Alex Kozinski's wife (Marcy Tiffany) explains it all.

In a long, very carefully written email to the Patterico blog.

First, what do we think of this use of one's wife to run interference for you in matters sexual? For me, it's a little too:



But let's look at some text excerpts:

[T]he LA Times story, authored by Scott Glover, is riddled with half-truths, gross mischaracterizations and outright lies. One significant mischaracterization is that Alex was maintaining some kind of “website” to which he posted pornographic material.

Obviously, Glover’s use of the word “website” was intended to convey a false image of a carefully designed and maintained graphical interface, with text, pictures, sound and hyperlinks, such as businesses maintain or that individuals can set up on Facebook, rather than a bunch of random files located in one of many folders stored on our family’s file server. The “server” is actually just another home computer that sits next to my desk in our home office, and that we use to store files, perform back-ups, and route the Internet to the family network. It has no graphical interface, but if you know the precise location of a file, you can access it either from one of the home computers or remotely.

Now, it is a website, though, isn't it? Tiffany avoids saying that Glover falsely identified Kozinski's site on the web as a website. She can only assert that that he meant for readers to picture something more elaborate and accessible than it was.

As to how [the tipster Cyrus] Sanai accessed our server and was able to rummage through our personal files, frankly we are still trying figure it out. Apparently, if a person is able to find a link to an item in the “stuff” file, and he knows what he is doing, it is possible for him to reverse engineer his way into other items stored in that file without our knowledge or consent.

But wait! Kozinski himself welcomed visitors when he promoted himself in the "Judicial Hotties" contest run on the conspicuous blog Underneath Their Robes and provided links to his server. And what is this "reverse engineering"? Clicking around within a site?

A newspaper – especially a major newspaper as the Los Angeles Times purports to be – is supposed to be a responsible member of the community, not a predator. If the presence of certain files on a judge’s computer is a truly a newsworthy matter, it would have been so months earlier, before Alex was assigned [the Isaacs] trial, and certainly a few days earlier, before a jury had been chosen and the trial had commenced. But what excuse is there for timing the story with surgical precision so as to do maximum damage to the judicial process? In doing so, the LA Times caused the effort of the court, the parties and the 150 citizens who answered the call of duty by reporting for jury service from near and far to go to waste, just to make a big splash. This strikes me as worse than irresponsible.

I certainly agree with that and with much other material in the letter. The LA Times shouldn't have published the idiotic attack, and Kozinski did nothing wrong.