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 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.
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.
I don't think all information should be easily accessible.
Some information should be in libraries, held for the public to access, but have that access recorded.
If a group of people (citizens of a country) have data stored, they ought to be able to access it, but others maybe should pay a fee.
There is data in "public records" that should be very hard to access, such as evidence of a court case involving the abuse of minors that really shouldn't be public, but we also need to ensure that secrets are not kept to protect wrongdoing by those in government or in power.
> 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.
OR it should be allowed for humans to access the public record but charge fees for scrapers
>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.
Spoken like someone who's never spent thousands of dollars and literal years struggling to get online records corrected to reflect an expungement. Fuck anything that makes that process even more difficult which AI companies certainly will.
> 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.
I disagree.
Even if you simply made the database no cost but such that an actual human has to show up at an office with a signed request, that is fine. That's still open.
The problem isn't the openness; it's the aggregation.
>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.
Eeehh
I agree in principle. Its just that, a lot of people would want those databases heavily redacted if this was the case, which would ruin their utility.
The financial disincentive that a 25 dollar access fee creates, reduces the amount of spam that can be directed at people listed in these databases by several orders of magnitude. Land title searches are already difficult (in my locality), because a few people can afford to have their solicitors or agents receive and read all their mail. Open that right up, and everyone will either hide behind an agent selling a trash all service, or try and sneak the wrong data in there. Poisoning it.
The issue is that the ease of access to information and the ease of proagating it can be transformative with regards to the effects of information to the public.
> 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.
I really don't see why. Adding friction to how available information is may be a way to preserve the ability for the public to access information, while also avoiding the pitfalls of unrestricted information access and processing.
I think the right balance is to air gap a database and allow access to the public by your standard: show up somewhere with a USB.
I think it's right to prevent random drive by scraping by bots/AI/scammers. But it shouldnt inhibit consumers who want to use it to do their civic duties.
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).
One of the problems with open access to these government DBs is that it gives out a lot of information that spammers and scammers use.
Eg if you create a business then that email address/phone number is going to get phished and spammed to hell and back again. It's all because the government makes that info freely accessible online. You could be a one man self-employed business and the moment you register you get inundated with spam.
The idea that an individual can look up and case they want is the same thing as a bot being able to scrape and archive an entire dataset forever is just silly.
One individual could spend their entire life going through one by one recording cases and never get through the whole dataset. A bot farm could sift through it in an hour. They are not the same thing.
This is a good use case for a blockchain. AI companies can run their own nodes so they're not bashing infra that they don't pay for. Concerned citizens can run their own nodes so they know that the government isn't involved in any 1984-type shenanigans. In the sealed-for-X-years case, the government can publish a hash of the blocks that they intend to publish in X years so that when the time comes, people can prove that nobody tampered with the data in the interim.
The government can decide to stop paying for the infra, but the only way to delete something that was once public record should be for all interested parties to also stop their nodes.
Confused what to make of the comments here. Access to court lists has always been free and open, it's just a pain in the ass to work with. The lists contain nothing much of value beyond the names involved in a case and the type of hearing
It's not easy to see who to believe. The MP introducing it claiming there is a "cover up" is just what MPs do. Of course it makes him look bad, a service he oversaw the introduction of is being withdrawn. The rebuttal by the company essentially denies everything. Simultaneously it's important to notice the government are working on a replacement system of their own.
I think this is a non-event. If you really want to read the court lists you already can, and without paying a company for the privilege. It sounds like HMCTS want to internalise this behaviour by providing a better centralised service themselves, and meanwhile all the fuss appears to be from a company operated by an ex-newspaper editor who just had its only income stream built around preferential access to court data cut off.
As for the openness of court data itself, wake me in another 800 years when present day norms have permeated the courts. Complaining about this aspect just shows a misunderstanding of the (arguably necessary) realities of the legal system.
I think you're underestimating how important "just a pain in the ass to work with" may be.
