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>Just to play devil's advocate here (and I understand this goes against prevailing opinion), but he did break the law. He absolutely did break the law. I, pers

>Just to play devil's advocate here (and I understand this goes against prevailing opinion), but he did break the law. He absolutely did break the law. I, personally don't dispute that, nor do I think that that's a controversial fact here. The trouble that I and many other commenters here have with what happened to Aaron Swartz is the gross disproportionality of the punishment he was facing. For downloading academic papers, he was facing a punishment that could have gone to literally millions of dollars in fines and up to 35 years in prison. That is the sort of punishment that I would expect for ending a life (i.e. negligent homicide), not downloading a few thousand academic papers and publishing them on the Internet. Should Aaron have gone to jail? Should he have been forced to pay some restitution? Probably. But I don't think that holding the spectre of millions of dollars in fines and the rest of his adult life in jail over his head was the right thing for the prosecutor to do. Its very rare for a crime to break just one law. Prosecutors almost always have a choice of laws to prosecute under. In this case, the prosecutor chose the heaviest, most punishing law, when she could have chosen a lesser charge.

raldi 11y ago
> For downloading academic papers, he was facing [...] You left out the part where he snuck into a server closet and tampered with the network equipment. Among other things, that's burglary.
- wolfgke 11y ago
  > Among other things, that's burglary. And locking away scientific papers of research that was funded with public money behind paywalls is burglary of the public.
  - raldi 11y ago
    I can't imagine a way that's even figuratively true. The crime of burglary is about being somewhere that you're not supposed to; perhaps you meant to say it's like larceny of the public. But even then, it's a very tenuous connection you're trying to draw. These companies were not taking anything away from the public; they made the effort to digitize, process, and catalog documents, which is no small task. And they set up servers to host these documents and make them searchable. If you feel they're asking too much money for these efforts, you're welcome to simply pretend they don't exist, and replicate their work yourself. They did nothing to make that task harder. Now, if the companies destroyed the original public records or otherwise placed new locks around them that hadn't existed beforehand, then yes, your metaphor, while still hand-wavy, would at least hold water. But of course nothing like that actually happened here.
    - jsprogrammer 11y ago
      >or otherwise placed new locks around them that hadn't existed beforehand How is creating network and identity based locks around the papers not placing new locks?
      - raldi 11y ago
        The "them" in the sentence you quoted refers to "the original public records". The locks you refer to were around the new, value-added work: the digitized, processed, cataloged version of the papers they had made by adding value to the original public-domain documents. The locks were not applied to the original documents. It's like the difference between storing a touched-up version you made of an Apollo 11 photo in a vault, and stealing the original photo negative from NASA and putting that in a vault.
        jsprogrammer 11y ago
        Maybe you are talking about a different lock box? JSTOR doesn't claim that its documents are public-domain: Our licenses from publishers are non-exclusive, meaning that the publishers are free to license their content to others to digitize or make it available in any way they might wish. [0] Not only were many of the papers in JSTOR funded by the public, but JSTOR itself claims to be funded through by the public through universities: We do this with funds provided by thousands of libraries and institutions, all of whom are our partners in disseminating access around the globe. [0] [0] http://about.jstor.org/10things http://about.jstor.org/10things
        foldr 11y ago
        JSTOR cannot magically put documents in the public domain. It needs the permission of the original publishers. JSTOR is responsible for scanning a whole ton of old journals which would otherwise only be available as physical copies in libraries. Nothing JSTOR has ever done has ever made anything less accessible than it was before.
  - tzs 11y ago
    JSTOR doesn't lock content away. They make deals with existing journals to take content that is not available online and make it available online. Any access restrictions JSTOR imposes come from the content owners, not JSTOR. JSTOR has also convinced most of these journals, even ones with restrictive access policies, to let JSTOR make their content available for free to the public at many libraries and schools, including ones that do not have subscriptions to the underlying journals. Because of JSTOR, many second tier colleges, community colleges, and even high schools have free access to vast journal libraries that they would not have otherwise had access to. They also do a lot to bring cheap or free access to vast journal libraries to schools and libraries in developing countries. JSTOR has probably expanded free public access to scientific research more than any other group or organization. Sure, it would be nice if everything were open access so you could just legally get it all on the net for free, but many journals aren't willing to do that yet, and in the meantime JSTOR provides a way for most of the public to get that content at the cost of having to visit a library or school that offers public JSTOR.
- quanticle 11y ago
