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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.
I'm not sure I'd call it a great opinion piece. It's good that someone's taking issue with judicial workplace privacy invasion. It'd be a great piece if he talked to the larger issue of any employee's right to privacy. It's kind of ironic that BOFH policies hit the news with judges, but what about the rest of us?
I have a friend who is a circuit court judge. A couple of years ago his IT department began monitoring and limiting his Internet access.
His solution? He bought a dial-up account and had an analog phone line installed in his courthouse office.
So, how come it's OK for a /. editor to suggest a bogus email address for the WSJ registration, but it's not OK for a /. editor to automatically change the NYT links to be registration-free? Don't both of those actions subvert the normal registration process, and don't they both have privacy implications? It seems like /. should just get a consistent policy on this sort of thing, and stick with it.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
If surveillance can invade a judge's workplace, it's for damnsure there's nothing keeping it out of yours.
Well, if I could play the role of devil's advocate for a moment:
It is more significant if a judge is surfing for illegal pr0n or warez on the job than some average luser. Is it so wrong to hold the guarantors of justice to a higher standard?
Who guards the guards?
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Just because it's legal doesn't make it right. I once refused to use company equipment for exactly this reason. I used my own laptop, my private e-mail (over a secure link), and my own cell-phone. The company didn't like this, but my contract didn't say I had to use their stuff, nor did it say I had to submit to monitoring.
I've contracted for many companies, and I've never had to submit to monitoring. I spend enough of my life (way more than 40 hours/week) at work that I feel quite justified in using some of that time for personal business.
My experience has been that the companies that insist on monitoring employees also tend to be the ones with the worst moral and the least compentent management. Of course that doesn't prove a causal relationship, but I doubt it's a coincidence.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
I work at a large inventment bank, where many employees have access to information that other employees do not. And, I suppose that whoever has the job of snooping on people's email, etc. would have access to all of this proprietary or client information. But that's not stopping them from having the policy.
Is the outcome of this struggle amongst judges really going to have any effect on the rest of us in the private sector?
That may not be accurate.
http://www.usc.edu/isd/policies/general/
(see sections 1.4 and 3.3)
"No prints can come from fingers / If machines become our hands." -- Jack Johnson
I can't support monitoring of the on-line activities of members of the judiciary, not because I have problems with monitoring in general (which I do, but that's another issue) but because it represents our first tentitive steps onto a slippery slope which has the potential of being the root cause of many great miscarages of justice.
Monitoring opens the door for filtering, which by definition operates with the sole purpose of preventing access to certain information. It is an exceedingly dangerour proposition, to suggest that Judges should be prevented from recieving certain information, as a matter of law, however this bears a little explaining. I'm not prtoposing that preventing judges from viewing pornography while they contemplate a legal decision is nessecerily a bad thing, but merely having the capability to filter what a judge sees opens the door to the potential risk of the abuse of the technology. Granted, monitoring is not filtering, but again, it's a slippery slope. Slippery slope arguments are difficult to make because you come off as though you're tilting at windmills, however, I think any technically knowlegable person can see the risks here.
This decision has been a long time in coming. Earlier this year Judge wrote an article in the Green Bag Law Journal called In Defense of the Hard Drive in response to proposals then to monitor the office PCs of members of the judiciary. It seems that proposal has been expanded to an unbelievable degree at this point.
On the bright side, there is a new grounds for appeal for every case brought before any court where this proposed system is implemented. Essentially, the argument could be made that undue influence was excerted over the court by those who monitor the proposed monitoring system; that judges will be hesitant to seek out information theough communications systems made available to him for that specific purpose in his/her chambers.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Has anyone else at any company of any size (>100 employees) seen anything along these lines? Simply asking employees to cut down Internet use and the employees did? Or any studies about this?
It sounds kinda odd to me. My reason for asking: I had never had any hesitations installing censorware for my employer to cut down on wasting bandwidth. But if asking actually works for >100 people, (ideally several documented cases) then I'll rethink my stance..
