"The Court is Capable of Maintaining Its Own Website"
BY Nancy Scola | Friday, May 1 2009
Good to know. In the comments, Tim Cullen points out that Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer were up on Capitol Hill last week to ask a House Appropriations subcommittee for, among other things, funding to bring the Supreme Court website at SupremeCourtUS.gov in-house. The site, which enjoys 18 million hits a year, is currently housed with the Government Printing Office -- which means content from the court has to be routed through GPO for posting. That arrangement worked well enough for a while, said Thomas and Breyer, but the court is ready to run its own website. To that end, the court is asking Congress for some web development money (pdf):
The Court can move its Website in-house through a relatively small expenditure of funds. This initiative would require $303,000 for purchasing additional hardware, software, network components, and electronics to support the Court’s Website. It would also require $418,000 to fund four new full-time information technology specialist positions: one new information technology (IT) specialist who will be the first point of contact for all technical and user issues; a security analyst/auditor who will monitor Website activity, analyze and respond to incidents and implement security enhancements; a software developer who will develop, support, and administer the Website’s software applications, and a network administrator who will support the Website network and server environment. The Court would also need $78,000 to hire a composition specialist to prepare and post data on the Website.
Tim also points us to a funny/awkward moment when subcommittee member Rep. John Culberson made the argument in favor of court transparency to Justices Thomas and Breyer by pulling out his pocket video camera and livestreaming via Qik (noted previously on the Sunlight blog):
Man, to be able to read Thomas and Breyer's minds at that moment...