Last night at 7 p.m. EST, a federal judge unsealed more than 900 pages of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein. The package included flight logs, unredacted testimony, and included big names like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Stephen Hawking. They are likely the most widely-anticipated public court documents of the decade, if not the century so far. So, they were posted to Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER), a government website that hosts publicly available court records.
It crashed instantly.
Epstein’s life, death, and alleged crimes are an area of massive public interest. His apparent suicide is the kind of thing that seems to prove every conspiracy theory that’s underpinned American political life for the past fifty years: A private island, a mysterious fortune, young girls being trafficked, and the world’s elite. The public wants to know, and should know, everything it can about the rich man with the famous and powerful friends and the crimes he allegedly committed and enabled.
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America’s court records system wasn’t up to the task, and couldn’t keep up with demand. Anyone familiar with PACER knows that it’s terrible. The connection is spotty, court records are sometimes uploaded incorrectly, and the cost is ridiculous. This is a government-run service where, ostensibly, anybody can access public court documents—a cornerstone of U.S. democracy. As long as you’re willing to pay 10 cents a page or $2.40 per audio file, that is. When the documents run more than 900 pages, the cost adds up to about $35. That’s a barrier for many.
But the court records have a way of making it out of PACER and onto the wider internet, thanks to people and organizations willing to shoulder the costs. As PACER shit the bed, news organizations and social media stepped in to meet the demand for the Epstein documents. Mirrors appeared on the more stable Documentcloud and other hosting sites, some uploaded by news sites, others by online sleuths. Unable to get into PACER, I found my copy through a mirror on the Jeffrey Epstein subreddit.
It shouldn’t be this way. America has the infrastructure and the technology to make court records free and easily available to anyone who wants them. Using the service feels like stepping into an internet that is 20 years out of date. PACER has faced criticism and has even been the subject of a class action lawsuit over its fee structure. The class action suit alleged that the feds had overcharged users for access to public information and the U.S government settled the case in 2022, agreeing to pay $125 million in refunds.
But the site hasn’t changed much since then. It’s still antiquated. It still charges for a service that should be free. It’s still a nightmare to use. It still crashes when the world wants to get access to documents housed there. Lawyers and journalists still take to the internet to complain about it. And watching it all fall apart during a rare moment when all eyes are on the U.S. court system shows that it finally needs to change.
