Judge Alex Kozinski's porn stash
Judge Alex Kozinski is a friend of free speech. Now bloggers have discovered his secret online porn stash -- and forgiven him for it. Yes, there's naked women painted like cows, a man fellating himself, and two women hiking their skirts under a "Bush for President" sign...Link (Thanks, Moe!)But the L.A. Times' "neutral" editorial language made it all sound much more sinister than it really is. Looking at the photos, they're clearly standard-issue viral emails. (Apparently his music directory even included two Weird Al Yankovic mp3s and Monty Python's "Lumberjack Song.")
The judge says he didn't know the directory was world-readable, and that many of the images belonged to his college-age son.
The internet has not only changed politics, media, and freedom speech -- it also made it easier for the judge to get caught in an embarrassing situation. But I also wonder if all the MySpace/Digg/Fark users in the world will give the judge a knowing wink, and we can all finally stop being hypocrites?
Update: Some thoughtful commentary on this from Lessig:
Here are the facts as I've been able to tell: For at least a month, a disgruntled litigant, angry at Judge Kozinski (and the Ninth Circuit) has been talking to the media to try to smear Kozinski. Kozinski had sent a link to a file (unrelated to the stuff being reported about) that was stored on a file server maintained by Kozinski's son, Yale. From that link (and a mistake in how the server was configured), it was possible to determine the directory structure for the server. From that directory structure, it was possible to see likely interesting places to peer. The disgruntled sort did that, and shopped some of what he found to the news sources that are now spreading it...His son set up a server to make it easy for friends and family to share stuff -- family pictures, documents he wanted to share, videos, etc. Nothing alleged to have been on this server violates any law. (There's some ridiculous claim about "bestiality." But the video is not bestiality. It lives today on YouTube -- a funny (to some) short of a man defecating in a field, and then being chased by a donkey. If there was malicious intent in this video, it was the donkey's. And in any case, nothing sexual is shown in that video at all.) No one can know who uploaded what, or for whom. The site was not "on the web" in the sense of a site open and inviting anyone to come in. It had a robots.txt file to indicate its contents were not to be indexed. That someone got in is testimony to the fact that security -- everywhere -- is imperfect. But this was a private file server, like a private room, hacked by a litigant with a vendetta. Decent people -- and publications -- should say shame on the person violating the privacy here, and not feed the violation by forcing a judge to defend his humor to a nosy world.
When it comes to government invasions of our privacy, we are (and rightly) a privacy obsessed people. We need to extend some of that obsession to the increasingly common violations by private people against other private people. There is nothing for Chief Judge Kozinski to defend because he has violated no law, and we live in a free society (or so he thought when he immigrated from Romania). A free society should feed the right to be left alone, including the right not to have to defend publicly private choices and taste, by learning not to feed the privacy trolls.
the latest
latest episodes
*sigh*... pornography is "embarrassing", but working as a hired killer (er, "serving your country in the armed forces") is "honorable"... what a loony society we've got.
Wow. That's quite a leap you made there, Zuzu.
Hmm. I guess what made this whole case interesting, that makes giving the judge a knowing wink questionable is that he might be the hypocrite here.
He is after all presiding over a case regarding videos depicting bestiality being distributed online while have a collection online of his own that has naked women portrayed as cows and a dude doing it with farm animals.
So maybe that means he would have been more open minded towards the plaintiff, or maybe he'd have behaved like a Republican congressman passing anti-gay legislation while playing footsy in men's room stalls. Either way, his neutrality is obviously seriously compromised.
where's the leap? Show the error.
Lessing already debunked a lot of this.
http://lessig.org/blog/2008/06/the_kozinski_mess.html
#1, #4,
Pornography is an interesting subject. Humans have always (duh) had sex, it's a social event, part of the human experience, and not least of all, our only means of reproducing. Porn has presumably existed nearly as long as man-made imagery itself. Yet, as long as you and I have known it, and indeed many generations back, porn, masturbation, and even sex have been considered in many societies, dating back to the dark ages, as sinful and shameful. For many years the Catholic church (and many others as well!) held the stance that one was sinful to even derive pleasure from such an act.
