Comment by londons_explore
10 days ago
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.
>”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.
Also, courts record charges which are dismissed due to having no evidential basis whatsoever and statements which are deemed to be unreliable or even withdrawn. AI systems, particularly language models aggregating vast corpuses of data, are not always good at making these distinctions.
1 reply →
> 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.
That's up to the person for the particular role. Imagine hiring a nanny and some bureaucrat telling you what prior arrest is "relevant". No thanks. I'll make that call myself.
23 replies →
> 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).
11 replies →
> Not expunged or removed from record, just removed from any decision making.
This made me pause. It seems to me that if something is not meant to inform decision making, then why does a record of it need to persist?
10 replies →
That seems compatible with OP's suggestion, just with X being a large value like 100 years, so sensitive information is only published about dead people.
At some point, personal information becomes history, and we stop caring about protecting the owner's privacy. The only thing we can disagree on is how long that takes.
1 reply →
> There needs to be a statute of limitations just like there is for reporting the crimes.
The UK does not have a statute of limitations
2 replies →
The AI should decide if it's still relevant or not. People should fully understand that their actions reflect their character and this should influence them to always do the right thing.
16 replies →
[flagged]
4 replies →
> 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.
> Blocking access to the information is the wrong way to deal with this problem.
Blocking (or more accurately: restricting) access works pretty well for many other things that we know will be used in ways that are harmful. Historically, just having to go in person to a court house and request to view records was enough to keep most people from abusing the public information they had. It's perfectly valid to say that we want information accessible, but not accessible over the internet or in AI datasets. What do you think the "right way" to deal with the problem is because we already know that "hope that people choose to be better/smarter/more respectful" isn't going work.
2 replies →
> Blocking access to the information is the wrong way to deal with this problem.
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).
"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.
Even if made illegal, how does enforcement occur? The United States, at least, is notorious for HR being extremely opaque regarding hiring decisions.
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.
8 replies →
This is an extremely thorny question. Not allowing some kind of blank slate makes rehabilitation extremely difficult, and it is almost certainly a very expensive net social negative to exclude someone from society permanently, all the way up to their death at (say) 70, for something they did at 18. There is already a legal requirement to ignore "spent" convictions in some circumstances.
However, there's also jobs which legally require enhanced vetting checks.
5 replies →
>Instead, we should make it illegal to discriminate based on criminal conviction history
Absolutely not. I'm not saying every crime should disqualify you from every job but convictions are really a government officialized account of your behavior. Knowing a person has trouble controlling their impulses leading to aggrevated assault or something very much tells you they won't be good for certain roles. As a business you are liable for what your employees do it's in both your interests and your customers interests not to create dangerous situations.
> "court records are public forever" and "records of crimes expunged after X years" are incompatible.
Exactly. One option is for the person themselves to be able to ask for a LIMITED copy of their criminal history, which is otherwise kept private, but no one else.
This way it remains private, the HR cannot force the applicant to provide a detailed copy of their criminal history and discriminate based on it, they can only get a generic document from the court via Mr Doe that says, "Mr Doe is currently eligible to be employed as a financial advisor" or "Mr Doe is currently ineligible to be employed as a school teacher".
Ideally it should also be encrypted by the company's public key and then digitally signed by the court. This way, if it gets leaked, there's no way to prove its authenticity to a third party without at least outing the company as the source.
If you embezzled money at your last company, I shouldn't be able to decline to hire you on my finance team on that basis?
3 replies →
Are you suggesting that I cannot refuse to hire a bookkeeper that has multiple convictions for embezzlement?
Everything should remain absolutely private until after conviction.
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.
11 replies →
You'd need so many exceptions to such a law it would be leakier than a sieve. It sounds like a fine idea at ten thousand feet but it immediately breaks down when you get into the nitty gritty of what crimes and what what jobs we're talking about.
Problem is it's very hard to prove what factors were used in a decision. Person A has a minor criminal record, person B does not? You can just say "B was more qualified" and as long as there's some halfway credible basis for that nothing can really be done. Only if one can demonstrate a clear pattern of behavior might a claim of discrimination go anywhere.
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.
1 reply →
Curious, why should conviction history not be a factor? I could see the argument that previous convictions could indicate a lack of commitment to no longer committing crimes.
5 replies →
Discrimination could be very hard to prove in practice.
> Instead, we should make it illegal to discriminate based on criminal conviction history.
Good luck proving it when it happens. We haven't even managed to stop discrimination based on race and religion, and that problem has only gotten worse as HR departments started using AI which conveniently acts as a shield to protect them.
1 reply →
> we should make it illegal to discriminate based on criminal conviction history
Uhh I don't know about that, being a criminal sounds like a pretty reasonable differentiator.
right, for example someone convicted of killing their parents should fit right into an elderly care home staff team and convicted child rapists should not be barred from working in an elementary school, protecting honest and innocent people from criminals is basically the same thing as racism!
1 reply →
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
If you prohibit the punishment of minors, you create an incentive for criminals to exploit minors.
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?
13 replies →
Would you want the first thing to show up after somebody googles your name to be an accusation for improper conduct around a child? In theory, people could dig deeper and find out you won in court and were acquitted, but people here should know that nobody ever reads the article...
10 replies →
> Would you prevent newspapers from reporting on it, or stop users posting about it on public forums?
Yes
6 replies →
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.
