Someone hacked the federal courts’ beloved filing platform. Once a humble slush fund for courts to finance office renovations, PACER is now just a creaking but functional database struggling under the demands of power users and the sort of morons who think feeding every filing into an AI model will replace lawyering.[1] That’s not a recipe for keeping a system at the cutting edge of cybersecurity and it seems we’re now paying the price for that.
According to Politico, hackers broke into the system through “a series of breaches across multiple U.S. states.”
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While this is the first the public is hearing of it, apparently the breaches took place over a month ago, with the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts first coming to grips with the severity of the attack around July 4. Politico’s reporting suggests the Justice Department and the judiciary are still trying to ascertain how deep the cyberattack goes. But it’s believed to have revealed the identities of confidential informants. Look out, Tod! Beyond the informants, hackers getting inside the system can also access documents under seal and potentially see warrants before they’re executed.
And yet the Epstein files are somehow still not out there.
Michael Scudder, who chairs the Committee on Information Technology for the federal courts’ national policymaking body, told the House Judiciary Committee in June that CM/ECF and Pacer are “outdated, unsustainable due to cyber risks, and require replacement.”
He also said that because the federal Judiciary holds such sensitive information, it faces “unrelenting security threats of extraordinary gravity.”
Those opposing free PACER may cite this disaster as proof that courts should continue to nickel and dime everyone to access public records, but that’s a bullshit argument. The courts collected fees for years and failed to keep the website at the cutting edge even though we all knew cyber risks kept escalating. And there’s also no reason why updating the central repository of court records has to be accomplished through usage fees. Not everything has to “pay for itself” and some projects are important enough to just allocate the resources because they are, in fact, important.
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But maybe we should be thanking the court system. The costs may be dire, but at least we’ve got a legal tech story that’s not explicitly about AI. So that’s something.
Federal court filing system hit in sweeping hack [Politico]
Earlier: PACER Sucks More Than Usual… And We Know Exactly Who To Blame
DOGE Cuts Off Government PACER Access Because They Are The Dumbest People On The Planet
When Federal Judges Said Free PACER Would Cost $2B, They Were Completely Full Of Crap
[1] Speaking of that particular moron, he also arbitrarily cut off government access to PACER on a whim earlier this year. We are a very serious country!
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.