All other fedral employees already get to see this (DoDs warning) every time they log on and on every web page:
"THIS IS A DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE (DoD) COMPUTER SYSTEM. This computer system, including all related equipment, networks and network devices (specifically including internet access), are provided only for authorized U.S. Government use. DoD computer systems may be monitored for all lawful purposes, including to ensure that their use is authorized, for management of the system, to facilitate protection against unauthorized access, and to verify security procedures, survivability and operational security. Monitoring includes active attacks by authorized DoD entities to test or verify the security of this system. During monitoring, information may be examined, recorded, copied and used for authorized purposes. All information, including personal information, placed on or sent over this system may be monitored. Use of this DoD computer system, authorized or unauthorized, constitutes consent to monitoring of this system. Unauthorized use may subject you to criminal prosecution. EVIDENCE OF UNAUTHORIZED USE COLLECTED DURING THIS MONITORING MAY BE USED FOR ADMINISTRATIVE, CRIMINAL OR ADVERSE ACTION. USE OF THIS SYSTEM CONSTITUTES CONSENT TO MONITORING FOR THESE PURPOSES."
No joke here; I don't understand.
I read slashdot all the time, and there is always an article about how some judge has ruled in favor of a wealthy entity's right to take away the privacy of an individual, followed by posts from libertarians saying that its okay that individuals don't have privacy rights in "the real world" as long as they do in theory.
That's fine. That's good. That's slashdot. I love it.
But now we have a situation where the Judges' rights to privacy are in jeopardy. And it seems most people are rallying to their defense. Send letters! Send email! Fight for their right to privacy!
I don't get it. This is almost Shakespearean irony - judges being forced to endure the consequences of an environment that they themselves helped to create. Perhaps the best way for them to see the results of their rulings on individual privacy is for them to experience what it is like to be deprived of that privacy. Why would we interfere with poetic justice?
DJS
God is real unless declared integer
One point from Kozinski's article that hasn't been appreciate here so far is that federal judges do not have bosses. They do not have people who can tell them how they do their work or what hours they work or anything else similar. A higher court can tell a lower court that it was wrong and reverse it. The people of the United States can even amend the constitution, or Congress can amend a law.
A federal judge is appointed for life. Sure, Congress can remove him for bad behavior, but that has been applied as doing illegal things not how the judge ruminates about the case, or with whom. The system is designed to protect the ability of these individuals to make independent judgments. Courts of appeal provide the accountability, not putting the individuals under a microscope.
A judge cannot operate in a vacuum. He needs clerks, secretaries, and the like to do his job. Monitoring them can be like monitoring him. The judicial conference's monitoring plan is a genuine intrusion into the independence of federal judges that should be beaten back.
This is not only about the kind of privacy issue that comes up with all other workers. If that was the case, a prominent judge like Kozinski would probably not be publishing letters in the Wall Street Journal. (He's a likely candidate to be on Bush's short list for possible Supreme Court nominations.)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) believes that if we can't trust judicial employees to use computers appropriately, then we shouldn't trust them to administer our courts. -- The EFF
While I'm not advocating that Judges be subject to surveillance, I have to say that I do *not* trust judicial employees in the slightest. The US legal system is scary. It has very little to do with actual justice or fairness. And these are *government* employees we're talking about. The same government that runs the IRS, FBI, CIA, etc., and in the case of state governments the DMV, the state police, and so on. Does the thought of these organizations instill you with confidence in the abilities of our government workers?
I would agree that employees in the judicial branch of government (especially judges) are probably of higher caliber than, say, your average DMV worker, that doesn't change the fact that they are government employees and are therefore highly susceptible to bouts of extreme incompetence.
I think the EFF's rhetoric here only hurts their cause.
So the same judges who've been quite forward about giving away *my* privacy, via a long and depressing string of judgements that it is perfectly ok for employers to snoop on their employees (to "closely monitor" in order to sniff out "inappropriate content", yada yada) are now whining that their employer (me) doesn't have that right wrt them.
Nice try. No cookie...
"...they may harpoon us, but they ain't gonna pick us up on no radar screen!"