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FBI Investigates Liberator of Court Records
eldavojohn writes "Federal court documents aren't free to the public, they cost $0.08/page through a system called PACER. During a period when the US Government Printing Office was trying out free access at a number of courthouses around the US, a 22-year-old programmer named Aaron Swartz installed a small PERL script at the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals library in Chicago — a script that uploaded a public document every three seconds to Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service. Swartz then donated over 19 million documents to public.resource.org. That's when the FBI took interest in the programmer responsible for this effort and ran his name through government databases. How did he discover this? His FOIA was approved, of course, and he received the FBI's partially redacted report on himself. The public.resource.org database was later merged with that of the RECAP Firefox extension, which we discussed a couple of months back." Update: 10/06 18:22 GMT by KD: Timothy Lee pointed out that the summary as originally posted garbled the Swartz / RECAP connection. Improved now.
Man makes public documents available, for free, to the public. Obviously, this sort of thing cannot be allowed to continue.
if you look too closely at the gov't, they'll look too closely at you.
Seriously, as far as I know, all this material is a matter of public record anyway. It should already be freely available. I've used bulk.resource.org primarily to read opinions of appeals court cases, and it's fantastic to have all that information freely available online. The FBI should be investigating the turrurists instead.
Moral of the story is that if you don't pay 8 cent duplication fees and you know how to use PERL the FBI could come a knockin'?
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
The Schwartz makes anything possible!
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Install unauthorized software on a government, or business, computer anywhere and see what sort of response you get. This fellow installed an unauthorized perl script on a computer in a federal court (okay, the library thereof). I'm not surprised that the government decided to take a look at things. I'd be disappointed if they had not done so. DUH.
linquendum tondere
Congress could easily allocate enough money to make PACER a free service, maybe even get some contractors to write a solid web service API so government agencies and the public could easily access the service.
But they don't... because in so many cases they want the public to pay for services like this out of pocket so that they have revenue to spend on others.
It disgusts me that on the local level, there's money for welfare programs and all sorts of other crap, but no money to actually pay for a full-time fire fighting service in most communities.
The public really needs to demand that core services (defense, police, fire fighters, courts, transportation) be funded first and funded generously, and that the social services be funded with the scraps that are left over from the core budget and user fees.
AARON SWARTZ would have known his access was unauthorized because it was with a password that did not belonged to him.
Proof-reading. A valuable tool.
The disappearing pencil trick. Let me show you it.
100% agree. He installed a script on a 3rd-party system that funneled info off-site? Is he seriously thinking that's ok? Can anyone here imagine what would happen if they did that where they worked?
And spare me the "it's a public library and the docs are public" - the fact you can only access them from the library means there are controls in place(pricing, etc) for a REASON. YOU DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO CIRCUMVENT THEM. Why not drive around toll-booths on turnpikes then? Hell, there is some grass over there, next to the row of toll booths, I should write a plugin to drive around these damn $1 shacks!!
Website Hosting
((((19,856,160 x 3 sec)/60 sec)/60 min)/24 hours)/365 days = 1.9 years
entirely doable
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This makes it easier for everyone to access information. It's faster (search and download) and cheaper (don't have to pay them to print and mail).
This is a good thing for everyone.
"Are government bodies not entitled to charge a nominal fee for services rendered?"
No.
Especially in this instance, as the service wasn't rendered. If you pay for Document X, the money doesn't go to the people who did whatever work went into that document, it goes to the reproduction office. All he's really done is take out the middle man. There's also that whole taxation thing...
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.
8 cents per PAGE doesn't sound like a nominal fee to me.
Government services charge a nominal fee that the majority of people pay for services rendered already.
They call this fee, "tax"
Most people don't want to pay again for what they've already paid for.
Why does the current generation of kids seem to think just about everything should be free no matter how little it costs? Are government bodies not entitled to charge a nominal fee for services rendered?
In the first place, this stuff is public information, so the goal of the government should be to make it as widely available as possible at the smallest cost.
