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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 don't want the government keeping track of what judges do online... I wanna know what congressmen do online. Which sex sites they go to. Which interns they're emailing about affairs. Which corporations they're getting email from. Stuff like that. Judges should be able to take care of themselves. Congressmen are far more expensive to buy.
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?
Well it seems obvious to me that this is an evil plot by the RIAA. They are behind this for a very simple, yet clear reason. Hillary (her name is hilliary, isn't it?) is afraid that judges are going to be surfing the net when they realize how stupid their case is in regards to the DCMA. She's afraid the DCMA will eventually get destoryed and then she has to find a new way to suck money out of the consumer market.
Now I think I'll be getting my morning coffee.
The op-ed article spends some time referring to people who are constantly watched as prisoners, which indirectly implies that its perfecally okay to continue the monitoring the private conversations of prisoners. This in and of itself, creates a problem, as you are divinding up society into two camps. Those who are permitted to be watched at all times, and those who are not permitted.
I should probably address those who will tell me that I shouldn't be defending prisoners. In fact, I would suspect that the first thing people will say is 'Prisoners give up their right to privacy when they break the social contract that our society agrees to', ie, when they break laws. However, not all prisoners are gulity, nor are all prisoners truly that dangerous. Giving a prisoner who commited a minor offense private access to a phone is hardly endangering the community.
Prisoners are people, and judges are people. We should treat all people as much like people as we can. And I think that involves giving them as much privacy as we can. Unless we suspect something hoakey is going on, we should never, ever be permitted to monitor anyone's private messages. If you think a judge is corrupt and you've got some resemblance of evidence, get a warrant, and start listening. If you think a prisoner is trying to hire a hitman to kill a judge, and you've got evidence, get a warrant and start listening. If Joe Prisoner says he wants to call his wife to make sure she knows how to properly do the laundry and just to talk to her, if he's got phone rights, by all means let him have his private time.
By creating artifical lines between humans, and allocating rights to some and not others, a greater divide is created. If judges can't be monitored, but prisoners can, does that mean entry level workers can be monitored for no reason, and CEO's can't? Or does it mean that all criminals (past and present) be watched in the workplace, and no one with a completely clean record?
Why not just make it easy and flat forbid it except in the most extreme of circumstances?
Am I the only one who sees the irony of asking my e-mail address before you show me an article about privacy? Yes, any address works, so it's not nearly as bad as it could be, but still
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
Does anyone know exactly what made this happen? Did someone just wake up one day and say "I don't trust all the judges"? Why do they think that judges need to be monitored (ok, the last question may be obvious, but what evidence do they have as to any wrongdoings that would constitute implementing such draconian restrictions?)
If God gave us curiosity
This reminds me of the Canadian navy guy who was suspended after having been caught surfing pr0n with a navy laptop. After a few weeks of the media trying desperately to rile the public and sell the story, he was quietly reinstated. No one cared, in the end. I suspect the same sort of paranoid forces at work here (although according to the article, it really comes down to one man and politics.) Ah well, at least the judges will proove to be the litmus test of whether communication monitoring in the work place will eventually be accepted as routine (or even American) by our kids.
"Old man yells at systemd"
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
It'll be interesting to see how Kozinski's fellow judges react. If they can't be bothered to protect their own privacy, we can't trust 'em to protect ours.
If they drop the ball on this one, maybe we should move to an elected judiciary. I've always opposed that, but the federal courts aren't exactly covering themselves with glory (or independence) these days.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
Legally, in the US, if you use a company computer to send email, that company has the right not only to read that email, but act on it. Your boss can bring up emails to boyfriends in reviews, and HR can fire you for posting contrary opinions to the web. As far as I'm aware, nothing prohibits identical behavior regarding phones, or even workplaces.
I may be wrong on this last point, but I think that employers can use surveilance equipment to monitor their employees activities without their knowledge. The best case is that the policy of surveilance must be made clear.
