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Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

judyrecords.com

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Re: Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

#21

Post by richardbarosky »

iqanq wrote: post #10
alangibson wrote: post #6

This site will be the first stop for anyone wanting to harass another person online. Some times a little friction is a good thing. I love projects like these, but they're the digital equivalent of "dual use technologies". They can be used for good or evil. That said, nice work.

>This site will be the first stop for anyone wanting to harass another person online. Some times a little friction is a good thing. Precisely I was thinking of how much fun we'll be having in efnet with this.

I think broadly the same tradeoffs exist for any search sysetm, like Google or PACER for example.

Re: Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

#22

Post by EvanAnderson »

mmastrac wrote: post #9
kyboren wrote: post #3

This is... not great. It's crucial that these records be open to public inspection. But instant full-text search of the entire dockets of 630M cases feels wrong, invasive, and dangerous to me. It's yet another instance of panopticon surveillance now being too cheap to meter. I think our society needs to come to grips with this new reality and figure out what to do about it. Or are we all just cool with this?

Don't lawyers already have access to case law like this? I feel like this is not a new thing, but giving access to everyone is novel. I could be wrong on my facts.

The public has access to most local court data in my state (Ohio, US) thru websites run by the various local courts. A state-level database for government use is, as far as I know, still not actually available (though it has been in planning and some phase of execution for 10+ years).

Re: Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

#23

Post by rmbyrro »

alangibson wrote: post #6

This site will be the first stop for anyone wanting to harass another person online. Some times a little friction is a good thing. I love projects like these, but they're the digital equivalent of "dual use technologies". They can be used for good or evil. That said, nice work.

Yeah, the only missing piece for fulltext harassment is a "Google alert" for particular keywords. Put the names you wanna track and receive a delightful alert in your inbox with rocks to throw over other people's roof.

EDIT: the tech is great, but I think there should be a record of who is accessing the data, for what purpose, terms for how it can be used in a civil way, and means to go after misuse.

Re: Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

#24

Post by kingcharles »

richardbarosky wrote: post #17
codechad wrote: post #2

This is amazing. Can you share any info on how you were able to compile so much info from different sources? In my limited experience of hunting for legal filings, it seemed like every court had its own system, with nothing standardized or programmatic. Thanks!

The search uses elasticsearch 7 for full text search. It's been extremely fast and worked very well. You're right court data is scattered across many different systems and needs to be aggregated, which is a difficult process.

Are you using freelaw's code to scrape all the different servers? Why are there no contact details on the site? I don't understand the mystery and black ops nature of this thing. It feels like there is some sort of conspiracy here that I've yet to uncover!

Re: Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

#25

Post by wolverine876 »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #7
kyboren wrote: post #3

This is... not great. It's crucial that these records be open to public inspection. But instant full-text search of the entire dockets of 630M cases feels wrong, invasive, and dangerous to me. It's yet another instance of panopticon surveillance now being too cheap to meter. I think our society needs to come to grips with this new reality and figure out what to do about it. Or are we all just cool with this?

Powerful corporate and government actors have massive surveillance and data warehousing capabilities that aren't going away. At the very least, putting those powers into the hands of the public helps to level the playing field. Society will have to change to accommodate the digital panopticon. I don't see the digital panopticon going away, though.

> putting those powers into the hands of the public helps to level the playing field

Agreed, but ...

> Powerful corporate and government actors have massive surveillance and data warehousing capabilities that aren't going away.

To nitpick: They aren't going away as long as we spread that message. It's not easy, but we can make them go away. People do accomplish things and change the world - just compare today's world with 500 years ago; all the differences the result of people changing things. Defeatism is trendy, and who benefits? (The status quo.)

Re: Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

#26

Post by ghaff »

alangibson wrote: post #6

This site will be the first stop for anyone wanting to harass another person online. Some times a little friction is a good thing. I love projects like these, but they're the digital equivalent of "dual use technologies". They can be used for good or evil. That said, nice work.

There's a whole lot of information that the collective "we" decided to make public for various reasons. But those decisions making things public were in the context of the information being in some dusty town, county, or state office somewhere.

With more and more of that information being digital, we've more or less punted of the question whether all that information should still be public. Overall, more transparency is probably good but, as you say, it's not an unalloyed good as most of this information will live forever and be cheap/easy to access.

Re: Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

#27

Post by wolverine876 »

mmastrac wrote: post #9
kyboren wrote: post #3

This is... not great. It's crucial that these records be open to public inspection. But instant full-text search of the entire dockets of 630M cases feels wrong, invasive, and dangerous to me. It's yet another instance of panopticon surveillance now being too cheap to meter. I think our society needs to come to grips with this new reality and figure out what to do about it. Or are we all just cool with this?

Don't lawyers already have access to case law like this? I feel like this is not a new thing, but giving access to everyone is novel. I could be wrong on my facts.

> Don't lawyers already have access to case law like this?

Yes, through expensive services like Westlaw and Lexis.

Re: Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

#28

Post by richardbarosky »

kingcharles wrote: post #24
richardbarosky wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The search uses elasticsearch 7 for full text search. It's been extremely fast and worked very well. You're right court data is scattered across many different systems and needs to be aggregated, which is a difficult process.

Are you using freelaw's code to scrape all the different servers? Why are there no contact details on the site? I don't understand the mystery and black ops nature of this thing. It feels like there is some sort of conspiracy here that I've yet to uncover!

There are I think about 5 million opinions from that project, yes. I wouldn't say it's blackops, feel free contact me on reddit.

Re: Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases

#30

Post by alangibson »

rmbyrro wrote: post #23
alangibson wrote: post #6

This site will be the first stop for anyone wanting to harass another person online. Some times a little friction is a good thing. I love projects like these, but they're the digital equivalent of "dual use technologies". They can be used for good or evil. That said, nice work.

Yeah, the only missing piece for fulltext harassment is a "Google alert" for particular keywords. Put the names you wanna track and receive a delightful alert in your inbox with rocks to throw over other people's roof. EDIT: the tech is great, but I think there should be a record of who is accessing the data, for what purpose, terms for how it can be used in a civil way, and means to go after misuse.

How is harassment as a service not a thing yet?

You get a "Google alert" for your target. The service presents you with several buttons:

1. Send an AI written email 2. Post a link to the new info on their Facebook page 3. Tweet an image macro with the incriminating text embedded @ them

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