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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.
So much for "unreasonable search and seizure" protection. Amerika Da Free! Next stop "your travel papers and ID card"!
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Aaron Swartz is a brilliant developer who knows just about any language worth knowing.
I want to know why the fuckface chose PERL. That's what really annoys me about this.
freely passing around labels like "misrepresentation of reality". Yet your picture of reality, unlike your opponents', is based on all sorts of unchecked assumptions and misrepresentations.
Taxing me is a "bargain" because I do not get robbed by the poor? What sort of a bargain is that when I am not free to take it or leave it be, or even define the terms? Why does it have to be the central government to make this bargain for the willing and unwilling alike? Charity might or might not be a bargain for any particular community; what you describe is just plain forcing those who work to work some more for free, so that the government might "redistribute" the fruits of their labor.
"Preventive care" saves national health care costs? Hardly, according to the US Congressional Budget Office. It just does not work out this way.
And so on, one myth after another.
Oh look, evil politicians are "afraid of change". The fact that the change is actually a huge power grab for bureaucracies and populist politicians does not seem to register.
And please spare the "socioeconomic" smoke and mirrors. I lived in a poor but total welfare society, and in rich societies, and seen what moves both. Those of us who came to this country from Eastern Europe know exactly where this "change" bus is going.
Oh, go fuck yourself and your knee-jerk off-topic anti-Americanism.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.