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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

#71

Post by pjc50 »

krona wrote: post #49
pjc50 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

> People have traced what some of them were doing professionally when the PM would've been living there.

Traced what? Innuendo is not a substitute for information.

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

#72

Post by reactordev »

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.

>”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.

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

#73

Post by pjc50 »

londons_explore wrote: post #41
whizzter wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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.

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.

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

#74

Post by neversupervised »

bloak wrote: post #67
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…

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…

Without numbers this sounds made up

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

#76

Post by DrScientist »

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?

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.

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

#78

Post by pjc50 »

carlosjobim wrote: post #47
pjc50 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

In the case of Rotherham, I believe that most of those committing the crimes were not foreign; most were British born British nationals. Ethnicity is not the same as immigration status.

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

#79

Post by dathinab »

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

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

#80

Post by bloak »

neversupervised wrote: post #74
bloak wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.
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