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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.
... 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!
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.
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.
Not quite.
Document != page
19,856,160 pages at 3 seconds per court document.
I expect many (most?) of those court documents are multi-page documents.
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.
I love the american government, where even public information is available at anytime -- for a modest fee. Flamebait aside, but where the hell does your tax dollars go? You have almost no public health care, barely any public schooling, your elderly are crammed inside tuna cans, yet you're one of the wealthiest nations in the world. And if you say "Obama" I will smack you over the face with the European continent.
...even public information is available at anytime -- for a modest fee.
Just as an aside on that point, this guy found out about this investigation because he issued a FOIA on himself. If you have any inkling that you might have been looked at, file one. It takes a while, but it's easy. In my case, I've filed two. In one case (FBI), they told me that they didn't (yet) have anything that involved me. In the second case, they sent me a document that totaled 88 pages and was terribly interesting to read and included interviews with people I went to high-school with, known aliases (common nick-names), and information dating back to when I was 9.
Unlike the story at hand, all of this was done at no cost to me (surprisingly - the administrative work and postage must have cost something). They did ask on the FOIA form how much I'd be willing to pay to get my information, but I was never charged a penny.
Aside from the aside: I do not currently commit nor do I plan on committing criminal acts in the near future. I also have no criminal record.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
"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 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.
Then explain this part: A 22-year-old programmer named Aaron Swartz decided to capture 19,856,160 records by simply installing a small PERL script at the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals library in Chicago.
Sounds like he installed an unauthorized program on the court's computer system to me.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
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?
No they don't. We have far, far more eyes than they can ever hope for.
It just seems like they have more because they're more willing to use them.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
"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).
Aliases seem to be widely misunderstood by all to many people, and I would not be surprised if even the pros (such as the FBI), have people who aren't clear on the concept. This may have been a case where the agent assigned just thinks there's something vaguely tainted about all aliases.
My Ex had a tendency to sign things using either the middle initial of her maiden name or the one that was originally for her last name interchangably. (Still does, as she never reverted to using her maiden name after the divorce). She also has a fairly sloppy signature, so when a bank first noticed the multiple initials they went back and found what looked like a possible second variant. She also has a first name that is common in spelling, but is pronounced in an uncommon way, and once somebody else at the bank made a note about this in some file. So, eventually, the bank made her sign a form stipulating she had a number of legal aliases and she had to provide no less than 12 variations on her signature to cover all the bases. She wasn't actually using anything like 12 aliases - the bank wanted her to give them a signature for each case where somebody thought a letter was sloppy enough to be misread - "Now write it like you would if that "B" looked more like a "P".
I had a fairly high security clearance for a time, and the FBI checked on why my wife used so many aliases. While the bank record only showed one, actual alias of record, getting all those signatures on the card meant, to the investigator, that every one implied a different alias, so discussing just this one area took about 15 minutes. It was all cordial enough, but somewhere in my file or hers there's probably multiple pages of blather about how she spells and pronounces her first name the way her grandmother did, and so on.
There's a quote from Cardinal Richlieu: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him". That's what's vaguely spooky about all this - I can just see her getting into legal trouble and the FBI painting her as a brilliant, if twisted mastermind who had set up a huge batch of aliases many years in advance of her cunning scheme. If they knew about her secret lair under the volcano, it would probably be even worse...
Who is John Cabal?
Am I the only one noticing a discrepancy between the slashdot summary and the FBI document?
Specifically, the summary claims Swartz ran the scripts from a library computer. The FBI document claims this (I'm quoting the rest of the sentence you quoted first):
Between September 4, 2008 and September 22, 2008, PACER was accessed by computers from outside the library utilizing login information from two libraries participating in the pilot project.
If he merely wrote a script on a library computer, as the article summary claims, then the FBI document must be wrong. I can't say my confidence in Slashdot's summaries is high enough to outweigh the FBI's investigation...