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.

Comments

And where did he get the password?

[Kagato]

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.

So, it took 1.9 years?

[s-whs]

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?

Re:Doesn't the FBI have better things to do?

[DaveV1.0]

You mean like investigating the installation of unauthorized software on a federal government computer?

Oh wait....