n.the principle that private information in public records is effectively protected from disclosure as the result of practical barriers to accessEPIC 2003While court files always have been public, they were considered to enjoy “practical obscurity.” That is, the records were stored in such an inaccessible fashion that only the determined and resourceful could obtain them. To this day, most records probably are stored at the local level on different types of media (paper, magnetic tape) and are indexed with varying degrees of accuracy and usefulness.
Notes
Practical barriers to access include travel to view the record, the passage of time, and the limits of indexing. When public records are accessible on the internet, those barriers are diminished.
