@Humpleupagus government use of captchas (and analytics) hosted by third parties never sat well with me. these are government services, there's no other game in town and in many cases I am more or less forced to make use of them

they also "protect" the weirdest things against "bots" I mean if it were just the final submission page for various forms I would at least understand the motivation but often it's random informational pages or even worse something that's ALREADY BEHIND A LOGIN WTF

although in this case I suspect the entire thing stems from that one guy who scraped more or less all the available cases in the entire US and then (iirc) made them freely available and indexed things like names. but public is public so he did nothing wrong as far as I'm concerned