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Comment by tiahura | Hacker News Reader

Terrible news.

Federal court isn't personal information mother lode that state courts would be, but there's all sorts of stuff in there that doesn't need to be widely disseminated. If you're just interested in the occasional document, that's already free. This is just going to enable the worst sort of data harvesting.

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I understand your concern, but you're advocating for a form of security-through-obscurity. Data harvesting of this information is already available to bad actors. If information must be private for security reasons, it should not be in the public court records in the first place.

It’s already available to anyone. Your first $X / month is free, and after that, it’s like $.10 page. Or, you can drive to the courthouse and snoop for free all day long.

Mostly, this just facilitates more adtech and profile building. I don’t see the benefit.

Can you provide a citation for the proposition that rate-limiting is a form of security-through-obscurity? That seems like a pretty novel interpretation to me.

This information pre-dates the internet age. Lots of sensitive personal info.

I think you're right. Pacer is basically free for any of us wanting to look something up reasonably. The people that care are the people that want to harvest the data contained therein and sell it, use it for extortion, or use it to deny the reformed ex-con underclass access to housing, jobs and credit.

I suspect any professional law office that needs to research precedent, any legal journalist, etc will quickly exceed the $30/month. But yes, for normal people engaging in democracy it's effectively free.

$30 is 300 pages. That's nothing. Many people engaging in democracy need much more.

The pricing is per page, not per document. One larger document can go over the free threshold.

Courts already allow you to request that documents be flagged as sensitive.

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