to technology, justice is increasingly out of reach.

Today, cyber, data and privacy questions lie at the core of numerous corporate and government cases, and there aren’t anywhere near enough practicing lawyers who can adequately understand the complex issues involved, let alone who can sufficiently explain them in court or advise investigators on how to build a successful case. “This is a problem that pervades all of the national security apparatus,” says Alvaro Bedoya, who previously worked as the chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law, and now leads Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology. “You don’t have a pipeline of lawyers right now who can read code.”

[Garrett Graff is the former editor of Politico Magazine, and is a leading authority on national security, technology, and politics]