Something is either public record - in which case it should be on a government website for free, and the AI companies should be free to scrape to their hearts desire...
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.
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.
If you commit a crime, get caught, and that makes people trust you less in the future, that's just the natural consequences of your own actions.
No, I don't think if you shoplift as a teenager and get caught, charged, and convicted that automatically makes you a shoplifter for the rest of your life, but you also don't just get to wave a magic wand and make everyone forget you did what you did. You need to demonstrate you've changed and rebuild trust through your actions.
>”Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? No thanks.”
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.
> Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions?
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.
The actions of the government should always be publicly observable. This is what keeps it accountable. The fear that a person might be unfairly treated due to a long past indiscretion does not outweigh the public's right to observe and hold the government to account.
Alternatively consider that you are assuming the worst behavior of the public and the best behavior of the government if you support this and it should be obvious the dangerous position this creates.
"court records are public forever" and "records of crimes expunged after X years" are incompatible.
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.
Thanks, it’s super refreshing to hear this take. I fear where we are headed.
I robbed a drug dealer some odd 15 years ago while strung out. No excuses, but I paid my debt (4-11 years in state max, did min) yet I still feel like a have this weight I can’t shake.
I have worked for almost the whole time, am no longer on parole or probation. Paid all fines. I honestly felt terrible for what I did.
At the time I had a promising career and a secret clearance. I still work in tech as a 1099 making way less than I should. But that is life.
What does a background check matter when the first 20 links on Google is about me committing a robbery with a gun?
Edit: mine is an extreme and violent case. But I humbly believe, to my benefit surely, that once I paid all debts it should be done. That is what the 8+ years of parole/probation/counseling was for.
What we do here in sweden is that you can ask the courts for any court document (unless it is confidential for some reason).
But the courts are allowed to do it conditionally, so a common condition if you ask for a lot of cases is to condition it to redact any PII before making the data searchable. Having the effect that people that actually care and know what to look for, can find information. But you can't randomly just search for someone and see what you get.
There is also a second registry separate from the courts that used to keep track of people that have been convicted during the last n years that is used for backgrounds checks etc.
Fully agree. The AI companies have broken the basic pacts of public open data. Their ignoring of robots.txt files is but one example of their lack of regard.
With the open commons being quickly pillaged we’ll end up in a “community member access only model”. A shift from grab any books here you like just get them back in a month; to you’ll need to register as a library member before you can borrow. I see that’s where we’ll end up. Public blogs and websites will suffer and respond first is my prediction.
The names of minors should never be released in public (with a handful of exceptions).
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?
Can you explain your reasoning about “forever convictions”, and for full disclosure, do you have a conviction and are thereby biased?
Additionally, do you want a special class of privileged people, like a priestly class, who can interpret the data/bible for the peasantry? That mentality seems the same as that behind the old Latin bibles and Latin mass that people were abused to attend, even though they had no idea what was being said.
So who would you bequeath the privileges of doing “research”?Only the true believers who believe what you believe so you wouldn’t have to be confronted with contradictions?
And how would you prevent data exfiltration? Would you have your authorized “researchers” maybe go to a building, we can call it the Ministry of Truth, where they would have access to the information through telescreen terminals like how the DOJ is controlling the Epstein Files and then monitoring what the Congressmen were searching for? Think we would have discovered all we have discovered if only the Epstein people that rule the country had access to the Epstein files?
Yes, convictions are permanent records of one’s offenses against society, especially the egregious offenses we call felonies on the USA.
Should I as someone looking for a CFO or just an accountant not have the right that to know that someone was convicted of financial crimes, which is usually long precipitated by other transgressions and things like “mistakes” everyone knows weren’t mistakes? How would any professional association limit certification if that information is not accessible? So Madoff should Ave been able to get out and continue being involved in finances and investments?
Totally agree. And it goes beyond criminal history. Just because I choose to make a dataset publicly available doesn't mean I want some AI memorizing it and using it to generate profit.
AI isn't the problem here. Once something goes on the internet it lives forever (or should be treated as such). So has it always been.
If something is expungable it probably shouldn't be public record. Otherwise it should be open and scrapable and ingested by both search engines and AI.
Names and other PII can be replaced with aliases in bulk data, unsealed after ID verification on specific requests and within quotas. It’s not a big problem.
>Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? No thanks.
Is this the UK thing where PII is part of the released dataset? I know that Ukrainian rulings are all public, but the PII is redacted, so you can train your AI on largely anonymized rulings.
I think it should also be against GDPR to process sensitive PII like health records and criminal convictions without consent, but once it hits the public record, it's free to use.
> 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.
On the other hand, perpetrating crime is a GREAT predictor of perpetrating more crime -- in general most crime is perpetrated by past perps. Why should this info not be available to help others avoid troublemakers?
No, public doesn't mean access should be limited to academics of acceptable political alignment, it means open to the public: everybody.
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.
> 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.
The idea that society is required to forget crime is pretty toxic honestly.
We should remember that local journalism has been dead for a decade in most of the UK, largely due to social media.
