Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?