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FBI Investigates Liberator of Court Records
eldavojohn writes "Federal court documents aren't free to the public, they cost $0.08/page through a system called PACER. During a period when the US Government Printing Office was trying out free access at a number of courthouses around the US, a 22-year-old programmer named Aaron Swartz installed a small PERL script at the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals library in Chicago — a script that uploaded a public document every three seconds to Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service. Swartz then donated over 19 million documents to public.resource.org. That's when the FBI took interest in the programmer responsible for this effort and ran his name through government databases. How did he discover this? His FOIA was approved, of course, and he received the FBI's partially redacted report on himself. The public.resource.org database was later merged with that of the RECAP Firefox extension, which we discussed a couple of months back." Update: 10/06 18:22 GMT by KD: Timothy Lee pointed out that the summary as originally posted garbled the Swartz / RECAP connection. Improved now.
The GOVERNMENT wants to be able to ingest money on this. Huge, creamy, swaths of glorious money.
Man makes public documents available, for free, to the public. Obviously, this sort of thing cannot be allowed to continue.
if you look too closely at the gov't, they'll look too closely at you.
Seriously, as far as I know, all this material is a matter of public record anyway. It should already be freely available. I've used bulk.resource.org primarily to read opinions of appeals court cases, and it's fantastic to have all that information freely available online. The FBI should be investigating the turrurists instead.
Moral of the story is that if you don't pay 8 cent duplication fees and you know how to use PERL the FBI could come a knockin'?
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Looks like the system is working a lot better than I could've expected... though the bit in the FBI report valuing the data downloaded at $1.5 million is a little vexing. Government data has value, sure, but it should be shared widely so it can't be lost.
The Schwartz makes anything possible!
Support my political activism on Patreon.
... this kid has really given power to the people!
Not.
Why does the current generation of kids seem to think just about everything should be free no matter how little it costs? Are government bodies not entitled to charge a nominal fee for services rendered?
Now get off my lawn!
Install unauthorized software on a government, or business, computer anywhere and see what sort of response you get. This fellow installed an unauthorized perl script on a computer in a federal court (okay, the library thereof). I'm not surprised that the government decided to take a look at things. I'd be disappointed if they had not done so. DUH.
linquendum tondere
Congress could easily allocate enough money to make PACER a free service, maybe even get some contractors to write a solid web service API so government agencies and the public could easily access the service.
But they don't... because in so many cases they want the public to pay for services like this out of pocket so that they have revenue to spend on others.
It disgusts me that on the local level, there's money for welfare programs and all sorts of other crap, but no money to actually pay for a full-time fire fighting service in most communities.
The public really needs to demand that core services (defense, police, fire fighters, courts, transportation) be funded first and funded generously, and that the social services be funded with the scraps that are left over from the core budget and user fees.
AARON SWARTZ would have known his access was unauthorized because it was with a password that did not belonged to him.
Proof-reading. A valuable tool.
The disappearing pencil trick. Let me show you it.
((((19,856,160 x 3 sec)/60 sec)/60 min)/24 hours)/365 days = 1.9 years
entirely doable
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What the /. summary doesn't say is that Aaron used a user name and password of the library to run his script from an outside location. I would guess the FBI closed the case because 1) he got a lawyer and and refused the interview. 2) most likely the librarian had lax password handling that didn't specifically say he shouldn't have use it at home.
On the other hand if he did something like grab the password from a config file or unencode a URL with the credentials embedded I wouldn't feel bad if he landed in court.
Wired article:
> Swartz decided to use the trial to grab as many of the public court records as he could and, perversely, release them to the public.
How is that perverse? 'Ironically' would perhaps fit, but using the word perverse seems, eh, perverse :)
And 20 million documents, one every 3 seconds should take 1.9 years. However, the wired article says it was done in a few weeks. What am I missing?
I love how they wanted his help to "fix" problem.... mainly how to get him in jail (incriminate himself).
The most likely explanation for this is that some FBI employees who were ignorant to the fact that this was legal decided to run his name through their database and probably figured out he wasn't some evil-doer stealing court records. Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
I want to go on state red full-on black helicopter paranoia rant, but before that, can someone tell how probable/unusual for FBI to look into your record, say, in comparison to a no-name newspaper reporter, for example.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
So, did he have a script that automatically uploaded this FOIA on himself to a public server?
This is what the FBI is for? They see something strange, investigate, and find that it's nothing. I didn't RTFA, but nowhere in the summary above did it mention any charges being pressed. AFAIC, this is exactly what the FBI is there for.
I'm for once happy with the actions of the government here.
I wonder if the mere act of requesting your FBI file will cause them to open one. I'm sure it must be of interest to the Bureau that somebody is curious what the FBI has on them.
So much for "unreasonable search and seizure" protection. Amerika Da Free! Next stop "your travel papers and ID card"!
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Court records investigate F.B.I. !
Yours in Desnogorsk,
Kilgore T.
Pacer is worse than presented. Itâ(TM)s not just 8 cents a page for downloaded, itâ(TM)s 8 cents a page for any page you pull into your browser. They consider any Web page you surf on their site in search of the legal document to be a âoedownloadedâ document.
I work at a newspaper and one of my reporters ran up a $250 bill with Pacer checking many times a day to see if an important local opinion were issued. When it was, it was just 4 pages long; I expected to pay 32 cents. Instead they said we owed over $250. We never paid it and consequently no longer use Pacer.