In America and Great Britain in particular, this view was still legitimate in a social context until at least the 1920's.
We've come a long way since then, but it's clear that we still have some distance to cover before our societies can hold a healthy view of our own sexuality.
Military service likely dates back as far as porn. As long as there have been governments and hierarchies, there have been physical manifestations of their presence. From our ancient ancestors smashing each other to death with rocks, stick and their bare hands, to the modern military we see today.
Comparing military servicemen (and women!) to "hired killers", however does them a great injustice. If you are American, would you consider our forefathers, who fought to establish on the North American continent a new, free nation "hired killers"? (If you are British, however, feel free to do so.) Would you consider those before you that fought the Axis powers in World War II "hired killers"?
The men and women serving in the armed forces all over the world are simply doing their jobs, they're paying their mortgages, they're feeding their families in the best way they know how. They're not involved in the decision making process any more than you are. They don't get a special sort of vote, they don't decide that X country needs to be invaded. Sure there's a few bad apples, but there's also (in the US, at least) a Uniform Code of Military Justice. Just like society-at-large, there will always be criminals, and there will always be a justice system.
I can totally understand that many people all over the world are unhappy with the US's current state of affairs, especially in regard to the middle east. However, you must understand that the men and women in the armed forces did not choose to go there. There was no lieutenant or general that just got up in the morning and said to himself "I'm going to begin a lengthly and bloody occupation of an unstable region on false pretenses. The responsibility of those actions lies solely with the United States congress and its Commander-in-Chief.
-phew-
drafted were they?
In many cases, yes they were. Especially in those cases (see Vietnam) when no one wanted to volunteer. Think about it, Big Brother wants an army, so Big Brother gets one, whether it be by conscription or volunteer.
Case in point: If you are against the idea of a standing army, that's fine by me, but please understand that it's congress and the President (again, in the US) responsible for that, not the men and women at the bottom.
#4, "If you are American, would you consider our forefathers, who fought to establish on the North American continent a new, free nation 'hired killers'?"
Actually, yes. And don't forget genocidal.
The men and women serving in the armed forces all over the world are simply doing their jobs
Oh, that's just fantastic news. I've been feeling really bad about my job clubbing baby fur seals, but now that you've opened my eyes to the fact that it's okay because I'm only doing it for money, I feel much better. Thanks!
First - Lessig ist lessig.
Second - as a former hired killer, I don't really flinch at the term. Air Assault!
Wow. The media are a joke.
Point of information: Yahoo has a cached copy of the directory with an entry at least as late as:
25.minutes.to.go.wmv 28-May-2008 12:18 6.3M movie
So either Yahoo has a problem with robots.txt, or the robots.txt file was configured incorrectly.
I suspect there wasn't a relevant robots.txt file.
web.archive.org/web/20070629190035/http://alex.kozinski.com/robots.txt
has only:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /jurist-l/
#6: "who fought to establish on the North American continent a new, free nation "hired killers"?"
Yes, yes, yes and yes.
Sorry, you just really chose your words poorly there.
As for the rest of your post, yes, it's true that soldiers are merely tools of the government wielding them, but their function is still to kill people. For the most part, they made a choice to become killers, in the employ of the government. Hired killers.
(Well, conscription isn't very popular right now, but in some countries, even recently, it was. Even then, e.g. in South Africa, there were soldiers who were conscripted who were "conscientious objectors", who although forced into the armed forces, refused to bear arms.)
"Yet, as long as you and I have known it, and indeed many generations back, porn, masturbation, and even sex have been considered in many societies, dating back to the dark ages, as sinful and shameful."
Part 1 of that sentence is correct, but I'm doubtful about part 2. In Western cultures, I do believe that the negative stigma attached to sex, porn, masturbation, etc was very much a Victorian invention, brought about by some quack-ish but widely accepted at the time medical theories. Prior to then, societies tended to be fairly open about sex (with, possibly, quite specific and limited taboos or practices, but certainly not the widespread negativity of 100 years ago, which neither the U.K. nor the U.S. seem to have entirely grown out of.)