Judges is the US have defended this behavior for years now, and the computer (and phone) related argument is that the equipment belongs to the employer, and activies on them is in their purvue to observe. Let them be watched. I see no reason a judge should get any fairer treatment than the rest of us.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
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
Now that would be scary. Imagine if they start to emulate the cast:
Prosecutor: Dammit, the defendant ate my peanut butter again!
Judge: Yeah, he's just so selfish. Maybe I should add an extra two years to his sentence. Hmmm--that way I'll get the bedroom with the balcony.
Prosecutor: Great! Let's go get a latte.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
Everyday, thousands of americans are loosing their rights. For only a $.50 cents a day, about the cost for a cup of coffee, you can help save the privacy of a Judge in your area. That's right, only $.50 cents. So please act now, before privacy as we know it will be lost forever. Contact the EFF at http://www.eff.org
Thank you and God Bless
Linuxrunner
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
I doubt that any /.er would be happy with surveillance at the workplace or otherwise. Common sense and legal prededent (in the interest of privacy, the judiciary should adopt the least intrusive, rather than the most intrusive, means of discouraging Internet misuse. -- TNR Online ) dictate that the least invasive means should be employed when attempting to block abuse of the system.
So, the fact is that the monitoring of internet use is a gross over reaction to something that isn't really a problem at all.
So how is this good for us?
This may be exactly what is necessary to galvanize judges into action in the fight to preserve privacy. Like that guy in The Patriot they may finally fight the threat after it has hit too close to home.
--------
Remember that you are unique, just like everyone else.
Judges themselves being watched may set a disturbing precendent. Loss of privacy may spread to every sector of government. Corporations already basically do this to their employees, but it's still a disputed, fuzzy line. This may solidify their rights in monitoring employees. As corporations and government get more influence over our private lives, we may eventually lose privacy to the point where it exists no more.
Interestingly, though, I think that if this concept spreads to the legislative branch, our reps will not like it one bit. They will undoubtedly try to pass a law preventing government employees from being watched. So in the end maybe this'll turn out in favor of privacy.
Developers: We can use your help.
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?
Yeah it sucks, but there's some delicious irony about the whole thing. One of the arguments used for workplace monitoring is because if a company doesn't block certain sites it can open it up to litigation -- i.e. sexual harrasment, etc. When the courts say that a company can be held accountable (i.e. cough up mondo $$$) for the actions of one of its employees during company hours, and the civil definition of what constitutes harrasment is murky at best, companies take a "ban it all/monitor it all" mentality.
Imagine, for a sec, that the judges only used government material for work related issues.
In this case, the monitoring is even scarier. Based on the judges' private communications, sites visted, things like that, anyone with access to the log files can begin to recreate the judge's state of mind DURING the case.
Imagine what happens when this gets into the wrong hands. There are some very creative journalists who can take small bits of nformation and blow them out of proportion. We learn that people are likely to be convicted before the trial is complete. We learn that people who appear to be guilty are going to walk. And worse, we learn this because of things that the judges has said and done, rather than just speculation (as it is now) How much harder will it be to keep an untainted jury? Besides, if we know what the judge is thinking, why have a jury?
Yes, it's an exaggeration, but it's frightening to think that the scenario they are trying to achieve is actually worse than finding out which judge has what fetish...
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
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
Judge wakes up in the morning and looks in the mirror.
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.
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
This is an interesting question: why would *anyone* be entitled to privacy when you're using equipment that someone else has paid for?
... disturbing. Employees wouldn't stand for that. Yet they -- we -- stand for web monitoring?)
- for can *see* you yabbering when she passes your cubicle on her way to yet another important meeting.
The question is interesting for a couple reasons. First, it assumes that money -- cash, whatever -- negates privacy considerations. I'm entitled to privacy only with stuff -- phones, faxes, computers -- that I *pay* for. If I haven't paid for it, then anything goes.
Second -- and this is derived from the first point -- is the resulting "anything goes" mentality. This seems to be the real point of the WSJ article. Even though I'm getting paid for working -- and certainly expect to be given the money I'm entitled to -- why must I give my fundamental right of privacy up?
