Federal Court Staff’s Internet Use Curbed

Judges and their staffs may not download sexually explicit material, music or videos on their office computers, under a policy announced Wednesday by the rule-making body of the U.S. court system.

The new policy “will help ensure that taxpayer-provided resources are devoted to” official business, not personal use, said U.S. District Judge Edward Nelson of Birmingham, Ala. Judges are not “above the law” and do not have a right to use their computers for entirely personal uses, he added.

The new policy governs the 30,000 employees of the federal court system. It had been sharply debated in recent weeks, and not just because of its effect on these employees. The law is unclear on whether workers have any right to privacy in the use of their office computers.

But the federal court policy makes clear that privacy rights for all federal workers are minimal. Judges, along with other federal employees, do not have a “right to use government-office equipment for nongovernment uses,” the policy says.

In a second computer-related policy change, the judges said they want files in civil court cases to be put on the Internet so they can be accessed by anyone, anywhere. They said certain personal information, such as Social Security numbers or medical data, will be excluded.

If the paper files are now available to the public in a courthouse, they should also be available via computer on the Internet, the judges said.

Some district courts are currently making some civil court records available via a for-pay Web site. Wednesday’s decision will expand the program to all district courts.

For now, the new open-access policy covers only civil matters, not criminal cases. The judges said they will consider later whether to put all criminal files on the Internet.

While the move to put civil cases on the Internet will affect more people, the judges were focused more intently on the dispute over their own computers.

In May, judges on the West Coast rebelled when they learned their computers were being monitored by the administrative office of the U.S. courts in Washington. Judge Alex Kozinski of Pasadena, who sits on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, said the surveillance was illegal, and he and his colleagues unplugged the monitoring system.

Court officials in Washington replied they are not interested in spying on individual workers or monitoring their e-mail.

Rather, they say, their concern was triggered by evidence that large files had been downloaded onto some courthouse computers from Internet sites that contain sexually explicit videos.

In response to Kozinski’s protests, the rule-making body dropped part of the policy that says all court employees who use the court’s computers “consent to monitoring.”

But the rest of the policy detailing the “unauthorized or improper use” of court computers was adopted intact.

The policy change was to have been debated at the Supreme Court on Sept. 11, during the semiannual meeting of the U.S. Judicial Conference.

The conference consists of 27 top judges representing the federal circuit courts. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist was there to chair the meeting.

But the discussion had just begun about 10 a.m. when word came that jetliners had struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Rehnquist called off the meeting and the judges left the building.

Judges said this week it was the first time in 79 years that a meeting of the Judicial Conference was canceled. Instead, the judges voted by mail on the new policy.

The two 9th Circuit judges who led the protest said they were satisfied with the compromise.

“We don’t have a problem with saying that extensive downloading is inappropriate,” said Chief Judge Mary M. Schroeder in Phoenix. “I voted in favor of it.”

Kozinski said he continues to believe that it is illegal to monitor employees without their consent. “We had a problem with the monitoring part of this, and they withdrew what we found most objectionable.”