Legal News

A Look Back at Judge Kozinski?s Attack on Monitoring Court Computers

By Dan Slater

Earlier today the L.A. Times reported that Judge Alex Kozinski posted sexually explicit material to a personal Web site. (See this post.) The article said the site was not maintained on work computers.

Judge Kozinski does have some views on government monitoring of federal court employees’ computers. In a brouhaha over the issue seven years ago, the Administrative Office of the federal courts attempted to install a system that monitored the computers of all federal court workers. The move met vigorous opposition from the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, including Judge Kozinski. (See this NYT article.)

He argued that the monitoring was a violation of an anti-wiretap statute. Here’s an open letter to federal judges that Kozinski wrote at the time.

The Federal Judges Association, a group that represents about 85 percent of the nation’s 1,800 federal judges, voted to adopt a resolution opposing the monitoring program, according to a NYT article then.

Under this pressure, the NYT reported, head of the Administrative Office, Ralph Mecham, dropped the monitoring program, but not without stirring the pot with Kozinski. Mecham told the NYT that Kozinski was ”advocating his passionate views that judges are free, undetected, to download pornography and Napster music on government computers in federal court buildings on government time even though some of the downloading may constitute felonies.” He also said Judge Kozinski had shown ”great interest in keeping pornography available to judges.”

Judge Kozinski said ”I don’t think we need bureaucrats in Washington looking over our shoulders for this kind of thing.” Others criticized Mecham’s comments as inappropriate.

Wednesday, a court spokeswoman, Cathy Catterson, said: “Clearly back in 2001, it was for the principle of the issue. It was talking about the court’s computers. This is a totally separate thing. The computer was a family computer, maintained at home by one of his sons. It was not the property of the government. All the family uses it.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 11, 2008 (boomark / email).