Today’s posting is the second of a four-part series on PACER provided by G. Thomas Sandbach, Esq, owner of Justice Technology Consulting. Tom’s contact information appears at the end of the post.

Carl Malamud is a man on a mission. As the prime mover of Public.Resource.Org, he and his organization are dedicated to the purpose of “Making Government Information More Accessible“. According to a Wired Magazine article, Malamud ” wants access to all public legal documents in the U.S. to be free to the public.” A particular target of his cause has been the PACER system that provides public access to documents filed in United States Courts. Claiming that the courts are “rolling in dough” as a result of profits from the PACER system, Public.Resource.Org’s document “recycling” FAQ claims that the court public access system runs a tidy profit. Law Librarian Blog reports that Stephen Schultze, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, is currently  studying the role of PACER user fees for public access to court records in the budgeting process of the federal courts. You can see a preview of his research here.

In November 2007 the courts authorized 17 of the Government Printing Office’s federal depository libraries to participate in a pilot program to allow free access to court documents. Malamud recognized this as a golden opportunity to further his goal of freeing PACER.  He suggested that interested citizens join a “Thumb Drive Corps” by going to one of the participating libraries armed with a  portable USB-based drive, “filling it up with free PACER Documents, and uploading them” to his website for “recycling”. Taking the suggestion to heart, one Malamud supporter, Aaron Swartz arranged to download almost 20 million pages over a period of 6 weeks, constituting about 20% of the total contents of the system.

In late September 2008 librarians at the participating libraries were notified that the pilot program was abruptly “suspended”; that there had been a security breach and that one or two of the pilot program passwords had been used to download a massive amount of documents. According to an article in the New York Times:

A notice went out from the Government Printing Office that the free Pacer pilot program was suspended, “pending an evaluation.” A couple of weeks later, a Government Printing Office official, Richard G. Davis, told librarians that “the security of the Pacer service was compromised. The F.B.I. is conducting an investigation.

No results of any investigation have been announced; no arrests have been made; Malamud and Swarz have not been officially advised that they did anything wrong; and the evaluation “is continuing”. The downloaded documents are currently available for free at Mr. Malamud’s website in bulk, but in a format that is not easily searchable.

Nobody at the courts or at the GPO is blaming the Malamud effort for sinking the pilot, but the connection has been made by the New York Times, Wired  and a slew of bloggers.  Resumption of the pilot in its most recent format is unlikely.

Although Carl Malamud did not capture the whole PACER database, he’s not done yet.

Next: Free PACER? - The technological approaches

Photo Credit = Pacer

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Court Management, Technology.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.