Any tool like this that can help important stories be told, by improving journalist access to data and making the process more efficient, must be a good thing.
This is a good use case for a blockchain. AI companies can run their own nodes so they're not bashing infra that they don't pay for. Concerned citizens can run their own nodes so they know that the government isn't involved in any 1984-type shenanigans. In the sealed-for-X-years case, the government can publish a hash of the blocks that they intend to publish in X years so that when the time comes, people can prove that nobody tampered with the data in the interim.
The government can decide to stop paying for the infra, but the only way to delete something that was once public record should be for all interested parties to also stop their nodes.
>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.
No. Open is open. Beyond DDoS protections, there should be no limits.
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.
The issue with that is people can then flood everything with huge piles of documents, which is bad enough if it's all clean OCR'd digital data that you can quickly download in its entirety, but if you're stuck having to wait between downloading documents, you'll never find out what they don't want you to find out.
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...
Systems running core government functions should be set up to be able to efficiently execute their functions at scale, so I'd say it should only restrict extreme load, ie DoS attacks
If the rate limit is reasonable (allows full download of the entire set of data within a feasible time-frame), that could be acceptable. Otherwise, no.
> Something is either public record - in which case it should be on a government website for free, and the AI companies should be free to scrape to their hearts desire...Or it should be sealed for X years and then public record.
OR it should be allowed for humans to access the public record but charge fees for scrapers
I don't know what the particular issue is in this case but I've read about what happens with Freedom of Information (FOI) requests in England: apparently most of the requests are from male journalists/writers looking for salacious details of sex crimes against women, and the authorities are constantly using the mental health of family members as an argument for refusing to disclose material. Obviously there are also a few journalists using the FOI system to investigate serious political matters such as human rights and one wouldn't want those serious investigations to be hampered but there is a big problem with (what most people would call) abuse of the system. There _might_ perhaps be a similar issue with this court reporting database.
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 think the right balance is to air gap a database and allow access to the public by your standard: show up somewhere with a USB.
I think it's right to prevent random drive by scraping by bots/AI/scammers. But it shouldnt inhibit consumers who want to use it to do their civic duties.
One of the problems with open access to these government DBs is that it gives out a lot of information that spammers and scammers use.
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.
Spoken like someone who's never spent thousands of dollars and literal years struggling to get online records corrected to reflect an expungement. Fuck anything that makes that process even more difficult which AI companies certainly will.
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.
Totally agreed! This is yet another example of reduced friction due to improved technology breaking a previously functional system without really changing the qualities it had before. I don't understand why this isn't obvious to more people. It's been said that "quantity has a quality all its own", and this is even more true when that quantity approaches infinity.
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.
The idea that an individual can look up and case they want is the same thing as a bot being able to scrape and archive an entire dataset forever is just silly.
One individual could spend their entire life going through one by one recording cases and never get through the whole dataset. A bot farm could sift through it in an hour. They are not the same thing.
Yep, these are commonly sealed records and having worked with family law lawyers there are things that happened to the victims that should never be unsealed.
Confused what to make of the comments here. Access to court lists has always been free and open, it's just a pain in the ass to work with. The lists contain nothing much of value beyond the names involved in a case and the type of hearing
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.
I think you're underestimating how important "just a pain in the ass to work with" may be.
An analogy would be Hansard and theyworkforyou.com. The government always made Hansard (record of parliamentary debates) available. But theyworkforyou cleaned the data, and made it searchable with useful APIs so you could find how your MP voted. This work was very important for making parliament accessible; IIRC, the guys behind it were impressive enough that they eventually were brought in to improve gov.uk.
> “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.
Seems quite absurd that they would shut down the only system that could tell journalists what was actually happening in the criminal courts under the pretext that they sent information to a third-party AI company (who doesn’t these days). Here’s a rebuttal by one of the founders i believe: https://endaleahy.substack.com/p/what-the-minister-said
Absolutely fucking crazy that you typed this out as a legitimate defense of allowing extremely sensitive personal information to be scraped.
> only system that could tell journalists what was actually happening in the criminal courts
Who cares? Journalism is a dead profession and the people who have inherited the title only care about how they can mislead the public in order to maximize profit to themselves. Famously, "journalists" drove a world-renowned musician to his death by overdose with their self-interest-motivated coverage of his trial[1]. It seems to me that cutting the media circus out of criminal trials would actually be massively beneficial to society, not detrimental.
Absolutely fucking crazy that you call accurately describing the reality of AI scraping "absolutely fucking crazy" while at the same time going "who cares?" on attacks against journalism and free speech.
>Oh no, some musician died, PASS THE NATIONAL SECURITY ACT, LOCK DOWN ALL INFORMATION ABOUT CRIMINALS, JAIL JOURNALISTS!!!!
The government provided data to a private company. The private company sold resold access to a third party for AI ingestion. it's a plain case of tough titties to the private company.
That said I don't know why the hell the service concerned isn't provided by the government itself.
