So my next slide, we're going to move on to more practical issues about some of the challenges in the sort of ecosystem of the legal information IT environment in the state. And so we have Linda Hamel, who's general counsel for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Information Technology Division. She's been in that position since 2001. And before that, she was a general counsel for another state agency. And before that, she was a litigator representing software and hardware companies. And also invited Meg Hayden, who's been hearing about the Mass Trial Court Law Library's website a few times today, how fabulous it is. And we law librarians love it and rely on it so much. We have Meg Hayden, who's the electronic resources librarian that runs the website. And she's been at the Trial Court Law Library since 1986. She started as the head law librarian. And then in 1997, when the web started taking off even more, she created a website and a position involved into being a webmaster. And now she's the electronic resources librarian. So they're going to talk a little bit about... Well, Linda's going to talk a little bit about the ecosystem that exists within Massachusetts government with why maybe how the informational technology structure is that might be contributing to some of the things we've been seeing in our inventory. And Meg's going to show you the Mass Trial Court Law Library's website. Tell you a little bit about some of the challenges in handling that. Good afternoon. Thank you for the introduction. And thank you, work with Center Core. Invite you to come here and learn from you all today.  We've heard a great case today about why it is that legal materials in Massachusetts should be available online. So I'm going to talk a little bit about how we got to this point and how we could potentially change the future. And I should mention that although I'm a general counsel for state agency my comments don't necessarily reflect the views of the administration, although they're great on technology. So the story I have to tell is really a combination of law, money, and stakeholders. And starting with the legal piece, our state government is like every state government in the United States. We have a tri-partite government. Our state constitution establishes a number of elected officials, what are called constitutional offices, and then you have your three branches of government. And it's against that foundation that the technology used by the state has really developed. In addition, so when you look at the environment that people have described today, you see that it's very vulcanized. It's very patchwork. There are bits of public law all over the place on the websites of a whole series of different entities. There is no one stop shopping, one place that you can go, even within the state government umbrella to find all the law that happens to be available online, including statutes, administrative decisions by agencies, their policies or regulations, et cetera, et cetera. So I'll talk a little bit about how we got there. So you start with the fact that government is divided and technology gets built on whatever the sort of cultural and governmental infrastructure exists. So that was the infrastructure. In addition, in 1974, the Supreme Judicial Court issued a decision in the opinion of the justices. They were asked in that case to address the constitutionality of legislation proposed in the legislature that would have created a central multi-branch entity that would have done what was at that time called, basically, EDP, electronic data processing. In those days, people sat at little W terminals and they typed in data, and it went into these huge bass machines that filled rooms and batch processing was run. So the court said in that case that it would be unconstitutional for the state to have one central IT organization that was run by its kind of a troika of representatives from three branches, because in that case, representatives from one branch would have some control over the data of an entity for the business processes of other parts of state government. Perhaps not a very surprising decision, the state constitution of every state in the United States, in particular in Massachusetts. So they're trying to ensure that the technology infrastructure mimicked the separation of powers that our constitution creates. And that's that precision and our constitution and that fact of how our government is established is the parent, in some ways, the problems that we're talking about today. Because today there is no, and there can be no, central contents are who dictates what law is going to be put online in what form and with what access rights for people that cannot be in Massachusetts by law, one central contents are for all the different parts of state government. But I would maintain that's not an insupervole obstacle to obtaining the goals that people have articulated today. So state government has evolved, what Toronto government has evolved since 1974. In 1998 there was a report of an online government task force that identified that we had 80 agency websites in the state. And again that reflects the bulk organization piece the Secretary of the Commonwealth has one, the Department of Public Health had one, the Department of Corrections had one, everyone was talking about their own little website. And that report criticized those sites for having a high percentage, they recorded a later report in 2001, for having a high percentage of what people were calling for a shareware, just stuff that's published online. When these first sites started coming up, what did people put online? They tended to put their law up actually because they really weren't sure what they're supposed to be doing with their site. The public was pressuring government to have sites, if you wanted to have sites. So it wasn't very transactional in the early days, people were publishing in a small way, their rights and statute, the naval legislation, things like that. Gradually, and you can see this in the 2001 e-government strategic plan and the 2003 IT Commission report, there's a lot of emphasis in the planning efforts on doing more transactions online. So people are saying, well, just sticking a bunch of law up online, that doesn't mean anything to citizens. People want to be able to register their car online. They want to be able to apply for a grant online. So focus your attention not on the content, but on the activities that people can engage in online. And that, of course, was a great value and that's why you can register your car in Massachusetts online instead of standing in line and that's actually a very good thing for people. At the same time, it diminished the importance of the kind of activity that you've been speaking about today, which is the importance of making certain, the data that the state holds available to the public. So the historic trend, the potential of this one, a little bit in another direction lately, the state of Massachusetts and many other states have become involved in the open data movement. The open data movement, we've gotten a lot of stakeholder strong suggestions to us that we should start exposing some