(The logic here, then, if I'm *not* getting paid -- on my lunch hour -- then does that give me the right to surf? In some places, yes. In most places, no. Because -- and some junior manager will be quick to explain this -- the fact that you surf means not only wasted productivity [which is, of course, dubious] but also liability.)
Which brings me to my third point -- and one that I have yet to receive an explanation for: the digital paradox. Why does a company fear the internet more than it does idle chatter in the bathroom? Or idle phone conversation? Why aren't my telephone calls monitored -- yet every site I visit is.
Why aren't there video cameras in the bathroom? (Because, well, that would be
I'd really like an explanation as to why the web -- more so than the phone, more so than the break-room during "work" time -- is so feared by management.
The reason, of course, is power. Skippy the mid-level manager can *see* you yabbering away in the break room.
Britney the just-out-of-Keller-with-an-MBA-I-worked-real-hard
Ah well. It's all power. Britney needs to commandeer what little power she is and make sure the power remains inviolable. I think that's what managers fear most -- loss of power. There is this illusion among the worst managers that somehow power -- their own, tenuous power -- will increase productivity. Because that means money -- the real reason the web is monitored.
It's crazy -- the surveillance. Everybody's watching, watching to make sure you don't do something to decrease productivity. Fucking absurd.
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?
This is a very important issue, not just for the judiciary and rendering of justice, such as it is, in America, but in the long run for all of our individual rights in the workplace as well.
The Libertarian notion that constitutional protections stop at the private property line, and that it is therefor ok, even reasonable, for employers to invade and snoop the personal correspondence of their employees merely because such correspondence passes through their privately owned equipment or networks is responsible for more loss of individual privacy than all of the government's orwellian snooping combined, if for no other reason than that the focus of the privacy invasion is targeted so specifically by an entity against a relatively small group of people (their employees).
How then, are we to combat this remarkably Orwellian situation? First and foremost, by getting our government, in particular the judiciary, to understand what is going on and just what the stakes are. In so doing they will be sensitized to these issues, and rulings favoring individual employee rights over an employers property priveleges may perhaps become more common (after all, it is a felony for an employer to open an employee's private correspondence which has been sent by US Mail, even though the desk it is sitting on is privately owned by them, not the employee. Why should email, or web browsing, be any different?)
On the other hand, if judges are routinely subjected to this kind of invasive monitoring, and it becomes truly a widespread, acceptable practice within all branches of the government, then any argument for the protection of individual citizens' privacy will be correspondingly diluted. Our courts and judges may not grant a private citizen priveleges they themselves enjoy, but they certainly won't grant a private citizen priveleges, or rights, they themselves not only do not enjoy, and perhaps even have come to take the lake thereof for granted.
It is ironic that the judiciary is only now beginning to experience the kind of Orwellian monitoring and control all too many people have come to expect in their workplace, but perhaps this is exactly the catalyst that is needed to put an end to this nonsense in both the private and public spheres, once and for all.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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.
Judges in this nation do not only interpret law, they create it out of whole cloth. A perfect example is forced busing. No legislature enacted this program, the federal courts did. There are many other examples such as requirements to feed and shelter illegal aliens and requirements to display public documents in thousands of languages outside of English (de facto national language of the US). That is why I feel they need to be monitored and more reactive to public will. If they are going to be making laws when they have no Constitutional right too, they need more oversight by the public.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
The White House went in the other direction. Around 1995, the White House phone switch was modified so that long distance billing information wasn't trackable back to the original phone. Custom software mods were made (expensively) so that the info wasn't logged.
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..
As other people have noted here, this is hardly the first step toward online monitoring of employees. People like me who work in the national labs have to deal with this sort of thing constantly, even if we don't have access to any classified data and even if we don't have a security clearance (i.e., even when it's not worth while to monitor us). This is what it says when I log in at work. When I first saw it, I thought it was someone's bad idea of a joke.
You make it sound easy. Or even possible.
