Slashdot Mirror
Big Brother To Watch Judges?
One week from today, the U.S. Judicial Conference will decide whether judges and their staff can handle grown-up responsibilities like ... using the internet. No, you did not click onto The Onion by mistake: after heated
disagreement
earlier this year, the issue is coming to a head. Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has
a great Wall Street Journal opinion piece, today only. (It wants your email; try
me@privacy.net.)
Jeffrey Rosen's
analysis in TNR
is another good take on it. If you don't think the men and women who hold people's lives in their hands need daddy and mommy looking over their shoulder, you might take a moment to fire off a quick, polite email
per the EFF's suggestion.
If surveillance can invade a judge's workplace, it's for damnsure
there's nothing keeping it out of yours.
Cryptome has a posting showing the porn mpg download logs from a court computer. Its a letter from the court's administrative offices to one of the chief judges, giving the IP (and who's assigned to it) of the downloader.
.vbs and maybe other executables, but since mpgs don't (yet) contain virses and trojans horses, they *ARE* safe to download.
The downloads were at lunchtime, but jeeze, there are a lot of downloads. It looks like it was some sort of sharing software involved, by the looks of the filenames and the IP numbers.
The letter is from the adminstrative offices of the court to a chief judge, indicating the IP and registered owner of that IP. The log was captured as part of their "security intrusion detection" system because of the large volume of traffic. Sounds a little funny-- the volume of traffic is going the wrong way to be a massive data leak. I wonder how the judges like this "security" precaution being used to spy on them.
The administrative office goes on to complain about sexually-oriented websites are likely to contain "computer viruses, trojan horses, and other harmful products". First off, the administrator didn't notice that these weren't websites, and second, all the files were videos. A decent security system would have blocked
Sure, I'd be weirded out if someone was doing their thing to porn in the office next door, but it doesn't take a porn download to enable that sort of behavior. Besides, by the quantity of the downloads, it doesn't look like there was much time to view them.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
My ongoing complaint about the YRO articles is that whatever is currently being proposed is always ridiculed in favor of something else. Government regulation? Schools and libraries should set policies. Schools and libraries restricting access? It should be up to parents. Parents take responsibility? How dare they!
In this case, I would be extremely reluctant to join a workplace that monitored my computer usage. But unlike the hypocritical, dishonest bigots who edit Slashdot, I recognize the real issues here and I'm curious to hear what people think is an equitable way to deal with them.
Unfortunately, the reality is that workers in the judicial offices are not capable of policing themselves. ("A letter Lee sent on March 5 contains a list of all the movies accessed by a particular user between 12:12 p.m. and 1:35 p.m., including /bigtits/bix/mer021/3.mpg and /personal4/fuckmovie/asian/07.mpg. ")
It seems to me the issues are:
it's also all the employees of the Judicial branch. That includes court reporters, deputies, secretaries, administrators, receptionists, law clerks (my wife is actually a clerk for Judge Rosenbaum who is quoted in the editorial, and I got an email from her about 2 minutes before I saw the slashdot piece...wonder if someone reviewed the email before it went out???) all the way up to Chief Judge William Rehnquist. This is a pretty invasive policy.
Boston Public Library Departments Reference Desks, our Regional and
/ stories
Massachusetts Library of Last Recourse, so called, have forwarded
to City Hall some reference requests for public records
managed by our public library.
It's an attempt to be a kind of deterrent for public library users and
contrary to the usual expected discretion for BPL Departmental Reference Desk services.
oo__ dWs
Guide to Problematical Boston Public Library Use
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.com
http://saklad.org
It's a trade off. Judges were given long-term / permanent appointments exactly because we wanted them to be free of the restraints of having to run for re-election and fight public opinion. If they have to pander to public opinion then they might not do what they believe to be morally and ethically right when it conflicts with what a majority of the people want. It would a bad thing for the guardians of the rule of law to be compromising their ethics to ensure re-election.
Furthermore judges can only interpret the law. While this can have large implications, it's not the same as if they can decree martial law is in effect or pass taxes to raise money for themselves. The founders of our democracy decided that benevolent dictators with limited power were good for the republic.
