Slashdot Mirror
MIT Warned of a JSTOR Death Sentence Due To Swartz
theodp writes "The NY Times takes a look at how MIT ensnared Aaron Swartz, but doesn't shed much light on how the incident became a Federal case with Secret Service involvement. Still, the article is interesting with its report that 'E-mails among M.I.T. officials that Tuesday in January 2011 highlight the pressures university officials felt' from JSTOR, which is generally viewed as a good guy in the incident. From the story: 'Ann J. Wolpert, the director of libraries, wrote to Ellen Finnie Duranceau, the official who was receiving JSTOR's complaints: "Has there ever been a situation similar to this when we brought in campus police? The magnitude, systematic and careful nature of the abuses could be construed as approaching criminal action. Certainly, that's how JSTOR views it."' Less than a week later, a Google search reveals, Duranceau notified the MIT community that immediate changes to JSTOR access had to be made lest the University be subjected to a JSTOR 'death sentence.' 'Because JSTOR has recently reported excessive, systematic downloading of articles at MIT,' the post warned, 'we need to add a new layer of access control. This is the only way to prevent recurrence of the abuse and therefore the only way to ensure ongoing access to this valuable resource for the MIT Community.' The post concludes, 'The incidents that prompted this change involved the use of a robot, which is prohibited by JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use. ...Continued access to JSTOR and other resources is dependent on the MIT Community complying with these policies.' Hope you enjoyed that freewheeling culture while it lasted, kids — now Everything is a Crime."
theodp continues " MIT's Wolpert, who was recently named to an advisory board for JSTOR parent Ithaka, also chairs the Management Board of the MIT Press, where her reports from 2008-2010 included JSTOR Managing Director Laura Brown and MIT's Hal Abelson, adding another twist to Abelson's analysis of MIT's involvement in the Swartz tragedy."
Seriously? Death sentence? Yes. They used the words "death sentence" but it was for their access to JSTOR, not anything to do with Swartz. This is not news, this is grasping at straws.
JSTOR acted naively, but corrected itself later. MIT acted naively and then stupidly, but realized their mistake too late. Prosecutors acted like prosecutors typically do these days (I.E. tyranically) and a vulnerable kid took the least painful way out.
As in MIT didn't "ensnare" anyone. They first overreacted, but then couldn't reach the reset button before Ortiz et al took over and sent all reservations MIT may have had about pressing on and destroying his life straight to /dev/null .
The prosecutors killed Swartz. That's it. While I appreciate the details of exactly what happened within MIT, lets not divert attention away to what this story really is. This should actually be looked as a big fat spotlight being shined on our spectaular legal system that values conviction rates over actual decreased crime rates and political gain at the cost of lives.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
Swartz did something wrong, for sure, he used a script to download documents. He was being rude, making the system slower for everybody else.
The DOJ reaction? Slap a 50 years sentence on him.
If that's the prosecutor's reaction, she is certainly not competent for the job she does, she should be fired and the bar association should start an investigation on her.
I think disbarment would be the proper solution. That would be the right level of punishment in her case. She demonstrated very plainly that she doesn't have the understanding of law needed to work on it professionally.
> The decision whether to charge a defendant, and with what -- is almost entirely discretionary. ... > Hope you enjoyed that freewheeling culture while it lasted, kids — now Everything is a Crime."
Once to be charged with a crime there needed to be a criminal intent. No longer. There are so many ridiculous laws on the books now that you can't be a citizen without breaking some laws, and zealous prosecutors can pluck those laws out of obscurity to target anyone the don't like, or even just choose some unlucky sap they pick on to boost their career.