When there is a risk of feeding sensitive data to the AI giants the first reaction should be to pull the plug. I'm impressed the government acted quickly and decisively for once. Maybe the company involved will think twice before entering an agreement with an AI company. Notice in the whole rant it is never mentioned which AI giant they were feeding.
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.
I can’t believe that this even needs to be said. There are plenty of things which are publicly available but not free to share and definitely not allowed to be made money of.
The company in question had a direct relationship with HM Courts & Tribunals Service, and disputes that they sold/distributed any data to any 'AI third party' - says what they actually did was to hire AI-focussed contractors to build some new tool/feature for the platform.
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
They made the data accessible though. From what I can gather, before them, the data was only accessible via old windows apps. If the source of truth is locked and gated, what good is it?
You can get the daily court listings for free online. I would assume this service just provided a ux-friendly front end,etc. which in the clip the minister says they will be replacing.
This is odd; this is supposed to be public information, isn't it? I suspect it's run into bureaucratic empire-defending rather than a nefarious scheme to conceal cases.
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.
It is public information. The private company whose database is being deleted processed the public information into an easier to search and consume dataset
> ... 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.
This aligns with the explanation given in response to the urgent question. What looks like a simple breach of contract issue is being weaponized in bad faith by politicians who spend far too much time time on the shadier parts of the internet.
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.
This database exposed half a million weekend cases which were heard with zero press notification. Many grooming gang trials were heard this way. The database is being deleted weeks before the national inquiry into the grooming gang cover up begins, and the official reason for deleting the data is nonsensical.
Actually that’s what data and the preponderance of victims allege: an intersection of immigration and policing which interlocked to systematically deprioritize the investigation into abuse of working-class white girls by an over represented ethnic group.
In the local data that the audit examined from three police forces, they identified clear evidence of “over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men”.
It’s unfortunate to watch people and entire countries twist themselves in logic pretzels to avoid ever suggesting that immigration has no ills, and we’re just being polite here about it.
Can you explain your reasoning? Horrible crimes committed by foreign men against native children were covered up for political reasons in the UK. This is common knowledge.
They believe that they exist to control us. And let's been honest, British people are a meek bunch who have done little to disillusion them of that notion, at times positively encouraging our own subjugation.
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.
I think there is a legitimate argument that the names of people who go to court and are either victims or are found innocent of the charges, should not be trivially searchable by anyone.
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.
This presumably also falls under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 which forbids this kind of citizen data being relayed to third parties without permission. The company don't have a leg to stand on here, which is why it is basing its public appeals now on the impact to its users (journalists). But no company has a right to flout data protection regulations or its agreed conditions of use without serious consequences. Since the data has already been passed on, the breach itself can't be fixed, so it is totally proportionate to order the service to be closed and its data deleted. Frankly, fuck companies with the arrogance to behave this way - cheating agreements and responsibilities in order to make more money, and then expecting indulgence because of the uniqueness of their service.
The political answer is that open justice provides ammunition for their political opponents, and that juries also tend to dislike prosecutions that feel targeted against political opponents. See palestine action as a left wing example and Jamie Michael's racial hatred trial as a right wing example.
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.
FYI, apparently there was a data breach, but it would seem better to fix the issue and continue with this public service than to just shut it down completely. Here is the Journalist organization in the UK responding:
"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."
Along with the attempt to prevent jury trials for all but the most serious criminal cases, this is beginning to look like an attempt to prevent reporting on an upcoming case. I can think of one happening in April, involving the prime minister. Given he was head of the CPS for 5 years, would know exactly which levers to pull.
Why do you think "they" are trying to suppress reporting on a Russian-recruited Ukranian national carrying out arson attacks against properties the PM is "linked to" but does not live in? What's the supposed angle?
And how exactly is eliminating a third party search tool for efficiently searching lots of obscure magistrates court proceedings going to stop journalists from paying attention to a spicy court case linked to foreign agents and the PM?
5 Ukrainians. People have traced what some of them were doing professionally when the PM would've been living there. It could be nothing, but we need transparency.
Courtsdesk are rather misrepresenting this situation.
Quoting from an urgent question in the House of Lords a few days ago:
> HMCTS was working to expand and improve the service by creating a new data licence agreement with Courtsdesk and others to expand access to justice. It was in the course of making that arrangement with Courtsdesk that data protection issues came to light. What has arisen is that this private company has been sharing private, personal and legally sensitive information with a third-party AI company, including potentially the addresses and dates of birth of defendants and victims. That is a direct breach of our agreement with Courtsdesk, which the Conservatives negotiated.
Digital access to UK court records was already abysmal. And we're somehow going even further backwards. At least in the US you have initiatives like https://www.courtlistener.com/.
In many cases government texts are not covered by copyright, so it may not even be relevant here, regardless of it is is allowed to copy the data or not.
In the UK government records are generally covered by Crown Copyright (which is its own slightly more restrictive weird thing) rather than in the public domain. I haven't checked to see what the status of the court listings are, but the default is very different to the US.