Revenu stream under threat?
Favor from Washington...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Man makes free public documents available, for free, to the public. Obviously, this sort of thing cannot be allowed to continue.
Fixed that for you.
Perl is only an acronym in certain contexts and PERL is a shibboleth! Fortunately, you can load PERL with this module: http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Inline::PERL
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
I disagree: "defense" as is implemented in the USA is NOT a core service. It is a tool for some (not you, a simple citizen) to gain power on others inside and outside of the USA.
I would guess that some sort of file is created, how else do they keep track of and coordinate the progress and work done to satisfy the request? Said file would have to be associated with the original requester since they have to know who to send the results to. - duh
I would put things in a different order - education being first. Others would have their own order. I know something needs to be changed, but who decides?
...the parent and grandparent post have said everything that needs to be said.
The public really needs to demand that core services (defense, police, fire fighters, courts, transportation) be funded first and funded generously, that the social services be funded next, and that corporate interests & pork barrel kickbacks & empire building be funded with the scraps that are left over from the core budget and user fees.
clarified that a bit for you
"social services" really ought to be handled by private organizations like they used to. The government ought to stick to protecting the borders, punishing evildoers (you know, like rapists and murderers and burglars, not "criminals" like stoners and crack heads), and maybe building roads. That's it. Then, the budget problems would go away, and there would be no need for oppressive taxes. Everything can then be funded through import tariffs.
Hey, why didn't our founding fathers consider that? Oh right, that's what they intended in the first place. The problem is bleeding hearts had the though "wouldn't it be nice if government could provide __________ - for the children" and after having done that like eleventy trillion times we have a national debt that isn't $11.x trillion, which is horrifying enough, but really more like $60 TRILLION dollars when every liability (social security, bonds, etc.) are all accounted for. That doesn't include states' debts either.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I think the public understands core services just fine. They just consider "social services" which feed kids and families and support the disadvantaged to be a core service.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
What is unauthorized about using a program to do what the user could do manually?
Select - File - Save As (repeat 1 million times)
-or-
mput list_of_files remote_storage
And how can you call something unauthorized when there is obviously a perl interpreter installed on the computer and the user is given permission to run it. Now if the user rooted the box to install perl and/or given himself permission to run perl scripts, then he did something nefarious.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
There's also the (rapidly eroding) question of "accessibility of free information" - when "freely available information" required a trip to the county courthouse, a human to human request for the book, a delay of some minutes while the book was retrieved, a $1 per page copying fee, etc. the freely available information was still relatively safe from broad-scale data-trawling, and many in this great country have come to expect those de-facto protections to continue.
If you are a judge who is thoroughly documented in those 18M records, it is possible that you might not like any Tom, Dick, or Harry to be able to run correlations on your case files - not that an honest, above board judge would have anything to hide.... but even the innocent can look suspicious if you gather enough data on them.
I love to use my local city, Atlanta, as an example of what is so wrong with government.
When faced with a budget shortfall what got cut? Firefighters and policemen. In fact they went after the stations in areas of most resistance to new taxation.
What was kept? The over loaded with cronies corrupt city hall. Oh, they went after teachers too and kept the huge administrative sections of the school system; again stuffed with friends.
The larger system is just the same.
Instead now its all about how much of someone Else's money can you give me.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
false dichotomies, misrepresented reality, etc.
nobody in their right mind is thinking of shortchanging something like defense spending for the sake of welfare recipients. this never enters into any governmental spending calculus as it is blindingly obvious something like police are more important to absolutely everyone involved in decision making. if spending is not at the level you think it should be, it has to do with someone thinking less is needed for that particular spending allotment, in a vacuum of any other consideration, not because someone needs a battered women's shelter instead. you present a false choice in your comment that never exists in the real world
furthermore social services are a bargain: every dollar spent on welfare and healthcare and other social services is one less guy breaking into your house or mugging you on the street, because they can't feed their kids, or because they can't keep their job with a broken arm (that they can't afford to fix). it's cheaper to fix their arm. you will pay for social services one way or another. the idea of not spending on healthcare for the poor means the problem just goes away is ignorance: every untreated case of diabetes winding up in the emergency room, every case of tuberculosis untreated resulting in your children catching it, every untreated case of hypertension resulting in a heart attack for the family breadwinner who now leaves a familty to fend on their own: you pay for that in the form of a sick society, and that affects your bottom line and the balance in your checking account, whether you are blind to how you are not an island in this world or not
when you live in a rich society, you in turn are rich. when you live a poor society you in turn are poor. the money that exists in your pocket is not something devoid of any relationship to everything around you, the money in your pocket is abstract expression of the wealth around you. you pay for basic simple social services, or the money in your pocket is worth less and is less in quantity. that you can't see that is a defect in your perception. unfortunately, so many people take this defect in perception as the basis for an entire philosophy of life that assumes they exist apart from their society
it isn't about individual responsibility and self-initiative, and those who don't have that having less socioeconomic status then you, it isn't about rewarding the undeserving. it is about giving the genuinely undeserving the bottom of the basement standard of living, so they don't wind up a cancer in your society that rots your entire society, which in turn impoverishes you. think of social services as an investment that pays dividends that are indirect. apparently beyond your ability to understand. and not making that investment resulting in the loss of far more of your money than you spend on basic social services
the idea is freedom right? freedom from poverty deciding issues of basic human dignity right? oh yeah... durrr...
but you shouldn't respond to me, you should get into politics. listen to any senator arguing out of ignorant resistance to change, and we see exactly the same sort of false choices and red herrings. you have a bright future in ignorant ideological grandstanding and fearmongering: go for it dude
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The feds also checked Swartz’s Facebook page, ran his name against the Department of Labor to figure out his work history, looked for outstanding warrants and prior convictions, checked to see if his mobile phone number had ever come up in a federal wiretap or pen register, and checked him against the records in a private data broker’s database.