  Which just proves my point. The penalty he would have faced for burglary would have been less, by far, than the penalty he faced for violating the CFAA.
  - raldi 11y ago
    The penalty for burglary in Massachusetts is up to 20 years ... a first-time offender might get five years: http://www.burglarylaws.com/massachusetts/ http://www.burglarylaws.com/massachusetts/ Aaron was offered a plea bargain of six months. Also, you're still glossing over the part where he tampered with MIT's network infrastructure.
- ericd 11y ago
  I've heard stories from my days at MIT of people doing much worse things in server closets. The MIT community's view on these things is vastly different from the federal government's, and there's a large and shocking disconnect when those laws are applied to what's normally fairly accepted (if not explicitly, then implicitly condoned) behavior in the community.
  - raldi 11y ago
    This wasn't implicitly or explicitly condoned. MIT had detected what Aaron was doing, and deployed countermeasures. Aaron defeated those countermeasures; MIT deployed tougher ones, and Aaron escalated again by breaking into the server closet and patching his laptop directly into the network switch, knowing it was the only way to bypass the considerable efforts MIT was making to protect itself. This was no, "Oops, I didn't realize you minded!" situation. Aaron was fully aware that MIT didn't approve of what he was doing, and he didn't care, and was actively battling to do what he pleased anyway.
    - nitrogen 11y ago
      Are you basing this on statements from MIT, from the government, from the indictment...? I ask because, though I've never been near MIT, everything I read about it suggests that every one of these steps is seen as part of the game expected to be played by a few curious students now and then.
      - raldi 11y ago
        Some quotes from the official MIT report: http://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.pdf http://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.pd... Typically, when an excessive use case is reported that is determined to originate from within MIT’s network, the Libraries report this to either the MIT Information Services and Technology (IS&T) network security team or MIT’s “Stopit” group, which deals with inappropriate behavior that occurs electronically. The Stopit group’s general response is to send the offender a warning email message. This is almost always all that is needed to get people’s attention and have them stop whatever it was they were doing that caused the problem. [...] This time, the requests and downloads stimulated a cascade of failures that brought down multiple JSTOR servers. Half the servers in one data center failed, and JSTOR engineers feared that the entire service might go down worldwide. [...] Also on October 12, the Director of the MIT Libraries reported to MIT’s Academic Council that a cyber-attack of the JSTOR database had caused a weekend shutdown of JSTOR to the entire campus. Now take a look at the "MIT Hacker Ethic", particularly bulletpoint #2: http://hacks.mit.edu/misc/ethics.html http://hacks.mit.edu/misc/ethics.html
- id 11y ago
  > that's burglary No, it's not.
  - raldi 11y ago
    "Burglary is typically defined as the unlawful entry into almost any structure (not just a home or business) with the intent to commit any crime inside (not just theft/larceny). No physical breaking and entering is required; the offender may simply trespass through an open door." http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/burglary-overview.html http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/burglary-overvi...
ryanlol 11y ago
> he was facing a punishment that could have gone to literally millions of dollars in fines and up to 35 years in prison. This is really not how the court system works. Also, by killing himself before being sentenced he kind of ruined that argument anyway.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  This is really not how the court system works. Big, intimidating numbers are definitely one of the tactics used by prosecutors to coerce a plea.
  - ryanlol 11y ago
    And this is why we have lawyers.
tzs 11y ago
> For downloading academic papers, he was facing a punishment that could have gone to literally millions of dollars in fines and up to 35 years in prison He wasn't realistically facing 35 years. He could not get anywhere near that under the federal sentencing guidelines. See this prior discussion for details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7996807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7996807 In particular, be sure to read this article linked to in the first comment, which explains exactly how the numbers given in DOJ press releases have very little connection to reality: https://popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence-eleventy-million-years/ https://popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence-el... Also see these two article if you want details specifically on how sentencing works on the specific charges Swartz faced: http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/ http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/ http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-aaron-swartz-part-2-prosecutorial-discretion/ http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-agains... Prosecutors in the Swartz case were actually asking for about 7 years, which was still much higher than they were likely to get. Swartz's own lawyer thought that he'd probably just get probation if convicted. The DOJ really needs to stop using this stupid method of writing press releases. They wrote the indictment and so they sure as hell better know exactly what they are charging and what facts they are alleging, so they should be able to figure out the guideline sentence that would result if they won on all counts. That's what should be in the press release.

