Systems used by courts and govs across the US riddled with vulnerabilities

With hundreds of courts and gov agencies affected, chances are, one near you is, too.

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[Fatesrider]

I worked with a lawyer as a client for decades, mostly tending to all of his IT needs. And that included the actual filing of the cases. I didn't need to be a lawyer to follow those instructions. He filled in the paperwork. I just made sure all the paperwork was filled in where it needed to be (a program helped do that automatically).

Then the clusterfuck began. Two systems had to authenticate, one of them was the case preparation software, and the other was to the courthouse, through a third party access portal called PACER.

Yes, you could log into the courthouse directly, but the program wouldn't let you auto-file the case, which saves like an hour and a half worth of nonsense. CASES were limited to about 10 MB (most are black and white PDF's, but it's very easy to exceed 10 MB for a complicated case), which threw errors and stuff that shouldn't have been there. And this is up until about 2022, when he finally retired.

For the record, this did not substantively change from the first time I was introduced to the program about 20 years previously. The procedures were the same, constant changing of passwords, constant requirements for "complicated passwords", and a host of other things. And the connection seemed to be set at 56K, which suggested to me that it had its origins during the dial up period. Faxing was still very, VERY common.

The point being, the court system filing and access appears to have been progressively built upon the rotting corpses of what came before, without the bother of clearing away the corpses.

I made a LOT of money troubleshooting the fucking thing, making it ten times harder to just do anything, but somehow not making it ten times more expensive, too. Except when you get paid by the hour and spend a couple of them on hold with tech support. Then it gets expensive.

So that they have vulnerabilities riddled throughout that system surprises me NOT AT ALL. It always seemed like a security protocol that was conceived sometime before I was born, made more complicated by budget and regulatory constraints across multiple entities and jurisdictions.

I mean, people say the wheels of justice grind slowly, but I it appears to be that the system has square wheels to start with. It makes for a very slow, and very bumpy ride.

I'm really glad I'm not fucking around with that thing anymore. And I feel sincere pity for those unfortunate souls who are.