Patterico's Pontifications

6/13/2008

Kozinski Asks for Investigation of Himself

Filed under: Dog Trainer,General,Kozinski — Patterico @ 11:11 am



Judge Kozinski has called for an investigation of himself:

The chief judge of the federal appeals court in San Francisco, whose pornography-laden Web site hit the headlines while he was presiding over an obscenity trial in Los Angeles, invited an investigation Thursday by a judicial disciplinary agency.

Judge Alex Kozinski said in a statement that he has asked the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ Judicial Council to begin proceedings to determine whether he engaged in misconduct. The council has the power to censure a judge, temporarily halt case assignments, or take the first steps that could lead to congressional impeachment and removal from office.

“I will cooperate fully in any investigation,” Kozinski said.

I think the investigation should address the extent to which Kozinski thought the site was private:

He said he had believed it was a private site that others could see only with his permission, until he learned otherwise this week from the newspaper and his son.

Most people reading that would probably assume that Kozinski believed that a member of the public would have to log in, likely presenting a password, in order to view anything stored on his site. But clearly Kozinski knew that members of the public could view material stored on his web site without a password or login. After all, he wrote an article about Cyrus Sanai that, in the 13th paragraph, hyperlinked a document stored on his web site:

Nor would the reader — unless he happened to enter Mr. Sanai’s name in the Westlaw CTA9-ALL database — realize that, as part of the same imbroglio, he and certain members of his family have hounded a state trial judge off their case (read the PDF); been held in contempt and sanctioned under 28 U.S.C. §1927 and had their ninth sortie to our court in the same case designated as “frivolous” and “an improper dilatory tactic” by the district court. A detached observer, Mr. Sanai is not.

The “read the PDF” hyperlink is to this link: http://alex.kozinski.com/judge.thibodeau.pdf. Unless Kozinski took specific steps to unlock permission for the viewing of that one document — an action which would, presumably, have familiarized him with the permissions applicable to his site — he knew the public could view documents on his site.

My guess is that Kozinski assumed members of the public could view these materials only if they had the correct address for the material in question — but that they couldn’t view it if they didn’t know the specific address. But that’s just a guess. I am trying to obtain contact information for Kozinski so I can ask him more directly.

I don’t ask this question in the spirit of attacking Judge Kozinski. Before this controversy, I had long admired him as a smart, iconoclastic judge with a clear and entertaining writing style. I don’t have any pre-existing hostility to the man. I’m just interested in the facts.

I’ll remind people that the material I posted is not all of the material on Kozinski’s website, by a longshot. It is merely a selection of material I received from Cyrus Sanai by e-mail. Mr. Sanai — who cheerfully admitted to me that he went after Judge Kozinski to bring publicity to his parents’ case and what he perceived to be the Ninth Circuit’s inconsistency on a an area of law related to that case — agreed to mail me a CD of the entire contents he downloaded from Judge Kozinski’s site. I will be contacting him again to follow up on that. In the meantime, you can get an idea of what was in Kozinski’s “stuff” subdirectory from the file list in this comment, which lists file names found in a search engine cache.

In the meantime, I find it interesting that most people who view the images for themselves find them less offensive than they had expected to find them, based upon a text description of the material in the L.A. Times article. What the article often omits is the humorous context of many of the images. It’s not always my brand of humor, but in most cases, the material is at least an attempt to be humorous.

Meanwhile, I have sent an e-mail to Scott Glover, the author of the L.A. Times article, asking him whether the “video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal” is that video I linked on Wednesday of a man running away from an aroused donkey. That is a video that was not present on the site when Mr. Sanai did his download, so only the L.A. Times can answer that question. If, as I suspect, the donkey video is the video in question, I think the paper did Kozinski a disservice by using the word “cavorting,” which is suggestive of a human receptive to the idea of bestiality.

UPDATE: I should add that the Chronicle‘s statement that Kozinski’s site depicted “bestiality” is wholly inaccurate and should be retracted. I have received confirmation from someone familiar with the contents of the site that it was indeed the donkey video that was described in the article. That is not an image of bestiality, and to describe it as such is irresponsible.

9 Responses to “Kozinski Asks for Investigation of Himself”

  1. Patterico:

    I don’t think it follows to say he presumed you needed a password. I think he meant you need a direct link to any file, and that there would not be general “browse” access. Many web servers are thusly configured. I sometimes put up family document or photo transfers in an open HTTP directory, but since they’re not linked from a page on the directory and referrer blocking is on, they can only be accessed if I supply a third party the direct URL of the file.

    He supplied the public with the direct URL of one or more files, but that does not mean he understood that the whole directory would be subject to browsing.

    Gonzo (aec2cd)

  2. Gonzo, I think we’re saying the same thing.

    Patterico (9a63bb)

  3. You’re being kind by saying the Times did him “a disservice.” I’d say they were irresponsible and sensationalist.

    WCJ (cc882a)

  4. Patterico,

    Thanks, I figured as much. But “browse” access is one of those “biggie” things that are important, and a lot of people don’t think about. There have been ‘insider trading’ problems because someone found browse access to a news release on a web server on a Friday, and not “linked” until a Monday, for example.

    Gonzo (aec2cd)

  5. See my blog post:

    How “alex.kozinski.com” worked

    He knew people could retrieve files from the site, even from the /stuff directory. I speculate that he thought they needed specific filenames.

    Seth Finkelstein (8c4429)

  6. Seth Finkelstein’s discovery is very important. It’s not how I got into the directory, but demonstrates that Judge Kozinski was granting access freely.

    Cyrus Sanai

    Cyrus Sanai (4df861)

  7. I believe the sense of “cavorting” intended was “prancing” or ” to leap or dance about in a lively manner”. I don’t normally think of “cavorting” as sexual, but it’s not a word I would often use except in a different sense, which is to be flagrantly associating oneself with something (“cavorting with criminals”).

    By the way, there are fertility rituals involving dancing and “cavorting” around animals which are in an aroused state. In nomadic and agricultural societies, getting your farm animals to boink each other was an element of avoiding starvation. However, it is kind of a deviant (i.e. not normal) thing to be interested in these days unless you are in the stud business, and even then I don’t think stud meisters (or whatever you call them) exchange videos of each other’s greatest achievements in that area.

    Cyrus Sanai

    Cyrus Sanai (4df861)

  8. “In nomadic and agricultural societies, getting your farm animals to boink each other was an element of avoiding starvation. However, it is kind of a deviant (i.e. not normal) thing to be interested in these days unless you are in the stud business, and even then I don’t think stud meisters (or whatever you call them) exchange videos of each other’s greatest achievements in that area”

    I was in youtube just yesterday and i happened to stumble upon a video someone posted of two hamsters doing the “birds and the bees”. It lasted for about 5 minutes. I was kind of amused , but “deviant”, i think not.

    Bull Stud (89aa70)

  9. Hamster love videos are on YouTube?

    That just ain’t right.

    Maybe its my lack of farming experience, but I just find a deep interest in animal copulation creepy, and I think Glover and his editors did as well. But I am learning much more about differing human mores in the past six months than in my 40 years that preceded.

    Cyrus Sanai

    Cyrus Sanai (4df861)


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