>Not surprisingly for government IT projects, PACER looks like most web sites did around 1994. It's actually not one web site at all, but more like one hundred, spread across different court districts and circuits in the country. The district-level courts each have their own custom version because judges demand custom features, and no one can refuse their demands. The appellate-level courts have an entirely different and separate infrastructure, written in a different language. (Technically-inclined readers, it's a Java applet. But really twelve different Java applets, depending on the circuit. No joke.) The Supreme Court, which can do whatever it wants, opts out of PACER entirely. Each level of PACER has separate login requirements, not to mention that PACER is separate from CM/ECF, an unbelievably badly-named system that actually lets you file documents, but under a separate login. What this means is that it is essentially impossible to follow a case from court to court, and if you even try, it is very, very expensive.
For those involved in any government contracting work this is no surprise at all. The lowest bidder or the friend of a friend wins the contract who then skims off the top and then forwards work to sub and sub contractors and so on. In the end programmers with high school level of understanding end up writing the code, and layers and layers of intermediate L3, Lockheed, Mantech, Booz|Allen type contractors get rich and the government ends up with an overpriced piece of shit that doesn't work properly.
There is quite a bit of a business opportunity in there (at least in theory as it a slimy red tape mess) for small and agile teams to come in and clean up the crap left by the large botched up jobs like these.
Except that it's near impossible to have a 'small and agile' team that interfaces with a government contract in any way. You need at least one person to just sit in meetings, at least one architect to draw up powerpoint charts that people will buy into, a project manager, a change order coordinator, and an accounts payable/receivable type person to do battle with getting the government to pay you (it is a full time job). On top of that, you need to have had experience doing government work in the past with good recommendations (for which many smaller shops pair up with bigger shops to act as prime contractors, which inflates the price enormously), and you need to have an ITIL or CMMI (depending on the customer) to make sure that all those processes are being followed.
In addition to the two or three people you need to actually do the work, you need a head count of at least 6 more just to manage customer expectations.
Yes, yes. Good point. Agile in this domain means about 10 people. It is huge compared to a start-up but when compared to L3 or Lockheed it is a _very_ small team.
And you are right, meeting, trade shows, filling out red tape, security audits all those need full time position to be handled.
I'm not sure if this is the result of a high-priced government contractor boondoggle. The U.S. judiciary isn't a monolithic entity. Each circuit, each district, and even each judge have a great deal of autonomy, and administrative matters are completely decentralized. There's not even a single uniform website for the various courts. Compare the page for the eastern district of Pennsylvania (http://www.paed.uscourts.gov) with the page for the northern district of Illinois (http://www.ilnd.uscourts.gov) and the 7th circuit (http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov). The only thing they all share is the domain!
What it looks like to me is the usual scenario in decentralized organizations. Different pieces adopted systems as the need for them arose, and various systems were layered on top over that over the years to try and achieve some uniformity in certain areas.
I wonder if there is anyway to electronically disintermediate the process by which someone wins a government software contract. There much be some way to make discovering contracts easy, quick and cheap and make the process to apply and build those projects super simply. Basically a startup needs to democratize access to these projects so you only need to be only an expert software developer and not a expert government bureaucrat to understand the process to win these contracts.
The system is there. They publish bids out with requirements then there is a process that companies go through to get that contract. So it is better but it is often just the motions, it provide official deniability "see the paper/electronic trail show it was an open and fair bid process".
What often happens behind the scenes is that requirements are written to a specific software product that is already effectively pre-determined. Like let's say it is a complicated inventory tracking system, out of 50 or so requirement points, every one basically matching the system that L3 provides without naming L3. Stuff like that.
It is vital to do behind the scenes networking, hiring insiders, that needs to happen besides also having someone full time that knows how to jump through the "official" red tape.
