The Cat's Out of the Bag

Hm, well I guess now it's public. I had a bit of a role in the PACER liberation effort that was covered in the Times today. In a new blog post, John Schwartz explains:

[Aaron Swartz] approached Steve Schultze, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard who had found Pacer cumbersome to search. “The issue was just sort of a pet peeve in the back of my mind for a while,” Mr. Schultze said. He had written a small program that would crawl through the Pacer database and download documents automatically. He showed his bit of software — the code would fit on a single typewritten page — to Mr. Swartz, who set about debugging and improving it.

I was keeping a low profile so that hopefully the Feds wouldn't come knock my door down, but I guess my cover is blown. In any event, maybe they'll haul Aaron and Carl away before me.