Anyway, the point Zuzu was making is that, morally speaking, ending another human being's life is a lot higher up the scale of seriousness than possessing naked pictures of another human being. Despite this, societies (at least some) venerate soldiers but pornography. This is very much a product of Nationalism, yet another Victorian invention.
Come to think of it, I suspect that most of the problems with modern American culture can be reduced to the persistence of Victorian cultural values.
That should be "venerate soldiers but *condemn* pornography".
Meep.
V. nicely put commentary by Lessig. Two thumbs up for sanity and two down for hyprocicy.
me @17
Uh...make that "hypocrisy".
#1
What is looney is for someone to either believe that a country's military should only be killed but not kill in return, or else to not have a military at all.
I'm not even going to touch the silly soldiers topic going on here(How does it even happen?)....
As for the Judge, what a crock. If for some reason you decided to grab the jpgs of recent BoingBoing stories, you might have pictures of a pig in wellington's, naked she devils, naked breasted hairy she-creatures playing ukelales and a picture of some guy's mutant tongue. Just of the top of my head. I could probably spin a pretty good satanic pigfoot fetish from all that, but in context it all makes sense.
If there were any ethics left in professional journalism, we'd never even see this story.
I, for one, agree with the sentiment of Zuzu's comment.
Look at the same idea removing the obviously emotionally charged "soldier = hired killer" wording by applying pop culture/arts/media reference instead. Pornography may be "embarassing" but multi-million-dollar motion pictures depicting graphic violence, killing and even torture are always among the highest-grossing films and most popular with viewers. Yet nudity and certainly depictions of people having sex (consensual, mind you, as violent rape scenes seem to be OK in American cinema) will relegate your release to the adult video counter and not the multiplex.
Hypocritical? Yes. And Judge Kosinski has damaged the legal proceedings he presided over in the case, no matter what "tame" nature of the media on his accessible network.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what it sounds/reads like, this guy who broke the story to the press infiltrated this server obviously without permission. So should'nt he be guilty of some sort of hacking crime...or whatever they prosecute hackers with? (fraud maybe?)
If you go to the link and watch the video of the dating game i think that the judge beat out squiggy (David Lander) for a pretty chick.
Was the judge so connected that they stacked the panel of the dating game so he could win?
At least his server wasn't loaded with Bang Bus videos....
enochrewt - all that, plus the occasional unicorn!
Professional journalism is an oxymoron. The news makes mountains out of things that any true professional (of whatever topic) knows are anthills, let alone molehills.
Not anthills of giant man eating ants, mind you. Regular ones.
mikeywin - in the strictest sense, no. There were no access controls to bypass. And yahoo did the hard work for him. Set up a public web server and watch how quickly search engines find it. Even if you get cryptic with the naming of your directories, all it takes is one link on an existing site to something in there and you'll get spidered.
I've had personal experience with this. In college I had an open web server set up to stream music to my dorm... and if my logs were any indication, the rest of the campus... the country... even a few folks in Brazil! I never put a link to that server anywhere, but someone must have.
And I never got a nastygram about it from anyone.
@weigthedcompanioncube
ok, thanks...I really didn't know, thats why I asked. Thanks for clearing it up! :)
"immigrated from Romania"
One immigrates to America, and emigrates from Romania.
As an ex "hired-killer" myself (US Navy) I can say, sure call us what you will. Try to live in a nation without us, then learn to speak your neighbor's language because you'll need it real soon. Truth is, some people need killing.
The problem is NOT honoring our hired-killers.
The problem is thinking sex = sin.
But if someone wants to divert an entire conversation about a judge with some photos on his PC into a conversation about the value of military service and whether or not killing bipedal apes is good or bad, go for it.
I'll stand (proudly) with the killers.
-abs
When I no longer have to worry about being arrested for having the wrong plant growing in my yard or ingesting an unapproved substance, I'll happily support the judge's privacy rights.
Until then, he can live under the same rules he wants to enforce on the rest of us. ZERO sympathy for him here. He's getting exactly what he deserves.
