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Comment by cryptnotic | Hacker News Reader

Today I learned that 20 years ago I was a defendant in an unlawful detainer (eviction) lawsuit regarding an apartment I shared in college. I had moved out of the apartment after graduation. Apparently my roommate stopped paying the rent and the landlord sued both of us. I was never served and didn't know about the case until now.

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Today I learned that my boss has a lead foot. 15 speeding tickets in six states, all over 85 MPH.

Sounds like a privacy nightmare, though.

Why? There's no private information being shared right?

Not officially, no. But that's not the only possible interpretation.

Technically no but it makes a difference if you have all that information available easily through the internet vs having to put some effort into obtaining the records one by one. Same goes for surveillance: technically you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public spaces but once it becomes feasible that somebody can plaster a whole state/country with cameras and can analyze the data automatically it gets a little scary. I think a lot of privacy rules need to be revised in the context of current and future technological capabilities.

That would be more of a problem with the legal system, not this search page.

Very true. We have to rethink a lot of the rules around privacy considering the scale technology has made mass surveillance possible. .

That's not true. Court records used to be accessible in person only. You would have to be motivated to find anything. This puts everyone's past and often forgotten transgressions on display.

This might look cool or even useful to some, but it's straight up immoral.

Court records, including traffic violations, have been accessible online in the jurisdiction where I live for nearly 25 years. They've been aggregated from that website by third-parties for most of that time, too (which I know because I've done contract sysadmin work for one of the courts for most of that 25 years).

Mixed feelings on this, and a lot of it unfortunately stems from these systems requiring access in-person only as well as courts generally being inaccessible through FOIA. Had these records been available through FOIA from the beginning, for example, then these records would have gone through a review/redaction process. But, they're being released now, which can many ways be seen as a reaction to the lack of access to this information, generally. The extensive overuse of courts for non-violent cases definitely doesn't help either.

As a researcher, there are deep problems with the inaccessibility of court information in that it prevents the general public from learning about systemic issues, for example identifying extensive abuse by judges (singular, or in a group), or identifying whether bail is applied uniformly.

I don't know what the solution is and things get trickier the more you look at them. Restrictive access isn't a perfect answer, since it allows gatekeeping of those critical. Having talked with lawyers who have access, they basically have to keep completely out of public spot light while they have restrictive access, at the fear of losing it. And our massive systems around incarceration have shown themselves as being uninterested in providing information to those who are critical of them. We've dug ourselves into a pretty deep hole.

The documents being released are currently publicly available. It looks like records of minors either don't show up, or don't show details. It also looks like expunged convictions do not have the case showing up.

FOIA doesn't apply for two reasons. One is like you say - many court documents are considered privileged and not subject to FOIA (which I agree has many issues around things like complaints). The other is that documents that are publicly available like this don't need to be requested through FOIA since they are already available.

I can go to my state's website and get the same information as on this site. The thing this site does is allow you to search all state's for free. There are plenty of sites that will allow you to search for people like this, but they currently charge money.

Access to justice and information about justice shouldn't be gatekept through money. I understand where you're going with it, but it's very close to the same reasoning used to justify ex[tp]ensive bail -- it only fucks the poor.

"Access to justice and information about justice shouldn't be gatekept through money."

I agree. My comment was about how this site allows that access for free. And also that FOIA is moot for this information - it's publicly available without a request.

My point is that we should have gone through a FOIA route from the beginning.

And no, a lot of important information still isn't publicly available, so we still have these issues that need to be ironed out for the exact same reason as I'm describing. This release still only scratches the surface. I'm able to get court documents from city law departments, but the process takes forever (ten complaints per week, for example) and the alternative is to go downtown to work with computer systems that have poor search capabilities.

Had we been (and been able to be) aggressive from a FOIA perspective from the beginning, the inefficiencies of these systems (eg, segmentting private information is stored in court records) would be more ironed out.

"This might look cool or even useful to some, but it's straight up immoral."

Again, that's an issue with the legal system. States make this information available to the public online, and have done so for a long time. This is an aggregation, and similar services have been around for a long time.

If you want this information to be private, then you need legislation to be passed. Frankly, this isn't even the most immoral thing the system is involved in with. For example, 2-10% of the incarcerated are wrongly convicted. Or the fact that complaints and misconduct of judges are so secret that even if they contain exculpatory evidence they are not required to be exposed. Or that magistrates in most places are not required to have a law degree nor pass the bar, leading to the farcical outcome that the lawyers arguing the case have more knowledge of the law than the "judge" who is supposed to be the authority on the law. The list goes on and on. One day, enough people will be screwed over by the system that there won't be support for it anymore.

You and others are essentially arguing that we should put artificial barriers in place for accessing information that is public as a matter of law. Arguably there is information that's public today only because the circumstances at the time when that decision was made were different. But the solution would be to make less information public if it's a problem. Not to tell people they can only access this information when the town clerk is in the office--and he doesn't come in much.

I disagree. That is an excellent throttling mechanism. Keeps records open but preserves a modicum of privacy.

It's another topic if court records should be public at all, but I gather that's a pretty integral element of US judicial system.

How does that work? Lawyers and others can run searches and have for decades. This isn't anything new, except now you don't have to pay a lot of money.

Either it's private or it's not. Fake throttling that discriminates based one's ability to pay or suffer inconvenience is ridiculous. Not to mention, it's been decades since this information hasn't been available in this format.

There are records here connecting my legal name to my deadname, not even on a court name change order. I had gone to lengths to keep things private. This is devastating. I want to cry.

I learned there's an attorney with my exact name and middle initial and his kajillion filings obscure my traffic tickets.

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