Comment by xxpor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xxpor | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>Not surprisingly for government IT projects, PACER looks like most web sites did around 1994. It's actually not one web site at all, but more like one hundred, spread across different court districts and circuits in the country. The district-level courts each have their own custom version because judges demand custom features, and no one can refuse their demands. The appellate-level courts have an entirely different and separate infrastructure, written in a different language. (Technically-inclined readers, it's a Java applet. But really twelve different Java applets, depending on the circuit. No joke.) The Supreme Court, which can do whatever it wants, opts out of PACER entirely. Each level of PACER has separate login requirements, not to mention that PACER is separate from CM/ECF, an unbelievably badly-named system that actually lets you file documents, but under a separate login. What this means is that it is essentially impossible to follow a case from court to court, and if you even try, it is very, very expensive.

What. The. Fuck.

For those involved in any government contracting work this is no surprise at all. The lowest bidder or the friend of a friend wins the contract who then skims off the top and then forwards work to sub and sub contractors and so on. In the end programmers with high school level of understanding end up writing the code, and layers and layers of intermediate L3, Lockheed, Mantech, Booz|Allen type contractors get rich and the government ends up with an overpriced piece of shit that doesn't work properly.

There is quite a bit of a business opportunity in there (at least in theory as it a slimy red tape mess) for small and agile teams to come in and clean up the crap left by the large botched up jobs like these.

I'm not sure if this is the result of a high-priced government contractor boondoggle. The U.S. judiciary isn't a monolithic entity. Each circuit, each district, and even each judge have a great deal of autonomy, and administrative matters are completely decentralized. There's not even a single uniform website for the various courts. Compare the page for the eastern district of Pennsylvania (http://www.paed.uscourts.gov) with the page for the northern district of Illinois (http://www.ilnd.uscourts.gov) and the 7th circuit (http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov). The only thing they all share is the domain!

What it looks like to me is the usual scenario in decentralized organizations. Different pieces adopted systems as the need for them arose, and various systems were layered on top over that over the years to try and achieve some uniformity in certain areas.

I wonder if there is anyway to electronically disintermediate the process by which someone wins a government software contract. There much be some way to make discovering contracts easy, quick and cheap and make the process to apply and build those projects super simply. Basically a startup needs to democratize access to these projects so you only need to be only an expert software developer and not a expert government bureaucrat to understand the process to win these contracts.

The system is there. They publish bids out with requirements then there is a process that companies go through to get that contract. So it is better but it is often just the motions, it provide official deniability "see the paper/electronic trail show it was an open and fair bid process".

What often happens behind the scenes is that requirements are written to a specific software product that is already effectively pre-determined. Like let's say it is a complicated inventory tracking system, out of 50 or so requirement points, every one basically matching the system that L3 provides without naming L3. Stuff like that.

It is vital to do behind the scenes networking, hiring insiders, that needs to happen besides also having someone full time that knows how to jump through the "official" red tape.

You should read a few call-for-proposals, it's pretty enlightening. What I learned (hopefully this differs from place to place) is that they write them in such a way that only huge, dishonest shops can respond, by making the requirements huge and contradictory. An honest shop can't call out the contradictions and get the work because "fully satisfying" the requirements is necessary to be accepted. A small shop can't afford the time and expense to respond with a proposal. In both cases you need to build in enough overhead to cover the countless hours spent arguing about the featureset and to afford the lawyers when the litigation comes a few years down the road.

I don't think the government means to lock out small vendors. It's just that bureaucracy tends to generate bloated and inefficient systems like this, in which the only part of the contract the vendor can afford to skimp on is the implementation itself (and not the lawyers, negotiators, managers, etc.) The people who work for the government want good, working systems, they're just prevented from choosing vendors who can produce them because using common sense is not sufficiently bureaucratic.

You might find this of interest:

http://www.thinkcomputer.com/corporate/whitepapers/restassur...

Except that it's near impossible to have a 'small and agile' team that interfaces with a government contract in any way. You need at least one person to just sit in meetings, at least one architect to draw up powerpoint charts that people will buy into, a project manager, a change order coordinator, and an accounts payable/receivable type person to do battle with getting the government to pay you (it is a full time job). On top of that, you need to have had experience doing government work in the past with good recommendations (for which many smaller shops pair up with bigger shops to act as prime contractors, which inflates the price enormously), and you need to have an ITIL or CMMI (depending on the customer) to make sure that all those processes are being followed.

