P2P

45 I L T A N E T . O R G I n the United States, over 10 million people are arrested each year, with millions more issued summonses that draw them into the court system. If a court appearance is mandatory and the defendant fails to appear, an arrest warrant will be issued for even the most misdemeanor of offenses. This seemingly simple mistake has serious consequences, often escalating the original offense and placing that individual squarely where they do not want to be—inside the somewhat inescapable criminal justice system. Internationally, Russia and China follow the United States with the highest per capita incarceration rates. As courts around the world look to lesson caseloads due to COVID-19, as well as keep their prison populations down from low-level offenders, the use of (SMS) text messages is becoming increasingly popular as a means to notify and effectively keep defendants out of jail. International Use of SMS for Court Notifications As cited in the results of the Thematic report: Use of information technology in European courts (CEPEJ, 2016), after court proceedings begin, technology such as SMS is used in a number of European States to notify summons for hearings and pre-hearings. This study shows that half of the EU States utilize this option: "17 for all branches of law and ten others for individual branches." Statistics from the report highlight the equipment rate can vary considerably and can have a lasting impact on the quality and efficiency of the judicial system. For example, the equipment rate is 100 percent for only five States: Austria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland and Sweden. This means that for the remaining 10 States, summons notifications from the courts through a technology enhanced method is most utilized in civil cases, as nine out of 10 of these States have either fully or partially introduced these methods at the time of this study. Ukraine was the only exception. The study proclaims utilizing technology for notification of court proceedings can take a number of forms, such as a text message (SMS), email to the involved parties, or a specialized computer application to facilitate messaging for dedicated websites. This application provides a pre-notified username and password where court notices and summonses are securely stored. When taking a broad overview of all branches of law together, email is the preferred method of communicating notifications, just ahead of creating a specific application. For example, Lithuania notifies court users of summonses through a designated and secure portal, giving access only to those who have the pre-notified usernames and passwords. However, in Sweden, personal data protection is of the highest priority. To avoid security issues with private data sent over email, courts there have set up a secure private server for storing messages rather than sending them over insecure channels. In this instance, the recipient is sent an SMS message to gain access to the secure server and incorporates the more secure multi- factor authentication. In Slovenia, SMS messages are used exclusively for civil and/or commercial cases. Whereas in Ukraine, SMS is only used for criminal case notifications. In all these messaging deployments, security is a priority to ensure safe court updates and proceedings. The study also cites Turkey as having an "interesting example" of using SMS technology. In Turkey, the courts send summonses to hearings and pre-hearing appointments electronically in all branches of law by using SMS messages. Here, much like what we are seeing with court use of SMS messaging in the United States, a designated software program automatically sends lawyers and involved parties vital court information such as hearing dates, new developments and steps taken by judicial agencies and authorities on their case. In the United States this system is proving to have positive results without compromising privacy or security of involved parties.

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