My guess is that the company running this were found to be collaborating with contentious partners, and so the government is shutting down the collaboration as risk-mitigation, in order to internalize decisions within government.
Ministry of Justice in UK has always struck me as very savvy, from my work in the UK civic tech scene. They're quite self-aware, and I assume this is more pro-social than it might seem.
I've looked into the Courtdesk service. It's a stream of events from the courts, as they happen. They claim up to 12,000 updates in a 24 period, aggregated, filtered and organised. While court judgements are public, I don't know if the information Courtdesk provides is. This is a worrying direction.
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
I kept digging and reached the service https://www.courtserve.net. Seems like a windows application (old school one) that receives the data, but I need more time to explore there. They've been working with MoJ for 20 years (their claim).
Initially I thought they have people at the courts live reporting but that's a bit of a stretch...
Hard to see how this isn't totally asinine and retarded.
I haven't confirmed it but I've seen journalist friends of mine complain also that the deletion period for much data is about 7 years so victims are genuinely shocked that they can't access their own transcripts even from 2018... Oh and if they can they're often extremely expensive.
> 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
When people who are involved in the upkeep of these systems start saying no is when these decisions will cease. This problems are all done by our acquiesce.
Shutting down the only working database is the proof point that perfect is the enemy of good.
Of course, this gives cover to the "well, we're working on something better" and "AI companies are evil"
Fine, shut it down AFTER that better thing is finally in prod (as if).
And if the data was already leaked because you didn't do your due diligence and didn't have a good contract, that's on you. It's out there now anyway.
And, really, what's the issue with AI finally having good citations? Are we really going to try to pretend that AI isn't now permanently embedded in the legal system and that lawyers won't use AI to write extremely formulaic filings?
This is either bureaucracy doing what it does, or an actual conspiracy to shut down external access to public court records. It doesn't actually matter which: what matters is that this needs to be overturned immediately.
The subject of the article is the public right to access the daily schedule of England's courts.
In the United States our Constitution requires the government conduct all trials in public ( with the exception of some Family Court matters ). Secret trials are forbidden. This is a critical element to the operation of any democracy.
this is mostly not about historic data but about live data
Through the way AI companies could "severely/negligent mishandle the data potentially repeatedly destroying innocent people live" is about historic data, tho.
It's not just the historical data - they provided what is effectively a live stream of events from the courts in real time, allowing you to aggregate and filter it. This is not trivial.
Something is either public record - in which case it should be on a government website for free, and the AI companies should be free to scrape to their hearts desire...
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.
Open to research yes.
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.
If you commit a crime, get caught, and that makes people trust you less in the future, that's just the natural consequences of your own actions.
No, I don't think if you shoplift as a teenager and get caught, charged, and convicted that automatically makes you a shoplifter for the rest of your life, but you also don't just get to wave a magic wand and make everyone forget you did what you did. You need to demonstrate you've changed and rebuild trust through your actions.
>”Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? No thanks.”
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.
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> Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions?
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.
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The actions of the government should always be publicly observable. This is what keeps it accountable. The fear that a person might be unfairly treated due to a long past indiscretion does not outweigh the public's right to observe and hold the government to account.
Alternatively consider that you are assuming the worst behavior of the public and the best behavior of the government if you support this and it should be obvious the dangerous position this creates.
"court records are public forever" and "records of crimes expunged after X years" are incompatible.
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.
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Thanks, it’s super refreshing to hear this take. I fear where we are headed.
I robbed a drug dealer some odd 15 years ago while strung out. No excuses, but I paid my debt (4-11 years in state max, did min) yet I still feel like a have this weight I can’t shake.
I have worked for almost the whole time, am no longer on parole or probation. Paid all fines. I honestly felt terrible for what I did.
At the time I had a promising career and a secret clearance. I still work in tech as a 1099 making way less than I should. But that is life.
What does a background check matter when the first 20 links on Google is about me committing a robbery with a gun?
Edit: mine is an extreme and violent case. But I humbly believe, to my benefit surely, that once I paid all debts it should be done. That is what the 8+ years of parole/probation/counseling was for.
What we do here in sweden is that you can ask the courts for any court document (unless it is confidential for some reason).
But the courts are allowed to do it conditionally, so a common condition if you ask for a lot of cases is to condition it to redact any PII before making the data searchable. Having the effect that people that actually care and know what to look for, can find information. But you can't randomly just search for someone and see what you get.
There is also a second registry separate from the courts that used to keep track of people that have been convicted during the last n years that is used for backgrounds checks etc.
Fully agree. The AI companies have broken the basic pacts of public open data. Their ignoring of robots.txt files is but one example of their lack of regard. With the open commons being quickly pillaged we’ll end up in a “community member access only model”. A shift from grab any books here you like just get them back in a month; to you’ll need to register as a library member before you can borrow. I see that’s where we’ll end up. Public blogs and websites will suffer and respond first is my prediction.
The names of minors should never be released in public (with a handful of exceptions).
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?