Second, the guy took advantage of a free trial period to download as many documents as he could. When the government found out, they shut down the free service.
Third, it's fine to charge a "nominal fee for services rendered," and it makes sense to do so when there is a real cost involved. However, the fee needs to reflect the real costs of retrieving the information. In this case, 18 million pages of documents are not "worth" $1.5 million dollars. They were giving away access to the material at libraries, the search and retrieval mechanism was obviously automatic, so it wasn't wasting people's time or costing more to get the documents.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
RTFA... He ran the script on the library computer, and the computer had a cookie set that allowed access to the PACER system without inputting a password.
So, did he have a script that automatically uploaded this FOIA on himself to a public server?
Are government bodies not entitled to charge a nominal fee for services rendered?
No. First they didn't "render" and service - these records are available electronically anyway. Second these public records were already paid for by public taxes - the "nominal fee" has already been paid by Joe public (this is clear from having 17 free locations).
The problem is that the poor defendant might not be able to go to one of these 17 locations (because of terms of release, physical ability, cost etc) and might not be able to afford hundreds or thousands of dollars to do the necessary research to defend himself. This gives the government and the wealthy an advantage over the poor and thus impedes democracy.
Get a web developer
Yes it all costs money, and we the TAX payers have paid that money. Thus the works are public domain.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
> What am I missing?
Document != page
19,856,160 pages at 3 seconds per court document.
I expect many (most?) of those court documents are multi-page documents.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
I wonder if the mere act of requesting your FBI file will cause them to open one. I'm sure it must be of interest to the Bureau that somebody is curious what the FBI has on them.
When something is in the public domain, you can still charge for reproducing or hosting it. You just can not prevent someone from copying and distributing it in the manner that they want as well. Public domain does not preclude paid access. Also, since people pay money to file court documents, IE filing fees, etc. There are instance where you paid NOTHING for court documents to be produced at all. Courts do not run wholly on tax dollars alone.
Pacer is worse than presented. Itâ(TM)s not just 8 cents a page for downloaded, itâ(TM)s 8 cents a page for any page you pull into your browser. They consider any Web page you surf on their site in search of the legal document to be a âoedownloadedâ document.
I work at a newspaper and one of my reporters ran up a $250 bill with Pacer checking many times a day to see if an important local opinion were issued. When it was, it was just 4 pages long; I expected to pay 32 cents. Instead they said we owed over $250. We never paid it and consequently no longer use Pacer.
Perl is only an acronym in certain contexts and PERL is a shibboleth! Fortunately, you can load PERL with this module: http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Inline::PERL
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
Read the article. PACER was specifically giving the documents out for free via the library. He didn't circumvent anything, just made very efficient use of a perfectly legal process using perfectly legal means.
I love the american government, where even public information is available at anytime -- for a modest fee. Flamebait aside, but where the hell does your tax dollars go? You have almost no public health care, barely any public schooling, your elderly are crammed inside tuna cans, yet you're one of the wealthiest nations in the world. And if you say "Obama" I will smack you over the face with the European continent.
Thats probably because you're 12 andyour pocket money isn't much more. Now go do your homework.
RTFFBI report, they say that he ran the script from a location outside of the library using the library password. Either the FBI are wrong, or the article summary is.
Proof that lean living nets profits.
Our tax dollars primarily fund a welfare system known as civil service. We don't know what they do, but it requires a lot of them and a whole lot of time to do it.
...even public information is available at anytime -- for a modest fee.
Just as an aside on that point, this guy found out about this investigation because he issued a FOIA on himself. If you have any inkling that you might have been looked at, file one. It takes a while, but it's easy. In my case, I've filed two. In one case (FBI), they told me that they didn't (yet) have anything that involved me. In the second case, they sent me a document that totaled 88 pages and was terribly interesting to read and included interviews with people I went to high-school with, known aliases (common nick-names), and information dating back to when I was 9.
Unlike the story at hand, all of this was done at no cost to me (surprisingly - the administrative work and postage must have cost something). They did ask on the FOIA form how much I'd be willing to pay to get my information, but I was never charged a penny.
