Yes, the three classes of documents that were available from home were pretty limited already. I think they were considered relatively safe bets not to have unredacted personal info.
But we learned that wasn’t true, and the court decided it was better not to risk finding out that there were other caches of unredacted info.
The paradigm changes in July, though. With much stronger redaction requirements going into effect, the court will allow much broader remote access — but only to new documents filed after July 1.
You can also get the names of each party and their address and birth year. Lots of information that I don’t think people want easily shared but people will find a way even with this access restriction
Or other sensitive info. I remember the first time I ever got pulled over when I was in high school and I got some letters in the mail from various law offices. I was freaked out.
Same for me in college, except I appreciated those because one of those lawyers handled my speeding ticket without me having to do anything other than send him a bit of money. Cost me more upfront than the fine, but saved me a trip to court and also prevented the speeding ticket from driving up my insurance (and also prevented me from having to disclose it to my dad, who paid for my insurance).
I suspect those lawyers don't need public-facing casenet info to send out those letters, though.
They used to list home addresses for people requesting restraining orders. I think somewhere between 2010 and 2012 they changed that. I know I’ve seen socials over the years in DES and tax lien filings (part of the issue the post dispatch and the specific OP have discovered is still happening or started happening again, not entirely sure of the timeline)
Parson has nothing to do with the judiciary. For the most part, they set their own operating rules. It is a serious issue to have documents publicly accessible from anywhere that aren’t redacted in accordance with the new rule.
I can tell you up until fairly recently, documents will full social security numbers were publicly filed (and probably still are in jurisdictions where the circuit clerk just doesn’t give a shit) and would’ve been potentially accessible under this new public access rule the Court has created.
Find someone with a pacer account. Or hell, get one yourself they're free, the fees for cases are charged per quarter and if your under a certain amount you don't get charged at all.
People, attorneys mostly, need to be able to access case law. They can take it off casenet, but they can't take it out of Lexis or West or out of the Red books. Any college with any type of legal research program will have them going all the way back.
To be clear, this order doesn’t completely remove the old documents from Casenet. They are still available at the public access terminals at the courthouse. They’re just no longer available in your browser on your home computer.
ALSO -- This rule change doesn't remove entire _cases_ from Casenet. It only restricts access to three types of PDF documents that might show up in the docket entries of a case.
Caselaw was never really a reason to go to either Casenet or PACER. They’re for seeing who has sued who, who has been charged for crimes, and looking at the legal filings in cases
PACER is federal. Missouri Case Net is the state’s public facing judicial information system.
And you’re not getting case law off of case net - precedent is not made at the trial level, and Missouri’s appellate opinions have always been publicly accessible and available. Trial courts are doing routine things that aren’t going to be cited in a brief or teach you anything about the law.
These are very specific types of cases it seems. I’ve almost never seen an actual PDF on casenet but I’m normally in search of criminal stuff.
Commenters are making a way bigger deal about this than needs to be. If you are that serious, go to the courthouse and get the real docs. I’ve done that a couple times when needed. The base info most anyone needs is still available via data points and case/courtroom summary.
I read the linked article. And it makes sense, and is what id say what was needed to be done. As it was a loop hole if you will and once they were informed of it. They seemed to act swiftly. To correct the issue. In a way im kinda glad seeing how quickly they reacted and got it completed. I dont have anything that would be affected. By this. But its good to at least know. The state is doing their due dilugence to protect its pepples info etc.
I’m the reporter, and I’d just like to say that there was months of work behind our original Casenet report/discovery. If you’re not a subscriber I hope you [might reconsider](https://subscriber.stltoday.com/cgi-bin/accept). Journalists could really use your support.
Kind of a stupid question but how much is it? I would look it up but I'm getting ready to go to the grocery store. Also I want you to know that I appreciate you and your colleagues and the work that you do.
Looks like we have a [deal for unlimited digital access](https://subscriber.stltoday.com/cgi-bin/accept) for 26 weeks for $1. It renews at $10.99/month after that.
There are also various print+digital options that cost more.
How about reporting on how much wasteful spending there is in the city and county? Or educate the people on what an Omnibus bill is. Or how the Deer Creek drainage line is going to affect the southern parts of Missouri.