#15,
I was referring more specifically to those who fought in the revolutionary war. I'll digress and admit that while I may not have specified so in my original post, the "British" comments should have rang a bell.
working as a hired killer (er, "serving your country in the armed forces")
Congratulations, you win the "dumbest thing said on the internet today" award. And given how low the bar is, that's pretty impressive.
how many here want weekly urine tests for all judges,lawyers,politicians and police - so long as the current drug laws stand?
so when is the RIAA gonna do him for "making available" those MP3's
I know I shouldn't, but I'll go ahead and feed the troll.
There are some people in the armed forces who join them to "blow sh!t up" and/or to "travel to exotic places, meet new and interesting people, and kill them."
There are also some people in the armed forces who join them for the chance to defend our nation and its people against threats both foreign and domestic.
One of the things those people have in common is that NONE of them get to decide where they go or who they kill when they get there. Those decisions are made at a much higher pay grade than that of your common infatryman/airman/seaman (hehe. He said semen). It is those "highly paid leaders", especially the ones that we, the voting public, CHOOSE to elect, that we trust to make the decision on what constitutes a proper use of our military resources.
In recent (and not so recent) years, those leaders have failed to exercise good judgement in throwing the might of our armed forces around. That fact should in no way should belittle the fact that those men and women serving today have signed up not only to be "hired killers", but also to stand in harms way and take a bullet to save you in the event that some OTHER country's military leaders decide to fail to exercise good judgement.
Our soldiers serve as both sword and shield for our country. If that sword has gotten a bit bloody over the years, look to the arm that's swinging it, not the sword itself, for blame.
takuan - geez, why weekly? Isn't random testing like in any other occupation fair?
greg - get used to it around here. You'll quickly recognize the kooks. Shame you can't block them, but then again, look at how well that works elsewhere.
speaking of which, joe mommasan, the judge IS under the same privacy rights as everyone else. If a someone wants to build a pile of dirt on you, stuff you put on the web, knowingly or otherwise, is fair game. Your argument would hold more water if someone had broken into his home looked under his bed for porn.
Let's get soldiers out of the picture. Why is it OK to have graphic rape and murder on prime time USA TV (the "victim of the week" movie as my spouse used to say) but it's not OK to show explicitly intimate details of a loving sexual relationship between healthy and well adjusted consenting adults?
In the USA, a two second money shot is considered more obscene than a two hour portrayal of a cannibalistic serial rapist murderer.
--Charlie
look to the arm that's swinging it, not the sword itself, for blame.
These discussions have a tendency to devolve into I love the military/I hate the military, so I think that you've made a good point. The military under Washington, under Lincoln, under FDR, under Nixon, under Bush - they're different entities. It's impossible to imagine that the complete disregard for human life that's usurped the White House for the last eight years hasn't crept into the military. We live in the rare era in which the military is to the left of the civilian administration. In general. military leadership has opposed torture when the White House has supported it. The military is even to the left of the White House on accepting gay men and lesbians openly into its ranks.
But Bush and Cheney's evil ichor has trickled down into the ranks. Killing the innocent, or as we now call it, collateral damage, has become widely accepted in American society. The number of exemptions for the 'morally unfit' to enlist has skyrocketed. That means that there are soldiers with serious psychological and criminal records out there. In the case of actual atrocities, justice is not served. Of course, many of these problems have to do with private security firms like Blackwater, but I think that we have to accept that Blackwater and its vile ilk is now a de facto branch of the US military.
The problems won't be seriously addressed until the White House is broken open and the vermin therein eradicated, but the military will have a lot of house cleaning to do as well.
Charlie,
Would you please sign up for a BB account. You make a lot of comments, and I'm getting tired of having to approve your comments by hand. I promise that we won't spam you.
After all the hoo-ha here, I ask myself,
why would a judge who did not view pornography be qualified to rule on an obscenity case?
judges etc. have disproportionate power. They therefore merit a higher standard than ordinary citizens - especially as emissaries/authors of law.
Otherwise, they earn no respect. Test them all. Often.
regarding soldiers: in a non-draft situation, anyone joining joins understanding their job will be killing whoever they are told to kill. No duty to follow illegal orders such as killing children is a quibble. Ask any bomber crew. Or these days,anyone sitting in an air conditioned bunker flying a drone 12,000 miles away, finger over "Launch" button.
