"AP spoke to Beverly Hills, Calif., attorney Cyrus Sanai, who said he had told the Los Angeles Times about the images on the Kozinski website. He said he found them while monitoring the site as part of a dispute with the 9th Circuit in connection with his parents’ divorce. He said he contacted reporters at various publications since January in an effort to expose them."
Nothing like being persistent, I suppose.
I should note that it’s also bad luck for Kozinski. I bet the LA Times never would have run the story if it weren’t for Kozinski currently presiding over a fairly high-profile obscenity case in Los Angeles.
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....The site was not "on the web" in the sense of a site open and inviting anyone to come in. It had a robots.txt file to indicate its contents were not to be indexed. That someone got in is testimony to the fact that security -- everywhere -- is imperfect. But this was a private file server, like a private room, hacked by a litigant with a vendetta. Decent people -- and publications -- should say shame on the person violating the privacy here, and not feed the violation by forcing a judge to defend his humor to a nosy world.