of these huge databases we have and various government agencies at the federal, state, and county level across the U.S. are doing this to great effect. We've exposed the data and developers are very interested in developing applications that make it easier for residents of how these cities' states to use that data in new and interesting ways have great success with the MBTA recently with exposing data about transit schedules. So it turns out there's a great community. You know, we know there's a great community of active developers in the Boston area and elsewhere who are thrilled to take that data and a couple of hours, right, fantastic applications that people love to use that tell them where the bus is coming. Those are wonderful things to do. But when I was trying to put together my thoughts today, I wrote across the top of the page, who knew? Because I had absolutely no idea that people felt that we should also expose our legal data as we're exposing our database data, you know, little bits and bytes about where the buses are and how many people registered their power last year. I think one of the things that I see in the history of what's going on here is the central IT organizations may not have been aware that their stakeholder groups articulated a very clear case for treating the law that agencies hold in their coffers in paper or maybe just in bits and pieces on the website, treating it as if it were open data, like the open data that we are now starting to expose from our large large systems. So I think there's currently just a communication issue. So that's how we got there is the Law Drives organization and state technology enterprise both at the constitutional level, the level of this decision and so people have memory consistent about setting up their technology to mimic the legal structures that create the state and those very structures are frustrated after I had to come up with some kind of a contents and say, okay, let's come up with a page and make sure everybody can get access to our blog here but you don't really need a contents art to do it that's why it hasn't happened in the past but there's no reason people couldn't voluntarily get together and decide to work together to create a site or a page where people could go to get access to this information and a few other things that struck me this morning while listening to speakers was that there is some concern with authenticity when we talk about putting a lot online and I think when you see the copyright notices that you're seeing on the legislature's website I don't represent the legislature so I can't speak for them but there's always a concern in government about the authenticity of materials that people are quoting from us so if you're quoting me and saying that the department of revenue reached a decision about something and you've got an electronic document that purports to show what the department of revenue has said I want to make sure that you haven't come up with a bootleg version of what the department of revenue actually said because that's law and government agencies hold their law closed to the best and in part they hold the text closed to the best the text themselves because they have a sort of sacred nature in the public sector we want to make sure that everyone's in agreement about what the sacred original text actually says and in this assignment where it's increasingly difficult to get people to agree about facts I think there's some legitimate concern that if you don't authenticate electronically authenticate those legal documents before they go up online and others are allowed to concatenate them and republish them that perhaps they will not be quoted exactly and this is not just a theoretical fear these are fears that have been expressed by people as we talk about the e-government enterprise and just one more point I wanted to make is that we do have or two more points our state is the only state in the union that uses information technology capital funds to build out its IT infrastructure and that money has been on the whole spent wisely and well to build a very robust e-government infrastructure but the people who make the decisions about how that money is spent are not hearing from the people in this room about how there's a growing sense among some people that more law should be online so I think there's a need for the stakeholders in this area of potentially to coalesce and make their case for those who decide how investments are made in this state in information technology it's a very wise decision made in the part of how well the information technology bonds have persisted through multiple administrations and multiple parties and they made a great contribution to the state so we do have some resources to do some things with technology that might help achieve goals but somebody has to articulate to me I would say that the technology enterprise and government is a lot more responsive because we're not very heavily regulated and we don't regulate anybody so when external stakeholder groups have carefully articulated their needs and their visions the technology enterprise can change residents in Massachusetts want social media so we're now doing Flickr and YouTube and everything else that you can imagine in the social media realm residents in Massachusetts were concerned about the accessibility of the technology that we were using to use and they articulated their needs very clearly and we have changed over the past four or five years to become very very conscious about disability accessibility but your case has not been made so I think it's a very credible and interesting case and there are a lot of people in the executive department who might be interested in it but the case has to be made by stakeholders who can articulate a specific role they want to achieve perhaps how the resources of the state can be used to get there so without further ado thank you Hi, I'm Megan with the Law Libraries and I'm beyond excited to be here I think my entire professional career has been about bringing the law to the people and so long before we had computers to do it so I'm thrilled that this is finally getting somewhere and Judge Fine's remarks about procedural information is such an important component to what we do because as you get more and more information to lay people to self-represented litigants there's not much they can do with it and so that piece of thank you for giving me the law but now what it's very exciting to see that somebody will be addressing that I'm going to just show you the primary Massachusetts sources that we have available on our site and kind of where they come from and what's missing and why we started our site in about 1997 which was before the court system as a whole had a website and that's why the law library site has remained outside of the domain of the courts by the time the courts had a website ours was quite large and it was too difficult for them to just subsume us into the court's structure so we've always operated autonomously it's also true that our data is quite different from what the court provides because we're not making an official court statement we're making a library statement here's