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Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

523 points by harel 8mo ago

esbranson 8mo ago
There is no way to verify if European countries have rule of law without insight into their courts.
- pelorat 8mo ago
  You can always visit the court, and you know, sit in.
harel 8mo ago
I've looked into the Courtdesk service. It's a stream of events from the courts, as they happen. They claim up to 12,000 updates in a 24 period, aggregated, filtered and organised. While court judgements are public, I don't know if the information Courtdesk provides is. This is a worrying direction.
- nine_k 8mo ago
  If the sources of these event data are not public, your worry would be understandable. But if not public, what are these sources then?
  - harel 8mo ago
    I kept digging and reached the service https://www.courtserve.net https://www.courtserve.net. Seems like a windows application (old school one) that receives the data, but I need more time to explore there. They've been working with MoJ for 20 years (their claim). Initially I thought they have people at the courts live reporting but that's a bit of a stretch...
  - dathinab 8mo ago
    They are non-propagated/effectively hidden. If you don't "know about them from another source" you can't effectively find/access the information and you might not even know that there is something you really should know about. The service bridged the gap by providing a feed about what is potentially relevant for you depending on your filters etc. This mean with the change: - a lot of research/statistics are impossible to do/create - journalists are prone to only learning about potentially very relevant cases happening, when it's they are already over and no one was there to cover it
evaXhill 8mo ago
Seems quite absurd that they would shut down the only system that could tell journalists what was actually happening in the criminal courts under the pretext that they sent information to a third-party AI company (who doesn’t these days). Here’s a rebuttal by one of the founders i believe: https://endaleahy.substack.com/p/what-the-minister-said https://endaleahy.substack.com/p/what-the-minister-said
- gadders 8mo ago
  Based on that response, what the government are doing is dreadful.
  - phatfish 8mo ago
    When there is a risk of feeding sensitive data to the AI giants the first reaction should be to pull the plug. I'm impressed the government acted quickly and decisively for once. Maybe the company involved will think twice before entering an agreement with an AI company. Notice in the whole rant it is never mentioned which AI giant they were feeding.
  - squidbeak 8mo ago
    The government provided data to a private company. The private company sold resold access to a third party for AI ingestion. it's a plain case of tough titties to the private company. That said I don't know why the hell the service concerned isn't provided by the government itself.
    - dash2 8mo ago
      Perhaps that is true, but the response linked by GP claims exactly the opposite: "We hired a specialist firm to build, in a secure sandbox, a safety tool for journalists. They are experts in building privacy-preserving AI solutions - for people like law firms or anyone deeply concerned with how data is held, processed, and protected. That’s why we chose them. Their founders are not only respected academics in addition to being professionals, they have passed government security clearance and DBS checks in the past, and have worked on data systems for the National Archives, the Treasury, and other public agencies. They’ve published academic papers on data compliance for machine learning. "The Minister says we ‘shared data with an AI company”... as if we were pouring this critically sensitive information into OpenAI or some evil aggregator of data. This is simply ridiculous when you look at what we do and how we did it. "We didn’t “share” data with them. We hired them as our technical contractor to build a secure sandbox to test an idea, like any company using a cloud provider or an email service. They worked under a formal sub-processor agreement, which means under data protection law they’re not even classified as a “third party.” That’s not our interpretation. It’s the legal definition in the UK GDPR itself. ... "And “for commercial purposes”? The opposite is true. We paid them £45,000 a year. They didn’t pay us a penny. The money flowed from us to them. They were prohibited, in writing, from selling, sharing, licensing, or doing anything at all with the data other than providing the service we hired them for.. and they operated under our supervision at all times. They didn’t care what was in the data - we reviewed, with journalists, the outputs to make sure it worked." If this is true, it does seem that the government has mischaracterized what happened.
pjc50 8mo ago
This is odd; this is supposed to be public information, isn't it? I suspect it's run into bureaucratic empire-defending rather than a nefarious scheme to conceal cases. Relatedly, there's an extremely good online archive of important cases in the past, but because they disallow crawlers in robots.txt: https://www.bailii.org/robots.txt https://www.bailii.org/robots.txt not many people know about it. Personally I would prefer if all reporting on legal cases linked to the official transcript, but seemingly none of the parties involved finds it in their interest to make that work.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- cl0ckt0wer 8mo ago
  bureaucratic empire-defending is nefarious.
- flufluflufluffy 8mo ago
  It is public information. The private company whose database is being deleted processed the public information into an easier to search and consume dataset
cs02rm0 8mo ago
The minister who set this up claims this is a cover up: https://x.com/CPhilpOfficial/status/2021295301017923762 https://x.com/CPhilpOfficial/status/2021295301017923762 https://xcancel.com/CPhilpOfficial/status/2021295301017923762 https://xcancel.com/CPhilpOfficial/status/202129530101792376...
- pjc50 8mo ago
  Anyone banging on about coverups of crime due to immigrants should get immediately put in the bad faith argument bin, even if they were a Minister.
  - gulfofamerica 8mo ago
    [dead]
  - carlosjobim 8mo ago
    Can you explain your reasoning? Horrible crimes committed by foreign men against native children were covered up for political reasons in the UK. This is common knowledge.
    - pjc50 8mo ago
      In the case of Rotherham, I believe that most of those committing the crimes were not foreign; most were British born British nationals. Ethnicity is not the same as immigration status.
      - deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
      - gib444 8mo ago
        Congratulations, you've corrected us on the usage of the word immigrant. Now can we return to the topic? Whilst we're on Rotherham: "...by men predominantly of Pakistani heritage" [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-61868863 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-61868863 Their parents or grandparents were immigrants...
londons_explore 8mo ago