When was the last time the American people agreed on anything enough to change a facet of our national government? When was the last time we replaced Form X of government with Form Y, because Form X wasn't working? When was the last time the people actually had that much power to start with? 1776?
Come on, the old adage is true: if voting could change anything, they'd make it illegal.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
But honest and competant sysadmins will also tell you that usage monitoring never needs to pry into the content of the excessive usage. Merely reporting the amount to the user usually suffices. If not, reporting it to the user's boss by definition suffices.
Unix sysadmins have evolved certain privacy ethics over the decades. Never pry into user files, email or other traffic even though it is trivially easy to do. There is no justifiable need. Record and store email headers (addressees & subject) in the event of a complaint of email non-delivery. Remind users of excessive resource usage, preferably by automated email. At the limit, publicly post a list of the top10 resource hogs. But never any mention of content.
Perhaps NT admins need a lesson?
Dear Sir:
Employees are monitored all day, every working day in this country. They don't have access to the august pages of the WSJ to make their case. Since when should I believe you are a champion of the Little Guy? You represent the same class of people who appointed George Bush president, who support restitution for unauthorized computing in Georgia, Internet filtering for unauthorized reading in Michigan, arresting foreign nationals in California for unauthorized coding. When the tide turns against you, we should be concerned? My civil liberties are stripped from me daily with judicial complicity. What can you possibly expect in return?
Your rights end on conviction. Harm others and go to jail. Prove yourself untrustworthy and find that others track your activities. It was so much easier when you could just hang em high.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Given my druthers, I'd prefer a system where everyone got to keep their privacy, but with companies increasingly taking the position, "they're our computers so we can monitor and filter if we want," and ISPs increasingly saying, "they're our networks so we can monitor and filter if we want," does anybody really still believe that's an option? At least one other poster has pointed out that this sort of monitoring is already de rigueur for many employees. Are our saviors on the bench prepared to join the crusade against this practice once their own privacy is assured? Somehow, I doubt it.
I think the worst of all possible worlds would be the one where the high and mighty are allowed to have privacy, but the rest of us are not. If every detail of my life is potentially open to scrutiny by the whole world, then I want, at the very least, to be able to discourage people from making unfair use of that information through the threat of exposing their secrets. If we rally behind these judges, perhaps we might strike a blow for privacy; then again, perhaps we might open the door to that lopsided scenario where judges and congresspeople and billionaries can protect their privacy, but the rest of us can just lump it.
No thanks. I propose instead that we support monitoring for judges and elected officials until such time as they get off their duffs and take steps to assure privacy protection for all of us.
-rpl
It's not my right to use someone else's resources to surf the net at work, granted. But if I am allowed the privilege of doing so, it _is_ my right to have my privacy untrammelled while I'm at it. If a guest at your home asks to use the telephone, you are not obligated to let them. But if you _do_ give them permission, a basic respect for human dignity demands that you not eavesdrop on their conversation by using another phone without their knowledge. And I haven't met the person yet with enough ill-advised chutzpah to inform his guests that all calls made from his phones will be monitored by him without specific permission (which is exactly the stance many companies take in their anti-privacy policies that explicitly warn employees that everything they do is being watched.)
Personal use of company equipment is a privilege. To have my privacy respected while I exercise that privilege is my right.
IHBT (I think)
--
Pay no attention to the errors in my post. I am the great and powerful Oz.
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."
Please, please help your friend if you have not already. Set him up with a real OS and configure it well. If you do things right, you can hook him up to the normal network and preserve his privacy. If you explain these things to him and show him a little about how it works, you may do the rest of us a big favor. It would be nice for him to know just how bad things are already. Good luck!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You are correct sir! Damn those judges!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Funny how everyone that replied to this post totally ignored the argument it made. He already made an argument against the replies in his post, but nobody seems to have read past the first paragraph. If you're gonna post some moronic reply, at least read the damn post first. Maybe then you can actually say something regarding the actual point of the post instead of wasting everyone's time with this drivel.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Seriously, any network use requiring privacy should be done on one's own connection. It's too bad, but even eloquently written letters decrying this fact won't change it.
sulli
RTFJ.
