Rebels in Black Robes Recoil at Surveillance of Computers A group of federal employees who believed that the monitoring of their office computers was a major violation of their privacy recently staged an insurrection, disabling the software used to check on them and suggesting that the monitoring was illegal and unethical.

This was not just a random bunch of bureaucrats but a group of federal judges who are still engaged in a dispute with the office in Washington that administers the judicial branch and that had installed the software to detect downloading of music, streaming video and pornography.