raldi 11y ago

> For downloading academic papers, he was facing [...] You left out the part where he snuck into a server closet and tampered with the network equipment. Among other things, that's burglary.

wolfgke 11y ago
> Among other things, that's burglary. And locking away scientific papers of research that was funded with public money behind paywalls is burglary of the public.
- raldi 11y ago
  I can't imagine a way that's even figuratively true. The crime of burglary is about being somewhere that you're not supposed to; perhaps you meant to say it's like larceny of the public. But even then, it's a very tenuous connection you're trying to draw. These companies were not taking anything away from the public; they made the effort to digitize, process, and catalog documents, which is no small task. And they set up servers to host these documents and make them searchable. If you feel they're asking too much money for these efforts, you're welcome to simply pretend they don't exist, and replicate their work yourself. They did nothing to make that task harder. Now, if the companies destroyed the original public records or otherwise placed new locks around them that hadn't existed beforehand, then yes, your metaphor, while still hand-wavy, would at least hold water. But of course nothing like that actually happened here.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    >or otherwise placed new locks around them that hadn't existed beforehand How is creating network and identity based locks around the papers not placing new locks?
    - raldi 11y ago
      The "them" in the sentence you quoted refers to "the original public records". The locks you refer to were around the new, value-added work: the digitized, processed, cataloged version of the papers they had made by adding value to the original public-domain documents. The locks were not applied to the original documents. It's like the difference between storing a touched-up version you made of an Apollo 11 photo in a vault, and stealing the original photo negative from NASA and putting that in a vault.
      - jsprogrammer 11y ago
        Maybe you are talking about a different lock box? JSTOR doesn't claim that its documents are public-domain: Our licenses from publishers are non-exclusive, meaning that the publishers are free to license their content to others to digitize or make it available in any way they might wish. [0] Not only were many of the papers in JSTOR funded by the public, but JSTOR itself claims to be funded through by the public through universities: We do this with funds provided by thousands of libraries and institutions, all of whom are our partners in disseminating access around the globe. [0] [0] http://about.jstor.org/10things http://about.jstor.org/10things
        foldr 11y ago
        JSTOR cannot magically put documents in the public domain. It needs the permission of the original publishers. JSTOR is responsible for scanning a whole ton of old journals which would otherwise only be available as physical copies in libraries. Nothing JSTOR has ever done has ever made anything less accessible than it was before.
- tzs 11y ago
  JSTOR doesn't lock content away. They make deals with existing journals to take content that is not available online and make it available online. Any access restrictions JSTOR imposes come from the content owners, not JSTOR. JSTOR has also convinced most of these journals, even ones with restrictive access policies, to let JSTOR make their content available for free to the public at many libraries and schools, including ones that do not have subscriptions to the underlying journals. Because of JSTOR, many second tier colleges, community colleges, and even high schools have free access to vast journal libraries that they would not have otherwise had access to. They also do a lot to bring cheap or free access to vast journal libraries to schools and libraries in developing countries. JSTOR has probably expanded free public access to scientific research more than any other group or organization. Sure, it would be nice if everything were open access so you could just legally get it all on the net for free, but many journals aren't willing to do that yet, and in the meantime JSTOR provides a way for most of the public to get that content at the cost of having to visit a library or school that offers public JSTOR.
quanticle 11y ago
Which just proves my point. The penalty he would have faced for burglary would have been less, by far, than the penalty he faced for violating the CFAA.
- raldi 11y ago
