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Feds Add 9 Felony Charges Against Swartz For JSTOR Hack
Last year Aaron Swartz was indicted on four felony counts for allegedly stealing millions of academic journal articles from JSTOR. Today, Federal prosecutors piled on nine additional felony charges. The charges (PDF) are mostly covered under the 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and are likely to test the legislation's limits. According to Wired, "The indictment accuses Swartz of repeatedly spoofing the MAC address — an identifier that is usually static — of his computer after MIT blocked his computer based on that number. The grand jury indictment also notes that Swartz didn't provide a real e-mail address when registering on the network. Swartz also allegedly snuck an Acer laptop bought just for the downloading into a closet at MIT in order to get a persistent connection to the network. Swartz allegedly hid his face from surveillance cameras by holding his bike helmet up to his face and looking through the ventilation holes when going in to swap out an external drive used to store the documents. Swartz also allegedly named his guest account 'Gary Host,' with the nickname 'Ghost.'"
"The indictment accuses Swartz of repeatedly spoofing the MAC address — an identifier that is usually static — of his computer after MIT blocked his computer based on that number.
Right, and...? Is a MAC address some sort of protected id? Everyone knows that MAC filtering is ineffective, and MAC altering is enabled by hardware.
Swartz didn't provide a real e-mail address when registering on the network.
Uh oh, I'm in trouble.
Swartz allegedly hid his face from surveillance cameras by holding his bike helmet up to his face and looking through the ventilation holes when going in to swap out an external drive used to store the documents.
Again, so what? Is it some requirement that we display ourselves clearly to all security cameras?
Swartz also allegedly named his guest account 'Gary Host,' with the nickname 'Ghost.'"
Well, that is scary. Prosecute away then.
Federal prosecutors are some sick bastards. The worst of the worst. This is clearly intended to dissuade Swartz from exercising his constiutional right to a trial. Throw every charge at him in order to scare him into accepting a plea bargain. This is why 97% of federal cases end in plea bargains. Not because prosecutors are right 97% of the time, but because they are the biggest bullies in the country.
We'd all be safer if those who have charged Swartz were behind bars themselves.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It is if you're doing it to gain access to a computer that otherwise doesn't want you accessing it.
Its a win for the prosecutor's record and saves the time of a jury trial. If Everyone charged with a crime opted for a jury the courts would be back logged for decades.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Isn't it about time for Juries to use their power of Jury Nullification? Jury members can vote their conscience no matter what the law, the prosecutor or even the Judge says. Unfortunately most are told otherwise.
Am I the only one who thinks it's a bad idea to allow JSTOR and others to prevent worldwide dissemination of academic knowledge through a paywall?
Academic knowledge should belong to the world. Hoarding it for the elites is bad for humanity.
They're using their grammar skills there.
So it may demonstrate intent to access a system without authorization. But by itself, why is it illegal?
to gain access to a computer that otherwise doesn't want you accessing it.
The computer doesn't want? Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate that.
Have gnu, will travel.
We wince when we learn of what Russia is doing to the girl punk band Pussy Riot
They way Russia heaping charges after ridiculous charges on those 3 girls causes many of us boiling mad, and our main stream media condemn what Russia is doing ... on the other hand ...
When the American government heap charges after ridiculous charges on a guy - where are the main stream media ?
The silent treatment from New York Time or Washington Post or Newsweek or Times Magazine is especially deafening.
The fate of the 3 girls of Pussy Riot is ruined by a dictatorship.
The fate of a guy in US is equally ruined - but by a so-called "democratically elected government".
Why the double standards?
Isn't the personal liberty of a guy in USA as important as the liberty of the 3 girls of Pussy Riot?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Here's the reason given in the archive for the theft/release: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling 33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most have previously only been made available at high prices through paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR. Limited access to the documents here is typically sold for $19 USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as cheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Also included is the basic factual metadata allowing you to locate works by title, author, or publication date, and a checksum file to allow you to check for corruption. ef8c02959e947d7f4e4699f399ade838431692d972661f145b782c2fa3ebcc6a sha256sum.txt I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if I published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who profit from controlling access to these works.
I now feel that I've been making the wrong decision.
On July 19th 2011, Aaron Swartz was criminally charged by the US Attorney General's office for, effectively, downloading too many academic papers from JSTOR.
Academic publishing is an odd system—the authors are not paid for their writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they're just more unpaid academics), and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the authors must even pay the publishers.
And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals, but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete.
As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves little significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. The "publish or perish" pressure in academia gives the authors an impossibly weak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia.
Those with the most power to change the system--the long-tenured luminary scholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals, rather than the other way around--are the least impacted by its failures. They are supported by institutions who invisibly provide access to all of the resources they need. And as the journals depend on them, they may ask for alterations to the standard contract without risking their career on the loss of a publication offer. Many don't even realize the extent to which academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do they realize what sort of work is being done outside universities that would benefit by it.
Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout needed to abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extending it to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historic documents and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaid scientists. They're even able to make the taxpayers pay for their attacks on free society by pursuing criminal prosecution (copyright has classically been a civil matter) and by burdening public institutions with outrageous subscription fees.
Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we give up some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange for creating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy more works. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence, when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they use threats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publicly owned works, they are stealing from everyone else.
Several years ago I came into possession, through rather boring and lawful means, of a large collection of JSTOR documents.
These particular documents are the historic back archives of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society—a prestigious scien
Im much more concerned with a generation that seems to favor some kind of anarchy where everyone decides for themselves which of the laws are worth following
Who thinks that? I don't see people breaking sensible laws, regardless of their age...
Oh, wait, you were referring to laws that are not sensible. Well what did you expect?
Palm trees and 8
The most annoying JSTOR policy is that their site is available only to institutions or scholars associated with institutions. They will not sell a subscription to an ordinary individual. Most libraries have subscriptions, but they don't permit remote access. The only exception I know of is the New York Society Library, which costs $200 per year. http://www.nysoclib.org/index.html
What did you expect? You raised us. We watched you speed, fail to yield. We watched you vote for the largest prison population and percentage in the world.
We watched you vote for suffering -- for berlin, for tiannamen and tibet. We watched you pay for a military capable of fighting wars on two fronts, and when the economy went bad, we watched you pay for the wars they were ready for.
And we paid for them and will continue to pay.
I watched your generation ruin and sell out the internet before I could even lawfully purchase access to it -- and when I could, I had to sign a contract to do so -- even at a university.
I watched you sell out my education -- giving me 30 year old textbooks, making me nearly enslave myself at a local university to obtain a piece of paper proving I was willing to indenture myself for four years so that an employer might hope to shackle me down even harder to student loans.
Oh, I had scholarships, funds, state subsidized loans... they came in exchange for not entering the job market for years as a way to keep unemployment down until your generation could finish killing off all semblance of pensions, unions, and suck social security so hard we'll have to deal with historically high inflation rates to pay for it.
But you keep whining about anarchy because people decide laws aren't worth following.
Your law failed.
It isn't anarchy to reject institutionalized serfdom. I don't care if I don't have to bake my bread in your oven and grind my grain on your mill anymore -- you've thoroughly enslaved the world to your dollar, your taxes, and the 'civilization' you've built such that it isn't even economically viable to survive without partaking of the evils you've voted in.
But I guess I'm free to move to Somalia if I don't like law right? Even if you helped orchestrate the overthrow of their government in the 70's and 90's?
If you don't think that everyone should decide for themselves which laws are worth following, then it follows that you would have handed over fugitive slaves in the 1850s, or fugitive Jews in the 1940s. If that is the case, then you are a terrible human being.
Law has no moral authority in and of itself.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I've used JSTOR and I never agreed to any TOS. More than likely, the University in question did that as they are the actual "customer".
I frankly find it hard to believe that spoofing a MAC address to keep from being banned from a network rises to the level of "hacking". The guy already has trespassing charges for being in the building, and that seems like the most appropriate crime to charge him with. Everything else is just piling on bullshit because "We didn't have a law that fit this guy, so we're gonna throw everything we can think of at him because we think he should go to jail."
For the record, all the articles he "stole" are public domain. JSTOR asserts copyright because it was their scan, even though the articles themselves belong to the public now. The problem is, that there's currently no way to access a lot of this older public domain stuff except by going through JSTOR.
please read the JSTOR book, there is the whole history of how they started their operation and what and how it works.
essentially they were google books before google books. they were the first. and they are a Non-Profit entity.
the problems they ran into were massive - old paper collections of journals are riddled with missing issues, damaged pages, scribbled notes, misprints, etc. they actually had to create their own paper-library where they store 'canonical' versions of the old journals, which scholars pore over, page by page, before being allowed into the collection.
then they send the paper to the Dominican Republic or other low cost labor nations to get it scanned. Then they go and review the scans to make sure they are accurate.
they dont 'prevent worldwide dissemination', they actually provide it. they give a sliding scale of subscription prices to libraries around the world, including lower prices for developing countries (maybe even free, i cant remember). there are literally millions of people who could never access this stuff if not for JSTOR.
the problem is that they have to deal with copyright law responsibly or the publishers will crush them out of existence. they are not google, they cant just rely on the DMCA to get them out of hot water. Remember these guys started in the 90s, before Google was even really a company. They were around in the time of mp3.com --- when a single threat of a lawsuit could wipe out an entire community and valuable web resource for doing stuff that was perfectly legal. IIRC there wasn't even really a DMCA infrastructure working back then. They have to do everything 'by the book'. They cannot, for example, just pull a google and "scan first ask questions later". They would never have existed in the first place if they had that philosophy.
Now you can argue, why arent our taxpayer funded institutions providing free access to this for everyone? Good question. Why should you have to go into a library to use JSTOR? Well, it's not really up to JSTOR, it's up to the copyright holders and the US legal system. So instead of shitting all over JSTOR, please go shit all over Elsevier and the rest of the corrupted, conflicted academic publishing world.
JSTOR are relatively good guys. They are not the ones suing this kid, the Attorney General is.
JSTOR would probably love to give universal access to everyone. they love revenue because it helps them conitnue their mission, expand their collection, hire more researchers and librarians, etc. they dont control the material though. they have to act super nice and kiss a lot of ass to get what they get already. Elsevier, and others, would love to crush JSTOR like a bug.