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.
If they are going to be making laws when they have no Constitutional right too, they need more oversight by the public.
They do have that right. The Constitution only grants the authority to pass codified law to Congress and the States; the Constitution is silent on whether or not the Judiciary can enact common law. Given that at the time the Constitution was drafted, a few hundred years of English common law had been incorporated into the United States, the historical record is pretty clear that the courts have always held the right to enact common law.
This doesn't mean it's wise or good when judges write a new chapter of common law, but it is most certainly Constitutional.
I know one Federal judge whose hobby is finding the oldest binding precedent that he can to support a notion. If I remember correctly, he's managed to get all the way back to 1632, predating the United States by almost two centuries, by using English common law which was incorporated into the United States.
Common law has a loooooooooooong pedigree.
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
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
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.
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.)
Hmm, seems to me that someone with a modicum of skill and an axe to grind could get his/her cow-orkers into a lot of trouble if their employer whas monitoring their web use and sanctioning them for "improper" surfing. Those "indisputable" log entries you mention will show exactly what you want. Forward ports. Forge packets. Re-route traffic. Sniff. Come on, you've got physical access to their computer -- if you can't think of a dozen ways to (mis)use that power, you don't deserve to call youself a geek.
Converely, if you want to surf in total privacy, it's trivial to do if you have the resources (IE a cable modem, DSL line, or some other permanent connection at home). All you have to do is run sshd and squid on your home machine, then ssh into it from work and forward a local port to the squid port at home:
ssh -2 -L 31337:myhost:8080 me@myhost.mydomain.com
Then set your web browser's proxy settings to localhost:31337 and the only thing that your employer will see is a bunch of encrypted packets going back and forth between your machine and an outside host. If you wanted to obfuscate what you are doing a little more, you could run sshd on another port (like 80 or 443). Use SSH-2 protocol and public-key authentication to eliminate man-in-the-middle attacks, and set up a dummy account on your home system (preferably with a non-functional shell) for extra security.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
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!"
The only perfect example this is of is how not knowing your history gets you into trouble. The people outlawed unequal treatment under the law when they ratified the 14th amendment, which states:
What you are forgetting is that prior to Brown v. Board of Education, busing existed, but was used for a different purpose: to segregate schools. This was true even in northern cities like Boston -- only many people didn't realize it because their children weren't the ones being bused. Busing to achieve racial uniformity didn't achieve what many people hoped for, and arguably it was close to an unmitigated disaster. But the courts did not "make it up out of whole cloth". They didn't walk into school districts that just let all kids go to their local schools and force them to start busing kids around. It was specifically a punishment and redress for the illegal actions of school administrations that targeted minority kids to go to inferior schools.
What the SC did in Brown V. Board of Education that was unusual was to overturn a previous constitutional principle it had established in Plessy v. Fergusson. In that ruling, it was admitted that unequal treatment would violate the 14th amendment, but that separate accomodations (segregation) was not tantamount to inequality. In retrospect, equality never happened, so this interpretation of the 14th amendment proved to be untenable.
You have to take one position or the other: either wilfull segregation based on race is a form of unequal treatment or it is not. This requires judgement, which the courts provided. The solution wasn't as good as if we all sat down in good faith and worked out a plan for our representatives to implement, but that didn't happen. So, like many other instances where we the people didn't have our act together, the courts came up with a solomonic solution that cut the baby in half.
A lot of this kind of reaction against "judicial activism" depends on whose ox was gored. Let me give two examples where I hope and expect the courts will intervene in express contradiction to the wishes of congress: copyright extension and the anti TPM section of the DMCA. In both cases, I wish them to do so because the congress has used underhanded means of achieving something they are not constitutionally allowed to do: grant copyrights for unlimited terms and restricting the fair use of copyrighted works.