There's a good book by ex-FBI cop & criminal lawyer Dale Carson who explains these people have run out of big time criminals to prosecute, and so now the justify their existence by filling jails with poor saps who meet this criteria, or they would be laying off cops, judges and prisoners for lack of business: http://www.amazon.com/Arrest-Proof-Yourself-Ex-Cop-Reveals-Arrested/dp/1556526377
Here's a real life case where US officials made life hell for a California marine biologist for no other reason than they have big swinging dicks and they could: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/eo20120803gw.html
This has been going on for a long time. Aaron is the first person to draw it to the wider public attention: "Legions of government lawyers inundate targets with discovery demands, producing financial burdens that compel the innocent to surrender in order to survive. Silverglate, a civil liberties lawyer in Boston, chillingly demonstrates how the mad proliferation of federal criminal laws — which often are too vague to give fair notice of what behavior is proscribed or prescribed — means that "our normal daily activities expose us to potential prosecution at the whim of a government official." Such laws, which enable government zealots to accuse almost anyone of committing three felonies in a day, do not just enable government misconduct, they incite prosecutors to intimidate decent people who never had culpable intentions. And to inflict punishments without crimes. The more Americans learn about their government's abuse of criminal law for capricious bullying, the more likely they are to recoil in a libertarian direction and put Leviathan on a short leash."
He wasn't sentenced (or even found guilty yet) and the claim wasn't for 50 years. But hey, facts happen to other people right?
The moment you start spouting nonsense like this, the rest of your opinion is automatically suspect as well. After all, if you don't know the facts, how can you form an accurate opinion?
Cases like this get very emotional but if you ever want to change anything, you need to argue with facts, not with made up stuff. Liars like mangu just make it easier for people on the other side to dismiss the opposition as being ill-informed morons whose rants have no value.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Sorry, I remembered wrong, it wasn't 50 years, just 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million.
Do you feel better now? Is 35 years in prison plus a $1 million fine the correct punishment for using a script to download documents?
Every student at MIT should download and article from JSTOR and post it online. Everyone. Let's see the system deal with that.
"I don't which is worse, that everyone has a price, or that the price is always so low"--Hobbes
The more details that come out the less sympathy I have for the legal troubles Swartz found himself in. He was smart enough to know going into this that there would be legal repercussions. It's possible he even ran his plan by Lessig, with Lessig explaining that it was wrong and he shouldn't do it. Barreling ahead anyways, he only decided not to do it at Harvard.
It's called Mens rea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea
Granted manslaughter isn't as cut and dry as premeditated murder, but I believe it would be having a state of mind of reckless indifference towards human life: http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120228041559AAE8XI3
The problem here is Stephen Heymann. He is the real zealous procsecutor here
He has been on a crusade for years for "computer crime" juicy publicty
I remember about a week or so ago Anonymous leaked some long diatribe written by Stephen Heymann about lowering the bar on what defines computer crimes etc. I can't find it now. This guy is on a crusade to make a name for himlself.
Nancy Black may be a better poster girl: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/eo20120803gw.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/06/nancy-black-marine-protection_n_1189118.html
Dale Carson points out there are many, many cases of this going on all the time, but it's been under the public radar. Most of these people get eaten up by the system and no one cares except their family who by then are bankrupted by the lawyers if they could afford them. Public Defenders don't have time for these so-called petty cases. No one else cares so journalists don't even consider it newsworthy. You won't even read about it. Aaron is an exception.
Who or what the fuck is a JSTOR? Would it kill the summary writer to explain the acronym?
Who or what the fuck is a JSTOR? Would it kill the summary writer to explain the acronym?
Most people know what it is, because of the Swartz-case. So you missed it - fine - but rambling about it on a geek-site like /. is hardly the way to go.
Have you tried Googling it?
https://www.google.com/search?q=JSTOR
have you tried looking it up on Wikipedia?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSTOR
Have you tried simply visiting their homepage - perhaps even their "about" page?
http://about.jstor.org/
Was that so hard? Really?
Seriously ... as a reader and poster here ... you have failed! :-)
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
Did he deserve to die, or are you happy with 50 years jail?
What do those questions have to do with the GP's post?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
With their resources, MIT could do the same thing in-house instead of outsourcing.
MIT is a wealthy institution and could afford to free considerable information without being adversarial. The solution isn't "lone rebels freeing the info", but using massive resources to break it loose instead.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
> During another investigation in the 1990s, Heymann wanted Harvard to place a electronic banner on its intranet telling users they were being monitored, as Network World reported. He said would allow the feds to monitor the network without getting a court order. Harvard disagreed, saying it respected the privacy of its users. According to his Harvard biography, Heymann is responsible for supervising approximately 80 criminal prosecutors and reviewing the majority of approximately 400 indictments returned and informations filed annually.