Something is either public record - in which case it should be on a government website for free, and the AI companies should be free to scrape to their hearts desire... Or it should be sealed for X years and then public record. Where X might be 1 in cases where you don't want to hurt an ongoing investigation, or 100 if it's someone's private affairs. Nothing that goes through the courts should be sealed forever. We should give up with the idea of databases which are 'open' to the public, but you have to pay to access, reproduction isn't allowed, records cost pounds per page, and bulk scraping is denied. That isn't open.
- nonethewiser 8mo ago
  >We should give up with the idea of databases which are 'open' to the public, but you have to pay to access, reproduction isn't allowed, records cost pounds per page, and bulk scraping is denied. That isn't open. How about rate limited?
  - londons_explore 8mo ago
    No. Open is open. Beyond DDoS protections, there should be no limits. If load on the server is a concern, make the whole database available as a torrent. People who run scrapers tend to prefer that anyway. This isn't someone's hobby project run from a $5 VPS - they can afford to serve 10k qps of readonly data if needed, and it would cost far less than the salary of 1 staff member.
    - delichon 8mo ago
      Rate limiting is a DDoS protection.
      - bastawhiz 8mo ago
        Pedantically: rate limiting is DoS prevention, not DDoS prevention. If you rate limit per IP, you're not mounting effective protection against a distributed attack. If you're rate limiting globally, you're taking your service offline for everyone.
mellosouls 8mo ago
The title appears to be somewhat misleading. The counter claim by the government is that this isn't "the source of truth" being deleted but rather a subset presented more accessibly by a third party (CourtsDesk) which has allegedly breached privacy rules and the service agreement by passing sensitive info to an AI service. Coverage of the "urgent question" in parliament on the subject here: House of Commons, Courtsdesk Data Platform Urgent Question https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002rg00 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002rg00
- harel 8mo ago
  They made the data accessible though. From what I can gather, before them, the data was only accessible via old windows apps. If the source of truth is locked and gated, what good is it?
  - mellosouls 8mo ago
    You can get the daily court listings for free online. I would assume this service just provided a ux-friendly front end,etc. which in the clip the minister says they will be replacing.
  - flufluflufluffy 8mo ago
    Should we always send the source of truth to a private company to have it repackaged and presented in a more inoffensive manner?
ultra_nick 8mo ago
No right to free speech. Then they start jailing people for posts. Then they get rid of juries. Then they get rid of public records. What are they trying to hide?
- BolsunBacset 8mo ago
  [flagged]
- reliabilityguy 8mo ago
  Free speech in the UK was done when people started to get police visits for tweets.
- zarzavat 8mo ago
  They believe that they exist to control us. And let's been honest, British people are a meek bunch who have done little to disillusion them of that notion, at times positively encouraging our own subjugation. In other countries, interference with the right to a fair trial would have lead to widespread protest. We don't hold our government to account, and we reap the consequences of that.
- spacebanana7 8mo ago
  The political answer is that open justice provides ammunition for their political opponents, and that juries also tend to dislike prosecutions that feel targeted against political opponents. See palestine action as a left wing example and Jamie Michael's racial hatred trial as a right wing example. Obviously the government Ministry of Justice cannot make other parts of government more popular in a way that appeases political opponents, so the logical solution is to clamp down on open justice.
- DrScientist 8mo ago
  I think there is a legitimate argument that the names of people who go to court and are either victims or are found innocent of the charges, should not be trivially searchable by anyone. Though I'm not sure stopping this service achieves that. Also - even in the case that somebody is found guilty - there is a fundamental principle that such convictions have a life time - after which they stop showing up on police searches etc. If some third party ( not applicable in this case ), holds all court cases forever in a searchable format, it fundamentally breaches this right to be forgotten.
alansaber 8mo ago
Digital access to UK court records was already abysmal. And we're somehow going even further backwards. At least in the US you have initiatives like https://www.courtlistener.com/ https://www.courtlistener.com/.
bhouston 8mo ago
FYI, apparently there was a data breach, but it would seem better to fix the issue and continue with this public service than to just shut it down completely. Here is the Journalist organization in the UK responding: "The government has cited a significant data protection breach as the reason for its decision - an issue it clearly has a duty to take seriously." https://www.nuj.org.uk/resource/nuj-responds-to-order-for-the-deletion-of-large-court-reporting-archive.html https://www.nuj.org.uk/resource/nuj-responds-to-order-for-th...
- jacquesm 8mo ago
  That's the dumbest possible response to this.
- pjc50 8mo ago
  Per the Minister herself, this matter wasn't important enough to refer to the ICO, who are the correct people to deal with data breaches.
  - RobotToaster 8mo ago
    I've had to deal with the ICO over some pretty minor local government stuff, the bar for reporting to them is very low. I smell a coverup.
- hulitu 8mo ago
  > but it would seem better to fix the issue They don't have a budget for that. And besides, it might be an externalized service, because self hosting is so 90s.
- masfuerte 8mo ago
  It wasn't a hack. The company used an external AI service. ETA: They didn't ship data off to e.g. ChatGPT. They hired a subcontractor to build them a secure AI service. Details in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47035141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47035141 leading to this: https://endaleahy.substack.com/p/what-the-minister-said https://endaleahy.substack.com/p/what-the-minister-said The government is behaving disgracefully.
krona 8mo ago
Along with the attempt to prevent jury trials for all but the most serious criminal cases, this is beginning to look like an attempt to prevent reporting on an upcoming case. I can think of one happening in April, involving the prime minister. Given he was head of the CPS for 5 years, would know exactly which levers to pull. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20dyzp4r42o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20dyzp4r42o
- pjc50 8mo ago
  Why do you think "they" are trying to suppress reporting on a Russian-recruited Ukranian national carrying out arson attacks against properties the PM is "linked to" but does not live in? What's the supposed angle?
  - krona 8mo ago
    5 Ukrainians. People have traced what some of them were doing professionally when the PM would've been living there. It could be nothing, but we need transparency.
