Re: a couple of questions

["Aaron Swartz" <xx@aaronsw.com>]

> Can you tell me more about how access to the pacer data was secured?  You
> said a cookie ... clear-text password transported in the cookie or somehow
> encrypted?  How did one get to that point?  Was https involved at any point?

The librarian logs the computer in, then the person at the library
asks the browser for the cookie. The cookie doesn't seem to contain a
password; it looks like a hash.

> Second, do you believe that for the districts you have, you are complete?
>  Or are these incomplete snapshots?  How would one estimate what portion of
> a district we have in that case?

For ilcd, ded, almd, mad, cand, dcd, ilnd, casd, and nysd I started at
the last case and worked down, so you should be able to figure out
what percentage you have with:

$ ls ilcd | sort -n | head -n 1
27
$ ls ilcd | sort -rn | head -n 1
3000

(3000-27)/3000 == .991

For vaed, mdd, njd, ord, prd, azd, cod, ctd, hid, pawd, mnd, ohsd,
txd, paed, akd, pamd, laed, flsd, I started at 1 and worked up, so
you'd need to find the last case number to estimate. (I found last
case numbers by doing binary search on the pacer server.)

The rest are all done.

I'd prefer to be anonymous.

Thanks for everything.