Relatedly, there's an extremely good online archive of important cases in the past, but because they disallow crawlers in robots.txt: https://www.bailii.org/robots.txt not many people know about it. Personally I would prefer if all reporting on legal cases linked to the official transcript, but seemingly none of the parties involved finds it in their interest to make that work.
https://x.com/CPhilpOfficial/status/2021295301017923762
https://xcancel.com/CPhilpOfficial/status/202129530101792376...
Whilst we're on Rotherham:
"...by men predominantly of Pakistani heritage" [0]
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-61868863
Their parents or grandparents were immigrants...
This kind of logic does more disservice than people realize. You can combat bigotry towards immigrants (issue #1), without covering up for criminal immigrants (issue #2) in fear of increase of issue #1 among the natives. It only brings up more resentment and bigotry.
Prosecution of sexual assault is often handled extremely badly. It needs to be done better, without fear or favor, including people who are friends with the police or in positions of power. As we're seeing the fallout of the Epstein files.
Great. How does it change the substance of my comment?
Perhaps, instead of arguing about whether “immigrants” is always a group as a collective, or a certain number of individuals acting together, you would focus on the high level implications of government’s action or inaction?
What do Epstein files have to do with anything right now? Stop shifting the goal posts.
- Policing language to distract from the topic.
- Trying to claim things are just a series of isolated incidents with absolutely nothing in common
- Claiming there are wider problems (that should be addressed in a manner that would take years and isn't even defined well enough to claim measure as being "better")
Or it should be sealed for X years and then public record. Where X might be 1 in cases where you don't want to hurt an ongoing investigation, or 100 if it's someone's private affairs.
Nothing that goes through the courts should be sealed forever.
We should give up with the idea of databases which are 'open' to the public, but you have to pay to access, reproduction isn't allowed, records cost pounds per page, and bulk scraping is denied. That isn't open.
How about rate limited?
If load on the server is a concern, make the whole database available as a torrent. People who run scrapers tend to prefer that anyway.
This isn't someone's hobby project run from a $5 VPS - they can afford to serve 10k qps of readonly data if needed, and it would cost far less than the salary of 1 staff member.
I’d then ask OpenAI to be open too since open is open.
It's like having you search through sand, it's bad enough while you can use a sift, but then they tell you that you can only use your bare hands, and your search efforts are made useless.
This is not a new tactic btw and pretty relevant to recent events...
Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? No thanks.
AI firms have shown themselves to be playing fast and loose with copyrighted works, a teenager shouldn't have their permanent AI profile become "shoplifter" because they did a crime at 15 yo that would otherwise have been expunged after a few years.
But why shouldn't a 19 year old shoplifter have that on their public record? Would you prevent newspapers from reporting on it, or stop users posting about it on public forums?
Yes
Why are we protecting criminals, just because they are minors? Protect victims, not criminals.
Unfortunately reputational damage is part of the punishment (I have a criminal record), but maybe it's moronic to create a class of people who can avoid meaningful punishment for crimes?
At a certain point, we say someone is an adult and fully responsible for their actions, because “that’s who they are”.
It’s not entirely nuanced—and in the US, at least, we charge children as adults all the time—but it’s understandable.
Protect victims and criminals. Protect victims from the harm done to them by criminals, but also protect criminals from excessive, or, as one might say, cruel and unusual punishment. Just because someone has a criminal record doesn't mean that anything that is done to them is fair game. Society can, and should, decide on an appropriate extent of punishment, and not exceed that.
This - nearly all drug deliveries in my town are done by 15 years olds on overpowered electric bikes. Same with most shoplifting. The real criminals just recruit the schoolchildren to do the work because they know schoolchildren rarely get punishment.
That is the entire point of having courts, since the time of Hammurabi. Otherwise it's back to the clan system, where justice is made by avenging blood.
Making and using any "profiles" of people is an entirely different thing than having court rulings accessible to the public.
Instead, we should make it illegal to discriminate based on criminal conviction history. Just like it is currently illegal to discriminate based on race or religion. That data should not be illegal to know, but illegal to use to make most decisions relating to that person.
Do you regard the justice system as a method of rehabilitating offenders and returning them to try to be productive members of society, or do you consider it to be a system for punishment? If the latter, is it Just for society to punish somebody for the rest of their life for a crime, even if the criminal justice considers them safe to release into society?
Is there anything but a negative consequence for allowing a spent conviction to limit people's ability to work, or to own/rent a home? We have carve-outs for sensitive positions (e.g. working with children/vulnerable adults)
Consider what you would do in that position if you had genuinely turned a corner but were denied access to jobs you're qualified for?
If a conviction is something minor enough that might be expungable, it should be private until that time comes. If the convicted person hasn't met the conditions for expungement, make it part of the public record, otherwise delete all history of it.
Then there's cases like Japan, where not only companies, but also landlords, will make people answer a question like: "have you ever been part of an anti-social organization or committed a crime?" If you don't answer truthfully, that is a legal reason to reject you. If you answer truthfully, then you will never get a job (or housing) again.