    - pjc50 8mo ago
      > People have traced what some of them were doing professionally when the PM would've been living there. Traced what? Innuendo is not a substitute for information.
  - notahacker 8mo ago
    And how exactly is eliminating a third party search tool for efficiently searching lots of obscure magistrates court proceedings going to stop journalists from paying attention to a spicy court case linked to foreign agents and the PM?
- rwmj 8mo ago
  There's no world in which this case is being covered up. It's literally on the BBC News website and you have linked to it.
randomtoast 8mo ago
Okay, then we need to distribute the database as torrent. Maybe Anna's Archive can help.
- harel 8mo ago
  It's not just the historical data - they provided what is effectively a live stream of events from the courts in real time, allowing you to aggregate and filter it. This is not trivial.
- dathinab 8mo ago
  this is mostly not about historic data but about live data Through the way AI companies could "severely/negligent mishandle the data potentially repeatedly destroying innocent people live" is about historic data, tho.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
helsinkiandrew 8mo ago
Better overview of what the complaint was here: https://www.tremark.co.uk/moj-orders-deletion-of-courtsdesk-court-reporting-archive/ https://www.tremark.co.uk/moj-orders-deletion-of-courtsdesk-... They raise the interesting point that "publicly available" doesn't necessarily mean its free to store/process etc: > One important distinction is that “publicly available” does not automatically mean “free to collect, combine, republish and retain indefinitely” in a searchable archive. Court lists and registers can include personal data, and compliance concerns often turn on how that information is processed at scale: who can access it, how long it is kept, whether it is shared onward, and what safeguards exist to reduce the risk of harm, especially in sensitive matters.
- tchalla 8mo ago
  I can’t believe that this even needs to be said. There are plenty of things which are publicly available but not free to share and definitely not allowed to be made money of.
  - OJFord 8mo ago
    The company in question had a direct relationship with HM Courts & Tribunals Service, and disputes that they sold/distributed any data to any 'AI third party' - says what they actually did was to hire AI-focussed contractors to build some new tool/feature for the platform.
sensecall 8mo ago
Interesting tweet on the topic here: https://xcancel.com/SamjLondon/status/2021084532187775244 https://xcancel.com/SamjLondon/status/2021084532187775244 > ... the agreement restricts the supply of court data to news agencies and journalists only. > However, a cursory review of the Courtsdesk website indicates that this same data is also being supplied to other third parties — including members of @InvestigatorsUK — who pay a fee for access. > Those users could, in turn, deploy the information in live or prospective legal proceedings, something the agreement expressly prohibits.
- rorylawless 8mo ago
  This aligns with the explanation given in response to the urgent question. What looks like a simple breach of contract issue is being weaponized in bad faith by politicians who spend far too much time time on the shadier parts of the internet. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2026-02-10/debates/037487A8-145D-44B0-AE56-37A1BBF5EE5E/details#contribution-14385CAE-0F56-4036-BE5A-6BF2B690BAD0 https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2026-02-10/debates/037...
  - sensecall 8mo ago
    Yes, predictably…
elphinstone 8mo ago
Naturally the first impulse is to protect criminals while law-abiding citizens are ignored.
jdkdkdkdfl 8mo ago
[flagged]
- rjmunro 8mo ago
  Are there actual numbers for this anywhere?
  - gdulli 8mo ago
    It feels true to them, that's the only thing that matters.
    - jdkdkdkdfl 8mo ago
      [flagged]
dathinab 8mo ago
Relevant part: > HMCTS acted to protect sensitive data after CourtsDesk sent information to a third-party AI company. (statement from the UK Ministry of Justice on Twitter, CourtsDesk had ran the database) but it's unclear how much this was an excuse to remove transparency and how much this actually is related to worry how AI could misuse this information
dathinab 8mo ago
This all loops back to the same thing: you _really_ shouldn't be allowed to train on information without having a copyright license explicitly allowing it "publicly available" isn't the same as "anyone can do whatever they want with it", just anyone can read it/use it for research
- yxhuvud 8mo ago
  In many cases government texts are not covered by copyright, so it may not even be relevant here, regardless of it is is allowed to copy the data or not.
  - pmyteh 8mo ago
    In the UK government records are generally covered by Crown Copyright (which is its own slightly more restrictive weird thing) rather than in the public domain. I haven't checked to see what the status of the court listings are, but the default is very different to the US.
g-mork 8mo ago
Confused what to make of the comments here. Access to court lists has always been free and open, it's just a pain in the ass to work with. The lists contain nothing much of value beyond the names involved in a case and the type of hearing It's not easy to see who to believe. The MP introducing it claiming there is a "cover up" is just what MPs do. Of course it makes him look bad, a service he oversaw the introduction of is being withdrawn. The rebuttal by the company essentially denies everything. Simultaneously it's important to notice the government are working on a replacement system of their own. I think this is a non-event. If you really want to read the court lists you already can, and without paying a company for the privilege. It sounds like HMCTS want to internalise this behaviour by providing a better centralised service themselves, and meanwhile all the fuss appears to be from a company operated by an ex-newspaper editor who just had its only income stream built around preferential access to court data cut off. As for the openness of court data itself, wake me in another 800 years when present day norms have permeated the courts. Complaining about this aspect just shows a misunderstanding of the (arguably necessary) realities of the legal system.
- Defletter 8mo ago
  Would you mind elaborating on this new replacement system?
  - g-mork 8mo ago
    I may have misread: https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/courts/government-suspends-major-open-justice-project-5590291 https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/courts/government-suspe... > “We are also working on providing a new licensing arrangement which will allow third parties to apply to use our data. We will provide more information on this in the coming weeks.
- dash2 8mo ago
  I think you're underestimating how important "just a pain in the ass to work with" may be. An analogy would be Hansard and theyworkforyou.com. The government always made Hansard (record of parliamentary debates) available. But theyworkforyou cleaned the data, and made it searchable with useful APIs so you could find how your MP voted. This work was very important for making parliament accessible; IIRC, the guys behind it were impressive enough that they eventually were brought in to improve gov.uk.