An analogy would be Hansard and theyworkforyou.com. The government always made Hansard (record of parliamentary debates) available. But theyworkforyou cleaned the data, and made it searchable with useful APIs so you could find how your MP voted. This work was very important for making parliament accessible; IIRC, the guys behind it were impressive enough that they eventually were brought in to improve gov.uk.
They raise the interesting point that "publicly available" doesn't necessarily mean its free to store/process etc:
> One important distinction is that “publicly available” does not automatically mean “free to collect, combine, republish and retain indefinitely” in a searchable archive. Court lists and registers can include personal data, and compliance concerns often turn on how that information is processed at scale: who can access it, how long it is kept, whether it is shared onward, and what safeguards exist to reduce the risk of harm, especially in sensitive matters.
I can’t believe that this even needs to be said. There are plenty of things which are publicly available but not free to share and definitely not allowed to be made money of.
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
Absolutely fucking crazy that you typed this out as a legitimate defense of allowing extremely sensitive personal information to be scraped.
> only system that could tell journalists what was actually happening in the criminal courts
Who cares? Journalism is a dead profession and the people who have inherited the title only care about how they can mislead the public in order to maximize profit to themselves. Famously, "journalists" drove a world-renowned musician to his death by overdose with their self-interest-motivated coverage of his trial[1]. It seems to me that cutting the media circus out of criminal trials would actually be massively beneficial to society, not detrimental.
The counter claim by the government is that this isn't "the source of truth" being deleted but rather a subset presented more accessibly by a third party (CourtsDesk) which has allegedly breached privacy rules and the service agreement by passing sensitive info to an AI service.
Coverage of the "urgent question" in parliament on the subject here:
House of Commons, Courtsdesk Data Platform Urgent Question
They made the data accessible though. From what I can gather, before them, the data was only accessible via old windows apps. If the source of truth is locked and gated, what good is it?
> ... 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.
This aligns with the explanation given in response to the urgent question. What looks like a simple breach of contract issue is being weaponized in bad faith by politicians who spend far too much time time on the shadier parts of the internet.
This is odd; this is supposed to be public information, isn't it? I suspect it's run into bureaucratic empire-defending rather than a nefarious scheme to conceal cases.
Relatedly, there's an extremely good online archive of important cases in the past, but because they disallow crawlers in robots.txt: https://www.bailii.org/robots.txt not many people know about it. Personally I would prefer if all reporting on legal cases linked to the official transcript, but seemingly none of the parties involved finds it in their interest to make that work.
It is public information. The private company whose database is being deleted processed the public information into an easier to search and consume dataset
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.
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.
The political answer is that open justice provides ammunition for their political opponents, and that juries also tend to dislike prosecutions that feel targeted against political opponents. See palestine action as a left wing example and Jamie Michael's racial hatred trial as a right wing example.
Obviously the government Ministry of Justice cannot make other parts of government more popular in a way that appeases political opponents, so the logical solution is to clamp down on open justice.
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."
Along with the attempt to prevent jury trials for all but the most serious criminal cases, this is beginning to look like an attempt to prevent reporting on an upcoming case. I can think of one happening in April, involving the prime minister. Given he was head of the CPS for 5 years, would know exactly which levers to pull.
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?
Digital access to UK court records was already abysmal. And we're somehow going even further backwards. At least in the US you have initiatives like https://www.courtlistener.com/.
Not long ago, Italian Supreme Court (Cassazione, ord. 34217/2025) established a critical principle reflecting a broader trend in personal data management: the "digital image" of a person must reflect their actual current situation through complete and accurate information. The court rejected deletion but endorsed contextualization, articles must explicitly note the acquittal (assoluzione) or dismissal that concluded the investigation. An article mentioning "investigation for [crime]" without noting "subsequently acquitted" is factually incomplete, therefore false.
This principle applies directly to search engines and data processors. When Courtsdesk was deleted before reaching AI companies, the government recognized the constraint: AI systems can't apply this "completeness" standard. They preserve raw archives without contextual updates. They can't distinguish between "investigato" (under investigation) and "assolto" (aquitted). They can't enforce the court's requirement that information must be "correttamente aggiornata con la notizia dell'esito favorevole" (properly updated to reflect the favorable resolution of the proceedings).