some stuff about a topic not stuff that the court endorses not stuff that a particular judge wants to use but just stuff to read about a topic so we have way of basically three sections to the site there's the laws by subject which is where we put most of our energy and I'm not going to talk about that now but we bring together so if someone were facing an eviction they would get a law about eviction and then there's library stuff and then there's the primary law so primary law started on the web let me see if I have to hear late 1998 the mass general laws went online from the legislature and so what we've done here is just have a link to where you can search by citation or search by phrase and obviously there's inherent problems in searching full text general laws because if the words you're using don't appear in the law you're not going to find it and so in a little bit I'll show you this popular name table that some of our staff members created to get at the laws that are known by something by a word that's never going to appear within the text of the word of the law so after the mass general laws went up suddenly our website became more than just a directory of here we are and here's our addresses and we didn't really know what to put on the web suddenly it was like there's actual content out there and to wonder what other content was out there and so in about 1999 we started looking for the regulations and as Linda mentioned these agencies were all operating quite independently and so some agencies were putting up their regulations and some weren't and what we would do is go to mass.gov which had a different name at the time and go to every agency alphabetically and look through their site for something that looked like regulations because sometimes they wouldn't call them that and so we created a list and at the time it was quite small this is it now still basically works the same way we no longer go agency by agency but by citation if you go to this it will give you the departments and then within each department it links to their regulations we also have an index and the index we had been creating in print has probably a lot of law libraries had when the CMR first came out it didn't have an index and so good little library indexers had made these homemade indexes over 20, 30 years and so we put our index up with links but for the ranks now what we do is we get them from the agency websites and then when the mass register comes out which updates the ranks every two weeks we go through that in print and compare it to the agency's regulation that's online if it's current the link stays if it's not we put up the regulation in ourselves so I'm going to show you a couple examples of regulations and every agency does this differently so this is the department of transitional assistance which from my mind gets an A plus and the big reason is you can see that they have dates on them so that if and each page has its own date now I don't know if this one is going to so you can see this one has a different date so if something changed on a given date it's easy not only for me but for the user to look at it and feel that that rank is current as of whatever date then there's departments that make them look very pretty and again they're very useful but it just requires more work on our part to go through and make sure that it's current so if I go to let's see this was in 209 this is 209 CMR 31 very user friendly it prints well and you can get through it but there are no dates and so for this one when the math register comes out we find out that subsection 0.02 whatever changed and we read word for word to be sure that what they have on the web is current it used to be when the agency sites were more separate that you could kind of look at the directory structure of a given website and see when those files were uploaded and get a clue about that we have less clue now in the kind of database driven format so that is fairly time consuming so those are two of them are common ways that they look and then the third option is if we have had to add it so this is one that we put up and what we do with ours is make them look just like the print so anybody who's got the print it's got the date at the bottom of every page and that just makes it easier for us when we are updating it to be able to know that it's the same content just the print and that's how the CMR works it's obviously labor intensive much less so now than it used to be because more and more agencies are putting their information up and so when a red shows up in the mass register probably 80% of the time it is on the web and of those maybe a third of the time it's out of date so somewhere around 50% or so are up there and fine and then the rest require so the CMR index which every library does these things is just a handmade thing but it does basically the same thing it just provides subject index into those regulations and there are items here that are listed but are not linked because those regs aren't up we're not systematically going through the CMR and adding all the regs that are not available we're only doing them as they're updated and we've been doing that as they're updated for about two years so I don't know how long it will take to ever get to some of these agencies can I ask a quick question so this is the CMR there's also the official CMR the 155 so you're replicating that recently poorly I wouldn't say I'm replicating that because that's so much better when an agency promulgates regulations they do their little public hearings and stuff then those regulations go to the Secretary of State's office the Secretary of State pulls it all together into the code and sends them out in print and they also create a database of all of these regulations they're the only ones who have them all and they sell them but this is a shadow essentially we have never, Marty and I were discussing this earlier it's 110 bucks and we don't buy it on principle you know so here we are holding on to our honor and going through all this labor there's something kind of stupid about it we don't know that it would be 110 because as soon as we get it and we want to load it everywhere 110 is one of the worst so we don't know what the price would be I know we're not supposed to talk about money in polite companies how much do you spend to make this CMR? it's you and I don't pay that much money yeah how much money do you spend? I actually have a little bit of help with this it's a small you'll see there are a lot of other things that we're doing this is a small piece of it I would say the subject part of it is a bigger part of my time but if the CMR gave you rights to their publication then you'd be done right? yeah if we could have it and believe it was current it came from a reliable source I mean you want to double check and advocate so we just a sense of duplication no please do because some of this is that's precisely what I'm talking about you have the same doctrine in different places who knows if they're identical that's the child of this legal structure that is replicated with the technology well there are even things that we deliberately duplicate into those later because we don't