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Porn Found On L.A. Obscenity Case Judge's Website
Stanislav_J writes "In a bizarre revelation, the judge who is presiding over the Isaacs obscenity trial in Los Angeles was found to have sexually explicit material on a publicly-accessible website. Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, acknowledged that he had posted the materials, but says he believed the site to be for personal storage only, and not accessible to the public (though he does acknowledge sharing some of the material with friends). The files included images of masturbation, public sex, contortionist sex, a transsexual striptease, a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows, and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. The latter two are especially ironic in that the trial involves the distribution of allegedly obscene sexual fetish videos depicting bestiality, among other things, by Ira Isaacs, an L.A. filmmaker."
Stanislav_J continues:
"The judge has blocked public access to the site (putting up a graphic that reads, 'Ain't nothin' here — y'all best be movin' on, compadre').
Isaacs' defense had welcomed the assignment of Kozinski to the case because of his long record of defending the First Amendment, but the startling news about his website (the revelation of which seems to have been interestingly timed to coincide with today's scheduled opening arguments) now have many folks calling for him to be removed from the case. There is no indication that any of the images on Kozinski's site would be considered obscene or illegal. But certainly, one has to believe that most would consider this at the very least to represent a serious conflict of interest given the nature of the trial."
Isaacs' defense had welcomed the assignment of Kozinski to the case because of his long record of defending the First Amendment, but the startling news about his website (the revelation of which seems to have been interestingly timed to coincide with today's scheduled opening arguments) now have many folks calling for him to be removed from the case. There is no indication that any of the images on Kozinski's site would be considered obscene or illegal. But certainly, one has to believe that most would consider this at the very least to represent a serious conflict of interest given the nature of the trial."
Perhaps the porn was there as a benchmark (no pun intended). Anything freakier than what the judge had is obscene, anything less exotic is simply porn. Even if that wasn't it's intended purpose, it would make an interesting point to argue. After all as a judge, Kozinski is a moral compass, and he is sharing this material with his friends whom we can also assume are pillars of the community, so by them accepting this material,we can conclude that it is not "Offensive to accepted standards of decency or modesty." because the standard-bearers of our society have already show to find it acceptable.
We are all just people.
I once was approached to do some forensic analysis for the defense in a case where a school district's administrator was trying to get a principal much-loved by his community and staff to leave.
Said principal used a Mac, while the school was primarily PC-based. They seized his computer, and returned it over a month later, claiming that they'd found porn (and releasing some supposedly-recovered photos).
I did a full analysis -- wrote my own tools to analyze HFS+, scanned the raw disk for image headers, etc -- and found (1) that the system had files and directories with mtimes during the period in which it was in the district's possession (and thus that they'd failed to follow accepted digital forensics practices), (2) that there were in fact a small number of pornographic images on the hard drive... and (3) that every one of those images was autodownloaded by Eudora Pro, a mail client (written back before spam was a serious issue) which saved every attachment to a specific folder on the disk without prompting. However, not one of these images matched those the school district claimed to have recovered.
The district dropped their case -- and "promoted" the principal to an administrative position he hated, working directly under the man who tried to fire him. Sigh.
Probably.
Doesn't sound like it. Not that it matters. Not even commercial* porn providers require age verification.
The only major problem with that is, you'd have to actually show (a) the actual minors whose delinquency was contributed to (the "making available" argument doesn't fly) and (b) almost certainly show there was good reason to believe that the judge new he was distributing said content to minors (otherwise most porn mags would be shut down, since obviously if the porn mags weren't printed, you couldn't find minors with them).
In short, you have to consider the judge's position as if he were any other major publisher. Given the repeated attempts to try to "protect" minors on the internet in the past involving porn and how few laws have stood up to Constitutional scrutiny (the only one that comes to mind as accepted is ones involving libraries accpeting federal funds in exchange for having to include anti-porn filters; and assumedly that has to do with it being voluntary to accept funds), it just doesn't seem likely that yet another contorted attempt would work. But, obviously, it's all a matter of taking the judge to court and spending several years until the Supreme Court decides.
*Commercial in this context doesn't just mean "and we want your credit card number". The second one starts receiving money as a result of ads on one's website, one can be called commercial (just like broadcast TV). Assumedly this was a major reason that the age verification laws were discarded, as it would be very unreasonable to have every last website showing a nipple with an ad on it to request a credit card number. And odds are, most people *wouldn't* give a credit card number to the site. The last part, then, severely cripples freedom of speech by abridging the legitimate right of the vast majority to access a site without undue burden. Now, if there were some way to age verify someone in a more trivial fashion on the internet, the courts would probably have a much different interpretation on things.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Of course not. Only if the judge's website had illegal porn should he be considered to have a conflict of interest.
Perhaps:
... entertaining
http://web.archive.org/web/*hh_/alex.kozinski.com/underneathmyrobe/
Although, these are
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://alex.kozinski.com/underneathmyrobe/datinggame.rm
http://web.archive.org/web/*hh_/alex.kozinski.com/stuff/jump.avi
and this
http://alex.kozinski.com/jurist-l/
was blocked from the archive
http://web.archive.org/web/*hh_/alex.kozinski.com/robots.txt
That said, after digging throught the site, it looks like:
A. He's actually human, and has a life outside being a judge (shock horror).
B. The site apears to be a dump for random stuff rather than anything organised, I suspect these allegations are likley a smear campaign.
You laugh, but this actually happened. Frank Zappa's completely instrumental album Jazz From Hell was marked with one of the first "Parental Advisory - Explicit Lyrics" warnings. I repeat: the album has no lyrics. But it had an explicit lyrics warning from the RIAA. The likely reason? His vocal opposition to the Tipper Gore-led Parent's Music Resource Center, whose bludgeoning pressured the RIAA to start putting those warnings on albums in the first place. See http://ericnuzum.com/banned/incidents/80s.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_From_Hell
It's a good thing they did drop the case, because his lawyer would have had a hell of a time getting the court to accept evidence from a tool that you wrote yourself and which hadn't been properly certified for use in evidence gathering. Especially if you used it to scan the disk, and not an image extracted using a cable that had the write pins removed - plugging anything capable at the hardware level of writing to the disk into it will taint any evidence you found.
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