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A thing can't simultaneously be public and not. There is no license to do research nor should there be, so if researchers can get it then anyone can.
If it's not supposed to be public then don't publish it. If it's supposed to be public then stop trying to restrict it.
Can you explain your reasoning about “forever convictions”, and for full disclosure, do you have a conviction and are thereby biased?
Additionally, do you want a special class of privileged people, like a priestly class, who can interpret the data/bible for the peasantry? That mentality seems the same as that behind the old Latin bibles and Latin mass that people were abused to attend, even though they had no idea what was being said.
So who would you bequeath the privileges of doing “research”?Only the true believers who believe what you believe so you wouldn’t have to be confronted with contradictions?
And how would you prevent data exfiltration? Would you have your authorized “researchers” maybe go to a building, we can call it the Ministry of Truth, where they would have access to the information through telescreen terminals like how the DOJ is controlling the Epstein Files and then monitoring what the Congressmen were searching for? Think we would have discovered all we have discovered if only the Epstein people that rule the country had access to the Epstein files?
Yes, convictions are permanent records of one’s offenses against society, especially the egregious offenses we call felonies on the USA.
Should I as someone looking for a CFO or just an accountant not have the right that to know that someone was convicted of financial crimes, which is usually long precipitated by other transgressions and things like “mistakes” everyone knows weren’t mistakes? How would any professional association limit certification if that information is not accessible? So Madoff should Ave been able to get out and continue being involved in finances and investments?
Please explain
Totally agree. And it goes beyond criminal history. Just because I choose to make a dataset publicly available doesn't mean I want some AI memorizing it and using it to generate profit.
Records of cases involving children are already excluded so that's not a relevant risk.
Between not delivering the data to AI companies, and barring it altogether is a fair distance. As far as I know, the MoJ is in talks with openAI themselves (https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/ministry-of-justice-rea...).
AI isn't the problem here. Once something goes on the internet it lives forever (or should be treated as such). So has it always been.
If something is expungable it probably shouldn't be public record. Otherwise it should be open and scrapable and ingested by both search engines and AI.
Names and other PII can be replaced with aliases in bulk data, unsealed after ID verification on specific requests and within quotas. It’s not a big problem.
>Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? No thanks.
Is this the UK thing where PII is part of the released dataset? I know that Ukrainian rulings are all public, but the PII is redacted, so you can train your AI on largely anonymized rulings.
I think it should also be against GDPR to process sensitive PII like health records and criminal convictions without consent, but once it hits the public record, it's free to use.
> 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.
On the other hand, perpetrating crime is a GREAT predictor of perpetrating more crime -- in general most crime is perpetrated by past perps. Why should this info not be available to help others avoid troublemakers?
https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/returning-prison-0
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/sex_offense_recidivism_2...
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-common-is-it-for-released-...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807/
https://ciceroinstitute.org/research/the-case-for-incarcerat...
https://bjs.ojp.gov/topics/recidivism-and-reentry
I know some countries that emit a "certificate of no judicial history", even when the citizen has so, if they ended the jail time
I think this is wrong, it should be reported entirely at least for 5 years after the fact happened
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No, public doesn't mean access should be limited to academics of acceptable political alignment, it means open to the public: everybody.
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.
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> 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.
The idea that society is required to forget crime is pretty toxic honestly.
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Im sorry but that's the equivalent of "I believe in free speech but not the right to hate speech". Its either free or not
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The story is about a tool that allows journalists to get advanced warning of court proceedings so them can choose to cover things of public interest.
It's not about any post-case information.
We should remember that local journalism has been dead for a decade in most of the UK, largely due to social media.
Any tool like this that can help important stories be told, by improving journalist access to data and making the process more efficient, must be a good thing.
Then it would be even worse if this ends up affecting post-case information.
This is a good use case for a blockchain. AI companies can run their own nodes so they're not bashing infra that they don't pay for. Concerned citizens can run their own nodes so they know that the government isn't involved in any 1984-type shenanigans. In the sealed-for-X-years case, the government can publish a hash of the blocks that they intend to publish in X years so that when the time comes, people can prove that nobody tampered with the data in the interim.
The government can decide to stop paying for the infra, but the only way to delete something that was once public record should be for all interested parties to also stop their nodes.
>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?
No. Open is open. Beyond DDoS protections, there should be no limits.
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.
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The issue with that is people can then flood everything with huge piles of documents, which is bad enough if it's all clean OCR'd digital data that you can quickly download in its entirety, but if you're stuck having to wait between downloading documents, you'll never find out what they don't want you to find out.
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...
Systems running core government functions should be set up to be able to efficiently execute their functions at scale, so I'd say it should only restrict extreme load, ie DoS attacks
If the rate limit is reasonable (allows full download of the entire set of data within a feasible time-frame), that could be acceptable. Otherwise, no.
> Something is either public record - in which case it should be on a government website for free, and the AI companies should be free to scrape to their hearts desire...Or it should be sealed for X years and then public record.
