Senate Judiciary chairman urges PACER to restore access to removed case archives | Hacker News Reader

Senate Judiciary chairman urges PACER to restore access to removed case archives

washingtonpost.com

70 pointsprivong17 comments

Our law firm wrote to the Chief Judge of the 2nd Circuit (in NYC) last month asking for these PACER docs to be restored. http://adlervermillion.com/removal-of-public-pacer-records/

Leahy obviously has more pull than our little tech law firm.

They get paid $0.10 for each "page view" (and a "page view" is an estimate of how many 8.5"x11" paper pages would have been required to show the content) and they still can't be fucked to keep the archive online. Incredible.

Total fucking bullshit.

Here's a thought experiment: ask Google if they would do it for free!

I'd bet that Google would jump on it, just because. Okay, so they'd serve ads for bail bondsmen and for ambulance chasers with every page view, but at least we'd have the data.

What is this incompatibility they are alluding to? If the data could be viewed in the old system, it can be extracted..

It's not clear.

The AO claims that the courts affected have systems created by "local vendors." It never appeared before that individual court sites were made by any other vendor than the AO itself, however, with some customizations for each court.

Even if database engines or schemas differ, there's always ODBC.

There's effectively no good reason why the cases should not be available on PACER. And there's also no good reason why PACER should cost $0.10 per page.

Disclaimer: I'm suing the AO over this. http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/29himg3wm/california-northe...

I'm sure you are right, but the PACER system is a mess and certainly feels neglected. Like the article mentions, it is not a unified system. Each district, and each court, can have their own version of the system. Some courts are on the same version but with custom modifications.

This tells me that the system has no real architect. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Migrating old data? The people in charge don't know how to do it, and don't much care.

There's a lot of opportunity to fix this service.

To be fair, the AO has to deal with a lot of local personalities.

Chief judge of each court basically has their own say, plus whatever their admins/clerks want.

There are 94 federal judicial districts. So it's like having 94 different clients.

Nobody at the top (which is really the supreme court) is really willing to say "no, we are all going go this way", because the people at the top are judges, not technologists. There is a tremendous amount of politics involved.

All that said, i'm not defending them. THey have 164 people working in IT. That's plenty to build a functioning database system. I've seen some public judge apologists for the complexity of pacer: that nobody understands how hard this is to build, and that it's outside the realm of normal technologies.

That, to me, just demonstrates the problem: They think their problem is very very hard, and while not easy, it's not that difficult. People build systems that handle number, scope, and complexity equivalent to PACER every day.

Judge Kopf has a really interesting post about this

http://herculesandtheumpire.com/2014/09/03/the-latest-really...

This post is in particular, where i say "judge apologist" He thinks this is really difficult and no techies understand. In particular, he says

"3. For those who live in the IT world outside the judiciary, it is fashionable to trash PACER and CM/ECF. The problem is that those digit-heads are clueless when they get beyond slot A fits into slot B. Of course, in a perfect world these systems would be elegant and the cost to the public would be zero. But we don’t live in the pristine world of the computer geeks. They know absolutely nothing about managing a large organization, and that is particularly true for an organization that supports judges who have jobs for life under the Constitution. "

This is utter and complete bullshit from top to bottom. It is a stereotypical judge view of the world of technology. An old and outdated view that hasn't been true for 20 years.

Ha okay I understand. But you cut off the important bit:

As a consequence of this real life illiteracy, these outsiders have no clue what a triumph these systems are from a variety of perspectives such as internal management of cases to external judicial transparency. The will and skill necessary to convince the internal stakeholders (judges and lawyers) to adopt the concept of these systems (to let go of paper) and then construct a dual public/internal system with few glitches is a major milestone in the annals of good government.* This was a truly a monumental achievement. For my money, PACER and CM/ECF should be here to stay despite the present debacle.

RGK understands that this is technically pretty straightforward but going in guns blazing will not endear you to an Article 3 judge. At the end of the day you are replaceable, they aren't.

"The will and skill necessary to convince the internal stakeholders (judges and lawyers) to adopt the concept of these systems (to let go of paper) and then construct a dual public/internal system with few glitches is a major milestone in the annals of good government.* "

See, but i disagree with this. All it really demonstrates is a lack of high level management and drive. The AO and the judicial council could have just done this. There is enough political power and will at the top to accomplish the goal. It just wasn't used. Because of this, to me, PACER is not a triumph of good government, it is the "mission accomplished" of the government world.

It stays that way. Nobody feels it has to change, because they think they already did everything there is to do.

I interpreted him as agreeing with you--he is saying that the "digit-heads" and "computer geeks" don't understand that the problem is political, not technological.

Maybe you are right. Before I wrote that, I got the opposite impression from reading the comments. It seemed he thought it is both a political and a technological challenge. I think it is only the former.

So they'd need someone with a scanner in 94 different jurisdictions?

Good point. I'd chip in fifty bucks for a ScanSnap if someone can supply the documents. We can host them on the Internet Archive.

They charge for every page you want to access. They have a monopoly on said pages.

How can it possibly be neglected given the revenue stream?

If they don't wont to make the old data available, they should just release a freaking dump. People will gladly take care of providing it for everyone, at zero cost.

This is an organization for which a coldfusion webapp to keep track of their rent from the GSA was a fantastic advance.

(By the way, if you know perl and live near Boston, the district court is hiring)

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