The important thing is to make sure that only good honest people get to be judges in the first place. As an additional safe guard, the heirarchy of the judicial system ensures that only judges who consistently make intelligent reasonable rulings will advance in stature.
Sorry forgot the url to the letter about the pornographic mpegs in question that started this mess.
http://cryptome.org/aousc-porn.htm
Agreed. I work for a certain Federal Agency (no, not that one), and everyday I log on to my machine, I have to click past a disclaimer similar to the Prison Bureau one mentioned in the WSJ article. Yet another example of rights being violated for the sake of some etheral "safety" concept. Wvderfvl.
Some of us have fallen in love with the notion of giving without reserve-Raoul Vanegiem, Revolution of Everyday Life
Furthermore judges can only interpret the law. While this can have large implications, it's not the same as if they can decree martial law is in effect or pass taxes to raise money for themselves.
This actually happened in Missouri. If I recall correctly, Kansas City was not budgeting enough money to pay for a court-ordered desegregation effort, so the Federal judge sitting on the bench imposed a sales tax on Kansas City with orders that the proceeds from the tax be used to pay for this court-ordered desegregation.
This was very recently, too--in just the last few years.
The decision was later found to be grossly unconstitutional by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, but the damage had already been done.
When John Ashcroft was being grilled for his Attorney General confirmation hearings, he took a lot of flak (primarily from Democrats) for his statement that the number one threat to the Constitution and public liberty was ``judicial tyranny''. A lot of people screamed bloody murder that we couldn't approve Ashcroft as A.G., that he didn't trust the courts.
How could he?
John Ashcroft was the Governor of Missouri at the time this half-baked crock in a robe usurped the Constitution and passed his own tax on the citizens of Missouri.
TO: karen_siegel@aol.uscourts.gov
Dear Ms. Siegel and members of the Judicial Conference:
Please forward my comments on this matter to all members of the Judicial Conference.
I am writing to express my concern about the current proposals before the conference dealing with the monitoring of judicial employee communications.
Openness and privacy play vital roles in a great deal of court business. For instance, if the testimony used to convict an individual were to be kept secret it would undermine both the appearance of justice and the actual fact of justice (RARE special exceptions involving issues such as national security notwithstanding). If a judge were to hold lengthy, substantive conversations with a plaintiff's attorney without involving or permitting any counter by the defense, it would be unfair and unjust.
On the other side, if a defendant's privileged discussions with their lawyer, or between two attorneys on a defense team were to be published in the newspaper, it would undermine the court process. If the comments made by jurors during jury deliberations were available to the public, many a decision would be questioned or even thrown out.
I hope no more arguments are needed to substantiate my point that the decisions of what part of the legal process should be public and what should be private are vital ones which lie at the heart of the just functioning of our entire legal system. Over thousands of years we have developed a code for addressing these issues, and it has NOT included pervasive monitoring of judges and judicial staff, which might, or might not, become part of the public record. Even if it did not, the behavior of that staff, in their selection of what kinds of information to seek out would certainly be influenced. I think that to introduce such monitoring is unwise, but I am CERTAIN that to introduce it suddenly, without EXTENSIVE deliberation and consideration of its effects on the entire judicial system would be dangerous.
In addition to this main point, I would like to mention two other reasons why I believe that this proposed policy is misguided. One is that there is little evidence to indicate that monitoring is needed. Judge Kozinski's article in the Wall Street Journal (with which I am sure you are familiar) expresses this point quite effectively. And lastly, I feel that this is a terrible precedent to set for all workplaces. If the employees of our judicial system cannot be trusted to perform their jobs without pervasive, "Big Brother" style monitoring, then WHO CAN? And if they cannot be trusted without such monitoring, then how can they be trusted with the much more delicate and vital job of rendering justice?
I urge you to consider these issues in your decision. I would be willing to testify or to discuss such issues at further length if you feel it would be helpful, please contact me if you feel this would be desirable.
Sincerely,
Michael B Chermside
xxxx xxxxx xxxxx Ave
Chicago IL 60660
Phone: xxx-xxx-xxxx
The cameras are coming. They're getting smaller and nothing will stop them. The only question is: who watches whom?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.