OR it should be allowed for humans to access the public record but charge fees for scrapers
I don't know what the particular issue is in this case but I've read about what happens with Freedom of Information (FOI) requests in England: apparently most of the requests are from male journalists/writers looking for salacious details of sex crimes against women, and the authorities are constantly using the mental health of family members as an argument for refusing to disclose material. Obviously there are also a few journalists using the FOI system to investigate serious political matters such as human rights and one wouldn't want those serious investigations to be hampered but there is a big problem with (what most people would call) abuse of the system. There _might_ perhaps be a similar issue with this court reporting database.
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).
Without numbers this sounds made up
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I think the right balance is to air gap a database and allow access to the public by your standard: show up somewhere with a USB.
I think it's right to prevent random drive by scraping by bots/AI/scammers. But it shouldnt inhibit consumers who want to use it to do their civic duties.
One of the problems with open access to these government DBs is that it gives out a lot of information that spammers and scammers use.
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.
Spoken like someone who's never spent thousands of dollars and literal years struggling to get online records corrected to reflect an expungement. Fuck anything that makes that process even more difficult which AI companies certainly will.
Yes. This should be held by the London Archives in theory with the rest of the paper records of that sort.
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.
>and the AI companies should be free to scrape to their hearts desire...
Why? They generate massive traffic, why should they get access for free?
I want information to be free.
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.
Totally agreed! This is yet another example of reduced friction due to improved technology breaking a previously functional system without really changing the qualities it had before. I don't understand why this isn't obvious to more people. It's been said that "quantity has a quality all its own", and this is even more true when that quantity approaches infinity.
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.
The idea that an individual can look up and case they want is the same thing as a bot being able to scrape and archive an entire dataset forever is just silly.
One individual could spend their entire life going through one by one recording cases and never get through the whole dataset. A bot farm could sift through it in an hour. They are not the same thing.
> Nothing that goes through the courts should be sealed forever.
What about family law?
Yep, these are commonly sealed records and having worked with family law lawyers there are things that happened to the victims that should never be unsealed.
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Confused what to make of the comments here. Access to court lists has always been free and open, it's just a pain in the ass to work with. The lists contain nothing much of value beyond the names involved in a case and the type of hearing
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.
I think you're underestimating how important "just a pain in the ass to work with" may be.
An analogy would be Hansard and theyworkforyou.com. The government always made Hansard (record of parliamentary debates) available. But theyworkforyou cleaned the data, and made it searchable with useful APIs so you could find how your MP voted. This work was very important for making parliament accessible; IIRC, the guys behind it were impressive enough that they eventually were brought in to improve gov.uk.
Well said
Would you mind elaborating on this new replacement system?
I may have misread: https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/courts/government-suspe...
> “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.
Seems quite absurd that they would shut down the only system that could tell journalists what was actually happening in the criminal courts under the pretext that they sent information to a third-party AI company (who doesn’t these days). Here’s a rebuttal by one of the founders i believe: https://endaleahy.substack.com/p/what-the-minister-said
> (who doesn’t these days)
Absolutely fucking crazy that you typed this out as a legitimate defense of allowing extremely sensitive personal information to be scraped.
> only system that could tell journalists what was actually happening in the criminal courts
Who cares? Journalism is a dead profession and the people who have inherited the title only care about how they can mislead the public in order to maximize profit to themselves. Famously, "journalists" drove a world-renowned musician to his death by overdose with their self-interest-motivated coverage of his trial[1]. It seems to me that cutting the media circus out of criminal trials would actually be massively beneficial to society, not detrimental.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/one-of-the-most-shameful_b_61...
Information is either public or it is not.
If it is public, it will be scraped, AI companies are irrelevant here.
If information is truly sensitive, do not make it public, and that's completely fine. This might have been the case here.
Absolutely fucking crazy that you call accurately describing the reality of AI scraping "absolutely fucking crazy" while at the same time going "who cares?" on attacks against journalism and free speech.
>Oh no, some musician died, PASS THE NATIONAL SECURITY ACT, LOCK DOWN ALL INFORMATION ABOUT CRIMINALS, JAIL JOURNALISTS!!!!
It's not the "only" system to be fair. CourtServe looks like it was built in the 90s but works "OK".
Based on that response, what the government are doing is dreadful.
The government provided data to a private company. The private company sold resold access to a third party for AI ingestion. it's a plain case of tough titties to the private company.
That said I don't know why the hell the service concerned isn't provided by the government itself.
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When there is a risk of feeding sensitive data to the AI giants the first reaction should be to pull the plug. I'm impressed the government acted quickly and decisively for once. Maybe the company involved will think twice before entering an agreement with an AI company. Notice in the whole rant it is never mentioned which AI giant they were feeding.
This aligns with what all of the conspiracy theorists have been saying about the UK over the last year. Maybe there is something to it.
Everything aligns with internet conspiracy theories if you try hard enough.
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Better overview of what the complaint was here:
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.
I can’t believe that this even needs to be said. There are plenty of things which are publicly available but not free to share and definitely not allowed to be made money of.
