Private effort aims to open up federal court records

By Jenifer Reinhardt

from OhMyGov!, Aug 31 2009

Early on in his new job as Chief Information Officer of the United States, Vivek Kundra said he wanted to "tap into the ingenuity of the American people to show us a better way, to show us an innovative path." With an army of civic-minded tech geeks out there, who already have one-upped government transparency efforts with private sector projects like Recovery.org, Kundra’s strategy makes sense: Leverage all the resources you can.

A new project by a couple of researchers at Princeton University may be the next shining example of citizen ingenuity improving government. Researchers Tim Lee and Harlan Yu have developed a way to get at the holy grail of court records, turning the glacially slow, palatially expensive retrieval process into a fast, free one.

The current database for storing federal court records, called PACER, was created in 1988 to allow for easier access, but the system was designed in the era of monochrome screens and is still slow and, amazingly, unsearchable. It also requires a credit card because the judicial branch charges 8 cents a page for downloaded records.

It doesn’t seem quite fair that we should have to pay for information that is supposedly ours already. That is what Stephen Schultze, fellow at the Berkman center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, thought when he visited Princeton University last year to give a speech on public access to court records. Lee and Yu were in the audience that day and in a post-speech chat with Schultze they began to plot out a "technical intervention."

The workaround they created, which comes as a free plug-in for the web browser Firefox, is the reverse of PACER, all the way down to its name: RECAP.

Read the entire article here.