For those of you interested in privacy, you might find this amusing.
Tucson, Arizona Monday, 13 August 2001
A judicial right to privacy
Federal judges are sometimes regarded as lofty black-robed beings perched high above the rest of society. So it was refreshing to see the human side of the judiciary emerge this week in a story describing how some judges are rebelling against government efforts to monitor their office computer use.
A federal court administrator in Washington, D.C. had software installed in all federal courts to detect downloading of music, streaming video and pornography. This outraged judges in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals who ordered the program disconnected, the New York Times reported.
It would seem that when it comes to workplace spying, federal judges are a lot like regular folks. They find it just as offensive as do workers in more mundane occupations.
"We are concerned about the propriety and even the legality of monitoring Internet usage," Chief Judge Mary Schroeder of the Ninth Circuit said in a June memorandum to the the Administrative Office of the Courts. The Ninth Circuit covers nine Western states including Arizona.
The Washington adminstration office said it ordered the monitoring software to increase security and discourage computer use unrelated to judicial work. Officials there said the program was installed after a survey "revealed that as much as 3 to 7 percent of the judiciary browser's traffic consists of streaming media such as radio and video broadcasts, which are unlikely to relate to official business," according to the Times report.
The administrators said monitoring revealed some cases where pornographic websites had been accessed from court work stations, although there was no evidence that judges were the culprits. Dozens of employees were disciplined over those incidents, even though the workers were never given clear notice of the court's computer use policy, said the memo from Schroeder, the chief judge.
Judge Alex Kozinski, also a member of the Ninth Circuit, responded with 18-page memo that said in his view the the computer monitoring "may be a felony" because it could violate anti-wiretapping laws.
The legality of computer monitoring "is something that we as federal judges have jurisdiction to consider. We have to pass on this very kind of conduct in the private sphere," Kozinski's memo said.
Some courts around the nation have ruled that private employers have the right to spy electronically on employees as long as they warn workers that they are subject to such monitoring.
The U.S. Supreme Court, has not yet ruled on the issue directly but privacy experts believe it's only a matter of time before such a case ends up there.
In the meantime, Arizona employees can take some comfort that if they ever are embroiled in such a case, it will be judges the likes of Schroeder and Kozinski who will be ruling on their right to privacy.
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