Aside from the aside: I do not currently commit nor do I plan on committing criminal acts in the near future. I also have no criminal record.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
"social services" really ought to be handled by private organizations like they used to. The government ought to stick to protecting the borders, punishing evildoers (you know, like rapists and murderers and burglars, not "criminals" like stoners and crack heads), and maybe building roads. That's it. Then, the budget problems would go away, and there would be no need for oppressive taxes. Everything can then be funded through import tariffs.
Hey, why didn't our founding fathers consider that? Oh right, that's what they intended in the first place. The problem is bleeding hearts had the though "wouldn't it be nice if government could provide __________ - for the children" and after having done that like eleventy trillion times we have a national debt that isn't $11.x trillion, which is horrifying enough, but really more like $60 TRILLION dollars when every liability (social security, bonds, etc.) are all accounted for. That doesn't include states' debts either.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
His Perl script pulled almost 20 million PAGES. It doesn't say exactly how many RECORDS were pulled. I'm assuming most records are multiple pages. Basic math says the script rain for 18 days, so (18*24*60*60)/3 = 518400 possible records to be pulled in that time at an average of 39 pages per record to reach the 20 million pages.
I love to use my local city, Atlanta, as an example of what is so wrong with government.
When faced with a budget shortfall what got cut? Firefighters and policemen. In fact they went after the stations in areas of most resistance to new taxation.
What was kept? The over loaded with cronies corrupt city hall. Oh, they went after teachers too and kept the huge administrative sections of the school system; again stuffed with friends.
The larger system is just the same.
Instead now its all about how much of someone Else's money can you give me.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
false dichotomies, misrepresented reality, etc.
nobody in their right mind is thinking of shortchanging something like defense spending for the sake of welfare recipients. this never enters into any governmental spending calculus as it is blindingly obvious something like police are more important to absolutely everyone involved in decision making. if spending is not at the level you think it should be, it has to do with someone thinking less is needed for that particular spending allotment, in a vacuum of any other consideration, not because someone needs a battered women's shelter instead. you present a false choice in your comment that never exists in the real world
furthermore social services are a bargain: every dollar spent on welfare and healthcare and other social services is one less guy breaking into your house or mugging you on the street, because they can't feed their kids, or because they can't keep their job with a broken arm (that they can't afford to fix). it's cheaper to fix their arm. you will pay for social services one way or another. the idea of not spending on healthcare for the poor means the problem just goes away is ignorance: every untreated case of diabetes winding up in the emergency room, every case of tuberculosis untreated resulting in your children catching it, every untreated case of hypertension resulting in a heart attack for the family breadwinner who now leaves a familty to fend on their own: you pay for that in the form of a sick society, and that affects your bottom line and the balance in your checking account, whether you are blind to how you are not an island in this world or not
when you live in a rich society, you in turn are rich. when you live a poor society you in turn are poor. the money that exists in your pocket is not something devoid of any relationship to everything around you, the money in your pocket is abstract expression of the wealth around you. you pay for basic simple social services, or the money in your pocket is worth less and is less in quantity. that you can't see that is a defect in your perception. unfortunately, so many people take this defect in perception as the basis for an entire philosophy of life that assumes they exist apart from their society
it isn't about individual responsibility and self-initiative, and those who don't have that having less socioeconomic status then you, it isn't about rewarding the undeserving. it is about giving the genuinely undeserving the bottom of the basement standard of living, so they don't wind up a cancer in your society that rots your entire society, which in turn impoverishes you. think of social services as an investment that pays dividends that are indirect. apparently beyond your ability to understand. and not making that investment resulting in the loss of far more of your money than you spend on basic social services
the idea is freedom right? freedom from poverty deciding issues of basic human dignity right? oh yeah... durrr...
but you shouldn't respond to me, you should get into politics. listen to any senator arguing out of ignorant resistance to change, and we see exactly the same sort of false choices and red herrings. you have a bright future in ignorant ideological grandstanding and fearmongering: go for it dude
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Either the FBI are wrong, or the article summary is.