You should read a few call-for-proposals, it's pretty enlightening. What I learned (hopefully this differs from place to place) is that they write them in such a way that only huge, dishonest shops can respond, by making the requirements huge and contradictory. An honest shop can't call out the contradictions and get the work because "fully satisfying" the requirements is necessary to be accepted. A small shop can't afford the time and expense to respond with a proposal. In both cases you need to build in enough overhead to cover the countless hours spent arguing about the featureset and to afford the lawyers when the litigation comes a few years down the road.
I don't think the government means to lock out small vendors. It's just that bureaucracy tends to generate bloated and inefficient systems like this, in which the only part of the contract the vendor can afford to skimp on is the implementation itself (and not the lawyers, negotiators, managers, etc.) The people who work for the government want good, working systems, they're just prevented from choosing vendors who can produce them because using common sense is not sufficiently bureaucratic.
I worked for a company that made scale models of the Eurofighter for (I think) British aerospace. We made full scale models of those pylon held fuel tanks. Made them to the specs given to us and they didn't fit when they arrived at some kind of arms fair. Much scrambling later the problem was found. We made the tanks correctly, but the actual plane had some kind of old standard built into it by accident.
Remember that PACER is not intended as a site to research cases, which tends to be how many lawyers use it. It's meant as a site to organize electronically submitted court documents for the judges and the lawyers for a single case, instead of a paper file. The people involved in a case are going to be looking at all the documents for one case, and that is all nicely organized on one docket page. "Following a case from court to court" is not the intent of the system.
Court docket management software, not litigant case workflow.
I would imagine each court has no incentive to play nice with other courts, since it would basically simplify the process for challenging their judgments. Also, a higher court can basically use the court-to-court impedance barrier as a low-level filter to reduce their workloads.
PACER was designed in the early 1990s, before the internet was popular, i.e., when AOL was the internet for most of America. Indeed, PACER is probably as old, if not older than, most HN users.
It has not been upgraded since then, largely because Congress has not provided sufficient funds to the courts for them to do so (appropriations in the past two decades have largely been reserved for operations or for courtroom construction, but not technological upgrades. Much of the money from PACER access fees goes toward meeting the shortful in the operation budget, because Congress in its infinite wisdom has underfunded the federal courts for most of the last two decades.
(It's wierd that I have spent most of the last two days defending the American court system...)
This is such a load of self-serving bureaucratic nonsense. Pacer is an awful site that rips off the American people. Even if it is a cash cow, there's NO justification from keeping copyright free documents that are essential to democracy behind a paywall.
Increase the fees that Lexis-Nexis pays. Or charge more to submit documents. There's lots of solutions that could work to create a site that's usable and free to the American people.
This blame Congress crap has gone on long enough. When will the U.S. court system take its responsibility to the American people seriously? The answer: when people like you stop parroting its rationale.
Does 'rprasad work for the court system? Does he have some financial stake in it? If not, how is this "self-serving"? If it's just the idea that you find "self-serving", why did you target it at him specifically with "people like you"? What incentive does he have to "parrot" anything from the courts?
The US Courts are underfunded and have crippling case loads. Beyond that, is it even clear that any court has the authority to "increase the fees that Lexis-Nexis pays"? Or to charge more to submit documents?
Lexis-Nexis pays bulk rates to Pacer via contract. Attorneys pay to file documents. Those are set by the U.S. court system, not Congress.
He's making the same argument the U.S. court system has made, sub-rosa, for years, as it's raised fees for accessing court documents. It used to be 8 cents a page. Jumped to 10 cents earlier this year.
If they don't have money to upgrade the system, where does their $65 million in operating "income" go? I recognize this question could sound facetious, but I'm genuinely curious. My guess would be that they probably don't have the autonomy to take their budget and do as they please with it. Do PACER profits just get thrown into some general US gov coffer?
If you say it's a matter of funding, where do the extra revenues PACER takes in beyond cost go? Are they appropriated back into the general fund and thus not usable for upgrades?
Back in the 1990s, I remember that staff at the Civil Division of the Department of Justice used to get into PACER by way of dial-up. I really hadn't thought of PACER since about 1996.