LightBug1 8mo ago
And, to think ... I voted for this horseshit ... I don't remember seeing this in the bloody manifesto. This is why having decent standards in politics and opposition matters so much. We all got together to vote out the last wankers, only to find that the current lot are of the same quality but in different ways. And to think... the 'heads up their arses while trying to suppress a Hitler salute' brigade (Reform) are waiting in the wings to prove my point.
EIDOLONXcapital 8mo ago
[flagged]
fukukitaru 8mo ago
Part and parcel!
keernan 8mo ago
The subject of the article is the public right to access the daily schedule of England's courts. In the United States our Constitution requires the government conduct all trials in public ( with the exception of some Family Court matters ). Secret trials are forbidden. This is a critical element to the operation of any democracy.
ratrace 8mo ago
Here's an idea: Host it in the U.S. and tell the UK government to fuck off.
trinsic2 8mo ago
When people who are involved in the upkeep of these systems start saying no is when these decisions will cease. This problems are all done by our acquiesce.
gunapologist99 8mo ago
Transparency always loses. Shutting down the only working database is the proof point that perfect is the enemy of good. Of course, this gives cover to the "well, we're working on something better" and "AI companies are evil" Fine, shut it down AFTER that better thing is finally in prod (as if). And if the data was already leaked because you didn't do your due diligence and didn't have a good contract, that's on you. It's out there now anyway. And, really, what's the issue with AI finally having good citations? Are we really going to try to pretend that AI isn't now permanently embedded in the legal system and that lawyers won't use AI to write extremely formulaic filings? This is either bureaucracy doing what it does, or an actual conspiracy to shut down external access to public court records. It doesn't actually matter which: what matters is that this needs to be overturned immediately.
MagicMoonlight 8mo ago
So the government was being nice, letting a private company access court data. And the company decided to immediately sell all of that data.
_slih 8mo ago
so the government's fix for a data breach is to delete the entire database instead of fixing the access controls. classic.
nephihaha 8mo ago
Yet they are happy to share private health data with Palantir etc. What a shower of hypocrites!
patcon 8mo ago
My guess is that the company running this were found to be collaborating with contentious partners, and so the government is shutting down the collaboration as risk-mitigation, in order to internalize decisions within government. Ministry of Justice in UK has always struck me as very savvy, from my work in the UK civic tech scene. They're quite self-aware, and I assume this is more pro-social than it might seem.
jonty 8mo ago
Courtsdesk are rather misrepresenting this situation. Quoting from an urgent question in the House of Lords a few days ago: > HMCTS was working to expand and improve the service by creating a new data licence agreement with Courtsdesk and others to expand access to justice. It was in the course of making that arrangement with Courtsdesk that data protection issues came to light. What has arisen is that this private company has been sharing private, personal and legally sensitive information with a third-party AI company, including potentially the addresses and dates of birth of defendants and victims. That is a direct breach of our agreement with Courtsdesk, which the Conservatives negotiated. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2026-02-10/debates/037487A8-145D-44B0-AE56-37A1BBF5EE5E/CourtReportingData https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2026-02-10/debates/037...
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
mhh__ 8mo ago
Hard to see how this isn't totally asinine and retarded. I haven't confirmed it but I've seen journalist friends of mine complain also that the deletion period for much data is about 7 years so victims are genuinely shocked that they can't access their own transcripts even from 2018... Oh and if they can they're often extremely expensive.
retinaros 8mo ago
england has fallen and the rest of europe too. they are not free countries anymore
rm30 8mo ago
Not long ago, Italian Supreme Court (Cassazione, ord. 34217/2025) established a critical principle reflecting a broader trend in personal data management: the "digital image" of a person must reflect their actual current situation through complete and accurate information. The court rejected deletion but endorsed contextualization, articles must explicitly note the acquittal (assoluzione) or dismissal that concluded the investigation. An article mentioning "investigation for [crime]" without noting "subsequently acquitted" is factually incomplete, therefore false. This principle applies directly to search engines and data processors. When Courtsdesk was deleted before reaching AI companies, the government recognized the constraint: AI systems can't apply this "completeness" standard. They preserve raw archives without contextual updates. They can't distinguish between "investigato" (under investigation) and "assolto" (aquitted). They can't enforce the court's requirement that information must be "correttamente aggiornata con la notizia dell'esito favorevole" (properly updated to reflect the favorable resolution of the proceedings). The UK government prevented the structural violation the Cassazione just identified: permanent archival of incomplete truth. This isn't about suppressing information, it's about refusing to embed factually false contexts into systems designed for eternity.
ganelonhb 8mo ago
2 tiers.
malklera 8mo ago
Is never good when governments make access to information more difficult. If the information is already accessibly to the public, even if what they claim about selling it to an AI company is true, the AI companies already has access to it if they want.
troad 8mo ago
There's so much nonsense going on in the UK lately that it seems worthwhile to start hosting public interest information like this off-shore, in the US. A non-commercial initiative hosted by a group of Americans who wish to promote the cause of free information, but are themselves not interested in travelling to the UK, would be relatively immune to overreach by the British state. A US based service could take benefit of the First Amendment, the SPEECH Act, the fair use provision in US copyright law, etc - and simply ignore all the numerous British 'suppression orders', 'cessation notices', 'online safety' laws, etc. If the Internet is indeed balkanizing - as sadly appears to be the case - let's squeeze some silver linings out of it.
metaPushkin 8mo ago
THE ONLY REASON IS THAT Courtsdesk PROVIDED TOO EFFECTIVE A TOOL FOR INVESTIGATING STATE CRIMES AND UNCOVERING CORRUPTION AMONG HIGH-RANKING OFFICIALS, LIKE Keir Starmer. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit..., Courtsdesk WAS ACTIVELY USED TO ANALYZE COURT CASES AND DETECT STATE CRIMES COMMITTED BY THE POLICE.

