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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.
Man makes public documents available, for free, to the public. Obviously, this sort of thing cannot be allowed to continue.
if you look too closely at the gov't, they'll look too closely at you.
Seriously, as far as I know, all this material is a matter of public record anyway. It should already be freely available. I've used bulk.resource.org primarily to read opinions of appeals court cases, and it's fantastic to have all that information freely available online. The FBI should be investigating the turrurists instead.
Moral of the story is that if you don't pay 8 cent duplication fees and you know how to use PERL the FBI could come a knockin'?
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
The Schwartz makes anything possible!
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Install unauthorized software on a government, or business, computer anywhere and see what sort of response you get. This fellow installed an unauthorized perl script on a computer in a federal court (okay, the library thereof). I'm not surprised that the government decided to take a look at things. I'd be disappointed if they had not done so. DUH.
linquendum tondere
((((19,856,160 x 3 sec)/60 sec)/60 min)/24 hours)/365 days = 1.9 years
entirely doable
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Government services charge a nominal fee that the majority of people pay for services rendered already.
They call this fee, "tax"
Most people don't want to pay again for what they've already paid for.
Yes it all costs money, and we the TAX payers have paid that money. Thus the works are public domain.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
> What am I missing?
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 can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
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.
When something is in the public domain, you can still charge for reproducing or hosting it. You just can not prevent someone from copying and distributing it in the manner that they want as well. Public domain does not preclude paid access. Also, since people pay money to file court documents, IE filing fees, etc. There are instance where you paid NOTHING for court documents to be produced at all. Courts do not run wholly on tax dollars alone.
Pacer is worse than presented. Itâ(TM)s not just 8 cents a page for downloaded, itâ(TM)s 8 cents a page for any page you pull into your browser. They consider any Web page you surf on their site in search of the legal document to be a âoedownloadedâ document.
I work at a newspaper and one of my reporters ran up a $250 bill with Pacer checking many times a day to see if an important local opinion were issued. When it was, it was just 4 pages long; I expected to pay 32 cents. Instead they said we owed over $250. We never paid it and consequently no longer use Pacer.
Thats probably because you're 12 andyour pocket money isn't much more. Now go do your homework.
RTFFBI report, they say that he ran the script from a location outside of the library using the library password. Either the FBI are wrong, or the article summary is.
Proof that lean living nets profits.
Our tax dollars primarily fund a welfare system known as civil service. We don't know what they do, but it requires a lot of them and a whole lot of time to do it.
...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.
false dichotomies, misrepresented reality, etc.
nobody in their right mind is thinking of shortchanging something like defense spending for the sake of welfare recipients. this never enters into any governmental spending calculus as it is blindingly obvious something like police are more important to absolutely everyone involved in decision making. if spending is not at the level you think it should be, it has to do with someone thinking less is needed for that particular spending allotment, in a vacuum of any other consideration, not because someone needs a battered women's shelter instead. you present a false choice in your comment that never exists in the real world
furthermore social services are a bargain: every dollar spent on welfare and healthcare and other social services is one less guy breaking into your house or mugging you on the street, because they can't feed their kids, or because they can't keep their job with a broken arm (that they can't afford to fix). it's cheaper to fix their arm. you will pay for social services one way or another. the idea of not spending on healthcare for the poor means the problem just goes away is ignorance: every untreated case of diabetes winding up in the emergency room, every case of tuberculosis untreated resulting in your children catching it, every untreated case of hypertension resulting in a heart attack for the family breadwinner who now leaves a familty to fend on their own: you pay for that in the form of a sick society, and that affects your bottom line and the balance in your checking account, whether you are blind to how you are not an island in this world or not
when you live in a rich society, you in turn are rich. when you live a poor society you in turn are poor. the money that exists in your pocket is not something devoid of any relationship to everything around you, the money in your pocket is abstract expression of the wealth around you. you pay for basic simple social services, or the money in your pocket is worth less and is less in quantity. that you can't see that is a defect in your perception. unfortunately, so many people take this defect in perception as the basis for an entire philosophy of life that assumes they exist apart from their society
it isn't about individual responsibility and self-initiative, and those who don't have that having less socioeconomic status then you, it isn't about rewarding the undeserving. it is about giving the genuinely undeserving the bottom of the basement standard of living, so they don't wind up a cancer in your society that rots your entire society, which in turn impoverishes you. think of social services as an investment that pays dividends that are indirect. apparently beyond your ability to understand. and not making that investment resulting in the loss of far more of your money than you spend on basic social services
the idea is freedom right? freedom from poverty deciding issues of basic human dignity right? oh yeah... durrr...
but you shouldn't respond to me, you should get into politics. listen to any senator arguing out of ignorant resistance to change, and we see exactly the same sort of false choices and red herrings. you have a bright future in ignorant ideological grandstanding and fearmongering: go for it dude
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Lol. You have no choice in who your military kicks the shit out of. You just get to see the aftermath on Fox. One day their gonna kick your Lilly ass you dumbass.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy also applies:
"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."
Get off my lawn.
it was a 1-line PERL script and the FBI and NSA are still trying to figure out everything it does.
Nullius in verba
bleeding hearts are responsible for the national debt
Actually, you're wrong.
"social services" really ought to be handled by private organizations like they used to.
You might want to do some research on the 1880s, and how effectively social services were handled by private organizations back then. Protip: they weren't handled at all. People died in the streets in massive numbers.
Most of the cries of "ooh big government! big government!" that people love to wave around come from an ignorance of how important government programs are to maintaining social order and a modicum of well-being for poor people. Well, that and a gross misconception of how much of the federal purse is spent on social programs, versus the things that the libertarians actually think are worthwhile. (We could just as easily cut almost all of our defense spending, since it's pretty much worthless).
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.