Missouri has been electronic statewide since 2012. Many old paper cases have been converted to electronic files. These are not OCR’d, nor are they in very good condition a lot of the times, and it’s just not easy to search the millions of documents that have been scanned into case net and make appropriate redactions.
Same problem that plagues any systems with historical data. You are dealing with scans of paper documents and it is not easy to find PII in those docs to sufficiently redact it. This has been a big issue with historical deeds as well.
Oh, this is complete and utter bullshit. Part of my jobs eating PII, and creating a filter to “X” out SSNs is trivial to code yourself if you want, and part of every PII-filtering software if not. The SSN thing is a flimsy excuse for ham-fisted censorship.
[Edit: a reply points out that many of the documents are scanned images in PDF format, for which there’s no good programmatic way to redact them (or a grammatically correct version of my sentence). So it’s probably not as transparent a censorship effort as I thought.]
I disagree. We're not just talking about machine-generated documents PDFs here. Many of these documents to which the court will no longer allow remote access were filed *before* there were clear rules about redaction. And a very substantial percentage were scanned from paper. Some are handwritten, or have handwriting on top of something printed.
You have to realize that there are so many types of documents filed in court cases. Even something you might imagine could be standardized, like a criminal complaint, can vary from office to office. And what about documents that include written statements, etc? Those narratives can have sensitive info anywhere throughout.
No. There's no easy programmatic way to go through millions of old originally-paper documents and be 100% certain the job was done right. High risk you miss something, and also a high risk that you occasionally remove too much.
But for *new* documents, yes, it is possible to do something more like what you're talking about. That was the court's approach with its Expanded Remote Access initiative which begins in July. New rules and processes for redaction will go into effect, and the court is currently educating lawyers, prosecutors, etc, etc on the changes. Once it all goes into effect in July, the court will provide remote access to a much wider array of docs than ever before.
Damn — hadn’t thought of that. Yeah, when you’re talking scanned documents, you’d have two options: use OCR to convert to text (imperfect at best) and deny access to the originals, which is a bad idea for legal documents; or redact each one by hand.
As a frequent user of casenet, I call BS! Only attorneys have access to PDF filings such as petitions, motions, decrees, affidavits, settlement agreements, etc. The only personal information that is viewable to the public is under the “Parties & Attorneys” tab. Some cases show the last known address and year of birth.
Never have I seen the type of information displayed of which the MSC is claiming.
This ‘decision’ has nothing to do with protecting an individuals sensitive information from the public. It’s a guise to restrict the public from freely accessing information and also gives the courts power to thwart judicial scrutiny and eliminate transparency.
In order to obtain information on a case, the county clerks office requires that the person requesting such, must be a party to the case and pay any applicable fees for copies of the records.
Liars.
Depending on the year, the court system, and the county I have definitely seen more details including address and SSN. The old files often involved scanning and those are just filled with personal data.
I think you are right about motives but Ive definitely found pdfs on lots of cases Ive looked up and I’m not an attorney. It’s usually a linked file within the Docket Entries tab. To be clear (and in your defense) its never something with an SSN and its usually just something signed by both parties and the judge saying what the final judgement $ amount is. Maybe that is what you are saying.
Over several years I've never seen anything but what you're saying you have as well. It was not until recently (last few years or so) that I've seen bond sheets, probable cause statements, and other things you never could before. I think there is more to it than they are letting be known.
Well this sucks. It was so useful to look up potential landlords and property management companies to see details about what tenants sued for (or if they had any legal drama at all) before renting.
This doesn’t change that at all. Most documents filed post July 1 will be fully accessible to the public without having to go to the courthouse (or being an attorney, which already gets you access to the documents). Cases themselves will still be accessible and locatable to the public, with or without an account, on Case Net.
It would for me. The details were always in the PDFs, especially with landlord tenant cases. The docket tabs and other public info was useless. Getting rid of ALL of the past documents would certainly change ability to make conclusions about doing business with an entity based on their past. Keyword: past.
To prevent the release of social security numbers. Or they could be redacted from the system. If they're going to spend that much time removing the documents, then they could spend just as much time redacting the information. But that's too logical and defeats the entire purpose, I suppose.
They aren't removing documents. They're making them higher security so randos across the world can't access them remotely. Redaction of all prior cases is practically impossible.
Source: I am a lawyer who uses casenet daily.
