Seems quite absurd that they would shut down the only system that could tell journalists what was actually happening in the criminal courts under the pretext that they sent information to a third-party AI company (who doesn’t these days). Here’s a rebuttal by one of the founders i believe: https://endaleahy.substack.com/p/what-the-minister-said
> (who doesn’t these days)
Absolutely fucking crazy that you typed this out as a legitimate defense of allowing extremely sensitive personal information to be scraped.
> only system that could tell journalists what was actually happening in the criminal courts
Who cares? Journalism is a dead profession and the people who have inherited the title only care about how they can mislead the public in order to maximize profit to themselves. Famously, "journalists" drove a world-renowned musician to his death by overdose with their self-interest-motivated coverage of his trial[1]. It seems to me that cutting the media circus out of criminal trials would actually be massively beneficial to society, not detrimental.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/one-of-the-most-shameful_b_61...
Information is either public or it is not.
If it is public, it will be scraped, AI companies are irrelevant here.
If information is truly sensitive, do not make it public, and that's completely fine. This might have been the case here.
Absolutely fucking crazy that you call accurately describing the reality of AI scraping "absolutely fucking crazy" while at the same time going "who cares?" on attacks against journalism and free speech.
>Oh no, some musician died, PASS THE NATIONAL SECURITY ACT, LOCK DOWN ALL INFORMATION ABOUT CRIMINALS, JAIL JOURNALISTS!!!!
> on attacks against journalism and free speech.
"Free speech" is some kind of terminal brain worm that begs itself to be invoked to browbeat most anybody into submission, I suppose. Now we're apparently extending "free speech" to mean "the government must publish sensitive private information about every citizen in an easily-scraped manner". Well, I don't buy your cheap rhetorical trick. I support freedom of speech in exactly the scope it was originally intended, that is, the freedom to express ideas without facing government censorship or retaliation. Trying to associate your completely unrelated argument with something that everybody is expected to agree with by default is weak.
Nor is it "an attack on journalism". If a real journalist still exists in the current year, they can do investigative work to obtain information that is relevant to the public's interests and then publish it freely. Nobody is stopping them.
> LOCK DOWN ALL INFORMATION ABOUT CRIMINALS
Notably, people who aren't criminals may find themselves in court to determine whether or not they aren't. Unfortunately, people like yourself and the entirety of the broadcast and print media then go on to presume every person who goes to court are criminals and do everything in their power to ruin their lives. Far from just "some musician", most people who are arrested on serious charges get a black mark on their record that effectively destroys their careers and denies them the ability to rent property outside of a ghetto, as employers and landlords discriminate against them baselessly even after they are acquitted of all charges against them.
next time you should read what the thread is about before commenting, this is not about "wanting the government to publish X", it's about the government ordering a private company to delete, from their own servers, data that the government had published
it's a clear cut free speech issue, you just don't want to admit it since certain data being available and spread to other people doesn't suit your political ideology
It's not the "only" system to be fair. CourtServe looks like it was built in the 90s but works "OK".
Based on that response, what the government are doing is dreadful.
The government provided data to a private company. The private company sold resold access to a third party for AI ingestion. it's a plain case of tough titties to the private company.
That said I don't know why the hell the service concerned isn't provided by the government itself.
Perhaps that is true, but the response linked by GP claims exactly the opposite:
"We hired a specialist firm to build, in a secure sandbox, a safety tool for journalists. They are experts in building privacy-preserving AI solutions - for people like law firms or anyone deeply concerned with how data is held, processed, and protected. That’s why we chose them. Their founders are not only respected academics in addition to being professionals, they have passed government security clearance and DBS checks in the past, and have worked on data systems for the National Archives, the Treasury, and other public agencies. They’ve published academic papers on data compliance for machine learning.
"The Minister says we ‘shared data with an AI company”... as if we were pouring this critically sensitive information into OpenAI or some evil aggregator of data. This is simply ridiculous when you look at what we do and how we did it.
"We didn’t “share” data with them. We hired them as our technical contractor to build a secure sandbox to test an idea, like any company using a cloud provider or an email service. They worked under a formal sub-processor agreement, which means under data protection law they’re not even classified as a “third party.” That’s not our interpretation. It’s the legal definition in the UK GDPR itself. ... "And “for commercial purposes”? The opposite is true. We paid them £45,000 a year. They didn’t pay us a penny. The money flowed from us to them. They were prohibited, in writing, from selling, sharing, licensing, or doing anything at all with the data other than providing the service we hired them for.. and they operated under our supervision at all times. They didn’t care what was in the data - we reviewed, with journalists, the outputs to make sure it worked."
If this is true, it does seem that the government has mischaracterized what happened.
It sounds very reasonable. But it's also directly contradicted by the government information about this case, which was very specific even about the number of breaches:
> Our understanding is that some 700 individual cases, at least, were shared with the AI company. We have sought to understand what more may have been shared and who else may have been put at risk, but the mere fact that the agreement was breached in that way is incredibly serious.
> ... the original agreement that was reached between Courtsdesk and the previous Government made it clear that there should not be further sharing of the data with additional parties. It is one thing to share the data with accredited journalists who are subject to their own codes and who are expected to adhere to reporting restrictions, but Courtsdesk breached that agreement by sharing the information with an AI company.
(from https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2026-02-10/debates/037...)
When there is a risk of feeding sensitive data to the AI giants the first reaction should be to pull the plug. I'm impressed the government acted quickly and decisively for once. Maybe the company involved will think twice before entering an agreement with an AI company. Notice in the whole rant it is never mentioned which AI giant they were feeding.
This aligns with what all of the conspiracy theorists have been saying about the UK over the last year. Maybe there is something to it.
Everything aligns with internet conspiracy theories if you try hard enough.
I mean, sure.
But when the conspiracy involves lack of prosecution or inconsistent sentencing at scale and then the Ministry of Justice issues a blanket order to delete one of the best resources to look into those claims...? Significantly increases the legitimacy of the claims.
I assumed it was the usual conspiracy stuff up until this order.