The summary is wrong? That's unpossible!
Your favorite
Instead of spouting bullshit, you could get some facts first. From the PACER FAQs:
Why are there user fees for PACER?
In 1988, the Judiciary sought funding through the appropriation process to establish the capability to provide electronic public access services. Rather than appropriating additional funds for this purpose, Congress specifically directed the Judiciary to fund that initiative through the collection of user fees. As a result, the program relies exclusively on fee revenue.
So, in fact, PACER is NOT supported by taxes.
Furthermore, just because some service receives some tax money does not mean it is completely funded by taxes. There are many services that receive some tax money, but not enough to pay for the entire service. The rest is made up in user fees. This is not double dipping.
No, the guy didn't do anything wrong. He did something a little strange though. Why is he downloading files at a rate so much faster than he could possibly read them? Is there some secret government information that he's noticed that shouldn't be available to him? Might as well check the guy out, If I was the Fed who noticed this, I'd feel pretty stupid if the guy did turn out to be doing something illegal that an basic background investigation could have uncovered.
As it turns out, he was harmless, and the FBI dropped it. How was the FBI to determine this without at least doing a cursory check?
So they had 88 pages on you for no reason? What the heck could warrant that?
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Lol. You have no choice in who your military kicks the shit out of. You just get to see the aftermath on Fox. One day their gonna kick your Lilly ass you dumbass.
OK... No additional direct cost to me. Thanks for chipping in for postage =)
Sadly, in your (accurate) context, I helped pay for them to investigate me...
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
So they had 88 pages on you for no reason?
Not for no reason - I was told by the investigating agency that they were looking at me and I was interviewed twice, thus my interest in acquiring whatever they found. I knew pretty definitively that "they" had something on me. The point is, once they decide to look at you, they really try hard to look at you. So, if you know or suspect that you've got a file, read it - It's interesting.
Part of the fun for me was looking at the various 'Red Flags' that turned up (They turned up the facts that I used to home-brew explosives, make improvised explosives (some multiple pounds)*, and get high all the time** - Those, for some reason, were lesser red-flags than the fact that I've had a common nick-name since Junior High and therefore use an 'alias'). Another fun area was looking at their interview list. For the interview list, my reaction was mostly, "How in the heck did you find him?" or "Man, if you wanted dirt on me you really talked to the wrong people..."
* Stopped within a year after high-school
** Stopped after college
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
You just can not prevent someone from copying and distributing it in the manner that they want as well.
My memory is a little hazy. Could you remind me what the guy did here?
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy also applies:
"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."
Get off my lawn.
PACER has a little RECAP warning (at least as of last week). I forget most of it, but part of it warns users that it is open source and may contain bad software in it. I thought that was pretty funny.
You get the sense that the judges don't like it one bit, but they are being very circumspect in their language.
Maybe the judges are letting the FBI do their talking for them . . .
"social services" really ought to be handled by private organizations like they used to. The government ought to stick to protecting the borders, punishing evildoers (you know, like rapists and murderers and burglars, not "criminals" like stoners and crack heads), and maybe building roads. That's it. Then, the budget problems would go away, and there would be no need for oppressive taxes. Everything can then be funded through import tariffs.
Hey, why didn't our founding fathers consider that? Oh right, that's what they intended in the first place.
Many if yur founding fathers didn't have a problem with slavery, either, and in this "golden age of liberty" that you describe, being poor didn't mean having to eat in McDonalnds - it meant not having to eat at all, and dying from starvation or disease if you don't have the cash (and surprisingly many people didn't).
Aliases seem to be widely misunderstood by all to many people, and I would not be surprised if even the pros (such as the FBI), have people who aren't clear on the concept. This may have been a case where the agent assigned just thinks there's something vaguely tainted about all aliases.