trust that somebody isn't going to get into bed with a vendor and make it unavailable in the future so sometimes we feel like we're the only ones committed to full free absolute forever access and so there's a lot of work we do that seems goofy and it's because we're trying to make certain that something is sort of platform independent oh that's not goofy okay thank you for that okay so with the general laws with the CMR there's this indexing issue and so this is the product of a couple of my colleagues that won't take credit for it because they put a lot of work into this and went through when laws are called something that's not in the law so here we've got lemon law and there are actually lemon laws about other things like pets and wheelchairs but it links to things that people would want and although it was supposed to be at first just for the general laws we found out a lot of those things people don't know that this is a law or a reg or this is a case and so things here like the lamb warning is a case and I'll talk about cases in a little bit and so the popular name table puts together things where the user doesn't need to know if this is a law or a reg or a case they just know chapter 766 is special education well anyone in a public library knows that but 766 of what that doesn't really mean anything in the mass general laws and so those kinds of things we pulled together by name to just create more utility for it and that's something that obviously is updated regularly and it's that kind of thing that we try to spend more staff time on is the actual analysis and using your brains in some way so that was let me get back home so that's the general laws and the regulations and around the same time maybe a year or two later we started adding executive orders from the governor because they were hard to come by and we had them in print but we didn't really have them anywhere else and so this was sort of a massive scanning job and we scanned all the executive orders and and linked to them and now I only linked to them in text form because the PDFs were sort of unwieldy and not terribly handicapped accessible but we do have them in PDF people really wanted the whole signature and all of that stuff and then Patrick came along in 2007 and was the first governor to put his executive orders online so now with the newer ones we only link to the governor's site so you know up through 2007 we scanned them as they came in again and the beloved math registers where they would show up so it's another part of that all process and then we've created an index again kind of a labor intensive thing and one of the important things here is that it just keeps track of what revoked what we used to have to call the governor's office for this information and often their records weren't clear about what was superseded by what and so that's executive orders so that came about a little bit after the CMR and that seemed doable because we finally had scanners so that was exciting but also because executive orders are static documents and we began to think about static document that doesn't change, the regulations change and you have to take out this subsection and put in this subsection an executive order may get revoked but it is what it is it doesn't change and so that made executive orders sort of a nice place to start the state agency opinions I'm only going to mention this very briefly because we have very few of them if we happen upon opinions from a state agency that issues rulings we include them here we don't really go looking for these and are date wise kind of all over the map the Department of Environmental Protection is from 2004 some of them ethics commission 2002 to 2006 so we haven't done much of agency opinions and would love to see somebody bring those things together and in the same way with city and town bylaws we find them and link to them and in this one we do a systematic search there's 350 some towns in the state that's not an overwhelming number and we search them and find their bylaws and link to them and obviously these links of all of the website are the ones most prone to change these break every day because the cities change the name of the bylaw file or whatever and so they're all here which is nice if you want the bylaws for your town less useful if what you want is I want to see leash laws in every town in western Massachusetts where there isn't a good way to compare one provision from place to place with some of them if they're using the same vendor you can compare the towns that all use Munich code or all use the other one but again that's a small subset of the cities and towns so then we get into the court rules and the court rules were interesting because I was on a committee that did the court systems website and the people on this committee all of whom were very bright capable people were uncomfortable about putting the court rules on the court's website and it had to do with intellectual property it had to do with them not fully believing they owned their own rules and the issue was that they issued their rules in 1974 and then when they amended the rule they put out a piece of paper that said rule 6 paragraph 2 is hereby amended to take out the word and to put in the word war that was the only official thing they ever issued so they never compiled the amendments into the rules and put out an official rule book and so their feeling was that because they had never compiled that information they didn't own that information and so we started just putting a few rules up that people needed a lot so we started with like civil procedure rule 12 and bit by bit we added the rules years and years ago and so now we have nearly all of the Massachusetts rules Massachusetts has a lot more court rules than I realized and some things that are almost rules not quite rules and so now we're into those quasi-rules things things like standing orders of more obscure court so we just added the standing orders of the district court I'd say we have five or six of these little subsets of things to add but certainly we have more of the court rules than anywhere else on the web and we do make an effort the court's great about emailing me when rule changes are coming and so this one is one where there's a nice cooperation and so it's fairly easy to keep this up to date so that's the rule so that just kind of happened organically quick question if all the courts do is issue these periodic little change rules 6.2 changes what did you use to create the whole body of rules if you want to say it I'm trying to decide that I use a lot of sources because there isn't an official we weren't happy with anything being the official rules of Massachusetts and it's interesting when you get into rules questions and call this pre-judicial court nobody is clear on what the official rule is there isn't one put out that isn't by a publisher so we would sit with all of the books we would go on all of the databases and then we would get the text from a source that the licensing agreement did not prohibit us doing that but in many cases many cases Westlaw and Lexis are quite different I would say 25-28% of the time many cases and so for us that was very