523 points by harel 8mo ago

esbranson 8mo ago

There is no way to verify if European countries have rule of law without insight into their courts.

pelorat 8mo ago
You can always visit the court, and you know, sit in.

harel 8mo ago

I've looked into the Courtdesk service. It's a stream of events from the courts, as they happen. They claim up to 12,000 updates in a 24 period, aggregated, filtered and organised. While court judgements are public, I don't know if the information Courtdesk provides is. This is a worrying direction.

nine_k 8mo ago
If the sources of these event data are not public, your worry would be understandable. But if not public, what are these sources then?
- harel 8mo ago
  I kept digging and reached the service https://www.courtserve.net https://www.courtserve.net. Seems like a windows application (old school one) that receives the data, but I need more time to explore there. They've been working with MoJ for 20 years (their claim). Initially I thought they have people at the courts live reporting but that's a bit of a stretch...
- dathinab 8mo ago
  They are non-propagated/effectively hidden. If you don't "know about them from another source" you can't effectively find/access the information and you might not even know that there is something you really should know about. The service bridged the gap by providing a feed about what is potentially relevant for you depending on your filters etc. This mean with the change: - a lot of research/statistics are impossible to do/create - journalists are prone to only learning about potentially very relevant cases happening, when it's they are already over and no one was there to cover it

evaXhill 8mo ago

Seems quite absurd that they would shut down the only system that could tell journalists what was actually happening in the criminal courts under the pretext that they sent information to a third-party AI company (who doesn’t these days). Here’s a rebuttal by one of the founders i believe: https://endaleahy.substack.com/p/what-the-minister-said https://endaleahy.substack.com/p/what-the-minister-said

gadders 8mo ago
Based on that response, what the government are doing is dreadful.
- phatfish 8mo ago
  When there is a risk of feeding sensitive data to the AI giants the first reaction should be to pull the plug. I'm impressed the government acted quickly and decisively for once. Maybe the company involved will think twice before entering an agreement with an AI company. Notice in the whole rant it is never mentioned which AI giant they were feeding.
- squidbeak 8mo ago
  The government provided data to a private company. The private company sold resold access to a third party for AI ingestion. it's a plain case of tough titties to the private company. That said I don't know why the hell the service concerned isn't provided by the government itself.
  - dash2 8mo ago
    Perhaps that is true, but the response linked by GP claims exactly the opposite: "We hired a specialist firm to build, in a secure sandbox, a safety tool for journalists. They are experts in building privacy-preserving AI solutions - for people like law firms or anyone deeply concerned with how data is held, processed, and protected. That’s why we chose them. Their founders are not only respected academics in addition to being professionals, they have passed government security clearance and DBS checks in the past, and have worked on data systems for the National Archives, the Treasury, and other public agencies. They’ve published academic papers on data compliance for machine learning. "The Minister says we ‘shared data with an AI company”... as if we were pouring this critically sensitive information into OpenAI or some evil aggregator of data. This is simply ridiculous when you look at what we do and how we did it. "We didn’t “share” data with them. We hired them as our technical contractor to build a secure sandbox to test an idea, like any company using a cloud provider or an email service. They worked under a formal sub-processor agreement, which means under data protection law they’re not even classified as a “third party.” That’s not our interpretation. It’s the legal definition in the UK GDPR itself. ... "And “for commercial purposes”? The opposite is true. We paid them £45,000 a year. They didn’t pay us a penny. The money flowed from us to them. They were prohibited, in writing, from selling, sharing, licensing, or doing anything at all with the data other than providing the service we hired them for.. and they operated under our supervision at all times. They didn’t care what was in the data - we reviewed, with journalists, the outputs to make sure it worked." If this is true, it does seem that the government has mischaracterized what happened.

pjc50 8mo ago

This is odd; this is supposed to be public information, isn't it? I suspect it's run into bureaucratic empire-defending rather than a nefarious scheme to conceal cases. Relatedly, there's an extremely good online archive of important cases in the past, but because they disallow crawlers in robots.txt: https://www.bailii.org/robots.txt https://www.bailii.org/robots.txt not many people know about it. Personally I would prefer if all reporting on legal cases linked to the official transcript, but seemingly none of the parties involved finds it in their interest to make that work.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
cl0ckt0wer 8mo ago
bureaucratic empire-defending is nefarious.
flufluflufluffy 8mo ago
It is public information. The private company whose database is being deleted processed the public information into an easier to search and consume dataset

cs02rm0 8mo ago

The minister who set this up claims this is a cover up: https://x.com/CPhilpOfficial/status/2021295301017923762 https://x.com/CPhilpOfficial/status/2021295301017923762 https://xcancel.com/CPhilpOfficial/status/2021295301017923762 https://xcancel.com/CPhilpOfficial/status/202129530101792376...

pjc50 8mo ago
Anyone banging on about coverups of crime due to immigrants should get immediately put in the bad faith argument bin, even if they were a Minister.
- gulfofamerica 8mo ago
  [dead]
- carlosjobim 8mo ago
  Can you explain your reasoning? Horrible crimes committed by foreign men against native children were covered up for political reasons in the UK. This is common knowledge.
  - pjc50 8mo ago
    In the case of Rotherham, I believe that most of those committing the crimes were not foreign; most were British born British nationals. Ethnicity is not the same as immigration status.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - gib444 8mo ago
      Congratulations, you've corrected us on the usage of the word immigrant. Now can we return to the topic? Whilst we're on Rotherham: "...by men predominantly of Pakistani heritage" [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-61868863 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-61868863 Their parents or grandparents were immigrants...