> It has not been upgraded since then, largely because Congress has not provided sufficient funds to the courts for them to do so
What about the $65,000,000 surplus that the service generates?
I'd imagine the system could be drastically improved using a tiny fraction of that income. (Of course it could only get worse if they spent $65M on it...)
"What does RECAP do?
RECAP is an extension (or “add on”) for the Firefox web browser that improves the PACER experience while helping PACER users build a free and open repository of public court records. RECAP users automatically donate the documents they purchase from PACER into a public repository hosted by the Internet Archive. And RECAP saves users money by alerting them when a document they are searching for is already available from this repository. RECAP also makes other enhancements to the PACER experience, including more user-friendly file names."
Well, to state the obvious, it's because recap is a system that is competition to the author's plainsite project. Petty squabbling much like the article itself.
Actually, PlainSite depends upon RECAP, and I think it's a great product, which is why I mentioned the Princeton team. The essay was about PACER's pricing scheme, not about RECAP, but I fully encourage everyone to use it.
According to one commentator, that's not the only error in the article;
There are a couple of factual errors in this post:
"When you further consider that in the course of prosecuting one's own court case, one must refer to many, many other cases because of the nature of legal precedent, legal research can suddenly cost thousands of dollars—and that's without even hiring an overpriced lawyer."
Aaron misunderstands the nature of legal research. Legal research is done at the appellate level. In the course of prosecuting a case, legal research is necessary, but you won't be conducting legal research with PACER--it's not that kind of system. District court cases are not precedential with respect to other district court cases and it is rare that there is a usable opinion deciding the case. At the appellate level things are different, and there are both free and paywalled systems containing those precedents, such as Google Scholar (free) and Lexis/Nexis (paywall).
Putting aside legal research, it is not impossible to follow a case from court to court. Upon filing a notice of appeal, a district court case will be given an appellate court number which can then be followed on the appellate court's version of PACER.
From what I've seen, research is done at all levels, though the higher the level, the more likely the citation. For example, district judges like to cite other district decisions in their same courts for routine boilerplate, such as the conditions when a 12(b)(6) motion is appropriate.
I have conducted legal research with PACER multiple times in the course of handling litigation. One key time was when I had to look up ALA v. Pataki--a district decision--which has key implications in the FaceCash case because it deals with the right of states to regulate the internet. It never got to the appellate level, but it's the law of the land now. So I would disagree with your statement that "district court cases are not precedential," because they sometimes are. Many other times I wanted to see how particular motions were drafted in other cases (having never written them before), which is something that you can really only do if you have access to the PDFs of the motions themselves.
Google Scholar does not contain district case dockets or documents at this time, though it is a great resource. LexisNexis is barely usable for novices, expensive, and simply not a realistic option for many people involved in litigation who aren't lawyers.
Even though appellate courts obviously track cases with numbers, those cases are not directly linked from PACER such that you can follow a case backwards or forwards with one click. I've used these systems pretty extensively. I stand by what I wrote.
District courts are not precedential. Not even appellate cases from another circuit are binding. Judges do not routinely cite other district judges when there is circuit law available.
There is nothing wrong with using Pacer to learn about how motions are drafted and to take advantage of someone else's legal research. You can also examine case files for free at the courthouse or even the Federal Archives. Copies are expensive, but that's another story.
You can stand by what you wrote but you have made a layman's mistake which is easily corrected. You should do so.
In reverse order: Google Scholar does not have district court decisions, but these decisions are not precedential. Some, but not all of these, are published in the Federal Supplement series by Thomson-West. Most circuit decisions (but not all) are published in the Federal Reporter. "DO NOT PUBLISH" opinions are subject to special rules in each circuit.
The decision of one district judge does not bind another district judge in the same district. In the Mariel Boatlift cases, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida sat en banc precisely to avoid the problem of inconsistent decisions.
