PACER, Or Your First Amendment Right To Go Fuck Yourself For $0.10/Page
from the clunky,-inadequate-lie dept
Anyone who's used the US Court system's PACER system has complained about it. Some of those complaints have formed the basis of lawsuits. The multitude of complaints has moved legislators to make periodic runs at eliminating PACER's paywall. So far, PACER -- which looks and feels like it's still 2001 -- has managed to outlast these efforts. The only change over the last nineteen years has been an increase in access fees.
Many have complained, but few have complained as eloquently as Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of George Washington University's Program on Extremism. His op-ed for Politico is definitely worth reading. It highlights everything wrong with the PACER system, including its amazing profitability.
The U.S. federal court system rakes in about $145 million annually to grant access to records that, by all rights, belong to the public. For such an exorbitant price—it can cost hundreds of dollars a year to keep up with an ongoing criminal case—you might think the courts would at least make it easy to access basic documents. But you’d be wrong. The millions of dollars the courts have reaped in user fees have produced a website unworthy of the least talented of Silicon Valley garage programmers; 18 years since its online birth, PACER remains a byzantine and antiquated online repository of legal information.
This money is supposed to be used to improve PACER and fund other US Courts' efforts. A visit to PACER makes it clear none of that money is being routed towards making PACER less awful. At least one federal court has ruled the way the US Courts spend this money is illegal. But that determination hasn't stopped the court system from collecting fees and spending them on things like new TV screens in courthouses.
While it is a definite improvement over traveling to the pertinent court and using a kiosk to access electronic documents -- the way it was done from 1988-2001 -- the entire system is user-unfriendly and stupid expensive. The $0.10/page fee applies not only to documents, but to search results. Given the lack of standardization of case titles, searches are both expensive and frustrating. The fees apply whether or not the search turns up anything users are searching for.
And the per page fees for PDFs is simply ridiculous. These pages aren't being run off a Xerox by a court clerk. They're being served up from an infinite supply of 1s and 0s. Given their digital state, how does it possibly make sense to charge more for longer documents? The answer doesn't matter because it's the only game in town.
Adding to the problem is the court system's housecleaning efforts and the way it reacts to publication of public documents. In 2014, multiple appeals courts deleted "old" cases from their databases, memory-holing thousands of documents and decisions -- some only a couple of years old at that point. But what's more worrying is the way courts have responded to journalists publishing documents.
In January, I found a search warrant related to a wide-ranging investigation into public corruption in the Los Angeles City Council. When I made my discovery public, the Central District of California essentially locked down all search warrants filed on PACER. Most, if not all, search warrants recently filed in the district are no longer accessible online.
Presumably the DOJ and other law enforcement agencies did some loud complaining about the public court systems' publicly-accessible documents ending up in the hands of the public, resulting in a presumption of secrecy when it comes to affidavits and warrants.
More ends up hidden from public view -- not due to malice, but due to bureaucratic indifference. Hughes points out he has come across several terrorism prosecutions by the DOJ that have never been publicly announced by the Justice Department. The average member of the American public is not going to spend hundreds of dollars a month trying to track down documents from terrorism cases, so it's up the DOJ to provide timely notice of its anti-terrorism efforts. The DOJ is failing to do so and we only know this because dedicated private parties are willing to subject themselves to PACER's UI and inadequate search system to publicize the stuff the government can't be bothered to announce.
This all adds up to the worst system money can buy. It's broken. It's a joke. And it's the only access we the people have to documents the government has declared we have a First Amendment right to access. It's ugly, it's counterintuitive, and it somehow manages to personify the begrudging spirit of the most jaded bureaucrat, despite it being entirely composed of barely-functional code.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: access, access to law, pacer, transparency, us courts
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
I am guessing that the federal employees that run this system are using it to line their own pockets, like any good government employee would do with large amounts of money coming in and very little to no oversight!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
"Hundreds" of dollars would be at minimum 20,000 pages!
Anyone who needs that many can doubtless pay it. Judges can waive fees for the indigent, standard.
So likely what this person wants is unlimited access to data mine and promote his specific, possibly already remunerative or otherwise fulfilling agenda (bet he too is a corporate shill since featured here at Techdirt) at expense of taxpayers.
There has to be SOME price or corporations will simply grift off the taxpayer.
Now, the system is horrible? There's your niche, Mr Knows-it-all! Hire programmers and write a better front-end to the system, or whatever. -- But don't demand taxpayers to subsidize you in that, either.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: "Hundreds" of dollars would be at minimum 20,000 pages!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: "Hundreds" of dollars would be at minimum 20,000 pages!
Your thoughts are very incoherent.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: "Hundreds" of dollars would be at minimum 20,000 pages!
Parse Error: There was a problem parsing the package
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Ok, so now we know that Blue sucks at math as well as English.
