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Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

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Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#21

Post by whizzter »

londons_explore wrote: post #6

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 s…

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.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#22

Post by reliabilityguy »

ultra_nick wrote: post #10

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?

Free speech in the UK was done when people started to get police visits for tweets.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#23

Post by BillinghamJ »

nonethewiser wrote: post #9
londons_explore wrote: post #6

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 s…

>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?

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

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#24

Post by bschmidt800 »

londons_explore wrote: post #6

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 s…

[dead]

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#25

Post by pjc50 »

bhouston wrote: post #12

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-fo…

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.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#26

Post by hulitu »

bhouston wrote: post #12

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-fo…

> 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.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#27

Post by masfuerte »

bhouston wrote: post #12

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-fo…

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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47035141

leading to this:

https://endaleahy.substack.com/p/what-the-minister-said

The government is behaving disgracefully.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#28

Post by evolve2k »

whizzter wrote: post #21
londons_explore wrote: post #6

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 s…

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.

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.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#29

Post by pjc50 »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #5

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.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#30

Post by zarzavat »

ultra_nick wrote: post #10

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.

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