The decisions of one federal appellate circuit are not binding on other federal circuits. There are frequently conflicts, even amongst panels of the same circuit. These are first resolved by the circuit court sitting en banc to resolve the conflict. If there are conflicts among the circuits, these are resolved by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is not obligated to take these cases and sometimes the conflict is resolved by Congress passing legislation adopting one circuit court's view over another.
These are ancillary and non-essential points to your main argument, but are easily corrected. Pacer can be made better, (criminal cases are generally not included; why?) but lawyers simply do not need Pacer to research substantive or procedural federal law.
> District court cases are not precedential with respect to other district court cases and it is rare that there is a usable opinion deciding the case.
Lawyer and former litigator here. It's true that district-court decisions have the status of binding precedent authority only within their own districts. Such decisions, though, can be and regularly are cited elsewhere as "persuasive" authority.
For example, in a California case, a lawyer might argue, in effect, "Your Honor, in a similar situation in New York, Judge So-and-So took Action X, for the reasons explained in her published opinion; we submit that you should take Action X too."
I never said that district court decisions had no value; simply that you're not going to find them easily in PACER. And there's nothing wrong with citing caselaw in F.Supp.; but my point is that lawyers do not normally do case law research using PACER.
The way the US legal system should work is that once the parties see that Judge So-and-so is right, litigation should cease, right? But it doesn't work that way. Especially at the federal level--if Main Justice doesn't like a decision they'll keep shopping until they get one they like--as will any other litigant who has to litigate in multiple jurisdictions.
And my friend, since when do district judges follow the decisions of their district colleagues? Those decisions are only persuasive as well. Look at my SDFla comment. The only binding precedents are those from the Supremes and those that come from your circuit (or the 5th, if you're in the 11th and there's a need to cite a pre-1982? case). Or the Fed. Cir. for matters within their jurisdiction. Or the FS Ct., but now we are really far afield.
Another issue is what happened to FLITE and JURIS--these were two USG systems that were set up to provide federal lawyers with computer-assisted legal research (as it was called then). I think the JURIS database eventually became available, but FLITE was shut down. In any event, most of this material is now outside the Thomson/West Lexis/Nexis paywall, but the current situation as I understand it is still far from ideal.
I agree with this essay, but I want to point one thing out.
> Any startup could design a system better than this
> for $10,000. (For a frame of reference, PlainSite,
> which is roughly as complex as PACER, has cost Think
> about $1,000 so far.
This is shortsighted. I think hosting a government website is quite complex. They have very strict security requirements and maintenance requirements, with very little economy of scale. $25M does seem a bit high, but I can easily see their costs above $1M.
I doubt that $10,000 is anywhere close to the cost of designing the system. $10,000 is not even enough to hire one senior developer for a month. And the designers would have to have domain knowledge of the legal system, which very few web developers have; you'd probably need to hire lawyers as consultants. Plus, the article mentions that different courts and judges have differing requirements, so just figuring out what the system needs to do seems non-trivial.
Also, even if the system could be designed for $10,000, the yearly cost of operating it (hardware costs and personnel) would be significant, since all the data from the various courts would need to be entered daily, and someone would need to verify that the data in the system was complete and accurate. Plus, the system would need to be backed up and have redundancy and disaster recovery plans. You can't afford to shut down the legal system across the entire country because one data center loses power. We're not talking about Twitter here; we're talking about critical national infrastructure.
I'm a senior developer and I cost about that, at freelance rates. I could definitely design and build the things you mention in a month, providing the core functionality (a document storage system) is not overly complex.
And who said anything about the yearly cost of operating it?
How is 120k not considered good money in New York, LA, or Silicon Valley for a working professional? I live in New York and make in this ballpark and I consider it pretty decent money. Those cities are expensive, but I don't think so expensive that anyone wouldn't consider a 6 figure salary as somehow "not solid".
Are you kidding me? It's awful. I used it every week. Finding documents is a nightmare. There's no subscribe function. Trying to download a PDF is a ridiculous chore and even seeing a court docket costs money.