I found this to be some nice insight to what initial procedure the FBI takes towards one of its citizens.
Or, as the FBI report put it, the public records were "exfiltrated."
The Government Printing Office abruptly shut down the free trial and reported to the FBI that PACER was "compromised," the FBI file reveals.
"AARON SWARTZ would have known his access was unauthorized because it was with a password that did not belonged [sic] to him," reads the FBI report summarizing the judiciary’s position.
Swartz says his script only ran on the library computer. It didnt use a password at all, but used the PACER authentication cookie set in the PC’s browser.
Also, for all of you "I have nothing to hide crowd" look how hard the FBI tried to imply this kid was a threat for sharing records that were not private or sealed. You think they will be any less forgiving on you? Granted the way he went about it was not the best approach, but it shows the FBI’s overzealous mentality to make an example out of you.
A dashing rogue, and I don't even swing that way.
Incompetent malice by Swartz maybe. You don't go downloading those amounts of data from someone at that pace without at least a heads up to the admins. It's rude, it's expensive for the host and it endangers service to others and you shouldn't do it. I know netiquette is dead, but this should just be common sense.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
"flamebait" isn't supposed to be used as "I disagree"
Let us give them our medical records
I am sure nothing bad will happen.
I mean they only want government healthcare for the best of reasons.
More money into education? How about some legislation that makes publisher deals illegal, put some standards on what can appear in texts (no more of this 45% of each page is "related notes" and "bubbles" which aren't actually course material, more just ADHD compliant crap to occupy kids minds with web links and tidbits of information which they are likely to never find useful). Why don't they make this "edition" madness illegal, so new editions each year with less than a 0.5% change in content (generally adding a few pages and maybe changing a few problems) does not warrant charging the same excessive price for a new book, when the edition 1 costs ~20/book while edition 9 costs ~150/book, while overall the information is the same (ok look, Algebra material for students in highschool has not changed in many years, why should we need new "editions" ?).
No, the public education system is too corrupt, both on a grade school and even in colleges. State mandated "standardized tests" should be banned federally because they inhibit learning by setting a bar where students "ought to be" and stifling the learning of students who are exceptional while punishing those who just aren't quite "average" (albeit the bar falls each year to match the 70% mark, or so they hope). They also promote the teaching style known as "teach the test" which benefits no one, even if the scores for the school on these standardized tests goes up marginally.
Before we hand cash over to public schools to waste on overpriced books, study materials for standardized tests, and propaganda, we need to actually REFORM public education. The money would be better spent elsewhere until it can be shown that it will actually benefit students and not administration.
Destruction of revenue, that is.
If I have something of value and Person Q can take it, "liberate it" and make it available for free to the world, many people view it as Person Q's moral obligation to do so.
Notwithstanding that in doing so deprives me of revenue. Income. Livelihood. Food, clothing and shelter.
There might be some people that still pay for access even though it is available for free. Most people would term these do-gooders as "suckers" because they are wasting their own hard-earned money. Money that could be put to use buying something that isn't available for free.
Of course, when the owner of the material of value is the government with nearly unlimited investigative and enforcement powers that they are going to be significantly interested in this "liberation". So interested as to likely make life hell for the liberator. The owner of the liberated material is likely to consider this plain and simple theft, not much different than a hand reaching into their pocket for their wallet. The effect is about the same.
Clearly, what we have seen is there are three levels of owners of liberated materials. The first level is you and me - nobody. Our ability to deal with this is zero. The anonymous nature of the Internet makes it nearly impossible to really track down someone unless you already know their identity or can connect them with a serious crime. The crime in this case is too trivial for anyone to bother with. Try to make sure that you either have nothing of value to liberate or that what you have is physical goods that cannot be liberated through the Internet.
The second level is the RIAA. You might get lucky and get sued by them, but probably not. If you aren't sharing outbound they have virtually no way to track you down without the cooperation of your ISP, which they are loath to do. But if you do get caught in their net you will have nothing but trouble. Fortunately, getting caught in their net is very, very rare. The reward is so much higher than the risk that nearly everyone takes advantage of the materials liberated from the RIAA's grasp.
Obviously, the third level is the government. Do not liberate from the government. You will eventually be found and made to pay in some fashion.
Sure, it would be nice if there were rules and people followed them. The rule seems to be to take what you can get away with. Grab all you can, while you can. Of course, this rule turns the world on its ear and results in eventual anarchy. But that will be our children's problem, not ours.
No less than public court records, from a location where it was free to access them at that time. They just couldn't comprehend so many downloads, so quickly. If the free "trial" period had lasted years and everything had been downloaded over that time, no one would have given it a second thought. Government stupidity indeed.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
He placed an unauthorized PERL script on a government owned computer. And the government doesn't like that. What a surprise.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
Why are police, school, transportation, and fire services 'core' and say...health care isn't.
