If all court public records were easily available online - saving the public countless hours traveling to courthouses & searching through paper files - that would be a good thing right?  Well, maybe not according to a New Hampshire Supreme Court Task Force on Public Access to Court Records.  Read more here http://tinyurl.com/c38rtn and here http://tinyurl.com/d5mb7c

“If court records were electronic and were available online, then anyone could spend endless hours combing through whatever was available electronically, with no particular goal in mind, a practice that has been labeled ‘jammiesurfing,’” the report continued, adding later, “Members of the majority believed it prudent for the court to proceed slowly when considering making information available on the Internet and believed that ‘practical obscurity’ served important public purposes.”

“Although paper court records are freely available now, a member of the public has to know from the start that the record exists and has to travel during work hours to the courthouse where the proceedings are scheduled or where the record is stored,” the report states. “Moreover, there is no central repository for all court records - a member of the public has to travel to the particular court where the record is kept. These, and other practical barriers to public access to court records, have come to be known as ‘practical obscurity.’ ”

The bottom line is that the information available will be minimal: people will be able to search for names of businesses or persons and learn that a case exists somewhere, but that’s about all.

What do you think?  Is the promise of technology not in the public interest?