eye-opening because we didn't typically go to both places for a court rule and a lot of it involved calling the courts and saying why is this little paragraph here what happened to that language and having to go back in time and it became a much bigger deal and because of that we did look at them all to be certain that we weren't that we were getting the cleanest copy we could and I do have a lot of faith in what we have there is the best we could do but it's odd that there isn't an official official source for the rules and the SJC website now points to this for their rules it's nice enforcement they also have some of the rules up on their heads so then came the biggest project we had provided remote access to the database lowest law for our patrons and unlike in a law school where your patrons are a very defined set our patrons are anybody anybody who comes in and gets a library card can use our databases remotely so it can be a large group I don't think it's that large a group but it is a very they use it a lot and so Lovis law said to us we're not going to renew your contracts because you use it too much and we said you will pay more and they said we're not interested so they just flat out dropped us because we used the database too much and so when we were looking for a replacement database we surveyed our users and asked them what they missed most about not having lowest law and it was cases from the last 20 years massachusetts cases from the last 20 years well at the time lawyers weekly had on massachusetts cases from the last 10 years so we thought okay we will put on cases from the 10 years before that and then we'll have 20 years and we did find a replacement database but we also were just ticked that we were constantly be told into a vendor but at some point these are cases put out by the court like why are we buying this we were privileged it just stopped making sense and so we thought whatever happens with another database we're going to get cases in a format that no vendor no budget cut that nothing is going to take them away from us and so we added that second 10 year cases and just as we were finishing that project lawyers weekly decided no more access to cases preferring you have to be a subscriber navigating cases which kind of grew to your point so then we worked harder and got cases so for 20 years and then the project kind of snowball and we ended up so now we have cases back to 1938 back to volume 300 and the google books project where they just scan to the full text to the books goes up to volume 238 so there's this gap in the middle I'm not quite sure how format google scholar goes they've actually been very helpful in working with us with metadata and stuff so that we can create a search interface that works better but in the meantime they're just here they're hereby sentation they're hereby named if you know the case you want it's easy you can search them if you don't so now the only cases that we're adding when we add cases we get a little report that tells us which cases are most cited by the cases that we have on that we don't have on so we go through backwards and add the most cited cases so for some of these that are old if I go to volume 58 they're here because they're most cited by the newer cases so that within those cases you can click and hopefully find what you need so that project goes on kind of bubbly slowly but again it's just adding these quite old cases we've started adding two new kinds of cases which are the cases of the district court appellate division and in this case the district court asked us if we would add their cases to our site because they weren't having success apparently getting them in their own so what we do with these and these we have just started so the 2010 are complete and we're kind of working our way backwards in time with cases emailed from the district court and with these and the land court opinions which we're also doing they're emailed to me in word perfect and so we have to tweak them a little bit to make them go on the web these are slip opinions or final opinions? well to say that they're the final opinion that's not yet published anymore you know the final opinion the day it's issued and where are the final opinions published? they are published the district court is published in something called the district court appellate division reporter it is not an official reporter I'm going to say lawyers weekly is the publisher of that it's a small set of books are the final opinions different from the slip opinions or editorial corrections when they do have editorial corrections when the land court does change the district court or land court changes the opinion they email me the corrected opinion and they say this is the and then I make the change that's different in many states you know where the slip opinions are and it used to be in Massachusetts used to issue slip opinions in a weird way and then had an advance sheet site and then they got a real site after they don't do that now now they correct them Massachusetts will send out little correction pages and we use those the appellate division of the district court you can sometimes get a trial and error on a superior court and go through the whole system it's an unusual court the district court appellate division is an odd low court they have very interesting fact based it's a very fact deep kind of it's trial court the land court opinions land court is another obscure Massachusetts I don't know how common this is in the rest of the world in the case I don't have a citation for these are here by docket number where my name land court cases do come out in a private binder format called the land court reporter I'm still nervous about using their citations and I can read a lot of things that say oh you can use you know you can call it by the citation without violating copyright and there's something about that that troubles me the other thing is just practically speaking the opinions come out way before those volumes come out long before I have to go back in and add those citations you're in the second circuit aren't you from the court of appeal? in the second you'd have a binding precedent that was it certainly seems obvious to me it's just not the thing I've made a lot of I've gone out on some limbs here and that's not one that matters that much and some of the land court opinions are here as well and they go back to about 2008 so everything we do is about dealing with the circumstances in which we find ourselves and sort of getting around and by and through but it's all awkward and it would be great if things were really in some systematic way put on the web with some kind of I don't mean permanence in an archivist sense because we really rely on helping the people with the question in front of them and suddenly archiving and kind of leave to the academics but permanent in the sense that you can count on the format I think we've been burned a lot by people the Supreme Judicial Court as you saw they put their opinions up but they're through Westlaw and it's a Westlaw redirect that gets you to the opinion and so you get nervous about relying on sources that may get taken away and what we're trying to do is