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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

#61

Post by reliabilityguy »

pjc50 wrote: post #29
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.

Why? Immigrants cannot commit crimes?

This kind of logic does more disservice than people realize. You can combat bigotry towards immigrants (issue #1), without covering up for criminal immigrants (issue #2) in fear of increase of issue #1 among the natives. It only brings up more resentment and bigotry.

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

#62

Post by koito17 »

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.

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.

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

#63

Post by DrScientist »

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…

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.

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

#64

Post by gadders »

evaXhill wrote: post #3

Seems quite absurd that they would shut down the only system that could tell journalists what was actually happening in the criminal courts under the pretext that they sent information to a third-party AI company (who doesn’t these days). Here’s a rebuttal by one of the founders i believe: https://endaleahy.substack.com/p/what-the-minister-said

Based on that response, what the government are doing is dreadful.

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

#65

Post by alberto467 »

bko wrote: post #37
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.

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

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"

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

#66

Post by sensecall »

Interesting tweet on the topic here: https://xcancel.com/SamjLondon/status/2021084532187775244

> ... the agreement restricts the supply of court data to news agencies and journalists only.

> However, a cursory review of the Courtsdesk website indicates that this same data is also being supplied to other third parties — including members of @InvestigatorsUK — who pay a fee for access.

> Those users could, in turn, deploy the information in live or prospective legal proceedings, something the agreement expressly prohibits.

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

#67

Post by bloak »

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 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).

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

#68

Post by alberto467 »

DrScientist wrote: post #63
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…

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.

Then it would be even worse if this ends up affecting post-case information.

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

#69

Post by harel »

nine_k wrote: post #13
harel wrote: post #2

I've looked into the Courtdesk service. It's a stream of events from the courts, as they happen. They claim up to 12,000 updates in a 24 period, aggregated, filtered and organised. While court judgements are public, I don't know if the information Courtdesk provides is. This is a worrying direction.

If the sources of these event data are not public, your worry would be understandable. But if not public, what are these sources then?

I kept digging and reached the service https://www.courtserve.net. Seems like a windows application (old school one) that receives the data, but I need more time to explore there. They've been working with MoJ for 20 years (their claim). Initially I thought they have people at the courts live reporting but that's a bit of a stretch...

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

#70

Post by RobotToaster »

pjc50 wrote: post #25
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.

I've had to deal with the ICO over some pretty minor local government stuff, the bar for reporting to them is very low. I smell a coverup.
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