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Aaron Swartz Indicted in Attempted Piracy of Four Million Documents
An anonymous reader writes "New York Times has reported that Internet activist Aaron Swartz has been indicted for stealing more than 4 million documents from JSTOR."
The indictment contains an exciting tale featuring trespassing, MAC address forgery, a Python script or two, and even computers hidden under a cardboard box. El Reg has a decent summary. Demand Progress has released an official response claiming the charges are trumped up nonsense.
Perhaps this goes without saying, but the title is misleading. The Grand Jury did not indict Mr. Swartz on any copyright infringement or acts of piracy on the high seas. There are really only four indictments: wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information form a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer.
You can read the whole indictment here: http://ia700504.us.archive.org/29/items/gov.uscourts.mad.137971/gov.uscourts.mad.137971.2.0.pdf
Criminal copyright infringement is not one of the charges.
The "too many library books" thing is a little disingenuous; I wonder whether JSTOR's servers were capable of keeping up with this kind of assault (assuming the factual description of this event is correct). On the other hand, this looks like government deciding to throw the books at this guy because they don't like his organization, and are using this as a pretext.
Dog is my co-pilot.
"Aaron Swartz, a 24-year-old researcher in Harvard University's Center for Ethics, broke into a locked computer-wiring closet in an MIT basement and used a switch there to gain unauthorized access the college's network,"
How ethical.
"Members of Demand Progress, a nonprofit political action group Swartz founded, criticized the indictment."
Oh, really? No conflict of interest there.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Regardless of whether the tale in the indictment is true or not, it seems a weird way to go about just getting a whole bunch of jstor articles...
The defendant's record suggests a reasonable amount of tech savvy and some geek and activist cred. Combined, perhaps, with a little beer money, that should be enough to secure the cooperation of a few students at a great many of the colleges that have site licenses for jstor journals. Within trivial driving/MBTA distance of MIT alone, there are quite a few to choose from.
It seems like you could get entirely the same results, entirely above board, just by scraping a little more slowly, from slightly more endpoints, which would be easy to secure with the permission of their owners. While MIT is fairly laid back, cloak-and-daggering into their wiring closets risks the wrath of some resident BOFH, and it isn't legal. Mere scraping, on the other hand, is just a ToS violation at worst.
He claims to be a Reddit co-founder, but several sources including Reddit strongly dispute that claim.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
jesus christ, have you ever had your shit auto-filled in by facebook? do you remember authorizing that shit?
this whole thing is an assault on the intelligence of the public. it is absolutely outrageous abuse of power. the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is being rolled up like a stick and used as a battering ram against the First Amendment. this administration is completely out of control.
MIT doesn't care, but the fact that he's very critical of the government makes him a prime target for shoehorning accusations onto him to shut him and his site up.
JSTOR doesn't want it prosecuted
and neither does anyone with a shred of common sense.
the computer fraud and abuse act is one of the worst laws ever passed in the history of the country.
it is also being used against Bradley Manning and the Wikileaks cambridge people
it was also used against Thomas Drake
they also tried to use it against the Myspace suicide-woman
No, he is not.
"Edit: Actually, apparently Alexis had this to say[Gizmodo]:
He is absolutely not a founding member. We acquired his company in December, 6 months after Steve and I launched reddit."
... and it seems like once you start downloading too much it kicks you off or makes you contact someone.
Seems like he evaded that little scheme and they're charging him with that.
Insane... it'd be like charging someone for disabling pop-ups.
how pointless it is.
its like having a law that says 'its illegal to bad things on a computer'. what the hell does that even mean? its complete bullshit, which is proved by the wide variety of people that have been prosecuted under it.
Drake was not acquitted, he plead guilty to one misdemeanor under the CFAA (instead of 5 felonies under the Espionage Act) - the point of his case is that the CFAA made it criminal to simply take unclassified information and have it in your house. UNCLASSIFIED.
now the CFAA applies to women telling people to commit suicide? AND to a guy who downloads from JSTOR? And to a guy who jailbreaks his playstation? What the fuck kind of a law is that?
Theft is removing property of another person from their possession and control. Copying is NEVER theft.
Who cares what MIT or JSTOR thinks. This is criminal matter not a civil one. If they don't want to sue then that is their deal. The govement has a responcibility to its citizens to enforce the laws equally. If I broke into a closet at MIT I would get jail time even if I was just stealing soap.
No. Police don't arrest someone every time a crime appears to have been committed, nor do prosecutors prosecute every person arrested for a crime. They have discretion, and limited resources, and more apparent crimes than they can afford to investigate or prosecute. If the crime appears to be minor, and the victim doesn't want to press charges, or there's no victim, the police are likely to ignore it. What prosecutors actually prosecute is a policy decision -- which often means, a political decision.
In politics these days, what use are facts?
Democrats and their fawning media (DailyKos Markos and PBS's Gwen Ifill -- a presidential debate moderator -- started it) blasted Sarah Palin as ignorant over her "Party like it's 1773" comment to tea party activists. Doesn't that ignorant slut know it's 1776?
Then Republicans reminded them that she was referring to the Boston Tea Party, which did happen in 1773. So the Democrats are the ones without a clue.
Yet the story remains repeated, just as the one about "I can see Russia from my house" is. Somehow, being informed of their own ignorance doesn't even help. Eleanor Clift on The McLauglin Group during the election:
CLIFT: "And Palin said 'I can see Russia from my house.'"
BUCHANAN: "No she didn't. That's what Tina Fey said on Saturday Night Live."
CLIFT: "Well, that's what she meant to say."
Now it doesn't even matter what a Republican actually says, only what the Democrats say Republican meant to say.
The figures you cite are just for federal personal income tax and ignore the disappearance of corporate taxes as well as the rise in regressive taxes related to sales, social security, medicare, and housing. They also ignore that we have the largest rich/poor wealth disparity than in any time since the run up to the last great depression.
"I'm not sure about others, but in my small group I work with, I know many, many people would walk away from the job if the top rates went back to 91%."
Terrific! More jobs for other people who want them or need them. :-) Other people can grow into becoming "top performers" if we need that. Right now, the rich get richer, and the tallest sunflowers shade out the small ones and suck most of the nutrients out of the soil with bigger root systems. We need to address that somehow, otherwise, frankly, beyond our democracy disappearing socially now, the whole system may just disintegrate physically (perhaps in global war with nukes, plagues, killer robots, and whatever else) as poverty increases and the income-through-jobs link breaks as the "top performers" are increasingly robots and AIs. There is little political democracy without some financial democracy.
Social security and medicare for all, regardless of age, would go a long way to addressing the problems the USA faces, including the problem that the richest Republicans are the worst socialists as far as privatizing gains and socializing costs for pollution, war, ill health, and risk.
But sure, if you'd rather a wealth tax than an income tax, see also:
"Basic Income from a Millionaire's Perspective?"
http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.