20,000 x $0.10 = $2,000.00 and that's a bit more than "hundreds"
$200 is only going to get you 2,000 pages, but you are conveniently leaving out the search fees, which are also $0.10 each even for searches with zero results. With a system as sucky as PACER you are most likely going get a lot of zero result searches before you find what you need.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
blue's a copyright advocate. Do you seriously think those fuckers are ever going to demonstrate any sort of arithmetic competence?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: "Hundreds" of dollars would be at minimum 20,000 pages!
Judges can waive fees for the indigent, standard.
Uh, no. There is no judge I can go to asking them to waive PACER fees. That's not how it works. PACER is online. And it's for the public to access, not those who are parties in court.
There has to be SOME price or corporations will simply grift off the taxpayer.
For public information? Are you mad?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Longer documents means larger files. Larger files means higher storage cost and more bandwidth cost to send them to the user. Charging more for more work makes perfect sense. Now, the fees are orders of magnitude higher than reasonable at every level and deserve criticism accordingly, but it's a bit disingenuous to say that the courts should charge the same for a nearly blank single page filing as for a hundred page filing packed dense with inline images.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
My broadband connection costs the same regardless of whether I use 50 GB of data in a month or 1023; they don't start charging per byte (well, per 10GB) until I exceed a terabyte. And the reason they start charging extra then isn't that they're no longer covering costs; it's that they're greedy fucks with a natural monopoly.
Bandwidth and storage space are cheap; the difference between a 2K file and a 20MB file is four orders of magnitude, but it's insignificant in terms of the cost of storage and transmission. There are three reasons to charge per the byte at that scale:
This is #3.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
You left one off.
4. To limit or deny access.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
Great point.
This is #3 and also #4.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Wouldn't a ...
...per document fee make more sense?
Doesn't matter if it's a one-page Affidavit or a 30,000 page trial transcription.
Looking at that $145m number, and the $7m (IIRC) actual yearly budget/cost of the system, they could charge a dollar per document and still turn more of a profit than they're supposed to be getting.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Opinions are free, sites like Pacermonitor.com list the docket search results for free, and a totally free system would be overwhelmed, and lead to an explosion of pro-se litigation no one wants.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
And your evidence for this conclusion is...?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
“Opinions are free”
And yours is worth about as much.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
There is also the RECAP project which is working towards freeing documents from PACER one at a time.
Just out of curiosity, why would an explosion of pro-se litigation be a bad thing? I don't see a society of people educated on the actual laws that govern them as bad, myself. Ignorance of the law has never been an viable excuse, right?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
Unless you're a cop.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
At which point it's not only a valid excuse, but a greatly desirable state to achieve(or claim to).
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
Other than bogging down an already-clogged court system with a bunch of people who don't know what they're talking about, you mean?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: exploding Pro-Se's
Why do pro-se's bother you?
Because sometimes they might be right? Or do the filings of some of them where they combine law under replaced code along with comments about the Revolutionary War, the marches in Selma and Nazi's just unable to provide you with mirth?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
a totally free system would be overwhelmed,
Why? How many people are searching for court documents?
and lead to an explosion of pro-se litigation no one wants.
Wait, what? Giving people free access to past court cases will lead to an explosion of pro-se litigation? That makes no sense.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Absolutely, you don't want the commoners to get any idea of how the privileged insiders who have the money and power to use the system to their advantage to somehow get uppity ideas, like how they could actually obtain (gasp) justice on their own. Think of it as a poll tax to keep the plebes down. Let them beg for pro bono justice that the system hands out like scraps to those less qualified as a semblance that a judicial system cares about justice. After all justice is like a banker who sit upon his horde of cash, only handing it out to those credit worthy. Otherwise, the system goes broke.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Unless, of course, you want to download them through PACER. Then it is so much per page, after you first pay for the search.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
They're being served up from an infinite supply of 1s and 0s.
There you go misleading folks again. The laws of Thermodynamics state you can't really create or destroy anything...it is a closed system. This means that the supply of 1s and 0s is NOT infinite and so now your statement is attempting to force PACER to violate the law!
Shame on you for advocating lawlessness on the internet!
PS - I hope Pai uses this as an argument against web neutrality...that would be a hoot!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
We Need Aother Alexandra Elbakyan
Time for a new end-run around another current, pay-per-view, gate-keeper model...PACERHub.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: We Need Aother Alexandra Elbakyan
"LawHub"?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Write your congressmen (most are Lawyers), tell them this sucks.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Aaron Swartz
Wasn't trying to fix this broken middle finger what put Aaron Swartz in the feebs crosshairs?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Why the fuck do I have to register to search for a Fukien public record. Unbelievable! I register and I’m told I’ll get a token in mail and can I search until then
[ link to this | view in chronology ]