Publishing something publicly means readers can do anything they want with the knowledge they gained from it. They just can't redistribute it verbatim due to copyright.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
Exactly, public means to the _public_, just because it's persons of the public doesn't mean that corporations are entitled to be able to use or profit from that material.
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
The jail time is the entire punishment. To allow punishment to continue afterward is to invite recidivism.
1 reply →
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
Before you even get to the "AI dataset ... forever-conviction" or copyright issues, you need to address AI's propensity to hallucinate when fed legal data and questions.
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, and it's up to each individual person to decide whether they're convinced your trustworthy, not some government official with a delete button.
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.
The crime having happened is forever. No-one is entitled to have it forcibly forgotten. That's up to other people to decide.
>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.
The idea that society is required to forget crime is pretty toxic honestly.
Society does a poor job of assessing the degree of crime. It's too binary for people: You're either a criminal or not. There are too many employers who would look at a 40 year old sitting in front of them applying for a job, search his criminal record, find he stole a candy bar when he was 15, and declare him to be "a criminal" ineligible for employment.
1 reply →
The idea that society is required to forgive crime is pretty Christian, though.
1 reply →
Jeez this seems totally backwards to me. I'd rather live in a society where court records are as open and public as safely possible (like GP's vision) and we as a society adjust our norms such that it's assholish and discriminatory to pass over someone for hiring just because they shoplifted when they were 15.
There will for sure be major backlash against "permanent criminal" datasets (bringing up AI in this is a red herring, it's not fundamentally different from if someone were serving such a database using CGI scripts; AI just gives us more reach to do the things we were already committed to doing). But I frankly don't sympathize with the attitude that people should have the right to pretend that past decisions never happened. You also shouldn't be permanently _punished_ or _ostracized_ for your past self's decisions. But nor should you have the right to expect total anonymity / clean slate disconnected from your past self's decisions.
My probably unpopular view: The right direction is for us as a society to recognize and acknowledge that people change and _need to be allowed to change_ -- not take the easy hack of erasing history. The cost for larger-scale public transparency & institutional change efforts is just too high.
[dead]
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
Actually it isn't the same.
We can allow access to private persons while disallowing commercial usage and forbid data processing of private information (outside of law enforcement access).
Kinda like it was in pre-digital days, no we can't go back but we can at least _try_ to make PII information safeguarded.
Most EU countries have digital ID's, restricting and logging (for a limited time) all access to records to prevent mis-use. Anyone caught trying to scrape can be restricted without limiting people from accessing or searching for specific _records or persons of interest_ (seriously, would anyone have time to read more than a couple of records each day?).
I believe it would be more accurate to say: "I believe in free speech but only from accredited researchers. Oh btw the government can also make laws to control such accreditation"
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.
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.
> 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
>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.
You're talking about a tragedy of the commons situation. There is an organic query rate of this based on the amount of public interest. Then there is the inorganic vacuuming of the entire dataset by someone who wants to exploit public services for private profit. There is zero reason why the public should socialize the cost of serving the excess capacity caused by private parties looking to profit from the public data.
I could have my mind changed if the public policy is that any public data ingested into an AI system makes that AI system permanently free to use at any degree of load. If a company thinks that they should be able to put any load they want on public services for free, they should be willing to provide public services at any load for free.
> Open is open.
I’d then ask OpenAI to be open too since open is open.
Rate limiting is a DDoS protection.
1 reply →
The world is not black and white.
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.
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.
> 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.
I disagree.
Even if you simply made the database no cost but such that an actual human has to show up at an office with a signed request, that is fine. That's still open.
The problem isn't the openness; it's the aggregation.
>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.
Eeehh
I agree in principle. Its just that, a lot of people would want those databases heavily redacted if this was the case, which would ruin their utility.
The financial disincentive that a 25 dollar access fee creates, reduces the amount of spam that can be directed at people listed in these databases by several orders of magnitude. Land title searches are already difficult (in my locality), because a few people can afford to have their solicitors or agents receive and read all their mail. Open that right up, and everyone will either hide behind an agent selling a trash all service, or try and sneak the wrong data in there. Poisoning it.
The issue is that the ease of access to information and the ease of proagating it can be transformative with regards to the effects of information to the public.
> 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.
I really don't see why. Adding friction to how available information is may be a way to preserve the ability for the public to access information, while also avoiding the pitfalls of unrestricted information access and processing.
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.
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
I should clarify that I was talking about the FOI requests submitted to a particular authority: I think it was the National Archives or some subsection thereof. If you're talking about all FOI requests submitted to all authorities then probably most of them don't relate in any way to criminal cases. I think we don't really need precise numbers to observe that public access to judicial data can be abused, which is all I wanted to say, really. I wrote too many words.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
Even outside of family law there are many justifiable reasons for sealing and even expunging (deletion) of records. I’m a believer that under the correct circumstances criminal records should be sealed & even in some cases expunged as well. People deserve a second chance.
Family law is just the most obvious and unarguable example.
[dead]
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.
I like the part where you created a system where if someone has enough resources they can just alter the judicial record.
It seems like you're assuming we'd use proof-of-work. That would be crazy.
The consensus mechanism would be: block is good if it has a judge's signature (or some other combination of signatures from other elected officials, depending on how the laws work where you are).
Or are you proposing that somebody out there is prepared to subvert the signatures by computing a hash collision or some other herculean task?