I say let people deal with their own damn fires! Private fire departments can do the job better than government run ones! I sick and tired of subsidizing other peoples police and fire needs.
And dont even get me started on schools!! /end sarcasm
No, the guy didn't do anything wrong. He did something a little strange though. Why is he downloading files at a rate so much faster than he could possibly read them? Is there some secret government information that he's noticed that shouldn't be available to him? Might as well check the guy out, If I was the Fed who noticed this, I'd feel pretty stupid if the guy did turn out to be doing something illegal that an basic background investigation could have uncovered.
As it turns out, he was harmless, and the FBI dropped it. How was the FBI to determine this without at least doing a cursory check?
Education first?
After all this looking overseas for help to improve our healthcare, no one else noticed that we are also wildly overspending on education?
For me, it's all about efficiency. I think you fund the programs that are proven to be working first. Currently, our system does the exact opposite. Oh, transportation is working great. Let's shift some money away from that, and pour it down a drain. The end result is that nothing works.
You don't fix problems with money. You fix problems with solutions, and then you fund those solutions.
I am sure the eleventy trillion dollars spent on an unnecessary war didn't have anything to do with our debt. Yeah, it was all the "bleeding hearts" that drive it up to massive levels with social services. *Rolls eyes*
Unauthorized by whom? The librarian? So he broke a rule, maybe. So what? Just because your step-dad abused you doesn't mean the world actually works that way.
Except this would remove all barriers to abuse. I agree that a private citizen should be allowed free access to public records, but even as I say that, I have in mind an individual looking at physical records somehow relevant to an issue in his life. That's a pretty small set of documents.
Then I think about the scenes of investigators carting box after box of documents out of some office. Or about lawyers sorting through hundreds of thousands of pages. It's really easy to write a query that returns an ungodly amount of irrelevant information, and a page fee has the effect of forcing the requester to craft a good search. Removing that fee makes the government pay, in bandwidth and server time, for boneheaded, uninformative requests. It wouldn't be too hard to write a query that would return the entire library of congress, and then some.
Perhaps the FBI should send all their subjects annual reports the way the Social Security Administration sends out annual status reports.
Perhaps if perps knew just how much "they" knew it may dissuade further action that would land them in the "big house"?
Hope is the currency of fools
Aaron Swartz is a brilliant developer who knows just about any language worth knowing.
I want to know why the fuckface chose PERL. That's what really annoys me about this.
Yeah, it was all the "bleeding hearts" that drive it up to massive levels with social services. *Rolls eyes*
But they sure aren't doing anything to STOP it now, are they?
Most communities do not need a full time firefighting service, because most communities are not on fire full time. In large cities, even medium sized cities, absolutely necessary, sure. But smaller towns and villages simply don't need a full-time force to deal with the occasional fire.
PACER has a little RECAP warning (at least as of last week). I forget most of it, but part of it warns users that it is open source and may contain bad software in it. I thought that was pretty funny.
You get the sense that the judges don't like it one bit, but they are being very circumspect in their language.
Maybe the judges are letting the FBI do their talking for them . . .
There's a notice on the site - here or as a featured link on there home page - that says fee exempt customers are prohibited from releasing documents to the public. It didn't say anything about releasing them if you did pay for them.
Aside from the silly idea of saying you can't make public documents public, are they saying you can only release these documents if you payed for them?
My guess is that was the language available on the system.
Because the movements of your car are a matter of public record anyway and should be freely available IN BULK SEARCHABLE FORM, right?
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/09/30/1321214/Massachusetts-Police-Cant-Place-GPS-On-Autos-Without-Warrant
Probably because Perl was already installed on the system so he didn't have to install anything else? Perl would make something like this pretty easy, too. Of course, this being /., I didn't RTFA yet.
"social services" really ought to be handled by private organizations like they used to. The government ought to stick to protecting the borders, punishing evildoers (you know, like rapists and murderers and burglars, not "criminals" like stoners and crack heads), and maybe building roads. That's it. Then, the budget problems would go away, and there would be no need for oppressive taxes. Everything can then be funded through import tariffs.
Hey, why didn't our founding fathers consider that? Oh right, that's what they intended in the first place.
Many if yur founding fathers didn't have a problem with slavery, either, and in this "golden age of liberty" that you describe, being poor didn't mean having to eat in McDonalnds - it meant not having to eat at all, and dying from starvation or disease if you don't have the cash (and surprisingly many people didn't).
How about an "auto-post" option for the RECAP Firefox plugin? Then, get the librarians to turn it on so that each free download is automatically posted to RECAP.
And no need for 9/10ths of this overgrown cancer of a gov't, either. And maybe it wouldn't be so busy hiding what it does if it didn't DO so much. Let gov't do basic infrastructure and let We The People manage the rest, we'd all be better off.
BTW $60 trillion divided by 300M people comes out to $200,000 for every man, woman, and child. Why aren't all those poor people rich? Oh, maybe because public welfare doesn't work? D'oh!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
You actually mean less than one trillion right? Less than two percent of our total national debt?