Of course, there is a whole world outside of the United States and Japan. But these are the two countries I have experience dealing with.
The question a people must ask themselves: we are a nation of laws, but are we a nation of justice?
However, there's also jobs which legally require enhanced vetting checks.
And only released if it's in the public interest. I'd be very very strict here.
I'm a bit weird here though. I basically think the criminal justice system is very harsh.
Except when it comes to driving. With driving, at least in America, our laws are a joke. You can have multiple at fault accidents and keep your license.
DUI, keep your license.
Run into someone because watching Football is more important than operating a giant vehicle, whatever you might get a ticket.
I'd be quick to strip licenses over accidents and if you drive without a license and hit someone it's mandatory jail time. No exceptions.
By far the most dangerous thing in most American cities is driving. One clown on fan duel while he should be focusing on driving can instantly ruin dozens of lives.
But we treat driving as this sacred right. Why are car immobilizers even a thing?
No, you can not safely operate a vehicle. Go buy a bike.
The idea that society is required to forget crime is pretty toxic honestly.
1000x this. It’s one thing to have a felony for manslaughter. It’s another to have a felony for drug possession. In either case, if enough time has passed, and they have shown that they are reformed (long employment, life events, etc) then I think it should be removed from consideration. Not expunged or removed from record, just removed from any decision making. The timeline for this can be based on severity with things like rape and murder never expiring from consideration.
There needs to be a statute of limitations just like there is for reporting the crimes.
What I’m saying is, if you were stupid after your 18th birthday and caught a charge peeing on a cop car while publicly intoxicated, I don’t think that should be a factor when your 45 applying for a job after going to college, having a family, having a 20 year career, etc.
I'd go further and say a lot of charges and convictions shouldn't be a matter of public record that everyone can look up in the first place, at least not with a trivial index. File the court judgement and other documentation under a case number, ban reindexing by third parties (AI scrapers, "background check" services) entirely. That way, anyone interested can still go and review court judgements for glaring issues, but a "pissed on a patrol car" conviction won't hinder that person's employment perspectives forever.
In Germany for example, we have something called the Führungszeugnis - a certificate by the government showing that you haven't been convicted of a crime that warranted more than three months of imprisonment or the equivalent in monthly earning as a financial fine. Most employers don't even request that, only employers in security-sensitive environments, public service or anything to do with children (the latter get a certificate also including a bunch of sex pest crimes in the query).
You're conflating two distinct issues - access to information, and making bad decisions based on that information. Blocking access to the information is the wrong way to deal with this problem.
> a teenager shouldn't have their permanent AI profile become "shoplifter" because they did a crime at 15 yo that would otherwise have been expunged after a few years.
This would be a perfect example of something which should be made open after a delay. If the information is expunged before the delay, there's nothing to make open.
That's an assertion, but what's your reasoning?
> This would be a perfect example of something which should be made open after a delay. If the information is expunged before the delay, there's nothing to make open.
All across the EU, that information would be available immediately to journalists under exemptions for the Processing of Personal Data Solely for Journalistic Purposes, but would be simultaneously unlawful for any AI company to process for any other purposes (unless they had another legal basis like a Government contract).
OR it should be allowed for humans to access the public record but charge fees for scrapers
They have ability to seal documents until set dates and deal with digital archival and retrieval.
I suspect some of this is it's a complete shit show and they want to bury it quickly or avoid having to pay up for an expensive vendor migration.
It's not about any post-case information.
England has a genuinely independent judiciary. Judges and court staff do not usually attempt to hide from journalists stuff that journalists ought to be investigating. On the other hand, if it's something like an inquest into the death of a well-known person which would only attract the worst kind of journalist they sometimes do quite a good job of scheduling the "public" hearing in such a way that only family members find out about it in time.
A world government could perhaps make lots of legal records public while making it illegal for journalists to use that material for entertainment purpose but we don't have a world government: if the authorities in one country were to provide easy access to all the details of every rape and murder in that country then so-called "tech" companies in another country would use that data for entertainment purposes. I'm not sure what to do about that, apart, obviously, from establishing a world government (which arguably we need anyway in order to handle pollution and other things that are a "tragedy of the commons" but I don't see it happening any time soon).
I don't think all information should be easily accessible.
Some information should be in libraries, held for the public to access, but have that access recorded.
If a group of people (citizens of a country) have data stored, they ought to be able to access it, but others maybe should pay a fee.
There is data in "public records" that should be very hard to access, such as evidence of a court case involving the abuse of minors that really shouldn't be public, but we also need to ensure that secrets are not kept to protect wrongdoing by those in government or in power.
Yes, license plates are public, and yes, a police officer could have watched to see whether or not a suspect vehicle went past. No, that does not mean that it's the same thing to put up ALPRs and monitor the travel activity of every car in the country. Yes, court records should be public, no, that doesn't mean an automatic process is the same as a human process.
