Oopsie

A little free career advice, kids: if you're the chief judge of a federal Circuit Court of Appeals and you have a predilection for non-standard porn, don't keep your stash on the Internet. Amazingly, Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the Ninth Circuit, has been outed as a porn fiend because of a stash discovered on his personal website. Even more amazingly, the outing came while Kozinski was sitting by designation as a trial court judge in a Los Angeles obscenity trial, which has now been put on hold.

So what, exactly, was on the judge's website (now deleted - sort of)?

In an interview Tuesday with The Times, Kozinski acknowledged posting sexual content on his website. Among the images on the site were 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. He defended some of the adult content as 'funny' but conceded that other postings were inappropriate.

Kozinski, 57, said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public, although he also said he had shared some material on the site with friends. After the interview Tuesday evening, he blocked public access to the site.

While the whole thing is amusing to an outsider, I think Kozinski may be getting unfairly attacked.

For one thing, many folks (see the comments to the LA Times article) seem to be under the impression that the material on the judge's site came from the evidence presented at the obscenity trial. That's not the case and, at this point, nobody has alleged that what Kozinski was hosting was obscene (legally, anyway). Some of it sounds well beyond the bounds of traditional porn, but that isn't necessarily criminal.

For another, the charges of hypocrisy that oftentimes accompany these public sex scandals don't really apply here. Yes, Kozinski is a GOP Reagan appointee, but he's cut more from the libertarian wing of the GOP than the religious right wing. So this isn't a situation where a vocal morals crusader rails publicly about the evils of sex and drugs while privately smoking meth with transvestite hookers.

Having said all that, put the sex part to the side for a second, and I have serious questions about Kozinski's ability to deal with the realities of the 21st Century. How many times do people have to say it:

NOTHING IS PRIVATE
ON THE INTERNET

Shouldn't someone who deals with federal criminal statutes dealing with computers, kiddy porn, and the like be aware of something like that? Jeez.