My Ex had a tendency to sign things using either the middle initial of her maiden name or the one that was originally for her last name interchangably. (Still does, as she never reverted to using her maiden name after the divorce). She also has a fairly sloppy signature, so when a bank first noticed the multiple initials they went back and found what looked like a possible second variant. She also has a first name that is common in spelling, but is pronounced in an uncommon way, and once somebody else at the bank made a note about this in some file. So, eventually, the bank made her sign a form stipulating she had a number of legal aliases and she had to provide no less than 12 variations on her signature to cover all the bases. She wasn't actually using anything like 12 aliases - the bank wanted her to give them a signature for each case where somebody thought a letter was sloppy enough to be misread - "Now write it like you would if that "B" looked more like a "P".
I had a fairly high security clearance for a time, and the FBI checked on why my wife used so many aliases. While the bank record only showed one, actual alias of record, getting all those signatures on the card meant, to the investigator, that every one implied a different alias, so discussing just this one area took about 15 minutes. It was all cordial enough, but somewhere in my file or hers there's probably multiple pages of blather about how she spells and pronounces her first name the way her grandmother did, and so on.
There's a quote from Cardinal Richlieu: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him". That's what's vaguely spooky about all this - I can just see her getting into legal trouble and the FBI painting her as a brilliant, if twisted mastermind who had set up a huge batch of aliases many years in advance of her cunning scheme. If they knew about her secret lair under the volcano, it would probably be even worse...
Who is John Cabal?
according to any serious study that's ever been done
"So, in other words, I should have to pay people off (through threat of force) to keep them from breaking into my house and stealing my property?"
yes, this statement is 100% accurate. why don't you come to grips with reality?
you have poor people who live near you. you can give them the bare essentials to live, or you can give them nothing, and they will take it from you, because they need to feed themselves. this is reality all over the globe. compare the societies that have welfare to those that don't. you tell me which is the poorer societies. if you lived in those societies who do nothing for the poor, you would be poorer, not richer. because the cash in your pocket is a reflection of the wealth around you. do you understand this simple fact?
you pay, one way or another for those who are impoverished around you. welfare is just the cheaper way to do it. you don't want to pay welfare because you think the choice is between paying welfare and paying nothing. no, the choice is between paying welfare or paying for a new television set after your place is broken into
what is it about your thinking that makes you unable to understand this simple choice that has always existed? in all of history, in every society in every culture: those societies that take care of their weaker members are further enriched, in greater amounts than what they pay
you think poor people just disappear into the ether? you think their problems aren't yours? proactively do something to help those in need in your society, or your society experiences problems that begin to affect your bottom line. simple truth, simple choice. your entire way of thinking seems dependent on a sense of isolation from society, when in fact you are part of it. and the more you contribute to it, the more dividends you receive from it. ignore how the health of society affects your bottom line, and you get less money in your pocket
the only real poverty going on here, in the end, is in your mind and your inability to perceive these simple facts
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
it was a 1-line PERL script and the FBI and NSA are still trying to figure out everything it does.
Nullius in verba
I'm tired of seeing people perpetuating this idea that the wars are directly responsible for a large portion of our debt.
That counter doesn't track what was spent for those wars, but it tracks additional allocations above and beyond the standing military capable of invading any country and taking the capital (maybe not holding it, but certainly taking it). We could repel an invasion from any one country. Heck, we could probably do a pretty darned good job of repelling an invasion performed by the rest of the world combined. The costs for that massive standing army are a contributor to the debt. When those costs are being spent for time in Iraq, it's absurd to claim that they aren't costs attributed to that war. Yes, you pay the soldier whether he's in Bagdad or Oklahoma, but while he's there, he's a cost of the war. The site you linked is calculated to making the costs look as small as possible without outright lying. Swing the other way and you could make it be multi-trillion without lying either. You've just managed to form a border case. That's the minimum number one could attribute to the war. It may or may not be the actual number, but the actual is either equal to or higher.
If we stopped invading, we could drop the large standing army and those costs would have eliminated the entirety of the debt. And you'll have a hard time convincing me that invading Iraq (or Somalia, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, etc.) makes someone in Nebraska safer.