put up things that are there for everyone any questions? for anybody working for the state government where do you think people ever get their digital authentication in Massachusetts? I have absolutely no idea this is not authenticating public record documents that go up on the web it's just not something that we address I think the kind of work we would like to do would certainly make people take a hard look at it obviously authentication in terms of persons you can wrestle with that but authentication of documents for purposes of personal online is awesome if you looked at it it would be very easy to do so there's two kinds of authentication there's the authentication in which I am signing and saying I guarantee every word in here is correct and because it's a digital signature you can check that it hasn't changed there's another thing which is basically the rubber stamp digital signature that doesn't say I guarantee everything here correct it says I received it on this date I am whatever library and if you want to verify that it hasn't changed since I got it and I was wondering had you ever considered digitally signing for example the CMR that you harvest? it's really funny I haven't thought about until I've heard these two in a different context talking about authentication never crossed my mind for a second I just never thought about it there's information here and of course people want to know and so it is something I'm thinking about now for a PDF document it's not that difficult and even for an external for an HTML document one can do a checksum that can help verify it it's literally ignorance in my part it's never crossed my mind when we put the Securities and Exchange Commission database online over the very strong objections of the SEC one of the motivating factors we used is we digitally signed every SEC document on behalf of the United States Government and we thought that motivated the SEC very strongly to take that database over if you were to sign on behalf of the Secretary of the Commonwealth I'm not sure I guess I'd say about the authentication piece we're aware of the technologies but questions that we have to deal with are if you're publishing 8 million documents a year how much is that going to cost and what kind of decentralize or decentralize infrastructure do you want to put in place to enable agencies to be able to do that whether or not that would be very, very expensive at the scale which we operate or not I don't know you might consider asking the Government Printing Office to send their Chief Information Officer might wash over to brief you because he has extensive experience doing that in the SEC system where they do digitally sign all of the public laws and the Federal Register and things like that and it really isn't that difficult technical challenge to be doing there's a variety of different levels of doing it authentication is one of those rat holes in which people often try to oversolve the problem and again if you can't vouch for the document you could certainly rubber stamp it the PASER system is a good example of that the law librarian submitted a very strong petition suggesting that all PASER documents get the rubber stamp as opposed to the signature of the judge verifying that the brief was correct and so far the Administrative Office hasn't acted on that but GPO is a good fund of technical information on that subject thank you did you have one of the vendors that took CMR from your website that's some fast case that's some fast case even though it's not complete I think part of our brief is not so much that they sell it but they sell these things as if they're real they link to us for rules of court of belief for the CMR we haven't vouched the CMR's part of them are from complete so it does make us nervous when people are taking the time to chat with us it isn't there and how good we think it is there's a lot of law firms that take our stuff and put it on their sites if it's their own they haven't done anything interesting they literally pull it but that success though, that really is people taking your stuff and using it it's no different than coming to the library and reading your documents I think any librarian worries that it's more current now it's better now you have that feeling of but you're thinking too bad well that's an issue they harvest it once and they don't update it and people get misled but that's the library on the other hand when I search on things like CMR you're number one in Google in fact you're over the secretary and that's really the answer to the authenticity the issue of somebody taking it and doing a good job make yours better and you'll rise to the top and that helps solve that issue thank you both very much so we've got for the last half


One of the things you're talking about is a family connection, our heritage.  So what did you learn from your grandparents? What is your connection to India through them? The story of India for our family was always, always there. I remember, you know, Ray once said that her favorite music was the sound of the train whistles in Rajasthan. So that's part of our India story, and it starts with my grandparents, Charles and Ray Eames. So they came to India in 1958 at the invitation of Nehru. And he was kind of concerned about kind of lessening of the quality of things and also sort of how to deal with westernization. For those of you who may not be as familiar with Charles and Ray's work, this is a postcard they sent. This chair, they're kind of most famous for furniture, but they had a beautiful and very holistic vision of design. This is a house that they designed. They came to India, that's my grandmother, Ray, and they traveled for about three months and they went all over India. They took many pictures and they're really trying to figure out how to deal with this question that Nehru had raised, which is, you know, how do you deal with modernization without becoming so romantic about the past that you actually can't engage in what's really going on? After a while, they wrote something called the India report, and that was the document that founded the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. As this issue kind of unfolded of how to do it, they said, you know, first of all, with literally a thousand cultures on the subcontinent, why do you need to look outside? There must be answers here. And one of the answers they were really impressed by was this vessel, which is called Lota. Lota is a vessel for carrying water. And the thing that fascinated them about the Lota was that it had been designed by generations of youth. And so what that meant is that actually, you know, nobody can throw away something like this just because it wasn't working perfectly. But when it didn't work, then you would make it a little bit better. And in a way, through time, it answered all the things you would answer in design briefs, the, you know, fluid dynamics, the gender of the people that usually use it, whether it's hand, all these kinds of things. And so that's kind of an interesting model. And when you think about it, it's a little bit like what designed by designers is. That's a way you can use the process that comes