Judges OK New Rules On Privacy, Court Records Online.
Author/s: Brian Krebs
The policy-making body for the federal courts today announced that it
has unanimously approved new rules dictating the level of public access
to court documents online and the level of privacy that federal judges
and court employees can expect while using e-mail or the Internet at
work.
The 27-member Judicial Conference announced the approval of both
policies today after collecting the votes via mail. U.S. Supreme Court
Chief Justice William Rehnquist requested the mail-in vote after last
Tuesday's biannual meeting was cut short by terrorist attacks.
The Judicial Conference approved a plan calling on each federal court
to adopt at least a baseline "model use" policy that prohibits
the downloading of music, pornography or "any personal use that
could cause congestion, delay or disruption of service to any government
system or equipment."
The plan also requires federal courts to block access to certain
Internet protocols used by file-sharing and Web gaming sites.
The panel backed away from a controversial section of the proposal
that would have required all federal court employee workstations to be
equipped with a notice telling employees that they have "no
reasonable expectation of privacy" while using federal court
Internet systems.
That element was pulled after several judges complained it could
violate the Constitution and be interpreted to expressly require the all
federal courts to monitor the Internet and Web use of their judges and
employees.
Instead, the Judicial Conference voted to leave the ultimate means of
policing and enforcing those policies up to the individual courts.
"We may never reach the point where the committee tries to
define what privacy rights are," said U.S. District Court Judge
Edwin Nelson, chair of the Judicial Conference's Automation and
Technology Committee, which crafted the proposal.
"What we would like to do is devolve that responsibility back to
local courts so that judges on the scene can make decisions which are
appropriate to their own employees," he said. "We're not
congressmen, but we're still allowed to punt."
The panel also approved a plan to continue offering Web-based access
to civil and bankruptcy filings, provided that certain personal
identifiers such as Social Security numbers, birth dates and account
numbers are redacted from the records. The Judicial Conference opted to
remove such identifiers out of concern "for the safety of law
enforcement officers and witnesses," involved in criminal
proceedings.
However, the new policy prohibits electronic access to criminal
files, with the understanding that the Judicial Conference will revisit
the issue within the next two years.
To date, the many federal courts offer only limited electronic access
to court records through the federal PACER (Public Access to Electronic
Records) system. Once users are registered for PACER, they may gain
access to court dockets and summaries pages for a small per-page fee.
But the federal judiciary is pursuing a much more ambitious plan to
offer online access to all federal filings allowed by today's decision,
including individual court documents and briefs filed by attorneys. That
system is scheduled to be in place by 2007.
