Receive the weekly sampler of posts and "Resource of the Week".
Subscribe »

Enter your
email address:

My Account »


Bookmark and Share

Testimonial?
If you find ResourceShelf useful, please supply a testimonial »








Home > ResourceBlog > Article

« All ResourceBlog Articles

 

Bookmark and Share   Feed

Tuesday, 6th October 2009

FBI Investigated Coder for Liberating Paywalled Court Records

From the Article:

When 22-year-old programmer Aaron Swartz decided last fall to help an open-government activist amass a public and free copy of millions of federal court records, he did not expect he’d end up with an FBI agent trying to stake out his house.

But that’s what happened, as Swartz found out this week when he got his FBI file through a Freedom of Information Act request. A partially-redacted FBI report shows the feds mounted a serious investigation of Swartz for helping put public documents onto the public web.

The FBI ran Swartz through a full range of government databases starting in February, and drove by his home, after the U.S. court system told the feds he’d pilfered approximately 18 million pages of documents worth $1.5 million dollars. That’s how much the public records would have cost through the federal judiciary’s pay-walled PACER record system, which charges eight cents a page for most legal filings.

The article continues with details about how Swartz was able to access the PACER documents.

[Snip]

He [Swartz] donated the 19,856,160 pages to public.resource.org, an open government initiative spearheaded by Carl Malamud as part of a broader project to make public as many government databases as Malamud can find. It was Malamud who previously shamed the SEC into putting all its EDGAR filings online in the ’90s, and he used $600,000 in donations to buy 50 years of documents from the nation’s appeals court, which he promptly put on the internet for anyone to download in bulk.

[Snip]

PACER records still cost eight cents a page, but now PACER users running the Firefox browser can donate their downloads to the public domain with a simple plug-in called RECAP.

Use of the plug-in is not likely to start an investigation of you.

But then again, who knows.

Source: Wired (via /.)

See Also: Our First Post about RECAP (8/14/2009)
We also mention OpenJurist (free) and OpenRegs (Federal Regulations). Both of these services are also free.


Category:

Views: 495




blog comments powered by Disqus

« All ResourceBlog Articles

 

Read about the FreePint FamilyFreePint Family

A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »


FeedLatest Family Articles:


Click to view the article Quilting big data threads
Thursday, 24th May 2012

Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.


Click to view the article The fallacy of information overload
Wednesday, 23rd May 2012

A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?


Click to view the article Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure?
Wednesday, 23rd May 2012

Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.


Click to view the article Newsdesk: tracking millions of pieces of information a day
Tuesday, 22nd May 2012

What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?


Click to view the article Alacra Compliance adds managerial oversight
Tuesday, 22nd May 2012

Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).


All Family Articles »
Family Articles by Category »


Tell us what you're working on,
and we'll talk to you about how FreePint can help »


FreePint Family Testimonials

"Fabulous resource to learn of unique tools and insights. Very useful." Manager, Futures and Forecasting, Virginia, USA

More testimonials »






Subscribe

Subscribe to the ResourceShelf Newsletter and receive the weekly sampler of posts and Resource of the Week.

Find out more »

ResourceShelf sponsored by:

Article Categories

All Article Categories »

Archive

All Archives »