Learn to love Alaska
the idea of communism is that everyone should be as poor as its poorest member
the ideal society is a meritocracy, right? that you receive from hard work the right to a good life. that to reward those who are lazy loitering useless souls as much as you reward those who work hard, ruins any reason to work hard, right?
i'm not asking for communism, i'm asking for a meritocracy with social safety nets. you seem equate social safety nets with communism. this is classic demagoguery
your false dichotomy is that social safety nets are anathema to the meritocracy. but you can have a meritocracy with social safety nets. i'm not asking for the homeless to live in palaces, i'm asking for them to have heat in the winter and food on the plate. those who work hard are rewarded with good life far beyond those bare bones of existence. so there is plenty of reason to work hard and take initiative. its just that in a society with social safety nets, if you don't work hard, you live a miserable life, rather than freezing to death in a society with no social safety nets. and social safety nets in turn represents less people desperate enough to turn to crime to support themselves since society won't give them the simplest of basics. in fact, the costs of crime in a society without social safety nets are more expensive than the safety nets. if you are lazy and without initiative and without personal responsibility, you don't deserve middle class perks. but you also don't deserve no health care and an early death, especially when preventative care for things like hypertension and diabetes is so cheap. treating these people with a heart attack or amputation in the emergency room is far more expensive. and then you have to deal with the poor family with the breadwinner dead
furthermore, plenty of those who are rich are rich because they enjoy income from defects in the imperfect marketplace where they are rewarded for doing nothing. furthermore, plenty who are poor are poor for sins their fathers committed, and are in fact good people who would do well in the middle class if only that pesky broken arm wouldn't prevent them working (since they have no healthcare, they can't afford to fix it). free market fundamentalists and libertarians fail to see how life isn't really a meritocracy, that inevitable structural defects constantly reward the rich for doing nothing, and punish others for simply being born poor. in fact, if life is going to be a meritocracy, you need a strong governmental presence to enforce the rules of the game, and correct these inevitable spontaneous defects in the marketplace. in fact, left to its own devices, the market falls to pieces, it bubbles and pops, bubble and pops. a "free" market needs a strong governmental police presence to stay truly free
and please, don't give me the bullshit about charities. its always those who are asking to contribute the least to society who refer to charities in the hypothetical as the safety net. charities of course they will never contribute to. as if those who are espousing a philosophy of "i got mine, sucks to be you" are bountiful cornucopias of giving. no, they are blind selfish assholes who can't understand how the money in their pocket comes from the health of the society they live in. we need social safety nets precisely because so many people like you who espouse a philosophy of selfishness and will never will donate to charity
please, i await your response, where you insist you are bountiful giver to charity. and then i await your next sentence in which you espouse the meritocracy without social safety nets, where if you have nothing, you probably deserve it. pffffffft
communism != social safety nets. social safety nets != destruction of meritocracy
please make a fucking note of it, and adjust your blind ignorant ideology accordingly. thanks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Consider, for someone who is homeless and starving or in desperate need of medical care, if there are no social welfare programs their most logical course of action is to steal whatever they need. If they get away with it, fine. If not then you WILL be supporting them with your tax dollars to the tune of $60,000/year space in jail. Or you could have spent $20,000 and potentially ended up with a productive citizen or at least a 66% reduction in the cost of an unproductive citizen.
Another portion of social welfare spending is managed rather inefficiently through higher medical costs (including insurance ) since hospitals have the unfunded mandate to treat anyone even if they can't pay. The alternative is to step over the dead in the parking lot on your way to your checkup. That or end up mugged because as a whole parents would rather risk jail than let their kids die of treatable illnesses (and arguably, they are behaving ethically to do so).
Social welfare programs are a bargain. If we can refrain from trillion dollar military actions around the world and manage to stop making trillion dollar bailout payments (welfare checks for the rich) we'll have plenty of cash for social programs.
Are government bodies not entitled to charge a nominal fee for services rendered?
No. First they didn't "render" and service - these records are available electronically anyway.