very naturally to look to the future. One of the things that Meru asked Charles and Ray was, well, what do we do, you know, should we buy a brand new computer? And Charles and Ray said, no, you're much better off making a really crappy computer yourself, making all the mistakes, but having that learning happen here, because you never delegate understanding. So when Charles, when Meru died, they were asked to do an exhibition about Meru's life. And actually this exhibit is still at the Purgati Maidan in New Delhi. And what they did is they said, OK, well, we're happy to have the job, but we want to do it with the students of the National Institute of Design. So it was actually one of their first jobs that led to this design. So they actually walked the walk and talked the talk. And one little detail is you can see there are the sandbags there. And anyone who's ever designed an exhibition knows that traveling is a nightmare, because you have to carry all this weight. So what they did is they weighted down all the stands of the exhibition with sand, and then you could pour it out. And when you get to the next location, you just get some sand. That's great. So maybe your sense of design or how to get everybody to participate in their own culture could have an influence by them. And the second thing they were very known for is the concept of hours of 10 has changed people's perception of scale. So tell us a little bit about that and how it influenced you. So the film you're going to see, I did a powers of 10 of wine. So you're not going to listen to it. And this is the film that Charles and Ray made. And then what we have here is a concurrent journey through wine. But it's a very good introduction to the concept of scale. And one of the things that I believe very strongly is that scale is the new geography. In fact, if you don't understand scale, it's actually a form of illiteracy in this day and age. And a lot of the things that we've talked about are issues of scale, what we're just hearing about in the village. I mean, it has to happen on the individual basis, but it can actually be part of saving some amazing things. But if you think about it, we're not very fluent in scale. I mean, we see all these big numbers and we don't really know what they mean.  Whether it's the chemicals that are coming into the air, whether it's the four species being extinct, there'll be 30 minutes, all these kinds of things. And yet we can't really wrestle with it because we almost don't even understand what's going on. So to me, a scale line needs to be as comfortable for people as a timeline or as a map of the world. Yeah, and also, you know, the powers of 10 to me was that, you know, just within 20 steps, you go from, you know, from a body to the universe and from the body to the atom. I mean, it's just, it makes you understand life in such few shorter steps. Now, you know, you have your own version of how you see the world through a parallel universe you have created. So tell us a little bit about this. They're very sophisticated people behind the scenes here. Unfortunately, they're not in this chair. So the project I'm working on now is global work of multidimensional fiction. And it's called Chimerics there. It's very easy to pronounce. And it comes... Was that intentional? You wanted a name that's very difficult to pronounce? No, it actually came from the cognate word chimara, which means the true physicality of the planet and an x-theor, which is a shape with almost an infinity of dimensions or sides, infinity minus 29. So the control of those missing dimensions becomes very important. So I'm just, I call myself a geographer at large. I'm just a reporter about this parallel world. So what we do is we go around the world installing bronze plaques and historic sites that honor events from the parallel world in our world. This is the Museum of the Bench installed in what we call Abilene, Texas. We have about 89 sites in 19 countries. This is actually the least visited site. It's under 60 feet of water off the coast of Scotland. So one of the nice things about being involved in a parallel universe is sometimes the land values are still pretty good. So what we did is that we installed this plaque. We also brought about 100 tons of stone there to tell the story that happens in that place in the parallel world. Is it you want people to travel through different sites to kind of piece in the story or you want them to experience each location as it is? Or why are you calling it parallel universe and not a book or a novel? Well, it is kind of a novel with every page in a different place. When you read a book and you actually kind of lift out of the page as you read it and you visualize in the story. But what's really weird if you think about it is that your retinas, if you could look at what your retinas are seeing, they're actually seeing the characters on the page. So language is very much a part of perception. So what I wanted to do is kind of live in that space and use that kind of toolkit to help people see the world differently. So for example, it's very hard when you see a red car to only see the color red because your brain interprets what your eye sees before your mind even knows it. But the downside is you don't see all the things that aren't there. And then you think about everything that people have been talking about. They're talking about things that are there, but they're talking about things that aren't there. And so these things that aren't there are actually very important. So to create a way for people to conjure it up and not take the visual environment for granted is pretty cool. And the other thing about it is that we have this process, and this is a village near Sendwa, which is in Magyar Pradesh. What I do is I tell stories from the parallel world, from Chimerex there, to people around the world and ask them to create their own visions of what I've been doing. So if I do a sketch, then even if it's really bad, you sort of figure out, well, he wrote it. Of course, he knows what it looks like. But if everybody does it, then instead of having clusters of representation, you have clusters of understandings. And that's a very different thing. When we think about if we had all been born in the UK 500 years ago, we all would have known who Robin Hood was. What's weird is that we would all have had a different vision of Robin Hood in our heads. But we all would have had all of those visions would have been totally different, but they would have enough qualities of Robin Hoodness, whatever the heck that is, to be able to have a common conversation. But today, with special effects and all that, you can see everything. Darth Vader is a photograph of the helmet. So we're actually denied the beauty of ambiguity. So what we do is create disputed likenesses with these folks. So I worked with the kids in this village and told them the stories and they did a lot of different renderings. And we made this mural together. That's Cool of Larsa. She's the one who tricked the gods into not helping their believers. But she's, as you can tell, quite an impressive character. By the end of her tricking the gods, she built an echelon de crewella. So it