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Improve PACER – Sign the Petition
Folks, We crafted a very short petition directed at the Administrative Office of the US Courts to improve PACER. The petition is online here: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/improve-PACER. It reads:
We ask the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts to improve PACER by enhancing the authenticity, usability and availability of the system. We the undersigned, urge the Administrative Office of the US Courts (AO) to make the following changes to the PACER system: For verification and reliability, the AO should digitally sign every document put into PACER using readily available technology. PACER needs to be much more readily accessible if it is to be usable for research, education, and the practice of law. Improved accessibility includes both lowering the costs for using PACER and enhancing the web interfaces. Depository libraries should also have free access to PACER.Please sign the petition, comment on the ideas and share the petition with your friends and colleagues! I encourage you to sign the petition. And if you have any questions about it, please don't hesitate to contact me. Thank you, Erika Wayne e-mail: evwayne AT stanford DOT edu Continue reading
Selling the Law: The Business of Public Access to Court Records
Selling the Law: The Business of Public Access to Court Records, by Stephen Schultze and Shubham Mukherjee, presentation [video and slides] Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University, February 5, 2009.
As government documents are increasingly digitized and put online, two orthogonal approaches to distributing these documents have developed. Under one approach, the documents are made easily and freely accessible. In others, the government retains or introduces barriers to access that are inspired by traditional physical access. When these barriers are fee-based, the government can inadvertently create downstream monopolies or architectures of control over public information. This problem is especially severe in the case of federal district court documents, which are available only via an outdated, fee-based, court-run system or from expensive aggregators like Lexis or Westlaw. Indeed, evidence indicates that the courts are using public access fees to subsidize other activities. If we are to be a nation of laws, citizens must have access to the law. The upfront cost of making court documents freely available is far outweighed by the long-term benefits to society. Widespread digitization combined with Internet connectivity has placed these benefits within reach. The courts must now address the task of revamping outmoded policies and funding structures in order to align their practice with this reality.Continue reading
Won’t Get Fooled Again: Day 23
Tapping back into the "raw power" theme, I just read the New York Times article on Carl Malamud mentioned here by Jim Jacobs. I found the article curious for the simple reason that it equates "free" access to massive amounts of court records with power, and a good form of power, or what he calls the "operating system for democracy." Though this kind of rhetoric sparks the necessary energy to get people to leave their couches and join the open government brigade at the barricade, I think it also paints a too simplistic picture of the complex arrangement of constitutional and legal traditions that favor a highly evolved civic engagement. Missing from the newspaper article's description of what happened to the PACER pilot project and its sudden suspension is the more messy aspects of democracy that try to balance privacy with open access, free access with the necessary infrastructure (that requires money and personnel to function) to sustain long-term availability of "raw data." This balancing act depends on a series of relationships between the courts, users, the GPO and its depository libraries. Simply downloading millions of pages, as one person did in California is not a relationship, it is simply a power surge that may or may not be made useful by people on the information grid. However, as the article points out, Malamud does demand some level of privacy protection in these court documents, he puts that responsibility squarely back on the shoulders of the courts by pointing out that is the court's duty, and heavy lifting, to make sure this private information is not made publicly available. What I would expect to see, if indeed Malamud is interested in becoming a future Public Printer is less focus on the power aspects of the information grid, and more focus on the redistribution stations necessary to make government information understandable, accessible, and sustainable over long periods of time. Libraries have done this for several millennium, and they will continue to do so with the different technologies now being deployed. It isn't a race to see who can make the most government information available. It should be a long engaged relationship between those in power and those the power serves to assure that the knowledge, information and necessary data are understood and usable by the citizen. Power without breakers or distribution centers only overwhelms, it does not inform. Continue reading
Still no official word on PACER project
An article in the New York Times adds a little more to the story of the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) saga. The article also says of Carl Malamud: "Mr. Malamud said his years of activism had led him to set a long-shot goal: serving in the Obama administration, perhaps even as head of the Government Printing Office."
- An Effort to Upgrade a Court Archive System to Free and Easy, By JOHN SCHWARTZ, New York Times, February 13, 2009.
Those courts, with the help of the Government Printing Office, had opened a free trial of Pacer at 17 libraries around the country. Mr. Malamud urged fellow activists to go to those libraries, download as many court documents as they could, and send them to him for republication on the Web, where Google could get to them. Aaron Swartz, a 22-year-old Stanford dropout and entrepreneur who read Mr. Malamud's appeal, managed to download an estimated 20 percent of the entire database: 19,856,160 pages of text. Then on Sept. 29, all of the free servers stopped serving. The government, it turns out, was not pleased. A notice went out from the Government Printing Office that the free Pacer pilot program was suspended, "pending an evaluation." A couple of weeks later, a Government Printing Office official, Richard G. Davis, told librarians that "the security of the Pacer service was compromised. The F.B.I. is conducting an investigation." ...At the administrative office of the courts, a spokeswoman, Karen Redmond, said she could not comment on the fate of the free trial of Pacer, or whether there had been a criminal investigation into the mass download. The free program "is not terminated," Ms. Redmond said. "We'll just have to see what happens after the evaluation."See also Why was PACER suspended? and More on PACER. Continue reading
Carl Malamud Featured in Wired Magazine
There is a great article about Carl Malamud and PACER over at Wired Magazine: "Online Rebel Publishes Millions of Dollars in U.S. Court Records for Free" by Ryan Singel.
Malamud says he's looking forward to the day he doesn't have to game the system. "If I had $10 million, I'd make a copy of all the documents and be done."I hear ya, Carl. I hear ya. Continue reading
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