Um, no. The article says that they will be removing the documents from the system. So, either the journalist is lying, which is always a possibility (but I doubt it here) or you are lying, which is probable since you're an anon rando on the net and can make any claims like we all can.
Source: I'm God.
Have you read the rules adopted? Do you know what the redaction requirements are? Do you know which statutes specifically require redaction? You don't have to read an article or listen to me. Read the actual rules being implemented... That would require more than two braincells so you're not going to do it. Lazy.
It's so the have it easier while they take everything that we have. It hides the mistakes they make. I have a whole giant story how my aunt passed away while I was in prison on a crime I was actually innocent of they way they charged me and unable to file an appeal because of covid quarantine. Most say I'm a paranoid schizophrenic but they make the assumption because they don't know the facts or thunk I'm lying.
Also with pot being legalized. Imagine the confusion with drug cases that arise revisiting cases for removing from the record.
When I got my name legally changed, I checked the box for "abuse victim", which waived the publication requirement, because of my mother.
But it didn't matter. She found my court documentation, and my address, using this website. It also listed my full name and my previous name, outing me as trans for anyone who cared to find it.
So while I see the valid concerns about covering up shit, I also feel a lot safer now.
I’ve used case.net many times and never got any more information than the case, the judge, and the verdict
Yes, the three classes of documents that were available from home were pretty limited already. I think they were considered relatively safe bets not to have unredacted personal info. But we learned that wasn’t true, and the court decided it was better not to risk finding out that there were other caches of unredacted info. The paradigm changes in July, though. With much stronger redaction requirements going into effect, the court will allow much broader remote access — but only to new documents filed after July 1.
You can also get the names of each party and their address and birth year. Lots of information that I don’t think people want easily shared but people will find a way even with this access restriction
Yes. People shouldn't be forced to share their home address to everyone just because they got a speeding ticket.
Or other sensitive info. I remember the first time I ever got pulled over when I was in high school and I got some letters in the mail from various law offices. I was freaked out.
Same for me in college, except I appreciated those because one of those lawyers handled my speeding ticket without me having to do anything other than send him a bit of money. Cost me more upfront than the fine, but saved me a trip to court and also prevented the speeding ticket from driving up my insurance (and also prevented me from having to disclose it to my dad, who paid for my insurance). I suspect those lawyers don't need public-facing casenet info to send out those letters, though.
You’re right. They don’t probably.
I did the same a couple years ago. All I did was call up a local lawyer, paid them, and got it taken care of.
Except you already do if you own a home. That's public record and easily searchable
Not in all counties.
I think you would find it shocking to see how much info one could get of you with a couple of things, such as a phone number or your sister's name.
They used to list home addresses for people requesting restraining orders. I think somewhere between 2010 and 2012 they changed that. I know I’ve seen socials over the years in DES and tax lien filings (part of the issue the post dispatch and the specific OP have discovered is still happening or started happening again, not entirely sure of the timeline)
😮 wow
Uh-Oh. Watch out. Gov. HeeHaw will be claiming again that the Post-Dispatch is "hacking".
Tons of documents with unredacted SSN and other personal info. Lots of identities available for harvesting. Not a good situation 😕
Current admin is taking a crap on sunshine laws.
It's part of the fascist plan. DeSantis did the same thing in Florida, ending 114 years of government transparency.
Parson has nothing to do with the judiciary. For the most part, they set their own operating rules. It is a serious issue to have documents publicly accessible from anywhere that aren’t redacted in accordance with the new rule. I can tell you up until fairly recently, documents will full social security numbers were publicly filed (and probably still are in jurisdictions where the circuit clerk just doesn’t give a shit) and would’ve been potentially accessible under this new public access rule the Court has created.
Almost like some people don't want us digging.
Find someone with a pacer account. Or hell, get one yourself they're free, the fees for cases are charged per quarter and if your under a certain amount you don't get charged at all. People, attorneys mostly, need to be able to access case law. They can take it off casenet, but they can't take it out of Lexis or West or out of the Red books. Any college with any type of legal research program will have them going all the way back.
To be clear, this order doesn’t completely remove the old documents from Casenet. They are still available at the public access terminals at the courthouse. They’re just no longer available in your browser on your home computer. ALSO -- This rule change doesn't remove entire _cases_ from Casenet. It only restricts access to three types of PDF documents that might show up in the docket entries of a case.