In addition to the two or three people you need to actually do the work, you need a head count of at least 6 more just to manage customer expectations.

Yes, yes. Good point. Agile in this domain means about 10 people. It is huge compared to a start-up but when compared to L3 or Lockheed it is a _very_ small team.

And you are right, meeting, trade shows, filling out red tape, security audits all those need full time position to be handled.

Really makes you want to hand over important technology-based decisions to the government and court systems, no?

I worked for a company that made scale models of the Eurofighter for (I think) British aerospace. We made full scale models of those pylon held fuel tanks. Made them to the specs given to us and they didn't fit when they arrived at some kind of arms fair. Much scrambling later the problem was found. We made the tanks correctly, but the actual plane had some kind of old standard built into it by accident.

Remember that PACER is not intended as a site to research cases, which tends to be how many lawyers use it. It's meant as a site to organize electronically submitted court documents for the judges and the lawyers for a single case, instead of a paper file. The people involved in a case are going to be looking at all the documents for one case, and that is all nicely organized on one docket page. "Following a case from court to court" is not the intent of the system.

Court docket management software, not litigant case workflow.

I would imagine each court has no incentive to play nice with other courts, since it would basically simplify the process for challenging their judgments. Also, a higher court can basically use the court-to-court impedance barrier as a low-level filter to reduce their workloads.

PACER was designed in the early 1990s, before the internet was popular, i.e., when AOL was the internet for most of America. Indeed, PACER is probably as old, if not older than, most HN users.

It has not been upgraded since then, largely because Congress has not provided sufficient funds to the courts for them to do so (appropriations in the past two decades have largely been reserved for operations or for courtroom construction, but not technological upgrades. Much of the money from PACER access fees goes toward meeting the shortful in the operation budget, because Congress in its infinite wisdom has underfunded the federal courts for most of the last two decades.

(It's wierd that I have spent most of the last two days defending the American court system...)

This is such a load of self-serving bureaucratic nonsense. Pacer is an awful site that rips off the American people. Even if it is a cash cow, there's NO justification from keeping copyright free documents that are essential to democracy behind a paywall.

Increase the fees that Lexis-Nexis pays. Or charge more to submit documents. There's lots of solutions that could work to create a site that's usable and free to the American people.

This blame Congress crap has gone on long enough. When will the U.S. court system take its responsibility to the American people seriously? The answer: when people like you stop parroting its rationale.

Does 'rprasad work for the court system? Does he have some financial stake in it? If not, how is this "self-serving"? If it's just the idea that you find "self-serving", why did you target it at him specifically with "people like you"? What incentive does he have to "parrot" anything from the courts?

The US Courts are underfunded and have crippling case loads. Beyond that, is it even clear that any court has the authority to "increase the fees that Lexis-Nexis pays"? Or to charge more to submit documents?

Lexis-Nexis pays bulk rates to Pacer via contract. Attorneys pay to file documents. Those are set by the U.S. court system, not Congress.

He's making the same argument the U.S. court system has made, sub-rosa, for years, as it's raised fees for accessing court documents. It used to be 8 cents a page. Jumped to 10 cents earlier this year.

If they don't have money to upgrade the system, where does their $65 million in operating "income" go? I recognize this question could sound facetious, but I'm genuinely curious. My guess would be that they probably don't have the autonomy to take their budget and do as they please with it. Do PACER profits just get thrown into some general US gov coffer?

If you say it's a matter of funding, where do the extra revenues PACER takes in beyond cost go? Are they appropriated back into the general fund and thus not usable for upgrades?

Back in the 1990s, I remember that staff at the Civil Division of the Department of Justice used to get into PACER by way of dial-up. I really hadn't thought of PACER since about 1996.

> It has not been upgraded since then, largely because Congress has not provided sufficient funds to the courts for them to do so

What about the $65,000,000 surplus that the service generates?

I'd imagine the system could be drastically improved using a tiny fraction of that income. (Of course it could only get worse if they spent $65M on it...)

Thanks for all of your contributions on this issue, btw -- I disagree with very little of it on matters of fact, just in "should be y nor x".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com