During a computer system upgrade for its Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database, the Administrative Office of the US Courts has removed access — without any warning — to years of electronic documents from five courts:
US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit (cases filed prior to 1 January 2010)
US Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit (cases filed prior to CM/ECF conversion)
US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit (cases filed prior to 1 January 2010)
US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (cases filed prior to 1 March 2012)
US Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California (cases filed prior to 1 May 2001)
The document removal was not announced until it had already been done.
PACER is the system implemented between 2001-05 for public court records and charges US$0.10 per page of search results within its archive plus US$0.10 per page of court documents. This information is officially in the public record and it should be available to the citizenry at no cost because we’ve already paid.
Andrea Peterson writing for the Washington Post, cites Charles Hall, spokesperson for the Administrative Office, saying that the document removal was made “in preparation for an overhall of the PACER architecture including the implementation of the next generation of the Judiciary’s Case Management and Electronic Case Files System” (CM/ECF). According to Hall, the legacy case management systems used by the affected courts “were no longer compatible with PACER.”
Many open information advocates criticize PACER as a deeply flawed system that is much too hard to use, much too expensive, and much too inefficient.
Thankfully, digital copies of recent court documents — especially major decisions — are available somewhere online at no cost. For minor cases, many experts recommend RECAP, the joint project of Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy and the Free Law Project. It offers an archive of its own — at no cost — and free Firefox and Chrome browser extensions that automatically upload purchased PACER documents to the RECAP archive. RECAP would gladly host the removed files publicly and have reached out to the individual courts. As has open information advocate and general internet hero Carl Malmud who has made his letters publicly available.
Another no-cost alternative is PlainSite, a joint venture of Think Computer Corporation and Think Computer Foundation. Mike Masnick writing for Techdirt cites Aaron Greenspan, Think Computer founder’s response to the Administrative Office:
“The supposed explanation that the dockets and documents were stored in an ‘incompatible’ format is nonsensical and has no technical justification whatsoever. As you well know, database schema changes happen all the time, and it is easily within the realm of possibility to write conversion scripts — especially given how much money the AO has spent on PACER NextGen already. In fact, the technology known as ODBC exists for this very reason.”
Masnick reports that Greenspan offered to “reverse-engineer the supposedly legacy format(s) ourselves and make the data available to the public for free at no cost to the government.”
I’m not holding my breath; neither should you.
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PACER dumps records from five US courts was originally published by ARTS & FARCES internet on Tuesday, 2 September 2014 at 6:08 AM CDT. Copyright © ARTS & FARCES LLC. All rights reserved. | ISSN: 1535-8119 | OCLC: 48219498 | Digital fingerprint: 974a89ee1284e6e92dd256bbfbef3751 (173.192.238.41)