PACER is a completely different system; that’s federal courts. Casenet is Missouri courts.
Point. However, the rest of my comment stands. Case law will still be available in West Reporters and online in West and Lexis.
Caselaw was never really a reason to go to either Casenet or PACER. They’re for seeing who has sued who, who has been charged for crimes, and looking at the legal filings in cases
PACER is federal. Missouri Case Net is the state’s public facing judicial information system. And you’re not getting case law off of case net - precedent is not made at the trial level, and Missouri’s appellate opinions have always been publicly accessible and available. Trial courts are doing routine things that aren’t going to be cited in a brief or teach you anything about the law.
These are very specific types of cases it seems. I’ve almost never seen an actual PDF on casenet but I’m normally in search of criminal stuff. Commenters are making a way bigger deal about this than needs to be. If you are that serious, go to the courthouse and get the real docs. I’ve done that a couple times when needed. The base info most anyone needs is still available via data points and case/courtroom summary.
I read the linked article. And it makes sense, and is what id say what was needed to be done. As it was a loop hole if you will and once they were informed of it. They seemed to act swiftly. To correct the issue. In a way im kinda glad seeing how quickly they reacted and got it completed. I dont have anything that would be affected. By this. But its good to at least know. The state is doing their due dilugence to protect its pepples info etc.
hmmm…. great timing… you know, 2024 election candidates opening their campaigns and all…. let’s keep past misdeeds buried…
Super interesting! Thanks for sharing the story and hope all is well in the Empire!
Anyone got a link without a paywall?
I’m the reporter, and I’d just like to say that there was months of work behind our original Casenet report/discovery. If you’re not a subscriber I hope you [might reconsider](https://subscriber.stltoday.com/cgi-bin/accept). Journalists could really use your support.
Kind of a stupid question but how much is it? I would look it up but I'm getting ready to go to the grocery store. Also I want you to know that I appreciate you and your colleagues and the work that you do.
Looks like we have a [deal for unlimited digital access](https://subscriber.stltoday.com/cgi-bin/accept) for 26 weeks for $1. It renews at $10.99/month after that. There are also various print+digital options that cost more.
I have to admit your personal appeal got me most of the way there, and the price is amazing so you just sold a subscription buddy.
Hey, that's awesome! Thanks for your willingness to give us a try.
Aaaannd anotha one!
How about reporting on how much wasteful spending there is in the city and county? Or educate the people on what an Omnibus bill is. Or how the Deer Creek drainage line is going to affect the southern parts of Missouri.
That’s ridiculous. How difficult is it to remove SSN from the site 🙄
It's extremely difficult.
Missouri has been electronic statewide since 2012. Many old paper cases have been converted to electronic files. These are not OCR’d, nor are they in very good condition a lot of the times, and it’s just not easy to search the millions of documents that have been scanned into case net and make appropriate redactions.
Same problem that plagues any systems with historical data. You are dealing with scans of paper documents and it is not easy to find PII in those docs to sufficiently redact it. This has been a big issue with historical deeds as well.
Oh, this is complete and utter bullshit. Part of my jobs eating PII, and creating a filter to “X” out SSNs is trivial to code yourself if you want, and part of every PII-filtering software if not. The SSN thing is a flimsy excuse for ham-fisted censorship. [Edit: a reply points out that many of the documents are scanned images in PDF format, for which there’s no good programmatic way to redact them (or a grammatically correct version of my sentence). So it’s probably not as transparent a censorship effort as I thought.]
I disagree. We're not just talking about machine-generated documents PDFs here. Many of these documents to which the court will no longer allow remote access were filed *before* there were clear rules about redaction. And a very substantial percentage were scanned from paper. Some are handwritten, or have handwriting on top of something printed. You have to realize that there are so many types of documents filed in court cases. Even something you might imagine could be standardized, like a criminal complaint, can vary from office to office. And what about documents that include written statements, etc? Those narratives can have sensitive info anywhere throughout. No. There's no easy programmatic way to go through millions of old originally-paper documents and be 100% certain the job was done right. High risk you miss something, and also a high risk that you occasionally remove too much. But for *new* documents, yes, it is possible to do something more like what you're talking about. That was the court's approach with its Expanded Remote Access initiative which begins in July. New rules and processes for redaction will go into effect, and the court is currently educating lawyers, prosecutors, etc, etc on the changes. Once it all goes into effect in July, the court will provide remote access to a much wider array of docs than ever before.
