EclectEcon

Two days ago, I posted a clip from the Associated Press about Judge Alex Kozinski, of the 9th Circuit Court in the US. In that posting, I wondered,

...why he, or any judge for that matter, would say "he didn't believe the images were obscene" about a case he was hearing.

It turns out, of course, that the images on the website had been posted by the judge's son and neither the images nor the judge's comments had anything to do with the case Kozinski was hearing.

While I do not agree with one of the analogies here, the background and details are fleshed out at this site.

Lessig on the Kozinski Kerfuffle Larry Lessig has a blog post on what he calls, The Kozinski Mess, by which he means "the total inability of the media — including we, the media, bloggers — to get the basic facts right, and keep the reality in perspective. The real story here is how easily we let such a baseless smear travel - and our need is for a better developed immunity (in the sense of immunity from a virus) from this sort of garbage."

Here is how he explains the situation:

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.

For more details, see this from MSNBC, which says, in part,

Cyrus Sanai, a Beverly Hills lawyer who has had a long-running dispute with the 9th Circuit, took credit for bringing the graphic material to light.

Sanai said he discovered the sexual content in December while monitoring the judge's Web site as part of his legal rift with the court. After downloading the files, Sanai said he began contacting reporters at various publications in January to bring attention to what he called widespread ethical problems on the 9th Circuit.

He provided a copy of the files to The Associated Press on Wednesday, which appeared to mirror the Times' descriptions of videos and pictures on the Web site.

Sounds as if there was more at stake than just porn.