One of the quiet, grotesque, longrunning scandals of the US legal system is PACER, the paywall that separates the people of America from their court records. It's a hard drive of non-searchable PDFs, and it costs Americans $150m+/year to run.

pluralistic.net/2020/08/08/tur…

1/
After decades of fights - including the stunt that put @aaronsw in the FBI's crosshairs - Congress is finally moving on the Open Courts Act, which makes substantial reforms to the PACER system.

congress.gov/bill/116th-con…

2/
But as @carlmalamud - who has been a leader in the fight to free PACER - writes in an open letter to the bill's Congressional and Senate advocates, the Act doesn't go nearly far enough.

law.resource.org/pub/us/cfr/reg…

3/
The law is free as in speech - in the public domain, owned by no one. PACER should be a system for distributing whole copies of all US law to anyone who wants to host them (and it should be free for anyone who wants to confirm a copy's veracity).

4/
As Malamud points out, distributing copies of the PACER corpus takes some of the pressure off revisions to PACER itself. PACER is total flaming garbage and needs a complete overhaul. In recognition of this, the bill contemplates FIVE YEARS before major changes are due.

5/
But distributing copies of PACER - a mere 1b documents, peanuts compared to other open access projects - would enable public interest orgs to immediately build their own PACER mirrors to serve different audiences and use-cases.

6/
The letter has an impressive roster of signatories, from @EFF legal director @cmcsherr to @Wikipedia founder @jimmy_wales to @internetarchive founder @brewster_kahle to former CTOs of the USA, a former Chief Data Scientist of the USA, and more.

eof/

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More from @doctorow

6 Feb
Back in January, I got a very odd call from an FBI Special Agent, who wanted to discuss a blog post I'd written summarizing a Popular Mechanics article on the physics of monument toppling, having received a complaint about it.

pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoo…

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Thankfully, I have access to some of the very best civil liberties lawyers in the nation, namely my colleagues at @EFF. Andrew Mackey, an EFF lawyer who specializes in this kind of thing, had a talk with the agent, who agreed that I'd broken no laws and dropped the matter.

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Aaron did one better. He helped me draft a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI along with a demand that my record there be expunged, as is my right under settled precedent.

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I didn’t tell you before because I wasn’t sure whether it was real or not. But I am sure now. It is real. There’s a man out there.

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6 Feb
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Klobuchar wants to bust her some fuckin' trusts; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/02/06/cal…

#Pluralistic

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Next Tuesday, I'm helping Ed Snowden launch the young readers' version of his spectacular memoir "Permanent Record." Join us for a livestream event with Copperfield Books on Feb 9 at 19h Pacific.

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Klobuchar wants to bust her some fuckin' trusts: CALERA is A Big Fucking Deal.



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Read 14 tweets
6 Feb
Tonight I got invited to a virtual premiere of #BlissMovie from @PrimeVideo and they asked me to post about the movie afterwards.

It was...good. Weird. Good. Phildickian, ambiguous and very plague-escapist, a good and weird thing for a moment of great anxiety and hope.

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Parts of it triggered my, "Sorry, this isn't sf, it's just a cool eyeball kick" complaint, but then again, there was Selma Hayek putting in a genuinely spectacular performance, and Owen Wilson being a lot less goofy (modulo the nose!) than we've come to expect.

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Phildickian is not entirely complementary. I love PK Dick, but he didn't always make a hell of a lot of sense. Some of his most haunting stuff was his least coherent, but as David St Hubbins reminded us, "There's such a fine line between clever and stupid."

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6 Feb
America has passed four major antitrust bills since the Sherman Act of 1890. Each bill makes it clear that monopolism is a problem in and of itself - that allowing power to be concentrated into few, unaccountable hands perverts public policy and undermines the nation.

1/ Image
For generations, American regulators fought monopolies because they were monopolies. But in the early 1980s, a disgraced Nixonite criminal named Robert Bork became Ronald Reagan's court sorcerer, backed by a coalition of ultra-wealthy plutes.

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Bork claimed that if you stared at the Sherman Act and its successors long enough, eventually you would have a holy revelation and learn that the lawmakers who crafted these bills - and spoke explicitly about their distrust of monopolies - actually really LIKED monopolies.

3/
Read 18 tweets

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