I'm not saying it was a good use of our money, and I could spend all day naming things I would rather see it spent on (or, you know, I wouldn't mind keeping a little more of what I earn), but I'm tired of seeing people perpetuating this idea that the wars are directly responsible for a large portion of our debt.
I got the Down side - you see there are two sides to every Schwartz.
Why in the fuck the system can only serve a request every 3 seconds. And that having that much traffic hurts performance.
What does it send off a fax to a room full of people who then find it, and type it up for you and send it back via vacuum tube? WTF....
oogly boogly!
The trouble is that defense is funded overgenerously and everybody else gets squeezed.
according to any serious study that's ever been done
"So, in other words, I should have to pay people off (through threat of force) to keep them from breaking into my house and stealing my property?"
yes, this statement is 100% accurate. why don't you come to grips with reality?
you have poor people who live near you. you can give them the bare essentials to live, or you can give them nothing, and they will take it from you, because they need to feed themselves. this is reality all over the globe. compare the societies that have welfare to those that don't. you tell me which is the poorer societies. if you lived in those societies who do nothing for the poor, you would be poorer, not richer. because the cash in your pocket is a reflection of the wealth around you. do you understand this simple fact?
you pay, one way or another for those who are impoverished around you. welfare is just the cheaper way to do it. you don't want to pay welfare because you think the choice is between paying welfare and paying nothing. no, the choice is between paying welfare or paying for a new television set after your place is broken into
what is it about your thinking that makes you unable to understand this simple choice that has always existed? in all of history, in every society in every culture: those societies that take care of their weaker members are further enriched, in greater amounts than what they pay
you think poor people just disappear into the ether? you think their problems aren't yours? proactively do something to help those in need in your society, or your society experiences problems that begin to affect your bottom line. simple truth, simple choice. your entire way of thinking seems dependent on a sense of isolation from society, when in fact you are part of it. and the more you contribute to it, the more dividends you receive from it. ignore how the health of society affects your bottom line, and you get less money in your pocket
the only real poverty going on here, in the end, is in your mind and your inability to perceive these simple facts
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The Denver Mayor is cutting police funding (nearly 100 police will be laid off), and asking for 2.3 million to build 500 homes for the homeless. http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/21210487/detail.html http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/20659996/detail.html http://www.denverpost.com/election08/ci_13249592
Yeah, especially when he could have written it in Perl.
It's not a bloody theorem prover, it's a spider. That's the sort of thing perl is made for.
and of course, those decisions are fused at the hip right?
its impossible in your mind that the decision to pay less for police was made independently of the need for more for homeless shelters, right?
nah, the mayor was of course thinking "i want drugs and crime to spread unchecked on the innocent hardworking citizens of denver while the homeless get free palatial suites at the hilton"
see? that's some good demagoguery i wrote there
maybe i should just stop trying to fight for truth and get into your game of ignorant fearmongering
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
it was a 1-line PERL script and the FBI and NSA are still trying to figure out everything it does.
Nullius in verba
Do you actually understand what Perl is? Or did you just try to use it some time and didn't like it?
Perl is a very old (it gets updated, obviously) server scripting language that has been pretty much standard on all unix based servers for 20 years now (guesstimate there). The court system's document database is almost certainly a Unix based system.
Since he can obviously easily run a Perl script on the government machine by using the tools on the machine itself (thereby not illegally installing software on it) to automate the task. Seriously, I doubt this task was more than a line or two of Perl, what moron would use anything else?
Seriously, it's using the right tool for the job. Just because you don't like a scripting language does not mean it is not the best language to use in a given situation. Obviously this guy has the programming know-how and the flexible skill-set to actually use the best tool for a job, rather than bitch about a language he may or may not like.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Bah! I should have previewed.
Damnit, I hate fragments.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Your elementary knowledge of how markets function would be laughable if it wasn't so dangerous.
Just to be clear, the opinions issued by the Federal Courts of Appeal are all available free of charge from the various court web pages. You never have to pay to understand the law of the land or see the latest court opinion.
However, docketing sheets, procedural orders, etc. are available (i) free of charge in hard copy format at the court house, or (ii) electronically through the PACER system at a nominal per-page cost (currently 8 cents).
I just want people to be clear that court opinions are, and always have been, available free of charge.
Seriously? LOOK at the US Budget some time. Military spending is over twice what social services is, and more than the E.U, Russia, and China COMBINED. Provisions for that are just as Constitutional as social services spending: the elastic and the public welfare clause. Not only a math, fact, and civics fail, but also history and common sense fail.
Good job. Jackass.
maybe i should just stop trying to fight for truth
yes, maybe you should... at least until you calm down and not take a few newspaper links as a personal attack.
the idea of communism is that everyone should be as poor as its poorest member
the ideal society is a meritocracy, right? that you receive from hard work the right to a good life. that to reward those who are lazy loitering useless souls as much as you reward those who work hard, ruins any reason to work hard, right?