The UK government prevented the structural violation the Cassazione just identified: permanent archival of incomplete truth. This isn't about suppressing information, it's about refusing to embed factually false contexts into systems designed for eternity.
In many cases government texts are not covered by copyright, so it may not even be relevant here, regardless of it is is allowed to copy the data or not.
Courtsdesk are rather misrepresenting this situation.
Quoting from an urgent question in the House of Lords a few days ago:
> HMCTS was working to expand and improve the service by creating a new data licence agreement with Courtsdesk and others to expand access to justice. It was in the course of making that arrangement with Courtsdesk that data protection issues came to light. What has arisen is that this private company has been sharing private, personal and legally sensitive information with a third-party AI company, including potentially the addresses and dates of birth of defendants and victims. That is a direct breach of our agreement with Courtsdesk, which the Conservatives negotiated.
The subject of the article is the public right to access the daily schedule of England's courts.
In the United States our Constitution requires the government conduct all trials in public ( with the exception of some Family Court matters ). Secret trials are forbidden. This is a critical element to the operation of any democracy.
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.
THE ONLY REASON IS THAT Courtsdesk PROVIDED TOO EFFECTIVE A TOOL FOR INVESTIGATING STATE CRIMES AND UNCOVERING CORRUPTION AMONG HIGH-RANKING OFFICIALS, LIKE Keir Starmer. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit..., Courtsdesk WAS ACTIVELY USED TO ANALYZE COURT CASES AND DETECT STATE CRIMES COMMITTED BY THE POLICE.
My guess is that the company running this were found to be collaborating with contentious partners, and so the government is shutting down the collaboration as risk-mitigation, in order to internalize decisions within government.
Ministry of Justice in UK has always struck me as very savvy, from my work in the UK civic tech scene. They're quite self-aware, and I assume this is more pro-social than it might seem.
> 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
Is never good when governments make access to information more difficult.
If the information is already accessibly to the public, even if what they claim about selling it to an AI company is true, the AI companies already has access to it if they want.
When people who are involved in the upkeep of these systems start saying no is when these decisions will cease. This problems are all done by our acquiesce.
Shutting down the only working database is the proof point that perfect is the enemy of good.
Of course, this gives cover to the "well, we're working on something better" and "AI companies are evil"
Fine, shut it down AFTER that better thing is finally in prod (as if).
And if the data was already leaked because you didn't do your due diligence and didn't have a good contract, that's on you. It's out there now anyway.
And, really, what's the issue with AI finally having good citations? Are we really going to try to pretend that AI isn't now permanently embedded in the legal system and that lawyers won't use AI to write extremely formulaic filings?
This is either bureaucracy doing what it does, or an actual conspiracy to shut down external access to public court records. It doesn't actually matter which: what matters is that this needs to be overturned immediately.
There's so much nonsense going on in the UK lately that it seems worthwhile to start hosting public interest information like this off-shore, in the US.
A non-commercial initiative hosted by a group of Americans who wish to promote the cause of free information, but are themselves not interested in travelling to the UK, would be relatively immune to overreach by the British state. A US based service could take benefit of the First Amendment, the SPEECH Act, the fair use provision in US copyright law, etc - and simply ignore all the numerous British 'suppression orders', 'cessation notices', 'online safety' laws, etc.
If the Internet is indeed balkanizing - as sadly appears to be the case - let's squeeze some silver linings out of it.
this is mostly not about historic data but about live data
Through the way AI companies could "severely/negligent mishandle the data potentially repeatedly destroying innocent people live" is about historic data, tho.
It's not just the historical data - they provided what is effectively a live stream of events from the courts in real time, allowing you to aggregate and filter it. This is not trivial.
Hard to see how this isn't totally asinine and retarded.
