PACER Deleting Old Cases; Time To Fix PACER
from the down-the-memory-hole dept
For years, we've talked about the many problems with PACER, the horribly designed and managed electronic court records system that the federal court system uses here in the US. Beyond being clunky, buggy, horribly designed and slow -- it's also expensive. With some exceptions, it's 10 cents per page you download, and also 10 cents per search. As many have noted, this almost certainly violates the law concerning PACER, which says that the Judicial Conference can only "prescribe reasonable fees… to reimburse expenses incurred in providing these services." And yet the fees go way, way beyond what's needed to maintain the (again, horrible) system which they refuse to update. Instead, it's used for lots of other things. And, as many people note, it's something of a travesty that all of these public records are locked up, rather than being made available. Even more ridiculous is that when people hack around this system, such as with the open RECAP project to free up PACER documents, courts freak out. Or, when people like Aaron Swartz try to use free access to PACER to free up its documents, they end up being the subject of an FBI investigation for computer hacking.Aaron Greenspan, who runs an open court records site called Plainsite (and who is currently engaged in an unlikely-to-succeed lawsuit arguing that PACER should be free), has noticed that PACER is also shoving old cases down the memory hole so they will no longer be available. In a brief announcement on August 10th, PACER's website announced that a bunch of cases would "no longer be available."
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Filed Under: aaron greenspan, cases, pacer, public records, records
Companies: plainsite
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Re:
Of course. Public records are used against the government; therefore, they must be locked up so the government can abuse its citizens in peace. Or if not abuse, well, public records are very not a priority.
But records on all those potential terro...*ahem*...all those awesome citizens, well, those are a priority, because those help us control the citizens.
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Re:
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But hey the value of the access they've been selling to the data brokers just went up... I wonder who will be retiring to a nice new job at LN.
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I can't believe I'm saying this
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Re: I can't believe I'm saying this
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So far behind.
Just bought two, along with another Raspberry Pi to run the NAS made up of USB drives.
Nothing like rebooting the computer acting as your server to mess up things for other devices unnecessarily, like the movie I was watching stops, and reboots all around to re-recognize.
Now the governments issues are different. There is certainly sufficient technology to serve the documents, all the documents, cheaply (and unlike my solution above, safely) and distribute them for free, as they should, and probably reduce costs. It take extra money to implement limitations.
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Aggregating PACER
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Re:
That might just about work because although a person has the responsibility to find out what the law is rather than just acting and claiming ignorance, if they cannot find out what the law is it would be unjust to penalise someone for breaking it. (I wouldn't encourage anyone to try to set up such a situation, but it might be worth trying for an otherwise hopeless case.)
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Architecture
It might be a performance problem which gets worse the more cases they have available. It might be a design restriction which causes it to break if there are above a certain number of cases (like the issue slashdot had a long time ago when the number of comments no longer fit on a 4 byte integer). It might be that the older cases have their metadata formatted differently than the newer cases, and they want to make a change which needs the newer metadata. And so on.
Whatever the true cause is, it's not going to be something that simply adding a new drive could fix (if they can even add a new drive; the cause might be that their architecture limits the number of drives).
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Re: Architecture
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Re: Architecture
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Pacer
But what are they doing with cases like the one of the guy who called me, having been convicted ca. 1990 and still on supervised release (like parole) with occasional active entries. They shouldn't be wiping his case out, I had to refer to it to advise him.
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No its not. Its perfectly designed and does precisely what it is suppose to do, in exactly the manner it was designed to do it. In fact, its a showcase example of how to pretend to serve the public while doing everything possible to prevent public access.
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Funny
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