Federal Court’s PACER Comes Undone With “RECAP”

The Federal Court’s online document access program “PACER” requires $0.08 payment per page.  “RECAP” (PACER in reverse) is a Firefox web-browser add-on that adds any document you access to a free database allowing yourself and others to view the same document later for free.  You get the benefit of documents already accessed by others as well as your own.  In RECAP’s own words:

We created RECAP in hopes of hastening the day when court records would be freely available to the general public via the Internet. RECAP contributes to this goal in three important ways. Most obviously, we are directly increasing public access to legal documents by creating a free repository that anyone can access. Second, by donating bandwidth and CPU cycles to the cause of public access, we are reducing the load on the PACER servers and making it feasible for the courts to make more documents freely available with the computing resources they already have. Finally, we think that building and running RECAP will give us the opportunity to study the practical challenges involved in large-scale open access to public documents. We hope to learn lessons that will help the judiciary improve its own systems. And we hope our efforts will inspire the Administrative Office of the Courts to accelerate its own movement toward an open access regime.

*** ADDED BONUS: For those of you not yet running Mozilla’s Firefox web-browser, now is your chance to get it set up.  Firefox is a better alternative to other web-browsers such as Windows Internet Explorer (you may not even have realized that you have a choice of web-browsing software—you do.  Web browsing requires a program just like you need a program to type a letter or send an email.  Exercise your freedom of choice).  Try it, you’ll like it.

UPDATE: In a report by Wired Threat Level yesterday, it appears that the federal courts are, predictably, not as enthusiastic about RECAP as $.08-per-page-users of PACER.  In a warning notice, the courts cite privacy and security concerns– essentially a “a bit of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt” (aka “FUD”), and discourage use of RECAP until “the implications of its use are better understood.”

The initiation of RECAP and its implications prompts one reminder: Remember to redact all social security numbers from any documents submitted to the court as well as any other information that might be crucial to your client’s or others’ privacy and security.  A spot of care will help you and your clients “keep from falling apart at the seams.”

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