I haven't confirmed it but I've seen journalist friends of mine complain also that the deletion period for much data is about 7 years so victims are genuinely shocked that they can't access their own transcripts even from 2018... Oh and if they can they're often extremely expensive.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
londons_explore|13 days ago
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 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.
whizzter|13 days ago
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.
DrScientist|13 days ago
It's not about any post-case information.
newsclues|13 days ago
I don't think all information should be easily accessible.
Some information should be in libraries, held for the public to access, but have that access recorded.
If a group of people (citizens of a country) have data stored, they ought to be able to access it, but others maybe should pay a fee.
There is data in "public records" that should be very hard to access, such as evidence of a court case involving the abuse of minors that really shouldn't be public, but we also need to ensure that secrets are not kept to protect wrongdoing by those in government or in power.
tchalla|13 days ago
OR it should be allowed for humans to access the public record but charge fees for scrapers
nonethewiser|13 days ago
How about rate limited?
forgetfreeman|13 days ago
bsder|13 days ago
I disagree.
Even if you simply made the database no cost but such that an actual human has to show up at an office with a signed request, that is fine. That's still open.
The problem isn't the openness; it's the aggregation.
protocolture|13 days ago
Eeehh
I agree in principle. Its just that, a lot of people would want those databases heavily redacted if this was the case, which would ruin their utility.
The financial disincentive that a 25 dollar access fee creates, reduces the amount of spam that can be directed at people listed in these databases by several orders of magnitude. Land title searches are already difficult (in my locality), because a few people can afford to have their solicitors or agents receive and read all their mail. Open that right up, and everyone will either hide behind an agent selling a trash all service, or try and sneak the wrong data in there. Poisoning it.
pyrale|13 days ago
> 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.
I really don't see why. Adding friction to how available information is may be a way to preserve the ability for the public to access information, while also avoiding the pitfalls of unrestricted information access and processing.
cyanydeez|13 days ago
I think it's right to prevent random drive by scraping by bots/AI/scammers. But it shouldnt inhibit consumers who want to use it to do their civic duties.
bloak|13 days ago
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).
croes|13 days ago
Why? They generate massive traffic, why should they get access for free?
Aerroon|13 days ago
Eg if you create a business then that email address/phone number is going to get phished and spammed to hell and back again. It's all because the government makes that info freely accessible online. You could be a one man self-employed business and the moment you register you get inundated with spam.
dgxyz|13 days ago
They have ability to seal documents until set dates and deal with digital archival and retrieval.
I suspect some of this is it's a complete shit show and they want to bury it quickly or avoid having to pay up for an expensive vendor migration.
tw04|13 days ago
One individual could spend their entire life going through one by one recording cases and never get through the whole dataset. A bot farm could sift through it in an hour. They are not the same thing.
adastra22|13 days ago
What about family law?
bschmidt800|13 days ago
[deleted]
__MatrixMan__|13 days ago
The government can decide to stop paying for the infra, but the only way to delete something that was once public record should be for all interested parties to also stop their nodes.
g-mork|13 days ago
It's not easy to see who to believe. The MP introducing it claiming there is a "cover up" is just what MPs do. Of course it makes him look bad, a service he oversaw the introduction of is being withdrawn. The rebuttal by the company essentially denies everything. Simultaneously it's important to notice the government are working on a replacement system of their own.
I think this is a non-event. If you really want to read the court lists you already can, and without paying a company for the privilege. It sounds like HMCTS want to internalise this behaviour by providing a better centralised service themselves, and meanwhile all the fuss appears to be from a company operated by an ex-newspaper editor who just had its only income stream built around preferential access to court data cut off.
As for the openness of court data itself, wake me in another 800 years when present day norms have permeated the courts. Complaining about this aspect just shows a misunderstanding of the (arguably necessary) realities of the legal system.
dash2|13 days ago
An analogy would be Hansard and theyworkforyou.com. The government always made Hansard (record of parliamentary debates) available. But theyworkforyou cleaned the data, and made it searchable with useful APIs so you could find how your MP voted. This work was very important for making parliament accessible; IIRC, the guys behind it were impressive enough that they eventually were brought in to improve gov.uk.
