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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.
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.
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."
Good lord, where exactly is this evidence that it's unconstitutional? The fact that you don't like it isn't exactly a constitutional argument. Also, Thomas Drake was acquitted, and citing someone guilty of treason and a grown woman who convinced a teenage girl to kill herself as your "defense" isn't really as convincing as you seem to think it is.
I was under the(apparently mistaken) impression that that ugly little notion had been settled:
Back during that 'myspace suicide case' drama, the prosecution made the argument that, by creating an account under a false name(which the defendant definitely had), she had violated the myspace terms of service(which, she also definitely had); but then went on to claim that accessing a website in a way contrary to the ToS was a violation of the CFAA. Thankfully, that... exceptionally broad... interpretation was shot down.
Whatever he was doing in a locked wiring closet may well have been some sort of trespassing; but ToS violations are a matter between you and the entity(and generally only worth terminating your relationship) not you and the feds.
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?
Perhaps the SysAdmins at MIT want it prosecuted. Since he kept invading their network.
This isn't the first time Swartz has spidered a site in order to download the content hosted there. In 2009, he went after the PACER system which hosts court records. While those are public documents, they're behind a per-page paywall. His python script was probably reused from before, just s/pacer.gov/jstor.org/g. See: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/swartz-fbi/
When you're the creator of the Open Library project, liberating a few million articles from behind a rather expensive paywall is, at the very least, quite circumstantially indicative of what your intentions might be. While I personally think access to such document repositories for scientific journals is priced way too high, most people can go to public or university libraries to do any research they might want to do. Breaking into a wiring closet, getting MIT's access to JSTOR cut off for days, spoofing your MAC address, getting shut off, spoofing your MAC address again, and still continuing on downloading is not the way to go about trying to affect change the way he wanted to. Smart kid buried under an avalanche of dumb.
It's unconstitutionally vague, because courts are completely unsure how to draw the line between which ToS violations are criminal and which are not.
A non-vague possibility would be that all ToS violations are a federal "hacking" crime. For example, evading a Slashdot ban might be a felony. But few courts seem to want to do that. So which ToS are enforceable and which aren't?
Let's say that I'm on a university network without breaking into it (which I am). If I slurp 4 million JSTOR documents, this is clearly a violation of JSTOR's terms of service. But I have not in any meaningful way "hacked into" JSTOR; I accessed it from my university network, which I had legitimate access to. Yet it appears, under the theory advanced here, that I would be guilty of a federal crime, "stealing" 4 million documents from JSTOR, because my access went above the use JSTOR authorized me to make of their service, and therefore constitutes computer trespassing.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.