Today on The Lede, we have a contribution from John Schwartz, who wrote in Friday’s New York Times about Pacer, the Public Access to Court Electronic Records database run by the federal government. Mr. Schwartz focused on efforts by two activists “to push the court records system into the 21st century — by simply grabbing enormous chunks of the database and giving the documents away, to the great annoyance of the government.”

Here is more on those efforts, and a look at some of the other kinds of information available through the same Web site, Public.Resource.org:

Carl Malamud has worked crazy hours to push the courts into cleaning up the privacy violations he has found in the Pacer documents he has downloaded. That saga is best told in the exchanges of e-mailed notices, some of them pretty darned testy, that he has published on his Web site.

The site is a trove of other government documents he has made accessible to the public, including an enormous database of tax returns from nonprofit groups, state and local building codes and regulations, images from the Smithsonian Institution, and earlier work he did with material from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Patent and Trademark Office. Those can all be found through links from the main page of his site, Public.Resource.org.

Also on that site are links to what Mr. Malamud calls FedFlix — a growing archive of many films originally produced by the federal government, which he’s been uploading to the Internet Archive and a YouTube channel.

The 524 films in the FedFlix catalogue so far include such gems as “Sludge Management,” “Welcome to the Bureau of Prisons!” “ Foreign Lottery Scams,” “(Motorola Presents) Atomic Attack,” battle footage and training films from World War II and Vietnam, and the Cold War classic “Duck and Cover,” which is embedded here:

In the article, The Times mentions a Stanford drop-out and entrepreneur by the name of Aaron Swartz. In the technology world, Mr. Swartz is kind of a big deal, as the saying goes. At the age of 14, he had a hand in writing RSS, the now-ubiquitous software used to syndicate everything from blog posts to news headlines directly to subscribers.

Mr. Swartz came across the online manifesto that Carl Malamud published about freeing Pacer documents, in which Mr. Malamud wrote: “The law contains the rules that govern our society. We just want to be able to read our own user manual.”

In his call to action, Mr. Malamud pointed to the free trial Pacer was offering and called for a “Thumb Drive Corps” to go to libraries with small-but-capacious “thumb drives,” plug them into computers, download as many court documents as they could, and send them to Mr. Malamud so that he could translate them them into a format that Google’s search software can read and put them on line.

Mr. Malamud’s appeal evidently inspired Mr. Swartz to do it one better. (As we said, he knows his way around a keyboard.)

He approached Steve Schultze, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard who had found Pacer cumbersome to search. “The issue was just sort of a pet peeve in the back of my mind for a while,” Mr. Schultze said. He had written a small program that would crawl through the Pacer database and download documents automatically. He showed his bit of software — the code would fit on a single typewritten page — to Mr. Swartz, who set about debugging and improving it.

Then Mr. Swartz had a friend in California take a thumb drive with the “scraping” software on it to one of the free-trial libraries, sign up for an account and upload the program.

And that is how, over the course of six weeks, Mr. Swartz was able to download 780 gigabytes of data — 19,856,160 pages of text — from Pacer. The caper grabbed an estimated 20 percent of the entire PACER network, with a focus on the most recent cases from almost every circuit.

When the government abruptly shut down the free public program, Mr. Malamud saw it as a sign of possible trouble ahead. “Who shuts down a 17-site national program with no notice whatsoever?” he recalled thinking. “I immediately saw the potential for overreaction by the courts.”

Mr. Malamud told Mr. Swartz: “You need to talk to a lawyer. I need to talk to a lawyer.” Mr. Swartz recalled, “I had this vision of the Feds crashing down the door, taking everything away.”

He said he locked the deadbolt on his door, lay down on the bed for a while, and then called his mother.

But when lawyers told Mr. Malamud and Mr. Swartz that they appeared to have broken no laws, Mr. Malamud sent Mr. Swartz a message saying, “You should just lay low for a while.”

Mr. Swartz said that he waited for a couple of months, but “nobody came knocking on my door. I started breathing a little more easily.”