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.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 and is filed under Access to Information, Government Documents and Political Information, Legal.
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