Soldiers kill. That is their raison etre. "Defense" means killing attackers before they kill you. I wonder how that fits the huge civilian casualties in Iraq? People are not weapons. You are not a "sword". You make choices. First to
join, then to follow. I cannot accept any defense of ignorance from those who find themselves enmeshed in an army and war they now no longer wish to take moral responsibility for. Desert then.
There would be no threatening enemy in another land if people there did not make the choice to follow an aggressive military dictator. People are the same everywhere, no matter what war propaganda may say. Americans were appalled with the Germany people for following Hitler. Is not the world then entitled to be appalled at Americans for following Cheney?
Stop following leaders.
On the topic, I'm kinda with those who say that any judge who doesn't do some porn every now and then probably shouldn't sit in judgement of porn.
I'm also pretty strongly of the opinion that what said judge has on his personal PC should remain his own business and that we (as a society, not us here, well, okay ALSO us here) should probably STFU.
I'm actually kinda tickled he has bad porn. Makes him feel human. I'm also a little ashamed I care so much. And I'm very sad that he's getting tried in the court of public opinion over such silliness. (doubly so given what we've been learning about the whole story, he really does sound quite innocent, it's kind of charming)
Now, on to the off-topic crap.
--------
Hi Takuan,
Just noting that when you say "There would be no threatening enemy in another land if people there did not make the choice to follow an aggressive military dictator." you be technically correct. But practically speaking you're wrong.
Look over history, you won't find any "Camelot"s out there. Throughout the history of mankind we have always killed each other to take other people's stuff. (where stuff can be defined as almost anything) Like it or not one of the things humans are best at is making war. It is in fact a hominid trait, not merely human, lots of higher apes make war on one another. It's very common.
So yes, you aren't wrong that if no one ever chose to follow a vicious leader then there would be no need of a military to defend any cultural group.
But you're also not right because that peculiar circumstance has never happened in history. Frankly, I deem it unlikely to ever happen either. As a species we are greedy, violent, and xenophobic.
I think the best we can do is try to overcome those traits in our own selves. And when they crop up too strongly in another person kill them quickly before they become a serial-killer/fascist-dictator/cyborg-VP.
So while I admire idealists like yourself and Zuzu, I also think you need to get your heads at least a few meters below the cloud deck. Down here on the ground it's bloody and violent, and it always has been.
My $.02.
-abs
"I think the best we can do is try to overcome those traits in our own selves"
Begin by finding work that is not in the employ of murderers. If you have been tricked, leave.
You're all missing the big picture here. The guy named his son "Yale." How in holy hell is he going to get into Harvard with a name like that?
So we can conclude that one type of ideologue wants to ignore one aspect of humanity (violence) and another type of ideologue wants to ignore another aspect of humanity (sex), yet both do so in the hopes of bettering humanity. Interesting.
The hypocrisy problem isn't about privacy or free speech, it's about copyright infringement. Judge Kozinski is on record as very much in favor of unrestricted access to the internet on public computers, specifically including access to gay pr0n from the courthouse-- so that he and his research staff can make fully informed decisions about the cases they hear. And that's great, from a 1st amendment perspective.
Whether or not he enjoys looking at nekkid wimmen painted like cows is his business. As long as it's not kiddie pr0n or obscene, in the sense of "patently offensive to the relevant community with no redeeming artistic or social value," it's not against any laws in the US. And given the nature of some of the photos and movies on the web today, the stuff he reportedly had posted actually seems pretty tame in comparison. if you were shocked by the g0atse or 2g1c, you don't even want to know what genki-genki is doing with eels. Or octopus.
So he shouldn't be in any trouble on the first-amendment front. And there's no privacy issues here- he posted it on the web in an unsecured public directory. Maybe that's not what he MEANT to do, but too f*(king bad- in 2008, published once on the net is published forever.
No, the problem is that in the 9th Circuit, Kozinski's court, 'making available' is equivalent to copyright infringement. The copyright owner doesn't need to show that anyone actually downloaded the files in order to hold the hoster liable. According to rulings by his own court, if the owners of those videos somehow materialize and file suit against Kozinski, he could be on the hook for up to $150,000 per file.