No, they are not. You are simply and plainly wrong. That's the whole POINT of PACER: to send people into the vaults with tens of millions of pages of paper records and scan them, and check them and collate them and file them so they can be found by the people who need them. When was the last time you scanned tens of millions of pieces of paper? What makes you think this is not a service rendered?
Second these public records were already paid for by public taxes - the "nominal fee" has already been paid by Joe public
No, they haven't. PACER is not receiving tax money. You and your ilk would be frothing at the mouth about the waste of your tax dollars if it were.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
I'd understand, if they charged 5-10 cents per page for a copy on actual paper (whoever needs that). For an electronic download this is an insane amount of money. Unless, of course, they convert each scan to searchable text using really fancy text-recognition software (like Google do with their book-archive). And even then it sounds like huge price — good for them, if they can get it, but these guys need serious competition.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Of course, which is worst, the fed or the state? It seems to me like they each compete to see who can reach deepest into people's pockets. Take the payment I had to make today.... but lets step back a minute. I have a "fastlane pass" (speed pass in most states). They keep a credit card on file, and use that to refill my account, as I zip through tolls, which I do rather infrequently.
I hadn't used it ina few months, and took a recent trip out to western MA to visit some friends. As I go, the yellow light comes up... which it always does when the account gets low, right before automated recharge. No big deal right?
Then I get two pictures of the back of my car in the mail. They list my license plate, in text, they obviously had to look up my registration info to send this to me. With this, two $50 fines, one for each way.
So I call up, I pay the balance on the account, I find out my credit card had expired, and rather than tell me, they just waited for me to use the system again, and fined me. A fine which I could appeal by sending in my account statement (which they stopped sending me two years ago), and turn it into a smaller administrative fine.
WHat struck me is... they can look in the external registry database to get my address, but can't be bothered to check their own database and see that I am a registered user of the system! Seriously, I am expected to believe that this whole process of violations, sending in statements, and making appeals is supposed to make sense, when all it seems to really do is.... give them an excuse to charge people outrageous fees.
As much of a detractor of big business as I can be, I have never come across a company that acts with such wanton incompetence, and expects their customers to pay for their own laziness and screw ups. This should have been dealt with on my first phone call, not 3 calls (on hold for an hour each) and a written appeal later (to which they don't even send a response, they require that you call them to get the response to the appeal).
It seems to me that this sort of blatant money grabbing is endemic in the system.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
bleeding hearts are responsible for the national debt
Actually, you're wrong.
"social services" really ought to be handled by private organizations like they used to.
You might want to do some research on the 1880s, and how effectively social services were handled by private organizations back then. Protip: they weren't handled at all. People died in the streets in massive numbers.
Most of the cries of "ooh big government! big government!" that people love to wave around come from an ignorance of how important government programs are to maintaining social order and a modicum of well-being for poor people. Well, that and a gross misconception of how much of the federal purse is spent on social programs, versus the things that the libertarians actually think are worthwhile. (We could just as easily cut almost all of our defense spending, since it's pretty much worthless).
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
There are bad people in the world. Really. They'll come and take your stuff, even if you ask them very nicely not to. Any standard of living you have above being a slave exists only because some military protects your society from these bad people. For many decades, America's military protected a lot of other countries from these bad people. Post-cold war we've scaled back military speding significantly, but there's a minimum amount you need to remain a superpower.
Meanwhile, our social programs are more than half our spending, and some huge majority of future spending promises, thanks to the demographic time bomb in Medicare and to some extent Social Security.