Defletter|13 days ago
helsinkiandrew|13 days ago
https://www.tremark.co.uk/moj-orders-deletion-of-courtsdesk-...
They raise the interesting point that "publicly available" doesn't necessarily mean its free to store/process etc:
> One important distinction is that “publicly available” does not automatically mean “free to collect, combine, republish and retain indefinitely” in a searchable archive. Court lists and registers can include personal data, and compliance concerns often turn on how that information is processed at scale: who can access it, how long it is kept, whether it is shared onward, and what safeguards exist to reduce the risk of harm, especially in sensitive matters.
tchalla|13 days ago
evaXhill|13 days ago
anonymous908213|13 days ago
Absolutely fucking crazy that you typed this out as a legitimate defense of allowing extremely sensitive personal information to be scraped.
> only system that could tell journalists what was actually happening in the criminal courts
Who cares? Journalism is a dead profession and the people who have inherited the title only care about how they can mislead the public in order to maximize profit to themselves. Famously, "journalists" drove a world-renowned musician to his death by overdose with their self-interest-motivated coverage of his trial[1]. It seems to me that cutting the media circus out of criminal trials would actually be massively beneficial to society, not detrimental.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/one-of-the-most-shameful_b_61...
ferngodfather|13 days ago
gadders|13 days ago
brightball|13 days ago
mellosouls|13 days ago
The counter claim by the government is that this isn't "the source of truth" being deleted but rather a subset presented more accessibly by a third party (CourtsDesk) which has allegedly breached privacy rules and the service agreement by passing sensitive info to an AI service.
Coverage of the "urgent question" in parliament on the subject here:
House of Commons, Courtsdesk Data Platform Urgent Question
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002rg00
harel|13 days ago
sensecall|13 days ago
> ... 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.
rorylawless|13 days ago
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2026-02-10/debates/037...
pjc50|13 days ago
Relatedly, there's an extremely good online archive of important cases in the past, but because they disallow crawlers in robots.txt: https://www.bailii.org/robots.txt not many people know about it. Personally I would prefer if all reporting on legal cases linked to the official transcript, but seemingly none of the parties involved finds it in their interest to make that work.
flufluflufluffy|13 days ago
unknown|13 days ago
[deleted]
cl0ckt0wer|13 days ago
cs02rm0|13 days ago
https://x.com/CPhilpOfficial/status/2021295301017923762
https://xcancel.com/CPhilpOfficial/status/202129530101792376...
pjc50|13 days ago
ultra_nick|13 days ago
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?
zarzavat|13 days ago
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.
DrScientist|13 days ago
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.
reliabilityguy|13 days ago
spacebanana7|13 days ago
Obviously the government Ministry of Justice cannot make other parts of government more popular in a way that appeases political opponents, so the logical solution is to clamp down on open justice.
nephihaha|13 days ago
BolsunBacset|13 days ago
[deleted]
bhouston|13 days ago
"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-for-th...
masfuerte|13 days ago
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.
pjc50|13 days ago
hulitu|13 days ago
They don't have a budget for that. And besides, it might be an externalized service, because self hosting is so 90s.
jacquesm|13 days ago
krona|13 days ago
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20dyzp4r42o
rwmj|13 days ago
pjc50|13 days ago
gadders|13 days ago
[deleted]
alansaber|13 days ago
rm30|13 days ago
This principle applies directly to search engines and data processors. When Courtsdesk was deleted before reaching AI companies, the government recognized the constraint: AI systems can't apply this "completeness" standard. They preserve raw archives without contextual updates. They can't distinguish between "investigato" (under investigation) and "assolto" (aquitted). They can't enforce the court's requirement that information must be "correttamente aggiornata con la notizia dell'esito favorevole" (properly updated to reflect the favorable resolution of the proceedings).