Anyone trust this nutbag with your liberties? He has done it before too: Aaron Swartz prosecutor 'drove another hacker to suicide in 2008 after he named him in a cyber crime case. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2262831/Revealed-Aaron-Swartz-prosecutor-drove-hacker-suicide-2008-named-cyber-crime-case.html#ixzz2IhxDiQLD
Glenn Reynolds recommends the following law changes wrt plea bargaining.
- Ban plea bargains all together, so that every criminal charge filed would have to be backed up in open court.
- Alternatively, âoewe might require that the prosecutionâ(TM)s plea offers be presented to a jury or judge before sentencing. Jurors might then wonder why they are being asked to sentence a defendant to 20 years without parole when the prosecution was willing to settle for 5. 15 years in jail seems a rather stiff punishment for making the state undergo the bother of a trial.â
Valjean's descent from peasant to yellow card carrying convict, after serving 14 years in the gallows for bread theft & repeated escape attempts, is an odd parallel at first glance. In reflection; Both Schwartz and Valjean intentionally broke the law of the land, both offenses seem rather petty to most of their peers, and both faced draconian punishments. Of course, one man was stealing food for his starving sister and the other gent was engaged in idealistic hactivism, but I can see how prosecutorial discretion has the ability to continue our society's descent to a place where being a felon is so ubiquitous it's no longer a Big Red F.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The comments on this "The Tech," "MIT's oldest and largest newspaper & the first newspaper published on the web," online edition are very good:
Aaron Swartz commits suicide By Anne Cai
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Isn't this the very school that *created* hacker culture with the model railroad club and people lockpicking their way into offices at the school?
Is this school now going to teach that the investigative process itself is now a crime? That, if you try and figure out how something works, essentially reverse engineer it, you're a criminal?
What has happened to our world? Dammit, the vast majority of the infrastructure of the internet was created by college students, as a free and open system that was run largely on chaos theory.
I think it's time we took back our internet.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
If companies are people, the state should be able to execute them.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
"There's a good book by ex-FBI cop & criminal lawyer Dale Carson who explains these people have run out of big time criminals to prosecute, and so now the justify their existence by filling jails with poor saps who meet this criteria,"
----
In a word, that's bull. The world is filled with big time criminals. The problem is that they are "too big to prosecute". Look at HSBC. They laundered money, knowingly, for drug dealers, terrorists, and Iran (helping to fund their nuclear program).
Even after a full investigation, and HSBC admitting to criminal activity to the tune of billions of dollars, wanna take a guess how many people went to jail?
If you guessed anything other than ZERO, you are wrong. HSBC was fined 1.9 Billion Dollars, and then let off the hook. HSBC, incidentally, can make up for that fine over 4 weeks with some slightly more risky trading, and perhaps charging their customers a few pennies more per transaction.
The point is: Prosecutors don't go after "big targets" to make their name, because it's much, much tougher to win a case against an organization that can spend more in lawyers than the entire GDP of your district.
As a result, there have been no prosecutions of anyone guilty of market manipulation for the "Great Recession", there have been no prosecutions for "robosigning foreclosures", there have been no prosecutions for insider trading, there have been no prosecutions for LIBOR, there have been no prosecutions for HSBC.
So, Prosecutors spend their time being High School Bullies, going after targets they know they can win because the little guy has no resources to fight. That's why we have the highest incarceration rate in the world, and our jails are filled with petty criminals -- people busted for a few ounces of Pot. But the real criminals drive in limos.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Why do none of you idiots get the true nature of JSTOR. Like the organisations that pretend to collect artist 'fees' from the users of recordable media in more primitive nations, JSTOR exists purely to put extreme amounts of money into the pockets of those that run the organisation. For the big universities, JSTOR pays massive kick-backs to higher university administrators. JSTOR has only one goal- to make the access of academic papers ever more expensive year-on-year.