The courts have a role in our system to put a check on the excesses of the legislative and judicial branches. If you think this sucks, look at the countries where the judicial function is a tool of the government (China, for example). In the present case, it is a good thing that our judicial branch is getting a taste of the kind of high handed treatment that bureaucratic bluenoses are meting out to others.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Then the security guy comes to your desk and wants to know what all that encrypted traffic is, and demands you un-encrypt it. After all, you could be sending confidential company documents out into the world. He wants to see good little GET requests coming out of your PC, not this troubling abnormal traffic.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Dear Judge Kozinski,
I've just read your piece in the Wall Street Journal on the shocking behaviour of Mr. Mecham, and I would like to know if there's anything that I, as a private citizen, can do to bring an end to this man's employment by the taxpayers.
Mr. Mecham is a sordid little voyeur in the mold of J. Edgar Hoover, and he must be stopped. Indeed, if this man is allowed to escape prosecution, it will be a very sad commentary on the state of our republic.
I urge you, personally, to file both criminal and civil complaints against Mr. Mecham, and I hope you nail that little bastard to the wall.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If congresscritters have no privacy, why would they care if anyone else did?
The next time some anti-p0rn legislation comes up in committee, I want every secret wanker in the whole damned legislature knowing what they have to lose.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The court is dangerously close on way too many constitutional issues. I'd feel a whole lot better if there were at least one outspoken privacy advocate on the court.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If judges are going to sit around looking at porn all day instead of working then I, as a taxpayer and citizen, demand action be taken. Judges are NOT above the law, if anything they are held to a higher scrutiny than anyone else. Not only should detailed logs of their activity be kept, they should be posted to a public web site for any citizen to see. Internet monitoring is a good thing and I strongly support it to prevent abuse of public and corporate resources. You don't have any privacy in a public place and shouldn't expect any on the Internet.
There's a very long list of exceptions. Look at the municipal code of just about every city in the US that has a municipal traffic code.
In my city, speeding IS a crime, albeit a minor one. You get caught, you get issued. You have the option of paying by mail. Fail to pay by mail within the time perior (fifteen days in my city) and it becomes a summons to appear in the municipal court. Fail to appear on the summons, and a warrant is issued for your arrest.
Tell the cop that you won't take care of the ticket one way or the other, and he'll arrest you right then, assuming that the offense is arrestable and the officer is willing to deal with the paper. I usually just tell the driver "You've been served. If you want to leave this hanging, it's your problem."
Just about every home-rule city in Colorado has the same thing, with only the specific details varying. Most other states are similar, in that they have such practices at the state level or allow cities or counties to enact them into law.
Under the STATE CODE[1], speeding isn't necessarily a crime. It may just be a civil traffic infraction. (The cutoff is at 20MPH over the limit). Even so, fail to pay or appear and the court will simply enter a default judgement against you. Then DMV cancels your license. Then you will almost certainly be arrested if you're caught driving on a cancelled[1] license.
[1] State Patrol, State Parks and Wildlife, etc., only write under the state traffic code. However, city officers have the discretion to charge under either state law or muni code.
[2] The legal term is "denied." If your license is suspended, revoked, or cancelled in any state in the Traffic Offender's Compact, then it's automatically denied in Colorado. That means sitting behind the wheel on any public roadway in the state is good for jail time.
There's a certain appeal, but I am wary of any Constitutional amendment, especially one that treads near First Amendment ones. I am afraid people are too myopic to understand the 9th and 10th Amendments; that is, by marking some things off limits we create the automatic assumption that other things must be OK.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
got into trouble for watching people. Is there any particular reason why his conviction and 10 year sentence hasnt been mentioned either on this site, or kuro5hin?
That's why you run sshd on port 443 instead of 22, so it looks like a nice, harmless https session to a non-offessive web site. [Or use any other port that's normally used for encrypted traffic.] If they do notice and ask about it, you just say "Oh, I'm just logged into my machine at home so I can check my personal email." Of course, you should be sure you have the pop3/imap ports forwarded to back up your story.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Mecham has capitulated, and it looks like he's going to lose his job for things he said about about Judges Kozinski and Schroeder.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."