The company in question had a direct relationship with HM Courts & Tribunals Service, and disputes that they sold/distributed any data to any 'AI third party' - says what they actually did was to hire AI-focussed contractors to build some new tool/feature for the platform.
The title appears to be somewhat misleading.
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
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002rg00
They made the data accessible though. From what I can gather, before them, the data was only accessible via old windows apps. If the source of truth is locked and gated, what good is it?
Should we always send the source of truth to a private company to have it repackaged and presented in a more inoffensive manner?
You can get the daily court listings for free online. I would assume this service just provided a ux-friendly front end,etc. which in the clip the minister says they will be replacing.
This is odd; this is supposed to be public information, isn't it? I suspect it's run into bureaucratic empire-defending rather than a nefarious scheme to conceal cases.
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.
It is public information. The private company whose database is being deleted processed the public information into an easier to search and consume dataset
bureaucratic empire-defending is nefarious.
Interesting tweet on the topic here: https://xcancel.com/SamjLondon/status/2021084532187775244
> ... 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.
This aligns with the explanation given in response to the urgent question. What looks like a simple breach of contract issue is being weaponized in bad faith by politicians who spend far too much time time on the shadier parts of the internet.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2026-02-10/debates/037...
Yes, predictably…
The minister who set this up claims this is a cover up:
https://x.com/CPhilpOfficial/status/2021295301017923762
https://xcancel.com/CPhilpOfficial/status/202129530101792376...
Anyone banging on about coverups of crime due to immigrants should get immediately put in the bad faith argument bin, even if they were a Minister.
wake up its 2026 even obama and clinton are saying more or less that now about illegal immigration
Why? Immigrants cannot commit crimes?
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.
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This database exposed half a million weekend cases which were heard with zero press notification. Many grooming gang trials were heard this way. The database is being deleted weeks before the national inquiry into the grooming gang cover up begins, and the official reason for deleting the data is nonsensical.
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Actually that’s what data and the preponderance of victims allege: an intersection of immigration and policing which interlocked to systematically deprioritize the investigation into abuse of working-class white girls by an over represented ethnic group.
In the local data that the audit examined from three police forces, they identified clear evidence of “over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men”.
It’s unfortunate to watch people and entire countries twist themselves in logic pretzels to avoid ever suggesting that immigration has no ills, and we’re just being polite here about it.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/17/what-is-the-casey-r...
https://celina101.substack.com/p/the-uks-rape-gang-inquiry
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Can you explain your reasoning? Horrible crimes committed by foreign men against native children were covered up for political reasons in the UK. This is common knowledge.
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Why? Grooming gangs went from being a far right conspiracy theory to "there was a coverup" being official government position in a week.
No right to free speech.
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?
They believe that they exist to control us. And let's been honest, British people are a meek bunch who have done little to disillusion them of that notion, at times positively encouraging our own subjugation.
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.
I think there is a legitimate argument that the names of people who go to court and are either victims or are found innocent of the charges, should not be trivially searchable by anyone.
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.
This presumably also falls under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 which forbids this kind of citizen data being relayed to third parties without permission. The company don't have a leg to stand on here, which is why it is basing its public appeals now on the impact to its users (journalists). But no company has a right to flout data protection regulations or its agreed conditions of use without serious consequences. Since the data has already been passed on, the breach itself can't be fixed, so it is totally proportionate to order the service to be closed and its data deleted. Frankly, fuck companies with the arrogance to behave this way - cheating agreements and responsibilities in order to make more money, and then expecting indulgence because of the uniqueness of their service.
Free speech in the UK was done when people started to get police visits for tweets.
The political answer is that open justice provides ammunition for their political opponents, and that juries also tend to dislike prosecutions that feel targeted against political opponents. See palestine action as a left wing example and Jamie Michael's racial hatred trial as a right wing example.
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.
Don't forget your credit score being linked to how conformist you are.
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FYI, apparently there was a data breach, but it would seem better to fix the issue and continue with this public service than to just shut it down completely. Here is the Journalist organization in the UK responding:
"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...
It wasn't a hack. The company used an external AI service.
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://endaleahy.substack.com/p/what-the-minister-said
The government is behaving disgracefully.
Per the Minister herself, this matter wasn't important enough to refer to the ICO, who are the correct people to deal with data breaches.
I've had to deal with the ICO over some pretty minor local government stuff, the bar for reporting to them is very low. I smell a coverup.
> but it would seem better to fix the issue
They don't have a budget for that. And besides, it might be an externalized service, because self hosting is so 90s.
That's the dumbest possible response to this.
Along with the attempt to prevent jury trials for all but the most serious criminal cases, this is beginning to look like an attempt to prevent reporting on an upcoming case. I can think of one happening in April, involving the prime minister. Given he was head of the CPS for 5 years, would know exactly which levers to pull.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20dyzp4r42o
There's no world in which this case is being covered up. It's literally on the BBC News website and you have linked to it.
The poster linkd to the story they 'could think of', not one that may be upcoming. My guess is on a nonce-case, and the royals are involved.
