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Comment by amha | Hacker News Reader

Un-fucking-believable. PACER has always been awful (I've used it since about 2005), but this is a new low---this is ACTIVE awfulness.

I assume, based on the weird specificity of what they're removing, that the PACER office is doing this at the request of the individual courts. Which just sort of underscores how awful this is---that courts get to decide how public their own opinions are.

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Not so. The AO forced the courts to do it according to two people at the Second Circuit.

The most likely explanation is that as part of the "upgrade" of CM/ECF (the write component of PACER) they needed to jettison old databases that used a different schema. This is of course nonsense. They've likely spent over $100 million on this upgrade since 2007, though actual numbers are surprisingly hard to come by. For that price they could have probably afforded a few coders to convert the older databases over.

Is there any way to obtain this old data through a FOIA? Or do those requests not apply to US courts?

Alas, FOIA applies only to federal government agencies that are in the executive branch. It doesn't apply to federal courts or the U.S. Congress.

Well that's depressing.

Yep. Though Congress could liberate all of PACER, retrospective and prospective, if it chose -- one data dump to Carl Malamud would do it. The appropriations bills are wending their way through the legislative process right now (mostly out of committee), and that might be a vehicle to add a one-line amendment. Would require a lot of work in the next month or two.

Who do I call or who's door do I bang on?

I'd point you in the direction of Carl Malamud, Jim Harper at the Cato Institute, and EFF, probably in that order. Jim's made it a project to liberate government data; Carl's gone further and made it his life's work.

Inside Congress itself? Hmm. I'm spending my time working on http://recent.io/ and now paying close attention nowadays. But if you're local to the SF south bay try Rep. Lofgren? I've done some Q&As with her and found she's one of the smarter and well-informed members of Congress on tech policy issues.

Not really. You could try but I doubt it would get you anywhere.

This needs Congressional attention. Of course, Congress is on vacation. Not that it would matter.

Still, contact your representatives.

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