was one of these things that was built by her telling the story. And so then the kids and I built the five corners of that. Not really the five corners, but kind of a talisman of those quarters. And that's what's there now. And the kids will be happy to tell you the story. We also did this in Madrid with a group of artists. I'm not sure if you've seen this animal. It's called the Nasien. And Nasien's are seven-legged, deer-like creatures. And their prime-numbered legs are very nutritious. In fact, if you take one bite, it'll sustain you for a month. But if you eat the non-prime-numbered legs, it's poisonous unto death. So it's another reason to study math, because the elector of Empadraza, he thought one was a prime number. And we know what happened to him. So we also told that story to a group of embroiderers in Namibia. And they did these versions of the Nasien. So what's nice is that Nasien-ness is somewhere in between all these things. And even what you're imagining in your head. So I worked with Martha Malu, who founded this right after Namibian independence. And it's a group of embroiderers. Went there and told the stories. It took about 10 months. Not that I was there the whole time, but we used Skype and things like that. And then this is their version of the Tower of Wisdom. And so you can see. The other thing is that, again, it's another one of these creatures that doesn't get enough. But you can see that there's a lizard sort of thing on the shoulders of this girl. And you can see it here in the village. And that's a rock-mary lizard. And these are the only lizards that are telepathic. And so they can read your mind, which is pretty cool. And I just want to kind of wrap up with this idea of the shared experience where the truth is kind of between all the different versions of the story. And so this is back to the kid's version of it. So I think you gave a great conversation piece where people come and ask you, how do you come up with these characters? So thank you for sharing us with your journey and taking us into the parallel universe. OK. Thank you. Thanks.


Alexander please give us your assessment of how the appeal will go and in particular the indisputable parallels or what appear to be indisputable parallels with the Dan Ellsberg prosecution. Will the High Court accept this additional evidence of CIA malfeasance and is it likely to lead to Julian being released? So first of all the High Court has enormous discretion whether they hear new evidence or not and this is new evidence. I think they should certainly hear this new evidence because the evidence that we are hearing about all this information we're getting about what the CIA was up to is first of all directly relevant to the whole question of his extradition and it should have been disclosed by the US authorities at the trial before Britsa. Now to recap the British government Britain does not extradite people to countries where they are at serious risk whether you know life or health or whatever that's well established law that's foundational law. What we now learn is that not only was the government that is now seeking Julian's extradition very persistent in getting him and monitoring him all the time but a powerful agency of that government the Central Intelligence Agency was conducting covert operations against him.  So this says to me that he should absolutely not be extradited to the United States moreover though he should not in theory look at this new evidence at an appeal this evidence was not disclosed to the court by the US authorities which it should have been and therefore for that reason I think it can be and ought to be considered by the court at the forthcoming hearing. I will be very surprised indeed very astonished indeed if there is an application made to consider this evidence and if that application is not granted so we will see what happens as I said they have wide discretion in that field that certainly I think it should be heard and I get to say something else if this extradition request were being made by the government of any other country and this information had come out about what that country was doing in order to get the person whose extradition it was seeking then I have no doubt at all that the British courts would refuse extradition after these revelations it is because of the extraordinary position of the United States that there are these uncertainties and these questions. Thank you very much Alexander are there any other comments you'd like to make in general about the upcoming appeal on any of the other grounds? Yes I mean this is the problematic because what the United States has been allowed to do is to call into question findings by the trial judge about Julian Assange's health and this is really actually very extraordinary and extremely unusual generally when a trial judge makes findings of fact when the trial judge decides to accept evidence of an expert an appeal court does not revisit that question and of course the first judge who in the high court granted the United States permission to appeal on various grounds actually excluded that key question of the admissibility or rather the weight of the evidence of the expert who is now being challenged and I have to say the fact that the appeal court then reversed its position that in a complete turnaround and said well we are going to let the US authorities reconsider this all after all well that shows to my mind the extraordinary lengths to which the British authorities including the British judiciary are prepared to go to accommodate the US in this extradition case I cannot imagine that that would have happened in any other extradition case in honor appeal other than you know one brought by the United States and that's I'm afraid what creates the uncertainty about the whole proceedings if they were prepared to do that with respect to the expert's evidence well one has to worry what else they're going to do with this new evidence that's just appeared you know they might say for example with newspaper gossip we're not going to consider it for that reason even though it's clearly very well founded and my guess is that it's been leaked by people within the US government precisely because some of them are very unhappy about the way in which this extradition has been conducted and about this campaign against Julian Assange and that's I think an important fact that's a separate issue so it makes one very uneasy that we are looking at an appeal on these grounds reversing a decision of the first judge and it makes one uneasy about how they're going to handle everything but of course now with this new evidence it's becoming more difficult for them I would have thought to just disregard all of this close their eyes so you know and you know we don't see all of this evil if you like we're just going to go ahead and extradite him despite all the clear risks to him risks obviously to his health assurances from the US authorities which can't be relied on and of course assurances from a government which is now known one of its key agencies was actually prepared to take extreme steps of kidnapping and if necessary murder so that's that's where we are now I think in this case