It gets worse. Not only is JSTOR a vile criminal conspiracy, it is a very pro-active one. Go to any forum talking about this issue, and I promise you you will see long posts that pour hate on Aaron, and sing JSTOR's praises to the sky.
Always, where lots of money is concerned in a highly dubious or illegal enterprise, the most ruthless methods are ALWAYS deployed to protect the money stream. In this sense, JSTOR is no different from a big drug producing cartel- except JSTOR actually produces nothing, operating as a pure parasite. Cross either, and expect to get 'rubbed out'.
Organisations like JSTOR will use their massive funds to place tentacles into every influential aspect of society. They consider their primary goal is to always be one step ahead of their opponents, no matter how much money this takes. Like the musical 'fees' collection agencies, their truest and most dangerous enemy is the people that create the material they seek to control. If the authors of the academic papers ever seek to speak with a loud enough voice, JSTOR is clearly doomed.
Why hasn't JSTOR fallen yet. Well, it pays significant kick-backs to many of the 'bosses' of those that write the papers in the first place, to ensure it has vocal supporters of the status quo near ground level. People tend to fear their bosses, so dissent is neatly suppressed.
Anyway, think again of the amount of money involved. Remember, universities are, first and foremost, academic organisations. This being so, a university has no issue taking a VERY large subscription from every student (hidden in general fees) and giving this to JSTOR. University fees are rising faster than inflation in most nations, so JSTOR can tap every student for an every larger pay-out. The money JSTOR gets per student dwarfs the monthly fees collected by cable TV companies (if you take into account the average number of people in the TV household). We are talking about an incredible amount of money. We are thus talking about an incredible amount of corruption.
The costs of scanning and placing online academic papers is now trivial. Better, a free and open system would benefit from 'crowd-sourcing', where the community itself would automatically add features infinitely more useful and advanced than anything a commercial company could or would provide. Sadly, one of JSTOR's strongest arguments is that JSTOR effectively limits real access to elites, and this is what governments should crave.
The ode,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Qb0tCgNzbjk
The reason:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=9-UyhdNxv-4
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/technology/how-mit-ensnared-a-hacker-bucking-a-freewheeling-culture.html
This article convinced me. I will publish our speed limit data on a torrent.
We have a big database and we want it to be realtime, but it costs $72/month (you know who hosts us) which adds up quick.
So alas, when the money dries, we will torrent it...
Help eliminate stupid speeding tickets"
To be fair, Carson said that there are big criminals but not on the scale there once were. He said they are easy to arrest, but hard to prosecute. They need big and long police probes to gather evidence, and they are wealthy so will be defended by top tier lawyers. So do Oritz and Heymann go after the drug kingpins of Miami? No. Too much work. Low-hanging fruit like Aaron are much more attractive. He's a frightened kid with a family. They know they can break him easy. He doesn't have much money. Once they decide to go after him they know they can find something to stick him with. They're bullies who choose weaklings instead of other bullies.
White collar criminals have it much easier, but if they make for a career-making photo OP then prosecutors will use the same tactics they used on Aaron to find something to stick: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/nov/17/silverglate-three-felonies-book
A prosecutor can get an indictment from a grand jury, if he wants one, in just about any case: of the circa 20,000 cases brought to a grand jury per year, fewer than 100 will result in a "no bill" (refusal to indict), for an indictment rate of around 99.5%.
And your point is what, exactly?
I could just as easily say "Because prosecutors know they have to convince a grand jury that the case is worth it, they're very careful about what they bring to the grand jury."
Several friends have served on grand juries. None of them described any of the cases as jokes or questionable. Both said the same thing: the criminals were incredibly stupid, leaving substantial evidence behind.
Please help metamoderate.
Same deal with non-profits ICANN who oversee domain names: In theory non-profit but the people who run it are richly compensated. That JSTOR locks up publicly-funded knowledge to keep it out of the hands of the masses really sucks, and it was started by Princeton!
"Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world?" George Monbiot of the Guardian asks in a recent article. Scanning this week's headlines alone, one would find any number of viable candidates. Monbiot's answer: "While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but – wait for it – to academic publishers...Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities."
http://townsendlab.berkeley.edu/thl-administration/lab-blog/academic-publishing-one-big-racket
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/02/bad-science-academic-publishing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/aug/31/real-cost-academic-publishing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist
So their tax-exempt status could possibly be revoked. From a decade ago: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-dealing
"Self-dealing is the conduct of a trustee, an attorney, a corporate officer, or other fiduciary that consists of taking advantage of his position in a transaction and acting for his own interests rather than for the interests of the beneficiaries of the trust, corporate shareholders, or his clients. Self-dealing may involve misappropriation or usurpation of corporate assets or opportunities. Self-dealing is a form of conflict of interest.[1]"
The self-dealing happens because the non-profit could make its digital resources available to the world for essentially free these days. But instead MIT and JSTOR impose artificial scarcity to extract a revenue stream for its staff in order so it may then create new resources which it also sells access to make more such resources etc.. That model may have made some sense in the 20th century, but it makes no sense in the 21st. The argument that access to digital resources today should be restricted to support making more digital resources tomorrow is not one that a tax-exempt organization should legally be able to make these days IMHO. And in order to sustain their self-dealing, they contributed to the death of an idealistic young man, Aaron Swartz to sustain their obsolete and now essentially corrupt business models, which just highlights how evil what they (and many other non-profits) are doing has become bit-by-bit year-by-year if artificial scarcity ever made sense for a non-profit.
So, perhaps a way forward here is to make an example of both MIT and JSTOR by getting their IRS tax exempt status and also corporate charters revoked (a corporate "death sentence") for the act of self-dealing? That might serve as an example to other tax-exempt non-profits to shape up and make their digital works freely available before they get the same treatment? See also:
http://www.ratical.org/corporations/
"In most states a lot of the language from the early days, that reflected the subordinate nature of corporations is still on the books
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"Mr. Caswell’s family-owned and -operated property was worth approximately $1.5 million with no mortgage—making it a perfect target. Without a bank involved, the likelihood of the Caswells’ mounting a drawn-out legal defense was miniscule. For Carmen Ortiz, Russ Caswell was like the weakest kid on the block who was wearing something she, or the agencies her office represents, coveted. Ms. Ortiz’s fervency seems to have stemmed from the publicity such cases were sure to generate. All the defendants insisted on their innocence and fought the charges. The jury’s still out on O’Brien and Caswell, but Swartz and Mehanna have paid the price for their defiance."
http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/01/17/carmen-ortizs-sordid-rap-sheet/
There is a petition to remove her, but don't hold your breath. She is an Obama appointee and her Heymann's dad worked for Clinton.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-states-district-attorney-carmen-ortiz-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Ortiz
From when I first heard this news, I could not help thinking of the Dmitry Sklyarov case. In both cases, a corporation complained: Adobe and JSTOR. In both cases, when the the corporation found this action was not popular, they "officially" backed off: Adobe dropped the charges due to an internet outcry. JSTOR was "unwilling" to press charges. Finally, in both cases, the prosecutor was adamant that the trial continue.
I think the puppet show should be fairly obvious to anyone looking at the facts. JSTOR was obviously complaining a lot to MIT and pushing MIT to prosecute. JSTOR just did not want anyone to know publicly that they were doing that. Will MIT publish all of its communications with JSTOR related to this incident? While TFA names the individual at MIT that was receiving the complaints, it does not mention who at JSTOR was complaining. I find the secrecy around this a little telling.
In an assassination, who is the real murderer: the person who orders the assassination or the person who pulls the trigger? In my opinion, they are all guilty. JSTOR is playing innocent, and they should not be allowed to do so. Further, Aaron had a point, JSTOR's existence is an assault on the First Amendment and the very concepts of democracy and science.
I think that JSTOR should be dissolved as a result of this incident, and all documents under its control should lose their copyrights; publishers be damned.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
In addition to calling in Ortiz, there is a petition to Fire Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Heymann. The petitions by themselves might not do much but they do keep the ball rolling. What was done to Swartz has been and is done to many others.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.