The UK government prevented the structural violation the Cassazione just identified: permanent archival of incomplete truth. This isn't about suppressing information, it's about refusing to embed factually false contexts into systems designed for eternity.
dathinab|13 days ago
you _really_ shouldn't be allowed to train on information without having a copyright license explicitly allowing it
"publicly available" isn't the same as "anyone can do whatever they want with it", just anyone can read it/use it for research
yxhuvud|13 days ago
MagicMoonlight|13 days ago
jonty|13 days ago
Quoting from an urgent question in the House of Lords a few days ago:
> HMCTS was working to expand and improve the service by creating a new data licence agreement with Courtsdesk and others to expand access to justice. It was in the course of making that arrangement with Courtsdesk that data protection issues came to light. What has arisen is that this private company has been sharing private, personal and legally sensitive information with a third-party AI company, including potentially the addresses and dates of birth of defendants and victims. That is a direct breach of our agreement with Courtsdesk, which the Conservatives negotiated.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2026-02-10/debates/037...
unknown|13 days ago
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keernan|13 days ago
In the United States our Constitution requires the government conduct all trials in public ( with the exception of some Family Court matters ). Secret trials are forbidden. This is a critical element to the operation of any democracy.
harel|13 days ago
nine_k|13 days ago
metaPushkin|10 days ago
unknown|13 days ago
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patcon|13 days ago
Ministry of Justice in UK has always struck me as very savvy, from my work in the UK civic tech scene. They're quite self-aware, and I assume this is more pro-social than it might seem.
kevincloudsec|13 days ago
dathinab|13 days ago
> 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
malklera|13 days ago
If the information is already accessibly to the public, even if what they claim about selling it to an AI company is true, the AI companies already has access to it if they want.
trinsic2|13 days ago
gunapologist99|13 days ago
Shutting down the only working database is the proof point that perfect is the enemy of good.
Of course, this gives cover to the "well, we're working on something better" and "AI companies are evil"
Fine, shut it down AFTER that better thing is finally in prod (as if).
And if the data was already leaked because you didn't do your due diligence and didn't have a good contract, that's on you. It's out there now anyway.
And, really, what's the issue with AI finally having good citations? Are we really going to try to pretend that AI isn't now permanently embedded in the legal system and that lawyers won't use AI to write extremely formulaic filings?
This is either bureaucracy doing what it does, or an actual conspiracy to shut down external access to public court records. It doesn't actually matter which: what matters is that this needs to be overturned immediately.
esbranson|13 days ago
pelorat|13 days ago
nephihaha|13 days ago
elphinstone|13 days ago
troad|13 days ago
A non-commercial initiative hosted by a group of Americans who wish to promote the cause of free information, but are themselves not interested in travelling to the UK, would be relatively immune to overreach by the British state. A US based service could take benefit of the First Amendment, the SPEECH Act, the fair use provision in US copyright law, etc - and simply ignore all the numerous British 'suppression orders', 'cessation notices', 'online safety' laws, etc.
If the Internet is indeed balkanizing - as sadly appears to be the case - let's squeeze some silver linings out of it.
randomtoast|13 days ago
dathinab|13 days ago
Through the way AI companies could "severely/negligent mishandle the data potentially repeatedly destroying innocent people live" is about historic data, tho.
harel|13 days ago
mhh__|13 days ago
I haven't confirmed it but I've seen journalist friends of mine complain also that the deletion period for much data is about 7 years so victims are genuinely shocked that they can't access their own transcripts even from 2018... Oh and if they can they're often extremely expensive.
fukukitaru|13 days ago
LightBug1|13 days ago
This is why having decent standards in politics and opposition matters so much.
We all got together to vote out the last wankers, only to find that the current lot are of the same quality but in different ways.
And to think... the 'heads up their arses while trying to suppress a Hitler salute' brigade (Reform) are waiting in the wings to prove my point.
ganelonhb|13 days ago
ratrace|13 days ago
EIDOLONXcapital|13 days ago
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jdkdkdkdfl|13 days ago
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rjmunro|13 days ago
retinaros|13 days ago