londons_explore 8mo ago

Something is either public record - in which case it should be on a government website for free, and the AI companies should be free to scrape to their hearts desire... Or it should be sealed for X years and then public record. Where X might be 1 in cases where you don't want to hurt an ongoing investigation, or 100 if it's someone's private affairs. Nothing that goes through the courts should be sealed forever. We should give up with the idea of databases which are 'open' to the public, but you have to pay to access, reproduction isn't allowed, records cost pounds per page, and bulk scraping is denied. That isn't open.

nonethewiser 8mo ago
>We should give up with the idea of databases which are 'open' to the public, but you have to pay to access, reproduction isn't allowed, records cost pounds per page, and bulk scraping is denied. That isn't open. How about rate limited?
- londons_explore 8mo ago
  No. Open is open. Beyond DDoS protections, there should be no limits. If load on the server is a concern, make the whole database available as a torrent. People who run scrapers tend to prefer that anyway. This isn't someone's hobby project run from a $5 VPS - they can afford to serve 10k qps of readonly data if needed, and it would cost far less than the salary of 1 staff member.
  - delichon 8mo ago
    Rate limiting is a DDoS protection.
    - bastawhiz 8mo ago
      Pedantically: rate limiting is DoS prevention, not DDoS prevention. If you rate limit per IP, you're not mounting effective protection against a distributed attack. If you're rate limiting globally, you're taking your service offline for everyone.

mellosouls 8mo ago

The title appears to be somewhat misleading. The counter claim by the government is that this isn't "the source of truth" being deleted but rather a subset presented more accessibly by a third party (CourtsDesk) which has allegedly breached privacy rules and the service agreement by passing sensitive info to an AI service. Coverage of the "urgent question" in parliament on the subject here: House of Commons, Courtsdesk Data Platform Urgent Question https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002rg00 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002rg00

harel 8mo ago
They made the data accessible though. From what I can gather, before them, the data was only accessible via old windows apps. If the source of truth is locked and gated, what good is it?
- mellosouls 8mo ago
  You can get the daily court listings for free online. I would assume this service just provided a ux-friendly front end,etc. which in the clip the minister says they will be replacing.
- flufluflufluffy 8mo ago
  Should we always send the source of truth to a private company to have it repackaged and presented in a more inoffensive manner?

ultra_nick 8mo ago

No right to free speech. Then they start jailing people for posts. Then they get rid of juries. Then they get rid of public records. What are they trying to hide?

BolsunBacset 8mo ago
[flagged]
reliabilityguy 8mo ago
Free speech in the UK was done when people started to get police visits for tweets.
zarzavat 8mo ago
They believe that they exist to control us. And let's been honest, British people are a meek bunch who have done little to disillusion them of that notion, at times positively encouraging our own subjugation. In other countries, interference with the right to a fair trial would have lead to widespread protest. We don't hold our government to account, and we reap the consequences of that.
spacebanana7 8mo ago
The political answer is that open justice provides ammunition for their political opponents, and that juries also tend to dislike prosecutions that feel targeted against political opponents. See palestine action as a left wing example and Jamie Michael's racial hatred trial as a right wing example. Obviously the government Ministry of Justice cannot make other parts of government more popular in a way that appeases political opponents, so the logical solution is to clamp down on open justice.
DrScientist 8mo ago
I think there is a legitimate argument that the names of people who go to court and are either victims or are found innocent of the charges, should not be trivially searchable by anyone. Though I'm not sure stopping this service achieves that. Also - even in the case that somebody is found guilty - there is a fundamental principle that such convictions have a life time - after which they stop showing up on police searches etc. If some third party ( not applicable in this case ), holds all court cases forever in a searchable format, it fundamentally breaches this right to be forgotten.

alansaber 8mo ago

Digital access to UK court records was already abysmal. And we're somehow going even further backwards. At least in the US you have initiatives like https://www.courtlistener.com/ https://www.courtlistener.com/.

bhouston 8mo ago

FYI, apparently there was a data breach, but it would seem better to fix the issue and continue with this public service than to just shut it down completely. Here is the Journalist organization in the UK responding: "The government has cited a significant data protection breach as the reason for its decision - an issue it clearly has a duty to take seriously." https://www.nuj.org.uk/resource/nuj-responds-to-order-for-the-deletion-of-large-court-reporting-archive.html https://www.nuj.org.uk/resource/nuj-responds-to-order-for-th...

jacquesm 8mo ago
That's the dumbest possible response to this.
pjc50 8mo ago
Per the Minister herself, this matter wasn't important enough to refer to the ICO, who are the correct people to deal with data breaches.
- RobotToaster 8mo ago
  I've had to deal with the ICO over some pretty minor local government stuff, the bar for reporting to them is very low. I smell a coverup.
hulitu 8mo ago
> but it would seem better to fix the issue They don't have a budget for that. And besides, it might be an externalized service, because self hosting is so 90s.
masfuerte 8mo ago
It wasn't a hack. The company used an external AI service. ETA: They didn't ship data off to e.g. ChatGPT. They hired a subcontractor to build them a secure AI service. Details in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47035141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47035141 leading to this: https://endaleahy.substack.com/p/what-the-minister-said https://endaleahy.substack.com/p/what-the-minister-said The government is behaving disgracefully.

krona 8mo ago

Along with the attempt to prevent jury trials for all but the most serious criminal cases, this is beginning to look like an attempt to prevent reporting on an upcoming case. I can think of one happening in April, involving the prime minister. Given he was head of the CPS for 5 years, would know exactly which levers to pull. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20dyzp4r42o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20dyzp4r42o

pjc50 8mo ago
Why do you think "they" are trying to suppress reporting on a Russian-recruited Ukranian national carrying out arson attacks against properties the PM is "linked to" but does not live in? What's the supposed angle?
- krona 8mo ago
  5 Ukrainians. People have traced what some of them were doing professionally when the PM would've been living there. It could be nothing, but we need transparency.
  - pjc50 8mo ago
    > People have traced what some of them were doing professionally when the PM would've been living there. Traced what? Innuendo is not a substitute for information.
- notahacker 8mo ago
  And how exactly is eliminating a third party search tool for efficiently searching lots of obscure magistrates court proceedings going to stop journalists from paying attention to a spicy court case linked to foreign agents and the PM?
rwmj 8mo ago
There's no world in which this case is being covered up. It's literally on the BBC News website and you have linked to it.

