10 Rules for Radicals
This is particularly true for a database run by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, a database called PACER, which stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records. PACER contains 500 million pages of the proceedings of the U.S. district courts, including the dockets, briefs, motions, and opinions of every U.S. federal case.
The courts charge 8 cents per page and require a valid credit card to access PACER. A prisoner or other citizen can petition a judge for free access. But, petitioning a federal judge isn't exactly a low barrier to entry.
This is a big business for the courts: they drag in $120 million a year in revenue. The courts even charge the executive branch of the federal government millions a year to access filings!
To poke a few fingers in the eyes of the Administrative Office, we put up a recycling site, which let people upload their PDF documents from PACER—where we'd recycle them into the public domain.
Since PACER is a half-billion-page database, it was really kind of a bluff, a vehicle for an FAQ that tried to expose the finances behind PACER. But one of the things in the FAQ caught the attention of a couple of volunteers.
You see, the Courts, under strong congressional pressure to do something about public access, had just launched a trial program, putting one terminal in each of 17 libraries around the country. In the FAQ for the PACER recycling site, I encouraged volunteers to join the so-called Thumb Drive Corps and download docs from the