i'm not asking for communism, i'm asking for a meritocracy with social safety nets. you seem equate social safety nets with communism. this is classic demagoguery
your false dichotomy is that social safety nets are anathema to the meritocracy. but you can have a meritocracy with social safety nets. i'm not asking for the homeless to live in palaces, i'm asking for them to have heat in the winter and food on the plate. those who work hard are rewarded with good life far beyond those bare bones of existence. so there is plenty of reason to work hard and take initiative. its just that in a society with social safety nets, if you don't work hard, you live a miserable life, rather than freezing to death in a society with no social safety nets. and social safety nets in turn represents less people desperate enough to turn to crime to support themselves since society won't give them the simplest of basics. in fact, the costs of crime in a society without social safety nets are more expensive than the safety nets. if you are lazy and without initiative and without personal responsibility, you don't deserve middle class perks. but you also don't deserve no health care and an early death, especially when preventative care for things like hypertension and diabetes is so cheap. treating these people with a heart attack or amputation in the emergency room is far more expensive. and then you have to deal with the poor family with the breadwinner dead
furthermore, plenty of those who are rich are rich because they enjoy income from defects in the imperfect marketplace where they are rewarded for doing nothing. furthermore, plenty who are poor are poor for sins their fathers committed, and are in fact good people who would do well in the middle class if only that pesky broken arm wouldn't prevent them working (since they have no healthcare, they can't afford to fix it). free market fundamentalists and libertarians fail to see how life isn't really a meritocracy, that inevitable structural defects constantly reward the rich for doing nothing, and punish others for simply being born poor. in fact, if life is going to be a meritocracy, you need a strong governmental presence to enforce the rules of the game, and correct these inevitable spontaneous defects in the marketplace. in fact, left to its own devices, the market falls to pieces, it bubbles and pops, bubble and pops. a "free" market needs a strong governmental police presence to stay truly free
and please, don't give me the bullshit about charities. its always those who are asking to contribute the least to society who refer to charities in the hypothetical as the safety net. charities of course they will never contribute to. as if those who are espousing a philosophy of "i got mine, sucks to be you" are bountiful cornucopias of giving. no, they are blind selfish assholes who can't understand how the money in their pocket comes from the health of the society they live in. we need social safety nets precisely because so many people like you who espouse a philosophy of selfishness and will never will donate to charity
please, i await your response, where you insist you are bountiful giver to charity. and then i await your next sentence in which you espouse the meritocracy without social safety nets, where if you have nothing, you probably deserve it. pffffffft
communism != social safety nets. social safety nets != destruction of meritocracy
please make a fucking note of it, and adjust your blind ignorant ideology accordingly. thanks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
that the mayor of denver wishes his citizens would experience more crime, while the homeless live in palaces?
is that your honest assertion here about his motivations?
if that is not what you are trying to say, then maybe you can begin to consider the possibility that the choices the mayor made is gee, i dunno, just MAYBE a little more independent from each other than the stark fearmongering dichotomy you present?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
in which committees involved in different issues, independent of each other, make projections based on need, and in consideration of past returns for past investments, scale spending on particular issues up and down, at different times of the year, in different legislative and/ or administrative tracks
but, nah, who am i to say such a levelheaded thing? you clearly know far more about real budgeting processes, where socialist fascists sit in a room and say "we are going to fire cops so we can build palatial homeless shelters" and then laugh demonically
thanks for setting me straight on what its like to be involved in real budgeting processes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Consider, for someone who is homeless and starving or in desperate need of medical care, if there are no social welfare programs their most logical course of action is to steal whatever they need. If they get away with it, fine. If not then you WILL be supporting them with your tax dollars to the tune of $60,000/year space in jail. Or you could have spent $20,000 and potentially ended up with a productive citizen or at least a 66% reduction in the cost of an unproductive citizen.
Another portion of social welfare spending is managed rather inefficiently through higher medical costs (including insurance ) since hospitals have the unfunded mandate to treat anyone even if they can't pay. The alternative is to step over the dead in the parking lot on your way to your checkup. That or end up mugged because as a whole parents would rather risk jail than let their kids die of treatable illnesses (and arguably, they are behaving ethically to do so).
Social welfare programs are a bargain. If we can refrain from trillion dollar military actions around the world and manage to stop making trillion dollar bailout payments (welfare checks for the rich) we'll have plenty of cash for social programs.
main() {
print"lol";
return
}
I just "installed an unauthorized program" in your system.
The FBI should have just revoked his Group 7 Access and have him report to Dillinger immediately.
...will be reading 'Feds slashdotted'
And using a AC account to reply to your own retarded post isn't cool either kimvette.
of the world by ignoring a myriad of other facts and instead only focusing on those facts which reinforce your prejudices
there's a couple of hundred potshots i can take at your stilted broken reasoning, but i'll list only a bare few, since i'm not going to write a doctoral dissertation just to counteract the ignorance in your comments, and instead hope that you find the time to reexamine your misperceptions
1. poverty went down and continued to go down from well before lbj and well after him. a lot of urban decay is due to the rise of the suburbs, due to the rise of the automobile. and its quite the awesome suspension of logic where you perceive people sitting on their asses as the cause of no jobs, rather the result of no jobs. and no jobs in a particular industry due to simple inevitable unavoidable changes in basic economic world realities, not because of some supposed demonic government policy
2. single, poor women do have lots of kids. single, poor women have always had lots of kids, going back centuries before the existence of welfare, going back to the dawn of civilization. welfare has lifted them socioeconomically to the point where they don't have so many kids. again, an amazing creative effort of cause and effect on your part, bearing no resemblence whatsover to reality or historical fact, where you actually blame welfare for them having kids! and of course, no effort on your part to blame the men, rich and poor, who apply financial or emotional coercion or outright physical intimidation, screw them, and leave
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So you're saying the liberals aren't trying to get us out of Iraq or Afghanistan?
