 Sure, my pleasure. And I am delighted to be here. Is this mic working this time? All right, great. So much of my work has focused on the federal courts and I think I'd like to start by setting a little bit of context before we jump into some of the details of how PACER works and how those financials come to be. I think that access to the courts by the public has been a long-held principle going back to pre-American law back to English common law and of course incorporated in various ways in our practices and and our laws about the law and I think historically what we've seen is that as the as the idea of what it means to access the courts has shifted from say the right to access the physical courtroom to the right to inspect the public written record and beyond as new either technologies or practices have occurred. We've had to stop and consider the implications for these principles as on these new practices and I would expect that Professor Tribe might have something to say about this as well. He was of course very instrumental in establishing some of these first principles in the seminal Richmond newspapers versus Virginia case when it comes to access to the physical courtroom. But I think that what we're seeing is a transition right now where access to the law no longer simply means access to the courtroom or even the ability to physically go to the courthouse and inspect the records. Digital technologies are changing the way that we understand access to the courts and digital technologies have a tendency to make this type of dissemination both easier and cheaper and this can have good and bad effects and it's worth stopping for a moment to consider the effects in a couple of different areas to ask are these changes fully meeting our age-old principles for access to the courts and the two areas that I'll talk about briefly today are privacy and cost. I'll talk about privacy more more briefly and I will simply cite Peter Wynn who has done a tremendous amount of good work in this area but I'll discuss a couple of issues. So first of all, we have a couple of existing rules in this area. We have existing practices. We have this notion of sealing cases when there's a compelling need for them not to be publicly available. We also have practices around redaction for personal information found in cases. We have specific rules federal rules of civil procedure 5.2 about what kind of private and personal information needs to be redacted and traditionally as Peter Wynn has observed this has worked fairly well in practice. We have, because getting access to these records often involved physically going to the courthouse, we had a layer of practical obscurity over things like your social security number that might accidentally be entered into the record or the names of your minor children or even the gory details of your divorce proceedings. But I think that the digital technologies and the ease of dissemination change our necessary practices, perhaps. And it's worth taking a moment to consider how we might address that while still preserving the ability to access these public records as broadly as possible. And some of the work that we do at the Center for Information Technology a policy focuses on this in particular. For instance, we have a graduate student in computer science, Tim Lee, who is actively doing research right now on machine learning techniques for automatically identifying personal information so that it could be redacted even if it were accidentally included in the public record. And I think those types of activities are important to answering these dilemmas. One tempting option, which I think we should resist at all costs, is to introduce further downstream restrictions on the use of public information once it's been made public. What I mean by this is license agreements restricting the types of uses you can put different materials to or restricting you from combining different legal materials in ways that might be useful to end users. And I think precisely the reason we want to resist those is for precisely the reasons that Carl observed about innovation in his opening speech, which is we don't know what useful ways people will find to recombine or repurpose or make useful these records. And so I think that's something we want to watch out for when we're thinking about the privacy issue. With respect to cost, I can only speak to the federal courts and I certainly don't speak as a representative of the federal courts. But I've looked considerably at the financing around PACER, specifically where do the PACER fees come from and where do they go to and how does the judiciary justify this? It's worth noting that historically access costs associated with the courts have been considered part of the general operating expenses of the courts. Building and maintaining order in the gallery paying the bailiff to keep people in line. The ability to inspect the public record and the clerk's salary have been included as general operating expenses and were provided at no extra cost to members of the public who wanted to take advantage of them. When it comes to PACER, the public interface to the case management and electronic case filing system run by the federal courts, Congress has actually provided some statutory guidance around how this system should work so that so that the courts maintain as open access as possible without creating barriers of entry and restriction. And specifically they say they said in the 2002 e-government act the judicial conference may only to the extent necessary prescribe reasonable fees to reimburse expenses incurred in providing these services. In short, you can only charge for public access services if those fees are used at most to cover the operating expenses for those same services. So to better understand whether or not this is in fact a practice, I looked at a few of the budget and accounting documents from the judiciary itself. As a sidebar it's interesting doing research in this area, specifically transparency research where you want to get information on the functioning of the judiciary. There's a good reason why the judiciary operates largely independently from the various administrative oversight provisions that we have. Of course we want the judiciary to be as independent from the political wins as possible, et cetera. But on the other hand, there are quite a few administrative decisions, essentially administrative decisions being made at the courts about how the courts will run, which have broad impact on the public, but are nevertheless made largely internally and without, not only without input, but without too much reporting on what those decisions are. So when I wanted to understand the budgeting around PACER, I had to get a couple different sets of documents. The first was the annual judiciary financial plans, which they submit to Congress after they've been appropriated funds for that year, as a way of letting Congress know how they plan to spend the money. They're not formally approved or anything, and they're not published publicly anywhere, but they do in very useful fashion break out the different line items that the judiciary maintains, and specifically within the PACER fees what they spend those fees on. And what those reports reveal is that in 2010, the judiciary plans to spend a hundred and twenty-nine million dollars worth of PACER fees that it's collected, as Carl noted, but the vast majority of those fees are going to services which are in fact not PACER. They're going to other services within the judiciary, IT services, putting flat screen monitors and courtrooms. Nine point seven million dollars is going to a system which is provided for free to notify creditors when debtors file for bankruptcy, and a variety of other things. This would seem to work against the congressional intent in the 2002 E-Government Act, where they said our intent is to encourage the judicial conference to move to a fee structure in which this information is freely available to the greatest extent possible. And it's true the cost of running PACER has grown only slowly over time, but the profits have grown dramatically. In fact, they were making enough money that in 2008 they had an annual carry forward of forty-four point five million dollars, and that was around the time that they started to spend more aggressively on non-PACER items. One of the judicial conference's own committees observed that, quote, in recent years significant unobligated balances have accumulated and they proposed to, quote, expand the use of electronic access funds for IT efforts such as applicable network, courtroom technology, and jury management requirements. The IT committee did not support any reduction to the fee at this time, and in 2010 the expenditures on non-PACER services will actually exceed all collections from PACER for this year because they're spending out their carry forward, and as of 2011 the courts plan to have spent out most of this carry forward that they've accumulated. So what should PACER service cost to run? Well, there are a few exacerbation, exacerbating factors in the way that they run the system. For example, PACER has run on a highly inefficient decentralized infrastructure where each court runs its own, its own instance of PACER. The PACER costs include maintaining staff to answer phones to help you use the PACER system even though they don't charge for that service. The PACER costs include expenses from upgrading their own user interface when third parties in innovative fashion after the fact could possibly do a better job and could certainly do it more cheaply. And their costs include the overhead of fee collection itself. So what I would urge is that if the courts took an approach where free bulk access was at the heart of their service model, they might well be able to provide that service for much less than the current PACER system costs. In fact, they might be able to provide the service for free while simultaneously enabling any number of third party innovators to provide, in fact, a much better service than what end users are and what citizens are getting today. This whole principle is outlined in a paper by some of my colleagues at Princeton called Government Data and the Visible Hand, which I would recommend to you. But with that, I'll turn it over to our next panelist.