randomtoast 8mo ago

Okay, then we need to distribute the database as torrent. Maybe Anna's Archive can help.

harel 8mo ago
It's not just the historical data - they provided what is effectively a live stream of events from the courts in real time, allowing you to aggregate and filter it. This is not trivial.
dathinab 8mo ago
this is mostly not about historic data but about live data Through the way AI companies could "severely/negligent mishandle the data potentially repeatedly destroying innocent people live" is about historic data, tho.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

helsinkiandrew 8mo ago

Better overview of what the complaint was here: https://www.tremark.co.uk/moj-orders-deletion-of-courtsdesk-court-reporting-archive/ https://www.tremark.co.uk/moj-orders-deletion-of-courtsdesk-... They raise the interesting point that "publicly available" doesn't necessarily mean its free to store/process etc: > One important distinction is that “publicly available” does not automatically mean “free to collect, combine, republish and retain indefinitely” in a searchable archive. Court lists and registers can include personal data, and compliance concerns often turn on how that information is processed at scale: who can access it, how long it is kept, whether it is shared onward, and what safeguards exist to reduce the risk of harm, especially in sensitive matters.

tchalla 8mo ago
I can’t believe that this even needs to be said. There are plenty of things which are publicly available but not free to share and definitely not allowed to be made money of.
- OJFord 8mo ago
  The company in question had a direct relationship with HM Courts & Tribunals Service, and disputes that they sold/distributed any data to any 'AI third party' - says what they actually did was to hire AI-focussed contractors to build some new tool/feature for the platform.

sensecall 8mo ago

Interesting tweet on the topic here: https://xcancel.com/SamjLondon/status/2021084532187775244 https://xcancel.com/SamjLondon/status/2021084532187775244 > ... the agreement restricts the supply of court data to news agencies and journalists only. > However, a cursory review of the Courtsdesk website indicates that this same data is also being supplied to other third parties — including members of @InvestigatorsUK — who pay a fee for access. > Those users could, in turn, deploy the information in live or prospective legal proceedings, something the agreement expressly prohibits.

rorylawless 8mo ago
This aligns with the explanation given in response to the urgent question. What looks like a simple breach of contract issue is being weaponized in bad faith by politicians who spend far too much time time on the shadier parts of the internet. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2026-02-10/debates/037487A8-145D-44B0-AE56-37A1BBF5EE5E/details#contribution-14385CAE-0F56-4036-BE5A-6BF2B690BAD0 https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2026-02-10/debates/037...
- sensecall 8mo ago
  Yes, predictably…

elphinstone 8mo ago

Naturally the first impulse is to protect criminals while law-abiding citizens are ignored.

jdkdkdkdfl 8mo ago

[flagged]

rjmunro 8mo ago
Are there actual numbers for this anywhere?
- gdulli 8mo ago
  It feels true to them, that's the only thing that matters.
  - jdkdkdkdfl 8mo ago
    [flagged]

dathinab 8mo ago

Relevant part: > HMCTS acted to protect sensitive data after CourtsDesk sent information to a third-party AI company. (statement from the UK Ministry of Justice on Twitter, CourtsDesk had ran the database) but it's unclear how much this was an excuse to remove transparency and how much this actually is related to worry how AI could misuse this information

dathinab 8mo ago

This all loops back to the same thing: you _really_ shouldn't be allowed to train on information without having a copyright license explicitly allowing it "publicly available" isn't the same as "anyone can do whatever they want with it", just anyone can read it/use it for research

yxhuvud 8mo ago
In many cases government texts are not covered by copyright, so it may not even be relevant here, regardless of it is is allowed to copy the data or not.
- pmyteh 8mo ago
  In the UK government records are generally covered by Crown Copyright (which is its own slightly more restrictive weird thing) rather than in the public domain. I haven't checked to see what the status of the court listings are, but the default is very different to the US.

g-mork 8mo ago

Confused what to make of the comments here. Access to court lists has always been free and open, it's just a pain in the ass to work with. The lists contain nothing much of value beyond the names involved in a case and the type of hearing It's not easy to see who to believe. The MP introducing it claiming there is a "cover up" is just what MPs do. Of course it makes him look bad, a service he oversaw the introduction of is being withdrawn. The rebuttal by the company essentially denies everything. Simultaneously it's important to notice the government are working on a replacement system of their own. I think this is a non-event. If you really want to read the court lists you already can, and without paying a company for the privilege. It sounds like HMCTS want to internalise this behaviour by providing a better centralised service themselves, and meanwhile all the fuss appears to be from a company operated by an ex-newspaper editor who just had its only income stream built around preferential access to court data cut off. As for the openness of court data itself, wake me in another 800 years when present day norms have permeated the courts. Complaining about this aspect just shows a misunderstanding of the (arguably necessary) realities of the legal system.

Defletter 8mo ago
Would you mind elaborating on this new replacement system?
- g-mork 8mo ago
  I may have misread: https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/courts/government-suspends-major-open-justice-project-5590291 https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/courts/government-suspe... > “We are also working on providing a new licensing arrangement which will allow third parties to apply to use our data. We will provide more information on this in the coming weeks.
dash2 8mo ago
I think you're underestimating how important "just a pain in the ass to work with" may be. An analogy would be Hansard and theyworkforyou.com. The government always made Hansard (record of parliamentary debates) available. But theyworkforyou cleaned the data, and made it searchable with useful APIs so you could find how your MP voted. This work was very important for making parliament accessible; IIRC, the guys behind it were impressive enough that they eventually were brought in to improve gov.uk.

