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First he tackled the SEC and got his way. Now Carl Malamud has targeted the U.S. Justice Department, demanding that it stop using its vast storehouses of data as a profit center and give it, not sell it, to the public. “How can we be a nation of laws if the laws are locked up behind a cash register, stamped with an unwarranted copyright assertion and then shrink-wrapped in a license agreement, creating a private parcel from the public domain?” And just as Malamud pushed the SEC in the early 1990’s by putting the agency’s financial data online for free, he already has uploaded over 20-million court documents for public access.

In an inspiring speech at last month’s Gov 2.0 Summit, Malamud spoke of the value of the Justice Department’s case records and of the insurmountable cost barrier to accessing them – for school, advocacy groups, researchers and for individual litigants and citizens.

To level the playing field, a group at Princeton University developed a Firefox add-on called RECAP. RECAP stands for “recapture” and is the name of the Justice Department’s fee-based site, PACER, spelled backwards. And just like the SEC’s original response, they’re not so happy.

Here’s how it works: Once a customer loads RECAP and then goes to the Justice Department site, documents they download (for a fee) are automatically sent to a public Internet repository. Other RECAP/PACER customers are then able to check whether the documents they’re looking for are already available free from the Internet repository.

We applaud Malamud’s new crusade. When he first targeted the SEC, it was extremely difficult for the layman to access the EDGAR database of information on public companies. After creating a very popular public site using EDGAR data, Malamud shut it down and encouraged his loyal users to complain to the SEC, which bowed to the pressure. “It was our pleasure to turn all our source code over to the government—and even configure the SEC’s routers and loan them hardware,” said Malamud. “It was a service we gladly performed at no charge as part of our mission as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.”

Perhaps we’ll see a replay when the pressure mounts for the U.S. Judiciary to open its records. After all, PACER stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records. The massive database includes case and docket information from Federal Appellate, District and Bankruptcy courts, and the U.S. Party/Case Index and includes links to all courts, which maintain their own databases of case information.

A copy of Malamud’s speech is available here, but we highly recommend you watch and hear this passionate citizen deliver his concise and rousing speech about government of the people, for the people and by the people.

The theme of the Gov 2.0 Summit where he delivered it to warm applause was “Government as platform”, which, said Malamud, “means exposing the core information that makes government function and that information is of tremendous economic value to society. Government information—patents, corporate filings, agriculture research, maps, weather, medical research—is the raw material of innovation, creating a wealth of business opportunities that drive our economy forward.