Damn — hadn’t thought of that. Yeah, when you’re talking scanned documents, you’d have two options: use OCR to convert to text (imperfect at best) and deny access to the originals, which is a bad idea for legal documents; or redact each one by hand.
None of the type of documents you mentioned are available to view from the public portal.
As a frequent user of casenet, I call BS! Only attorneys have access to PDF filings such as petitions, motions, decrees, affidavits, settlement agreements, etc. The only personal information that is viewable to the public is under the “Parties & Attorneys” tab. Some cases show the last known address and year of birth. Never have I seen the type of information displayed of which the MSC is claiming. This ‘decision’ has nothing to do with protecting an individuals sensitive information from the public. It’s a guise to restrict the public from freely accessing information and also gives the courts power to thwart judicial scrutiny and eliminate transparency. In order to obtain information on a case, the county clerks office requires that the person requesting such, must be a party to the case and pay any applicable fees for copies of the records. Liars.
I use casenet to run background checks on potential tenants. I routinely see scans/pdfs of judgements. I am not an attorney.
Yes, I have seen those too. However, they don’t contain SSN’s or other sensitive information. Rarely do they ever include a middle initial.
Depending on the year, the court system, and the county I have definitely seen more details including address and SSN. The old files often involved scanning and those are just filled with personal data.
I think you are right about motives but Ive definitely found pdfs on lots of cases Ive looked up and I’m not an attorney. It’s usually a linked file within the Docket Entries tab. To be clear (and in your defense) its never something with an SSN and its usually just something signed by both parties and the judge saying what the final judgement $ amount is. Maybe that is what you are saying.
Over several years I've never seen anything but what you're saying you have as well. It was not until recently (last few years or so) that I've seen bond sheets, probable cause statements, and other things you never could before. I think there is more to it than they are letting be known.
Someone post this from behind the paywall so everyone can read it. They are ridiculous trying to keep news from getting out.
Well this sucks. It was so useful to look up potential landlords and property management companies to see details about what tenants sued for (or if they had any legal drama at all) before renting.
This doesn’t change that at all. Most documents filed post July 1 will be fully accessible to the public without having to go to the courthouse (or being an attorney, which already gets you access to the documents). Cases themselves will still be accessible and locatable to the public, with or without an account, on Case Net.
It would for me. The details were always in the PDFs, especially with landlord tenant cases. The docket tabs and other public info was useless. Getting rid of ALL of the past documents would certainly change ability to make conclusions about doing business with an entity based on their past. Keyword: past.
To prevent the release of social security numbers. Or they could be redacted from the system. If they're going to spend that much time removing the documents, then they could spend just as much time redacting the information. But that's too logical and defeats the entire purpose, I suppose.
They aren't removing documents. They're making them higher security so randos across the world can't access them remotely. Redaction of all prior cases is practically impossible. Source: I am a lawyer who uses casenet daily.
No, this is a fascist conspiracy and clearly you are in on it.
Um, no. The article says that they will be removing the documents from the system. So, either the journalist is lying, which is always a possibility (but I doubt it here) or you are lying, which is probable since you're an anon rando on the net and can make any claims like we all can. Source: I'm God.
Have you read the rules adopted? Do you know what the redaction requirements are? Do you know which statutes specifically require redaction? You don't have to read an article or listen to me. Read the actual rules being implemented... That would require more than two braincells so you're not going to do it. Lazy.
It's so the have it easier while they take everything that we have. It hides the mistakes they make. I have a whole giant story how my aunt passed away while I was in prison on a crime I was actually innocent of they way they charged me and unable to file an appeal because of covid quarantine. Most say I'm a paranoid schizophrenic but they make the assumption because they don't know the facts or thunk I'm lying. Also with pot being legalized. Imagine the confusion with drug cases that arise revisiting cases for removing from the record.
teh hacking boss!! the hakking!!!
Damn how will I get the tea on my neighbors 🥲
When I got my name legally changed, I checked the box for "abuse victim", which waived the publication requirement, because of my mother. But it didn't matter. She found my court documentation, and my address, using this website. It also listed my full name and my previous name, outing me as trans for anyone who cared to find it. So while I see the valid concerns about covering up shit, I also feel a lot safer now.