Spell PACER backwards and you get RECAP, a no-cost alternative to the federal courts' electronic documents database. Its creator says the new service is "turning PACER around" with the goal of "build[ing] the nation's most comprehensive public archive of freely-available federal judicial records."

Though federal court officials are skittish about security, more than 7,000 downloads have been made since Princeton University's Center for Information Technology launched the site, www.recapthelaw.org, on Aug. 14.

Documents in RECAP's database are available at no cost, in contrast to the eight cents per page charged by PACER. Free court records are available elsewhere online at Web sites like justia.com and publicresource.org, but what sets RECAP apart is that it is self-populating. Any document accessed through PACER (short for Public Access to Court Electronic Records) is uploaded automatically to RECAP's online archive.

RECAP started out with more than a million documents, chiefly from the Southern District of New York (238,098), the District of Columbia (219,049), and the District of Massachusetts (217,315). New Jersey has about 5,000.

That represents a smidgeon of the more than 500 million documents that have been electronically filed with the courts. But documents are continually being added, and Stephen Shultze, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, who worked on RECAP, estimates that the hundreds of documents uploaded per day at first has grown to thousands.

RECAP is an add-on or plug-in to the Mozilla Firefox browser, which, like RECAP, is a free, open-source program.

That openness, according to the federal judiciary, is the source of possible danger. A notice posted Aug. 22 on the District of New Jersey's PACER log-in page points out that RECAP "can be freely obtained by anyone with Internet access and modified for benign or malicious purposes, such as facilitating unauthorized access to restricted or sealed documents."

The notice further warns users of the courts' case management and electronic case filing system (CM/ECF) "to be diligent about their computer security practices to ensure that documents are not inadvertently shared or compromised."

The District of New Mexico used stronger language on its PACER page, saying, "We strongly discourage you from using this plugin until the implications of its use are better understood."

For PACER users who get to use the system without charge, such as indigents, nonprofit groups and pro bono attorneys, the courts have gone further, banning their use of RECAP. "Any transfer of data obtained as the result of a fee exemption is prohibited unless expressly authorized by the court," states a notice on the judiciary Web site. "Therefore, fee-exempt PACER customers must refrain from the use of RECAP."

RECAP's site says such fears are unfounded because the program was designed to deactivate itself when a user logs into CM/ECF to file documents, including sealed ones, rather than merely accessing ones that are already public by way of PACER.

In addition, it is always clear when the RECAP program is enabled because the gray "R" icon in the lower right corner turns blue, says the site. Other steps taken to protect privacy include scanning for and suppressing Social Security numbers that the filer failed to redact as required and not allowing saerch engine indexing, RECAP claims.

Shultze admits some glitches had to be worked out the first week but describes them as bugs that interfered with uploading rather than the type that put security at risk.

Paul Alan Levy, of the public interest group Public Citizen, is suspicious of the courts' negative reaction. He suggested on the Public Citizen's Consumer Law & Policy blog that the judiciary was using scare tactics against RECAP to protect its PACER revenue stream.

Levy e-mailed the Administrative Office of the Courts with his concerns and got a call from Michel Ishakian, chief of the Public Access and Records Management Division, who assured him the notices were not meant to discourage use of RECAP but only to remind ECF filers to be careful about security.

"We do not make a profit," says Ishakian, adding that "by law, we have to put all the money back into the program." PACER's revenues -- $76.8 million for the 2008 fiscal year -- pay for system operation, maintenance and upgrades, with any unspent revenues, $44.5 million in 2008, carried over to the next year.

Ishakian notes that PACER users are not billed until they run up charges of $10 or more in a given year, which allows them 125 free pages. Between the $10 of free access and the fee-exempt users, almost half of all PACER users pay nothing, she says.

A pilot program begun in 2007 to provide free PACER at 16 libraries in 14 states -- including Rutgers Law Library in Newark -- is on hold for reasons that Ishakian declines to discuss except to say the program needed to be evaluated but she hopes to get it going again.

As for RECAP, Ishakian says its Aug. 14 launch caught her office by surprise. Now that she's had a chance to examine the code, she has recommended but not required that courts provide PACER users with the form of notice being used on the New Jersey site.

The bottom line, says Ishakian, is "when people pay for access, they can do with those documents what they will."

RECAP user Joel Rothman, of Arnstein and Lehr in West Palm Beach, Fla., says he downloaded it after reading about it on boingboing.net and is using it in his intellectual property practice and to look up cases for a blog he writes. Rothman received an e-mail from the Southern District of Florida court on Aug. 27, with Ishakian's warning, which he terms "100 percent incorrect."