Who is John Cabal?
Strawmen don't fly well here. Backing off hyperbole and onto what was actually said, your insistence that "if spending is not at the level you think it should be, it has to do with someone thinking less is needed for that particular spending allotment, in a vacuum of any other consideration," is clearly made absurd by your use of the word "needed." Denver doesn't need less cops, the press coverage was pretty clear on that. Denver just has to pay less for something to balance the budget. Cops lost. The homeless might get 500 new homes, though, and some people think those priorities are wrong. Budget items can't be considered independently, as you claim they can, when they must all sum to equal the revenue. If you don't believe me, take your credit card out on the town and make a lot of decisions "in the vacuum of any other considerations" and let me know how that works out.
from a location where it was free to access them at that time.
Nope. The FBI document indicates that the accesses were from two Amazon EC2 instances, which were apparently running scripts that represented themselves to PACER as if they were authorized (using cookies obtained from library computers).
I don't think that this was strictly illegal (though IANAL), but it was definitely rude to the PACER system admins. One PDF every three seconds could easily get into the MB/sec range.
in a single room, at the same time
they are made at separate times, according to different economic projections, according to different goals, according to different past results, and by separate committees
absolutely you can make a case denver needs more cops. absolutely the homeless doesn't need the shelters. and people are making these cases. IN DIFFERENT ROOMS TO DIFFERENT PEOPLE AT DIFFERENT TIMES
to say that this is about priorities, to imply that some demonic mayor is sitting there taking money from cop funding and putting it into homeless shelters absolutely misrepresents the reality of how these decisions are made
If you don't believe me, take your credit card out on the town and make a lot of decisions "in the vacuum of any other considerations" and let me know how that works out
yes, classic demagoguery: you take the reality of a complicated sprawling funding process and reduce it to simplistic emotional scenario: a guy with a credit card choosing between buying food to feed his kids and buying a scratch off ticket. oh wait, you didn't say that. well, you can thank me for making your propaganda even more simplistic and emotional. pfffffffffft
please educate yourself, life is slightly more complicated than you think:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/false-dilemma.html
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
bleeding hearts are responsible for the national debt
Actually, you're wrong.
"social services" really ought to be handled by private organizations like they used to.
You might want to do some research on the 1880s, and how effectively social services were handled by private organizations back then. Protip: they weren't handled at all. People died in the streets in massive numbers.
Most of the cries of "ooh big government! big government!" that people love to wave around come from an ignorance of how important government programs are to maintaining social order and a modicum of well-being for poor people. Well, that and a gross misconception of how much of the federal purse is spent on social programs, versus the things that the libertarians actually think are worthwhile. (We could just as easily cut almost all of our defense spending, since it's pretty much worthless).
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
Excuse me but i paid for them ( and what ever court action was involved ) with my taxes. THey damned well better be free.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You cant compare a public access government computer to a business.
Us taxpayers own that pc in this case.. So its ours.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
One request every 3 seconds
He didn't do that with his fingers. He installed a small Perl program which did both download and upload.
Guess you're the one who didn't RTFA.
Infuriate left and right
If it wasn't for the police and the courts being overfunded and willing to spend 8 months and who knows how much money investigating me and my friend smoking pot when we were 16 I wouldn't have a criminal record and thus could get a decent job and wouldn't need food stamps and medicaid to support my family.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Typical unthinking knee jerk response.
Every president from WW II up to and including Carter decreased the national debtleft over from the Depression and WW II. Reagan and Bush II doubled it; Bush I increaed it but wasn't around long enough to double it. Reagan and Bush II cut taxes but not spending, which any 3rd grader could have told them was pretty braindead. Clinton balanced the budget, again, and began paying down the deficit, again. Once you assign this failed economy recovery costs to Bush II because it happened on his watch, he far more than doubled the deficit.
The $60 trillion unfunded mandate is silly. All of those mandates are deliberately funded by ongoing taxes. You can't count future expenditures without counting future taxes, and since neither are known with any certainty, it's pretty pointless propaganda to count either one, let alone just one and not the other. Besides which, one of those bleeding hearts you denigrate for non-essential unfunded mandates is Bush II with his poorly conceived and executed prescription plan, the biggest increase in unfunded mandates since LBJ.
As for the founding fathers ... you ought to look at the things they funded. read some history some time there's a lot of interesting things out there. They did not stick to just defense and crime and maybe roads. For one thing, crime was almost entirely a state or local problem, there being few federal crimes. Your conflation of federal and state funding right there labels you as an opportunistic cherry picker. Don't try to suddenly ignore state funding of all sorts of non-essential things now that you have based part of your argument on said non-essential funding. You can't use that cake while pretending you don't know about it.
You must be a typical braindead so-called conservative to spout nonsense like that, whether you believe it yourself or not. Your ignorance and arrogance are appalling but typical.