I don't want to just default to the idea that the way society was organized when I was a young person is the way it should be organized forever, but the capacity for access and analysis when various laws were passed and rights were agreed upon are completely different from the capacity for access and analysis with a computer.
Eg if you create a business then that email address/phone number is going to get phished and spammed to hell and back again. It's all because the government makes that info freely accessible online. You could be a one man self-employed business and the moment you register you get inundated with spam.
The counter claim by the government is that this isn't "the source of truth" being deleted but rather a subset presented more accessibly by a third party (CourtsDesk) which has allegedly breached privacy rules and the service agreement by passing sensitive info to an AI service.
Coverage of the "urgent question" in parliament on the subject here:
House of Commons, Courtsdesk Data Platform Urgent Question
Then they start jailing people for posts.
Then they get rid of juries.
Then they get rid of public records.
What are they trying to hide?
In other countries, interference with the right to a fair trial would have lead to widespread protest. We don't hold our government to account, and we reap the consequences of that.
Obviously the government Ministry of Justice cannot make other parts of government more popular in a way that appeases political opponents, so the logical solution is to clamp down on open justice.
Though I'm not sure stopping this service achieves that.
Also - even in the case that somebody is found guilty - there is a fundamental principle that such convictions have a life time - after which they stop showing up on police searches etc.
If some third party ( not applicable in this case ), holds all court cases forever in a searchable format, it fundamentally breaches this right to be forgotten.
"The government has cited a significant data protection breach as the reason for its decision - an issue it clearly has a duty to take seriously."
https://www.nuj.org.uk/resource/nuj-responds-to-order-for-th...
They don't have a budget for that. And besides, it might be an externalized service, because self hosting is so 90s.
ETA: They didn't ship data off to e.g. ChatGPT. They hired a subcontractor to build them a secure AI service.
Details in this comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47035141
leading to this:
https://endaleahy.substack.com/p/what-the-minister-said
The government is behaving disgracefully.
Traced what? Innuendo is not a substitute for information.
Through the way AI companies could "severely/negligent mishandle the data potentially repeatedly destroying innocent people live" is about historic data, tho.
https://www.tremark.co.uk/moj-orders-deletion-of-courtsdesk-...
They raise the interesting point that "publicly available" doesn't necessarily mean its free to store/process etc:
> One important distinction is that “publicly available” does not automatically mean “free to collect, combine, republish and retain indefinitely” in a searchable archive. Court lists and registers can include personal data, and compliance concerns often turn on how that information is processed at scale: who can access it, how long it is kept, whether it is shared onward, and what safeguards exist to reduce the risk of harm, especially in sensitive matters.
> ... the agreement restricts the supply of court data to news agencies and journalists only.
> However, a cursory review of the Courtsdesk website indicates that this same data is also being supplied to other third parties — including members of @InvestigatorsUK — who pay a fee for access.
> Those users could, in turn, deploy the information in live or prospective legal proceedings, something the agreement expressly prohibits.
> HMCTS acted to protect sensitive data after CourtsDesk sent information to a third-party AI company.
(statement from the UK Ministry of Justice on Twitter, CourtsDesk had ran the database)
but it's unclear how much this was an excuse to remove transparency and how much this actually is related to worry how AI could misuse this information
you _really_ shouldn't be allowed to train on information without having a copyright license explicitly allowing it
"publicly available" isn't the same as "anyone can do whatever they want with it", just anyone can read it/use it for research
It's not easy to see who to believe. The MP introducing it claiming there is a "cover up" is just what MPs do. Of course it makes him look bad, a service he oversaw the introduction of is being withdrawn. The rebuttal by the company essentially denies everything. Simultaneously it's important to notice the government are working on a replacement system of their own.
I think this is a non-event. If you really want to read the court lists you already can, and without paying a company for the privilege. It sounds like HMCTS want to internalise this behaviour by providing a better centralised service themselves, and meanwhile all the fuss appears to be from a company operated by an ex-newspaper editor who just had its only income stream built around preferential access to court data cut off.
As for the openness of court data itself, wake me in another 800 years when present day norms have permeated the courts. Complaining about this aspect just shows a misunderstanding of the (arguably necessary) realities of the legal system.
> “We are also working on providing a new licensing arrangement which will allow third parties to apply to use our data. We will provide more information on this in the coming weeks.
This is why having decent standards in politics and opposition matters so much.
We all got together to vote out the last wankers, only to find that the current lot are of the same quality but in different ways.
And to think... the 'heads up their arses while trying to suppress a Hitler salute' brigade (Reform) are waiting in the wings to prove my point.
harel•1h ago
nine_k•1h ago
harel•46m ago
dathinab•20m ago
If you don't "know about them from another source" you can't effectively find/access the information and you might not even know that there is something you really should know about.
The service bridged the gap by providing a feed about what is potentially relevant for you depending on your filters etc.
This mean with the change:
- a lot of research/statistics are impossible to do/create
- journalists are prone to only learning about potentially very relevant cases happening, when it's they are already over and no one was there to cover it