$25 million is pretty cheap for a government system. In the late 90's the Canadian government spent about a billion dollars (probably ~900 million US$) building a database of gun owners.
Last year they ditched the database for ideological reasons (over the protests of the public security sector who were finding it critical for officer safety).
That's government IT. Spend absurd amounts of money building something that you could assemble for next to nothing using off the shelf parts, underfund the maintenance, and then throw it away.
Note, the PACER incident is not the direct reason why Aaron was in the legal trouble he was in, that was his downloading of JSTOR's material, which under the law clearly illegal.
However there is widespread speculation that the PACER incident was behind why prosecutors may have wanted to throw the book at Aaron.
Just a note, but it's possible what Aaron did actually was legal. There was an article [1] by an expert witness in the case posted earlier today. So I think the trial would have been revealing. Admittedly the article doesn't prove anything, but I think everyone has so far been assuming Aaron's guilt. And while there is no denying the acts that he committed, they may have been legal.
That article contains one obvious bald faced lie: "Aaron did nothing to cover his tracks or hide his activity". That's just not true. He covered his face with a bicycle helmet and walked backwards to keep a camera from capturing his identity. He changed MAC addresses to evade detection. And when faced with police, he ran rather than show his face and identify himself.
I can understand an advocate stretching the truth, but when the lies are this obvious, it gets insulting.
I've known Alex Stamos for years; he is now a colleague of mine. There is no chance that he set out to deceive anyone with that post. If there were mistakes in his writeup, they were made in good faith. The whole case was complicated; read Swartz's motion to suppress evidence to see just a few of the twists and turns.
Stamos had nothing to gain from pushing a particular perspective. He was attached to the case as an expert witness and drew reasonable conclusions from the issues he was directly confronted with.
Thanks for explaining that Stamos has a good reputation.
I get that the case is complex. But there's just no excuse for writing that "Aaron did nothing to cover his tracks or hide his activity". None at all. And if Stamos was willing to update his blog and explain that that statement is not true, I'll happily agree that he made a mistake while acting in good faith.
But until he does that, I think it is fair to assume that he either acted dishonestly with intent to deceive or that he's really incompetent.
Look, everyone makes mistakes. I do all the time. But when honest people make mistakes, they fix them. I'd be happy with a correction on his personal blog where I first saw the statement rather than io9. Just fix a single sentence.
But if Stamos refuses to fix that sentence which is glaringly wrong, then it indicates he either doesn't know the most basic facts of the case or he's trying to deceive people.
A bit of a tautology there: If the expert witness that was on Aaron's side wasn't planning to testify he was not guilty... he wouldn't be the expert witness on Aaron's side.
I agree, it isn't a definitive source proving that Aaron was innocent. My main point was that btilly said it was "clearly illegal". And I've seen that point reiterated multiple times. Nearly every article I've seen has assumed his quilt. So I just wanted to point out that there is another side.
No, it just means he's not the impartial expert on the facts that some seem to be imagining him to be. I'm sure the prosecution had an expert witness who could have written a post saying "Aaron would have been found guilty."
For what it's worth, the expert we're talking about stated in his post that he usually testified against hackers. He explained what he thought was different in Aaron's case in his post.
True. But if we assume everyone put on the stand in a trial is a paid shill, lieing for one side or the other, we also have to assume that that the court system is a sham and there's no point in a trial.
I'd rather assume that we can find smart, honest experts who happen to disagree, and that we can trust what they are saying to be their view of reality.
Presumably it was the incident that left a bruise in the govt's eye and they never forgot it. But that is speculation, we don't know of course (even as tax payers who bankroll this crap) what goes into decision and who decides how and to what level of fervor cases get prosecuted.
It appears the Administrative Office deemed RECAP ok, while at the same time prohibiting "fee exempt PACER users" from sharing content [1]. That is a fine line.
