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FBI Investigates Liberator of Court Records

Posted by timothy on from the stop-doing-our-job-better-than-we-can dept.

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.

4 of 445 comments (clear)

  1. Re:retaliation by L4t3r4lu5 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    +6 Insightful.

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    Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
  2. Re:retaliation by Abstrackt · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Nice paraphrase of Nietzsche.

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    They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
  3. Re:What's wrong with this picture? by Chyeld · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    +1 for appropriate use of Alice's Restaurant.

  4. Re:Money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    If you look at the file you see at the bottom the FBI contacts him and he let's them know to speak to his lawyer. Which is a pretty big tip off they're investigating you.

    What? Try making sense, dammit.

    "The FBI contacts HIM"

    "and HE lets (not let's) THEM (the FBI) know to speak to HIS lawyer"

    So a guy tells the FBI to speak to his lawyer, and somehow that allows the guy to know the FBI is investigating him. Okay, CharlyFoxtrot, speak to my lawyer. Does that mean you are investigating me?

    Just more of the atrocious English from people who are quite likely native English speakers that I've come to expect, combined with the failure to recognize this as a problem that you should be doing something about that I have also come to expect. Try reading a book or two. Really, just give it a try, it won't hurt, and it's so obvious that you don't.