LightBug1 8mo ago

And, to think ... I voted for this horseshit ... I don't remember seeing this in the bloody manifesto. This is why having decent standards in politics and opposition matters so much. We all got together to vote out the last wankers, only to find that the current lot are of the same quality but in different ways. And to think... the 'heads up their arses while trying to suppress a Hitler salute' brigade (Reform) are waiting in the wings to prove my point.

EIDOLONXcapital 8mo ago

[flagged]

fukukitaru 8mo ago

Part and parcel!

keernan 8mo ago

The subject of the article is the public right to access the daily schedule of England's courts. In the United States our Constitution requires the government conduct all trials in public ( with the exception of some Family Court matters ). Secret trials are forbidden. This is a critical element to the operation of any democracy.

ratrace 8mo ago

Here's an idea: Host it in the U.S. and tell the UK government to fuck off.

trinsic2 8mo ago

When people who are involved in the upkeep of these systems start saying no is when these decisions will cease. This problems are all done by our acquiesce.

gunapologist99 8mo ago

Transparency always loses. Shutting down the only working database is the proof point that perfect is the enemy of good. Of course, this gives cover to the "well, we're working on something better" and "AI companies are evil" Fine, shut it down AFTER that better thing is finally in prod (as if). And if the data was already leaked because you didn't do your due diligence and didn't have a good contract, that's on you. It's out there now anyway. And, really, what's the issue with AI finally having good citations? Are we really going to try to pretend that AI isn't now permanently embedded in the legal system and that lawyers won't use AI to write extremely formulaic filings? This is either bureaucracy doing what it does, or an actual conspiracy to shut down external access to public court records. It doesn't actually matter which: what matters is that this needs to be overturned immediately.

MagicMoonlight 8mo ago

So the government was being nice, letting a private company access court data. And the company decided to immediately sell all of that data.

_slih 8mo ago

so the government's fix for a data breach is to delete the entire database instead of fixing the access controls. classic.

nephihaha 8mo ago

Yet they are happy to share private health data with Palantir etc. What a shower of hypocrites!

patcon 8mo ago

My guess is that the company running this were found to be collaborating with contentious partners, and so the government is shutting down the collaboration as risk-mitigation, in order to internalize decisions within government. Ministry of Justice in UK has always struck me as very savvy, from my work in the UK civic tech scene. They're quite self-aware, and I assume this is more pro-social than it might seem.

jonty 8mo ago

Courtsdesk are rather misrepresenting this situation. Quoting from an urgent question in the House of Lords a few days ago: > HMCTS was working to expand and improve the service by creating a new data licence agreement with Courtsdesk and others to expand access to justice. It was in the course of making that arrangement with Courtsdesk that data protection issues came to light. What has arisen is that this private company has been sharing private, personal and legally sensitive information with a third-party AI company, including potentially the addresses and dates of birth of defendants and victims. That is a direct breach of our agreement with Courtsdesk, which the Conservatives negotiated. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2026-02-10/debates/037487A8-145D-44B0-AE56-37A1BBF5EE5E/CourtReportingData https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2026-02-10/debates/037...

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

mhh__ 8mo ago

Hard to see how this isn't totally asinine and retarded. I haven't confirmed it but I've seen journalist friends of mine complain also that the deletion period for much data is about 7 years so victims are genuinely shocked that they can't access their own transcripts even from 2018... Oh and if they can they're often extremely expensive.

retinaros 8mo ago

england has fallen and the rest of europe too. they are not free countries anymore

rm30 8mo ago

Not long ago, Italian Supreme Court (Cassazione, ord. 34217/2025) established a critical principle reflecting a broader trend in personal data management: the "digital image" of a person must reflect their actual current situation through complete and accurate information. The court rejected deletion but endorsed contextualization, articles must explicitly note the acquittal (assoluzione) or dismissal that concluded the investigation. An article mentioning "investigation for [crime]" without noting "subsequently acquitted" is factually incomplete, therefore false. This principle applies directly to search engines and data processors. When Courtsdesk was deleted before reaching AI companies, the government recognized the constraint: AI systems can't apply this "completeness" standard. They preserve raw archives without contextual updates. They can't distinguish between "investigato" (under investigation) and "assolto" (aquitted). They can't enforce the court's requirement that information must be "correttamente aggiornata con la notizia dell'esito favorevole" (properly updated to reflect the favorable resolution of the proceedings). The UK government prevented the structural violation the Cassazione just identified: permanent archival of incomplete truth. This isn't about suppressing information, it's about refusing to embed factually false contexts into systems designed for eternity.

ganelonhb 8mo ago

2 tiers.

malklera 8mo ago

Is never good when governments make access to information more difficult. If the information is already accessibly to the public, even if what they claim about selling it to an AI company is true, the AI companies already has access to it if they want.

troad 8mo ago

There's so much nonsense going on in the UK lately that it seems worthwhile to start hosting public interest information like this off-shore, in the US. A non-commercial initiative hosted by a group of Americans who wish to promote the cause of free information, but are themselves not interested in travelling to the UK, would be relatively immune to overreach by the British state. A US based service could take benefit of the First Amendment, the SPEECH Act, the fair use provision in US copyright law, etc - and simply ignore all the numerous British 'suppression orders', 'cessation notices', 'online safety' laws, etc. If the Internet is indeed balkanizing - as sadly appears to be the case - let's squeeze some silver linings out of it.

metaPushkin 8mo ago

THE ONLY REASON IS THAT Courtsdesk PROVIDED TOO EFFECTIVE A TOOL FOR INVESTIGATING STATE CRIMES AND UNCOVERING CORRUPTION AMONG HIGH-RANKING OFFICIALS, LIKE Keir Starmer. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit..., Courtsdesk WAS ACTIVELY USED TO ANALYZE COURT CASES AND DETECT STATE CRIMES COMMITTED BY THE POLICE.