RECAP Extension 0.8 Beta Released

We are proud to announce beta version 0.8 of RECAP.

This release of RECAP fixes an issue introduced by the newest version of PACER, which has been deployed to several district courts. We'd like to thank the users that brought this issue to our attention and also encourage all RECAP users to contact us if you notice any irregularities in the future. Each district court operates their own version of PACER, so there are often small differences in code which can affect the way that RECAP operates.

In addition, we've added a feature that will allow CM/ECF users to more conveniently contribute documents to the RECAP archive. A substantial number of our users are attorneys who have a separate "ECF" login as well as a standard PACER account. Many of these users find it easy to download and pay for PACER documents while logged into the ECF system, but previous versions of RECAP would not upload these documents to the shared archive. Version 0.8 changes this behavior, allowing ECF users to contribute these documents to the RECAP archive.

When we released RECAP over a year ago, we intentionally disabled the extension when it detected an "ECF" login. We did this because we did not have experience with the non-public ECF system and we wanted to be completely certain that RECAP did not inadvertently upload private information. After spending a considerable time since then analyzing the ECF system, we believe the changes introduced in this release will have no impact on the privacy of our users and will not increase the risk of public disclosure of private information. Version 0.8 of RECAP activates only when an attorney has logged into both ECF and PACER systems and only on pages that display publicly available information. Our code is open source, we encourage the geeks out there to examine it and to report any potential issues.

We remain committed to preventing private information from being disclosed inadvertently and we encourage users to report issues if inappropriate personal information is found within the RECAP archive.

If you’re an existing Firefox user, Firefox periodically checks for updates to extensions and should automatically fetch the new version of the RECAP extension. Or you can force it to check immediately by clicking Tools->Extensions->Find Updates (or, depending on your Firefox version, Tools->Add-Ons->Find Updates). As always, please let us know if you find any bugs.