Why do you think "they" are trying to suppress reporting on a Russian-recruited Ukranian national carrying out arson attacks against properties the PM is "linked to" but does not live in? What's the supposed angle?
And how exactly is eliminating a third party search tool for efficiently searching lots of obscure magistrates court proceedings going to stop journalists from paying attention to a spicy court case linked to foreign agents and the PM?
5 Ukrainians. People have traced what some of them were doing professionally when the PM would've been living there. It could be nothing, but we need transparency.
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Courtsdesk are rather misrepresenting this situation.
Quoting from an urgent question in the House of Lords a few days ago:
> HMCTS was working to expand and improve the service by creating a new data licence agreement with Courtsdesk and others to expand access to justice. It was in the course of making that arrangement with Courtsdesk that data protection issues came to light. What has arisen is that this private company has been sharing private, personal and legally sensitive information with a third-party AI company, including potentially the addresses and dates of birth of defendants and victims. That is a direct breach of our agreement with Courtsdesk, which the Conservatives negotiated.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2026-02-10/debates/037...
Digital access to UK court records was already abysmal. And we're somehow going even further backwards. At least in the US you have initiatives like https://www.courtlistener.com/.
This all loops back to the same thing:
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
In many cases government texts are not covered by copyright, so it may not even be relevant here, regardless of it is is allowed to copy the data or not.
In the UK government records are generally covered by Crown Copyright (which is its own slightly more restrictive weird thing) rather than in the public domain. I haven't checked to see what the status of the court listings are, but the default is very different to the US.
england has fallen and the rest of europe too. they are not free countries anymore
My guess is that the company running this were found to be collaborating with contentious partners, and so the government is shutting down the collaboration as risk-mitigation, in order to internalize decisions within government.
Ministry of Justice in UK has always struck me as very savvy, from my work in the UK civic tech scene. They're quite self-aware, and I assume this is more pro-social than it might seem.
so the government's fix for a data breach is to delete the entire database instead of fixing the access controls. classic.
So the government was being nice, letting a private company access court data. And the company decided to immediately sell all of that data.
I've looked into the Courtdesk service. It's a stream of events from the courts, as they happen. They claim up to 12,000 updates in a 24 period, aggregated, filtered and organised. While court judgements are public, I don't know if the information Courtdesk provides is. This is a worrying direction.
If the sources of these event data are not public, your worry would be understandable. But if not public, what are these sources then?
They are non-propagated/effectively hidden.
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
I kept digging and reached the service https://www.courtserve.net. Seems like a windows application (old school one) that receives the data, but I need more time to explore there. They've been working with MoJ for 20 years (their claim). Initially I thought they have people at the courts live reporting but that's a bit of a stretch...
Hard to see how this isn't totally asinine and retarded.
I haven't confirmed it but I've seen journalist friends of mine complain also that the deletion period for much data is about 7 years so victims are genuinely shocked that they can't access their own transcripts even from 2018... Oh and if they can they're often extremely expensive.
Relevant part:
> 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
When people who are involved in the upkeep of these systems start saying no is when these decisions will cease. This problems are all done by our acquiesce.
There is no way to verify if European countries have rule of law without insight into their courts.
You can always visit the court, and you know, sit in.
Transparency always loses.
Shutting down the only working database is the proof point that perfect is the enemy of good.
Of course, this gives cover to the "well, we're working on something better" and "AI companies are evil"
Fine, shut it down AFTER that better thing is finally in prod (as if).
And if the data was already leaked because you didn't do your due diligence and didn't have a good contract, that's on you. It's out there now anyway.
And, really, what's the issue with AI finally having good citations? Are we really going to try to pretend that AI isn't now permanently embedded in the legal system and that lawyers won't use AI to write extremely formulaic filings?
This is either bureaucracy doing what it does, or an actual conspiracy to shut down external access to public court records. It doesn't actually matter which: what matters is that this needs to be overturned immediately.
Naturally the first impulse is to protect criminals while law-abiding citizens are ignored.
The subject of the article is the public right to access the daily schedule of England's courts.
In the United States our Constitution requires the government conduct all trials in public ( with the exception of some Family Court matters ). Secret trials are forbidden. This is a critical element to the operation of any democracy.
Yet they are happy to share private health data with Palantir etc. What a shower of hypocrites!
Here's an idea: Host it in the U.S. and tell the UK government to fuck off.
Part and parcel!
Okay, then we need to distribute the database as torrent. Maybe Anna's Archive can help.
this is mostly not about historic data but about live data
Through the way AI companies could "severely/negligent mishandle the data potentially repeatedly destroying innocent people live" is about historic data, tho.
It's not just the historical data - they provided what is effectively a live stream of events from the courts in real time, allowing you to aggregate and filter it. This is not trivial.
And, to think ... I voted for this horseshit ... I don't remember seeing this in the bloody manifesto.
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.
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Are there actual numbers for this anywhere?
It feels true to them, that's the only thing that matters.
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