Smell a rat? The judge did. He used the words "anger" and "spite" to describe the attitudes and actions of Choudhri's supervisors. The charges were trumped up, the judge said.

That didn't excuse Choudhri's insubordination, which included answering sarcastically when his boss asked about his Web surfing. But taken with other mitigating factors -- including Choudhri's good work history, the fact that he only surfed when his work was done and his admission that he was wrong to disobey orders -- it meant Choudhri deserved only a reprimand.

Incidentally, Judge Spooner also manages IT systems for his own department, New York City's Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (OATH). Yes, really. Until 2002, he even ran OATH's networks himself. So he knows about network capacity utilization and spam and viruses. He's uniquely qualified to focus on technical issues relating to how city employees use the Internet.

But he didn't.

Instead, he dug into questions of productivity (not affected by the nonbusiness Web surfing in this case, he concluded). And managerial effectiveness (undermined by Choudhri's insubordination, the judge said). And abuse of a manager's power (singling out Choudhri with a ban on personal Web use was "harsh and arbitrary," Spooner determined).