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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.
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'Cept they (gummint) closed the case, meaning they couldn't make anything stick.
The good thing here is that the gummint realized that this guy did nothing wrong, and their 27, 8x10, color glossy photographs with the circles and arrows, and a paragraph on the back of each one, weren't going to be of any use.
So, did he have a script that automatically uploaded this FOIA on himself to a public server?
Hey man, this are internet lands. You're kind of crap isnt belonged hear, so just make like a tree and hit the road.
Thats probably because you're 12 andyour pocket money isn't much more. Now go do your homework.
I agree. And I have a hard time seeing what the big deal about this is anyway. So they investigated. No charges were filed.
End story: The FBI was doing it's job to ensure a crime wasn't being committed, when something unexpected was occuring on a government computer system.
Sorry, this is Slashdot, after all. We're all a bunch of pseudo-anarcho-libertarians. If the FBI is actually doing its job, that's an example of too much government interference, so it should be disbanded so we can get back to work. And we're really really smart nerds, which makes us right.
Of course, all this changes if some company is screwing us over or we otherwise need the government. Then we'll take all the government we can get.
Either the FBI are wrong, or the article summary is.
The summary is wrong? That's unpossible!
Your favorite
it was a 1-line PERL script and the FBI and NSA are still trying to figure out everything it does.
Nullius in verba