It's yet another instance of panopticon surveillance now being too cheap to meter. I think our society needs to come to grips with this new reality and figure out what to do about it.
Or are we all just cool with this?
Lawyer: duty-bound professional, is an officer of the court, can be publicly disbarred, very expensive degree that needs to be paid off
Some guy on the internet with an axe to grind: ???
You dont need to be a lawyer to access any of it... I think the other poster simply meant that lawyers generally have Lexis subscriptions, already.
Also, the various court databases this site is searching are ALREADY online and publicly available, and have been for years. This is just providing a free, unified interface with a fast search index.
Yes, and that is a phase change difference. It's not a trivial enhancement.
I have a different theory about why this bugs you... Previous to today, you were ignorant of that these records were available online so cheaply and quickly. Nothing has really changed, except your own anxiety levels as your worldview struggles to absorb this information. But your brain wants the change to be external, because that's less threatening than the realization that this capability has been lurking out there in the world, all along.
On the other hand, outside of casually checking out someone, the reality is that this has long been available for anyone want to spend a very few bucks to do so.
Note in particular the education requirement:
> Here are all the options:
> - Three or four years of study at a law school accredited by the American Bar Association
> - Four years of study at a State Bar-registered, fixed-facility law school
> - Four years of study with a minimum of 864 hours of preparation at a registered unaccredited distance-learning or correspondence law school
> - Four years of study under the supervision of a state judge or attorney
> - A combination of these programs
If all you've done is pass the bar exam, you can go to hell. It may not even be possible; the requirements for the California exam are behind a login wall, but other states have restricted eligibility to take the exam based on the testee's education. I assume they didn't want to be embarrassed by having the wrong sort of person pass the bar.
This has consequences. For example, in some US states it takes a few seconds for an employer to find out a candidate was once arrested while drunk, or has a conviction for a minor offense from 15 years ago. And employers do that sort of search routinely, because it's free and easy. Only someone being targeted for a specific background check gets that treatment here, because it's not so easy.
Same argument applies to, for example, reading the previous divorce case for someone you're dating. Only a real weirdo would do that here, in part because it involves time and money. If it's freely available online, I do think it would be a lot more common.
I don't know whether it'd be better or worse to have such information more accessible, but it can change things.
I think your parent's point is that money isn't an issue for the rich. A billionaire doesn't care that it costs $150 to find out, they don't care that it costs a $1,000 to find out. So suddenly information becomes a class issue. Either it should be available to nobody or everybody, money shouldn't factor into it.
A lot of policies or laws don't affect billionares the same way. We don't fine speeding tickets based on income like norway. Nobody is changing any laws to make it proportional impact on billionares.
And they are ALREADY other websites/search products that provide a unified search interface... Lexis Nexus is probably the biggest/oldest, and I believe Bloomberg also has this feature... There are dozens (if not hundreds) of cheap public record search websites that charge $10/month for it, too.
If you're surprised by all this, you haven't been paying attention... For a few decades now.
Society will have to change to accommodate the digital panopticon. I don't see the digital panopticon going away, though.
Agreed, but ...
> Powerful corporate and government actors have massive surveillance and data warehousing capabilities that aren't going away.
To nitpick: They aren't going away as long as we spread that message. It's not easy, but we can make them go away. People do accomplish things and change the world - just compare today's world with 500 years ago; all the differences the result of people changing things. Defeatism is trendy, and who benefits? (The status quo.)
It's not defeatism-- it's just being realistic. I don't believe there's any useful method to make government actors comply with the law. I have an, admittedly US perspective, but evidence the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, the NSA and the subsequent Church committee hearings, and Snowden's disclosures as examples. The power afforded by mass surveillance and data warehousing is too attractive not to be abused.
You must have heard that line from pessimists 10,000 times before. There would be no startups, science, democracy, etc. if people believed it. We'd be living in caves - 'let's be realistic, we've been living in them for 190,000 years!'
> I don't believe there's any useful method to make government actors comply with the law.
The evidence is overwhelmingly otherwise: Many, many government actors have been caught, prosecuted and punished, at every level - including multiple Presidents, at least one Vice President (off the top of my head), members of Congress, federal judges, generals and admirals, and more, and that's just the federal level.
Goverments have widely differing levels of corruption, and the US has in the past been one of the best - so it's effective. Other countries are also more and less effective than the US, and we can see what they do and what works. There is plenty of research. Nothing is stopping you, but you.
The current trend in defeatism - against all evidence, in a country with one of the most effective governments in the history of humanity - serves someone's interests. Who? Who benefits from spreading this message?
Lowering the barriers to this is not necessarily a good thing. For example: if I have to drive to the county clerk's office to get records, I am unlikely to do so. This means that if I need the information, I will go get it, but if I do not need it, I won't bother.
The patent section being so easily searched is very useful and I see no downsides there.
So optimistically maybe having lots of information public and easily searchable like this ultimately leads to a similar outcome. Like maybe it forces us to stop using date of birth to verify identity since it's so easy to find anyone's date of birth.
If the information is going to be out there maybe it's safer for everyone to have it than just a few people. If just a few people have it, and they use it to screw just a few other people, there's no pressure to fix it.
Or of course maybe that's wishful thinking.
I could be wrong on my facts.
So generally easy to hide in the noise. Here you can just put in a name, and off you go.
Yes, through expensive services like Westlaw and Lexis.
As far as I can tell, all of this data is of the public nature.
While it may feel weird to type in someone's name and see their history with regard to legal filings... that is the society we live in: an open society.
Aggregating a number of disconnected data sources for search I think is absolutely a legitimate usage of the data.
The public can still see the filing and result (when the divorce was granted), but the actual documents are restricted so as not to air all of one's dirty laundry unnecessarily.