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I used PACER to look up that guy who DDoS attacked Hacker Dojo earlier this year and wasn't charged a dime for it, because it cost me $2.60 to download his enti

I used PACER to look up that guy who DDoS attacked Hacker Dojo earlier this year and wasn't charged a dime for it, because it cost me $2.60 to download his entire docket. To be clear, I used my computer, on the Internet, to download a couple dozen documents in a U.S. federal criminal trial, and I paid $2.60 instead of having to drive to the courthouse in San Jose and wait in line. I spent more than that for coffee today. Somehow this is an outrage, apparently, but I had to scroll for five minutes to find out why. A reporter from the Times reading a PACER case is generating more than the $10-$15 she will spend on the case when she publishes the investigative report. The one day a year I need PACER, it's pretty much free for me. I simply cannot comprehend the outrage here, because public records clearinghouses are by their very nature special cases. His problems are not my problems. Why is the approach here to spitefully crawl the service and make it more expensive for everyone, rather than designing a clearinghouse for open access data of all forms in a marketable solution for governments to use? PACER does much, much more than docket access, too, and it shows in the text that the guy is not a lawyer. Legal teams pretty much live on PACER when they're in a federal case, and you file through it as well.

istjohn 12y ago
Crawling the service doesn't make it more expensive for anyone. The price is already set, and the marginal cost of serving a document is practically zero. Congrats on being able to spend $2.60 without thinking about it, but not everyone is so fortunate. If you cannot understand why this is problematic, you are simply small-minded. Not only does this system erect an economically regressive barrier between the proceedings of the judiciary and the public, it precludes analysis of the judicial system through a wider lens and the utilization of statistical analysis and other big data technologies.
- jsmthrowaway 12y ago
  Bandwidth, storage space, digitization, records management, salaries for the employees involved, and secure delivery infrastructure are very far from free. Crawling nearly 1 TB of data from a system absolutely makes it more expensive for everyone; what do you think, transit, bandwidth, and storage just appear from thin air? I could go on for a long time about how often records management systems keep some data cold and the dozens of infrastructure concerns that undermine your idealistic position. The cost of serving you a document under intense regulatory scrutiny (ever heard of the OMB?) is not "practically zero," and it is incredibly short-sighted to allege that it is so. It's easy to sit as a startup employee and think "gosh, you could just throw all those documents in MongoDB and have some fun!" but the reality is that government and traditional corporate environments do not work that way. You didn't think about Sarbanes-Oxley when you were designing your billing and accounting system, did you? Do you even know what it is? For better or worse, systems outside of Silicon Valley are under intense regulatory pressure. Some of that is absolutely essential: Sarbox is one of them, and it was reactionary to mostly Enron. Document delivery and management can be expensive when you have a broader perspective, which is that government is incredibly complex and convoluted. Look how much they spend a year on PACER and tell me I'm wrong. If you want to reform something, reform that. I won't address the rest of your comment because it is completely uncalled for.

istjohn 12y ago

Crawling the service doesn't make it more expensive for anyone. The price is already set, and the marginal cost of serving a document is practically zero. Congrats on being able to spend $2.60 without thinking about it, but not everyone is so fortunate. If you cannot understand why this is problematic, you are simply small-minded. Not only does this system erect an economically regressive barrier between the proceedings of the judiciary and the public, it precludes analysis of the judicial system through a wider lens and the utilization of statistical analysis and other big data technologies.

jsmthrowaway 12y ago
Bandwidth, storage space, digitization, records management, salaries for the employees involved, and secure delivery infrastructure are very far from free. Crawling nearly 1 TB of data from a system absolutely makes it more expensive for everyone; what do you think, transit, bandwidth, and storage just appear from thin air? I could go on for a long time about how often records management systems keep some data cold and the dozens of infrastructure concerns that undermine your idealistic position. The cost of serving you a document under intense regulatory scrutiny (ever heard of the OMB?) is not "practically zero," and it is incredibly short-sighted to allege that it is so. It's easy to sit as a startup employee and think "gosh, you could just throw all those documents in MongoDB and have some fun!" but the reality is that government and traditional corporate environments do not work that way. You didn't think about Sarbanes-Oxley when you were designing your billing and accounting system, did you? Do you even know what it is? For better or worse, systems outside of Silicon Valley are under intense regulatory pressure. Some of that is absolutely essential: Sarbox is one of them, and it was reactionary to mostly Enron. Document delivery and management can be expensive when you have a broader perspective, which is that government is incredibly complex and convoluted. Look how much they spend a year on PACER and tell me I'm wrong. If you want to reform something, reform that. I won't address the rest of your comment because it is completely uncalled for.