US Budget in billions (Wikipedia numbers):
It's not like we're ignoring social programs here!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
For the past decade your government has been opposed to liberty, the problem is that your entire country had your head SO far up you asses with thoughts like "We're the best country in the world." or "We have so many guns and the knowledge to use them that the government wouldn't dare take away our liberties." That you have completely missed that huge portions of your population live in 3rd world conditions and that your own government has taken your liberties from under your very nose.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
Oh the system is perfectly tuned to screw you, no doubt. If you think that's unique to government, you weren't banking in the bad old days, when banks would hold both deposits and checks for days, programatically looking for some order of processing checks and deposits that would cause a check to bounce. But we expect banks and used car salesmen and other such slimeballs to screw us. We should expect politicians and bureaucrats to screw us just as hard but youthful idealism alway seems to turn a blind eye to this for some reason. "The government is evil and corrupt, but we'll fix it with more government" is the eternal rallying cry of the student. Go figure.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
There's a quote from Cardinal Richlieu: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him". That's what's vaguely spooky about all this - I can just see her getting into legal trouble and the FBI painting her as a brilliant, if twisted mastermind who had set up a huge batch of aliases many years in advance of her cunning scheme. If they knew about her secret lair under the volcano, it would probably be even worse...
In that vein, there are two youtube videos about talking to the cops. Basically, if someone wants you bad enough, they can find something.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Oh well, blame it on cultural differences
President Eisenhower explained the dangers of an entire industry built on creating the machines of war nearly 50 years ago. His warnings went unheeded, and the result is our out-of-control military spending. See his comments in his own words here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY
or google "military industrial complex" for more information. Many US citizens are opposed to our militarism, but we seem unable to alter the course of so much short-sighted self-interest, money, and influence.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
battling healthcare companies who maximize their returns by... drum roll please... denying services. the free market philosophy is completely incompatible with quality healthcare. left to their own designs, healthcare companies would continue maximizing more and more profits by denying people more and more benefits. well, that is actually a win-win capitalist situation: kill everyone, no more healthcare costs. lol
meanwhile you assert bureaucrats have "monopoly power" (cue dread music), conveniently forgetting to note that these bureaucrats work for you, and me, the people. if they do something we don't like, we replace them, duh. it's a democracy, isn't it?
furthermore, when you allude to "monopoly power" you are referring to what? a market system. as if this is the appropriate paradigm to talk about when talking about healthcare. hint: the concept of "quality healthcare" and the concept of "market forces" are logically incompatible. guess what: the marketplace does not answer every question in the universe. there are some situations in society where you need a system besides the free marketplace to solve a problem coherently. applying the same mindless philosophy again and again, without looking at the problem's requirements is a kind megalomania, not intelligence
there's another word for your mindless overdependence on the idea of the free market: fundamentalism. you are a free market fundamentalist, you think its the answer to everything. it isn't. the debacle of the stock market crash last year should have taught you something of the folly of completely free markets: they bubble and crash dummy, ednlessly. to be truly "free", a market need strong government regulation and intervention. the other kind of "free" market, the one you fetishize, bubbles and crashes itself out of existence
the idea of the free market is a mirage, a joke, a simpleton's idea. it never existed, and it never will. a healthy marketplace is a strongly regulated one. if you don't believe this, you never heard of a bubble
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You really think that because you have guns the government is scared shitless? Are you on crack?
Where did I say that the government was "scared shitless"?
on behalf of the government, since you seem to think that government provided services somehow reflect a reduction in liberty
The do reflect a reduction in liberty when they come with a "you MUST use this government service or ELSE" mandate.
You've been spoon fed paranoia and imagined threats for so many years (from the japs in WW2, hippies, communists, terrorists, environmentalists, socialists)
The Japanese were an "imagined threat"? Really? I guess we imagined them blowing up our ships and killing our servicemen?
You know what? It's your call, keep on believing in the delusion that having a gun will somehow make you free and that your government/corporations won't continue in shafting you royally.
I don't believe and never said that having an armed society "makes" us free. It "keeps" us free. Bit of a difference there.
that government intervention in the preservation of corporations and executive bonuses in the face of gross incompetence is ok
Executive bonuses in the face of gross incompetence is an issue for the shareholders, not for Uncle Sam.
but government intervention for "Joe the plumber" to provide him with healthcare is a stripping of his civil liberties.
Government offered healthcare does strip you of your civil liberties when it comes with a mandate that you must buy coverage or else you'll forfeit the fruits of your labor to the Government.
Me, I'm just glad I don't live in the good ol' US of A, because right now... it looks like a real shithole.
Go fuck yourself :)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.