The article cites PlainSite as a cost reference. That surely can't be the cost of a developer, server, bandwidth etc? Free labour? Anyone know more? I know that an enerprising hacker can do a lot, but setting up a system better than another that has a $25 million budget?
And would anyone care to guess what it should cost per page (ideally with some sort of cost justification)? 1c? .01c?
It should cost $0 per page. The infrastructure and maintenance for a document database of our country's tax-funded court proceedings should be so vanishingly small in relation to what we already spend on the justice system that it should approach 0.
I'm happy to make corrections, but I'm not sure of your source of information. Aside from PlainSite, both the GPO (official) and Cornell's LII (unofficial) show that the note still stands:
>"The per page charge applies to the number of pages that results from any search, including a search that yields no matches with a one page charge for no matches. The charge applies whether or not pages are printed, viewed, or downloaded. There is a maximum charge of $3.00 for electronic access to any single document."
It is also interesting to note that pricing is decoupled from actual bandwidth usage, or any other metric that could be correlated directly with the cost of providing the service.:
>1. We use a formula to determine the number of pages for an HTML formatted report.
>2. Any information extracted from the CM/ECF database, such as the data used to create a docket sheet, is billed using a formula based on the number of bytes extracted (4320 Bytes equals one page).
>3. For a PDF document, the actual number of pages are counted to determine the number of billable pages.
Lawyers use PACER quite a bit, but it's not because they love it or make money from it (in fact, clients are increasingly rejecting "research" charges). It's just that PACER is often faster, easier, and more certain than using the firm's internal document management system. PACER is set up for litigation - DMSes, while they let you store anything, don't understand what the content is.
Our startup is basically tackling that problem - and one of the side benefits will be dramatically reduced PACER bills. There is no reason firms should ever be looking up their own case documents on PACER, since they get them for free in the first place.
For once I find myself agreeing with Aaron Greenspan, except AaronSW's latest legal troubles were with JSTOR, not PACER. The article should have at least pointed that out.
It is by no means clear from reading this what the meaning of "necessary" is in context. Maybe it means "necessary to cover costs," but I can't tell from this post.
See Senator Lieberman's 2010 letter to Senate Appropriators for clarification (which I've updated my essay to reference):
"As you know, Court documents are electronically disseminated through the PACER system, which charges $.08-a-page for access. While charging for access was previously required, Section 205(e) of the E-Government Act changed a provision of the Judicial Appropriation Act of 2002 (28 U.S.C. 1913 note) so that courts “may, only to the extent necessary” (instead of “shall”) charge fees “for access to information available through automatic data processing equipment.” The Committee report stated: “[t]he Committee intends to encourage the Judicial Conference to move from a fee structure in which electronic docketing systems are supported primarily by user fees to a fee structure in which this information is freely available to the greatest extent possible… Pursuant to existing law, users of PACER are charged fees that are higher than the marginal cost of disseminating the information.”
Since the passage of the E-Government Act, the vision of having information “freely available to the greatest extent possible” is far from being met, despite the technological innovations that should have led to reduced costs in the past eight years. In fact, cost for these documents has gone up, from $.07 to $.08-per-page. The Judiciary has attempted to mitigate the shortcomings of the current fee approach in a variety of ways, including limiting charges to $2.40-per-document and the recent announcement that any charges less than $10-per-quarter will be waived. While these efforts should be commended, I continue to have concerns that these steps will not dramatically increase public access as long as the pay-per-access model continues."
Keep in mind that the US court system is not funded through filing fees. Courts generally have struggled with funding. Minimum mandatory penalties and the drug wars caused Miami to end up with four downtown federal courthouses and a (relatively) new federal prison. These facilities were not inexpensive.
To get back to the principal issue, the Government gets free access to PACER (and even free photocopies at the courthouse) whereas a private defendant, like Swartz, has to pay for these out of his own pocket. The government gets a case agent, the defendant gets none. The defendant may get a public defender, but only after he has exhausted his funds--and this happens.
What. The. Fuck.