Kudos to the judge for the stand he's taken in the past to maintain open access to the internet, and bravo to Lessig for defending him against the public outcry. But perhaps Lessig's little morality play might have been better directed at the real problem with the law, rather than at the simple appearance of impropriety.
Takuan@43: Begin by finding work that is not in the employ of murderers. If you have been tricked, leave.
Just up and leave? Well, you sure do make it sound easy. Are you speaking from experience of actually doing that, or is this some hypothetical model of the way you think things should be?
"The men and women serving in the armed forces all over the world are simply doing their jobs."
Every time I hear an odious task described as "just doing [a] job," I hear the sound of wind whistling through the barbed wire. I don't think copping that plea will get anybody into the heaven they imagine.
''Nothing personal,'' the hit-man murmers. "It's just business."
And, yeah, we do get paid.
I never went into that trap - by conscious choice.
Leaving is a matter for the individual. Many have deserted, many more will follow. There are less drastic ways to end the association. I also note a great many soldiers (from various outside countries) in the middle east being thrown out for shattered minds and souls.
"The men and women serving in the armed forces all over the world are simply doing their jobs."
In it's original context (#6), this comment made sense, emphasizing the contrast between decision maker and foot soldier. But it's been quoted now twice to quite a different end; it's become a bit of a straw man infecting our discourse. As you tilt at it, you should be aware of this.
judge bestiality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8USv8aAFK4
http://youtube.com/watch?v=WdJO-kUINMs
I never went into that trap - by conscious choice.
So, when you hand out that advice about how easy it is to leave, transparency would suggest you make clear that you're telling people how to do something that you yourself have never done.
"how easy it is to leave", your words, not mine.
Also note that you(I assume), similarly, have no experience in NOT going down that road. I "tell" nothing, I may occasionally prescribe and will put the value of my advice up against that of any military recruiter.
There's another way to walk away. Most of us were so young and ignorant that it was a done deal and all over by the time we realized how badly we'd been had. But many of us didn't stop our association with the military. As a veteran I have ACTIVELY opposed 90% of our military operations around the world, and 90% of our foreign policy. I draft counseled during Vietnam, ran AWOLs and deserters to Canada, demonstrated and destroyed (no more on that, I'm sure you'll understand), protested and petitioned, pissed and moaned—FOR THREE FUCKING WARS! And I'm sick of it. The stupidity and insanity continues. These clean-handed chickenshit chicken hawks keep coming at us, more of them hatching every day, and they keep squawking the same ignorant imperialistic...
I'm losing it. Bye for now.
http://www.coalingarecord.com/articles/2008/06/13/opinion/doc4852c5c505dc6221065276.txt
http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/diarypage.php?did=7744
Takuan: (I assume)
Don't.
I'm not giving advice to people in the military, you are.
When I give advice to people who ask questions about airplanes or helicopters, I tell them I've got some training on fixed wing and rotor, I've flown both. When I answer someone's question about skydiving, I'll tell them my total experience is one tandem jump from 13,000 feet. When I try to help someone with a cooking question, I'll tell them I am a greenhorn with almost zero experience. I tell them my experience so they can approach my advice with the appropriate level of skepticism. I tell them my experience level for their benefit.
If you want to give advice and withold your lack of experience, I can only assume that you're witholding it for your benefit, not theirs.
Quibble. You gainsay a key point strongly. You put words in my mouth with "how easy". You may assume what you wish, I misrepresent nothing, And I have yet to hear clear disclosure from you. You are under no obligation to answer the question. Save your conscience.
Experience, expertise and moral authority are different things, best not conflated.
Save your conscience.
Oh gawd.
oh? you have one of those too?
Children, settle. Don't make me come back there, and all that.
Also, someone said the magic word: Chicken Hawk!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsktNLgpCs8
Yeah, but he's still a f*****g putz. If you're a judge, grow the f*** up and don't put stuff like that on your computer. And did you see him on the Dating Game? How he squeezed her neck and kissed her? What a loser.
hey, at least he didn't get caught using a penis pump under his robes - yet.
Pliers,
Asterisks don't prevent people from noticing that you're being rude. Either say it, or don't say it. And in this case, I'm going to suggest Plan B.