Thanks for posting this! I'm the executive director of Free Law Project. If anybody has any questions or comments, I'm happy to chat!
1. How do you know which documents to buy with the donated credits?
2. How do you get access to the user's account? Do you store their password somewhere?
Maybe a simple trick would be to throw a little alert with the extension around the end of the quarter just to say, "Hey, it's the end of the quarter. Have you spent your entire free budget?"
Hm. There's an opportunity here, but we've never quite nailed it down.
2. The user provides their creds and you store them in Hashicorp Vault, AWS Param Store, or another secrets manager, and then retrieve them for use in making requests with a queue and runner mechanism.
If you have questions about this, email in profile. Last job was somewhere making requests for users with their creds at scale, currently in infosec. I would love to help make all PACER docs freely available.
Then if it's popular you can do more interesting things like prompting people to use the web page from the extension, moving the whole web page and fetch logic into the extension so it doesn't leak credentials, turning it into a cryptocurrency so people can fetch documents on demand, etc., but first things first.
I tend to browse Pacer side by side with courtlistener, e.g. get the docket, read through docket on courtlistener, then click through to buy the documents I want. When there's a delay like that I'm never quite sure if it was actually uploaded successfully so I go save the documents separately, it's inconvenient.
Also, is there any way you could upload documents that members of a case get for free through Pacer? What I've noticed is that it'll show the docket entry if I have the extension installed, but it's an abbreviated form (e.g. "motion to dismiss" instead of a longer entry with party info, attachments, etc).
> Also, is there any way you could upload documents that members of a case get for free through Pacer?
Yeah, we've experimented with that, but haven't gotten it nailed down yet. If somebody wanted to help, especially somebody with free-look access, we'd love to hear from you.
I've seen a lot of interesting ones from Steven Biss, where he also sued YouTube in the David Seaman lawsuit. He is the attorney representing Nunes against Twitter for someone having a parody account about him. He is currently representing a guy named Robert Steele in a lawsuit against Jason Goodman that has a lot of very unique and interesting documents regarding cyberwarfare, dirty bomb hoaxes, informants being involved, etc.
Where would be the best place to report this?