Infuriate left and right
You should fix the 'o' on your keyboard.
battling healthcare companies who maximize their returns by... drum roll please... denying services. the free market philosophy is completely incompatible with quality healthcare. left to their own designs, healthcare companies would continue maximizing more and more profits by denying people more and more benefits. well, that is actually a win-win capitalist situation: kill everyone, no more healthcare costs. lol
meanwhile you assert bureaucrats have "monopoly power" (cue dread music), conveniently forgetting to note that these bureaucrats work for you, and me, the people. if they do something we don't like, we replace them, duh. it's a democracy, isn't it?
furthermore, when you allude to "monopoly power" you are referring to what? a market system. as if this is the appropriate paradigm to talk about when talking about healthcare. hint: the concept of "quality healthcare" and the concept of "market forces" are logically incompatible. guess what: the marketplace does not answer every question in the universe. there are some situations in society where you need a system besides the free marketplace to solve a problem coherently. applying the same mindless philosophy again and again, without looking at the problem's requirements is a kind megalomania, not intelligence
there's another word for your mindless overdependence on the idea of the free market: fundamentalism. you are a free market fundamentalist, you think its the answer to everything. it isn't. the debacle of the stock market crash last year should have taught you something of the folly of completely free markets: they bubble and crash dummy, ednlessly. to be truly "free", a market need strong government regulation and intervention. the other kind of "free" market, the one you fetishize, bubbles and crashes itself out of existence
the idea of the free market is a mirage, a joke, a simpleton's idea. it never existed, and it never will. a healthy marketplace is a strongly regulated one. if you don't believe this, you never heard of a bubble
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Because the movements of your car are a matter of public record anyway and should be freely available IN BULK SEARCHABLE FORM, right?
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/09/30/1321214/Massachusetts-Police-Cant-Place-GPS-On-Autos-Without-Warrant
Another troll, but I'm bored.
If you installed GPS on your car, and then published your driving habits online, I'm not convinced you'd have a right to complain based on a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Then again, agencies, departments, and branches of government are not private citizens, either. And yes, I think their actions should be both freely-available and in bulk-searchable form.
I'm also in favor of a Corporate death penalty.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
yes, people in the usa are not starving
BECAUSE OF WELFARE YOU MORON
hello???
as for the self-initiative destroying, self-esteem destroying aspect of welfare: this is 100% real
so let's kick them off welfare so they can starve instead. because that's so much better for people than low self-esteem. pffffft
and it will decrease crime too, because after they are done being shot by irate homeowners protecting their food or dying in the streets without food, crime will go down! see this is all bourne out by societies without welfare: no one is starving in the slums of india, crime is nonexistent in the slums of nigeria
you're ignorant beyond belief
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So you're saying the liberals aren't trying to get us out of Iraq or Afghanistan?
Nope, didn't say that. I commented on the social services aspect. Surely you'll agree that proposed legislation and social efforts, as written, aren't exactly projected to save anyone or anything, and specifically won't save any money.
To a programmer, a Perl script is speech that Gets Stuff Done. To a politician a script is for a speech that gets nothing done.
Full Disclosure: I am a "Libertarian". I don't really like to be pigeonholed into one of a handful of names for political parties but "Libertarian" right now best describes most of my philosophies.
That said, a lot of the other Libertarians I have met have views that really disturb me, particularily involving "social services". Most Libertarians are against social services because they don't feel they should be forced to pay for helping others and that it should be done through private donations and the like. It sounds reasonable, it really does.....but few of the Libertarians I have encountered have taken the step forward to donate time or money to any types of charitable causes or organizations. I myself get out and get a bit active. One of the things I do in my spare time is cobble together still useful PC's (Pentium IV or better) and install them for children with parents who don't have the means to provide them with one. I've done 17 of them in the past few years (I also continue to support them...at no cost of course). Doesn't sound like much but if everyone that complained about the government "stealing their money to give to worthless slugs" actually did pitch in to help the less fortunate in their communities perhaps we could get greatly reduce the need for Government sponsored programs. Giving alms directly to the poor is a much more cost effective (And rewarding, I may add from my own experience) option for distributing wealth. Until people step up and actually DO IT, it is not even remotely a viable option.
agreed.
And I bet there were fewer poor people back when they died in the streets.
Um, how do you know that? From the discussion above I can only see that 'it's kind of sad *we think* we can't find out etc'
A lot of posts have alleged unauthorized access. A few mentioned using the password from the amazon account. Here's the relevant quote from the article.
"The code cycled sequentially through case numbers, requesting a new document from PACER every three seconds. In this manner, Swartz got nearly 20 million pages of court documents, which his script uploaded to Amazonâ(TM)s EC2 cloud computing service."
Note the perl script ran on the libraries computer. As a member of the public, using a FREE service available to the public he was authorized to use the computer. So unless there were specific rules saying he could not install a script it was authorized access.
Also note that the perl script SENT the documents to the amazon account, therefor he wasn't accessing the information from outside. The script, barring any probibitation from sending documents outside or baring Public use of the library computer when the specific user wasn't actually at the computer, was sending the documents outside.
To recap, barring any specific prohibitions:
Person authorized to use the computer. CHECK
Person runs script to more efficiently use the public access. CHECK
Script running on public access system in library sends results of searches to outside account. CHECK
Those who authorized the free public access SHOCKED because they didn't stop or even warn people not to use the FREE access the way they imagined. CHECK
Nothing to see folks, move along.
Ward
. Silence! Be thankful thy species is unpalatable! .
one of them is to politically shield them from the braindead philosophies of free market fundamentalists and libertarians who wish the usa were like somalia, because they are afraid simple social safety nets somehow makes us equivalent to the ussr
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it