  The penalty for burglary in Massachusetts is up to 20 years ... a first-time offender might get five years: http://www.burglarylaws.com/massachusetts/ http://www.burglarylaws.com/massachusetts/ Aaron was offered a plea bargain of six months. Also, you're still glossing over the part where he tampered with MIT's network infrastructure.
ericd 11y ago
I've heard stories from my days at MIT of people doing much worse things in server closets. The MIT community's view on these things is vastly different from the federal government's, and there's a large and shocking disconnect when those laws are applied to what's normally fairly accepted (if not explicitly, then implicitly condoned) behavior in the community.
- raldi 11y ago
  This wasn't implicitly or explicitly condoned. MIT had detected what Aaron was doing, and deployed countermeasures. Aaron defeated those countermeasures; MIT deployed tougher ones, and Aaron escalated again by breaking into the server closet and patching his laptop directly into the network switch, knowing it was the only way to bypass the considerable efforts MIT was making to protect itself. This was no, "Oops, I didn't realize you minded!" situation. Aaron was fully aware that MIT didn't approve of what he was doing, and he didn't care, and was actively battling to do what he pleased anyway.
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    Are you basing this on statements from MIT, from the government, from the indictment...? I ask because, though I've never been near MIT, everything I read about it suggests that every one of these steps is seen as part of the game expected to be played by a few curious students now and then.
    - raldi 11y ago
      Some quotes from the official MIT report: http://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.pdf http://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.pd... Typically, when an excessive use case is reported that is determined to originate from within MIT’s network, the Libraries report this to either the MIT Information Services and Technology (IS&T) network security team or MIT’s “Stopit” group, which deals with inappropriate behavior that occurs electronically. The Stopit group’s general response is to send the offender a warning email message. This is almost always all that is needed to get people’s attention and have them stop whatever it was they were doing that caused the problem. [...] This time, the requests and downloads stimulated a cascade of failures that brought down multiple JSTOR servers. Half the servers in one data center failed, and JSTOR engineers feared that the entire service might go down worldwide. [...] Also on October 12, the Director of the MIT Libraries reported to MIT’s Academic Council that a cyber-attack of the JSTOR database had caused a weekend shutdown of JSTOR to the entire campus. Now take a look at the "MIT Hacker Ethic", particularly bulletpoint #2: http://hacks.mit.edu/misc/ethics.html http://hacks.mit.edu/misc/ethics.html
id 11y ago
> that's burglary No, it's not.
- raldi 11y ago
  "Burglary is typically defined as the unlawful entry into almost any structure (not just a home or business) with the intent to commit any crime inside (not just theft/larceny). No physical breaking and entering is required; the offender may simply trespass through an open door." http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/burglary-overview.html http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/burglary-overvi...

ryanlol 11y ago

> he was facing a punishment that could have gone to literally millions of dollars in fines and up to 35 years in prison. This is really not how the court system works. Also, by killing himself before being sentenced he kind of ruined that argument anyway.

nitrogen 11y ago
This is really not how the court system works. Big, intimidating numbers are definitely one of the tactics used by prosecutors to coerce a plea.
- ryanlol 11y ago
  And this is why we have lawyers.

tzs 11y ago

> For downloading academic papers, he was facing a punishment that could have gone to literally millions of dollars in fines and up to 35 years in prison He wasn't realistically facing 35 years. He could not get anywhere near that under the federal sentencing guidelines. See this prior discussion for details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7996807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7996807 In particular, be sure to read this article linked to in the first comment, which explains exactly how the numbers given in DOJ press releases have very little connection to reality: https://popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence-eleventy-million-years/ https://popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence-el... Also see these two article if you want details specifically on how sentencing works on the specific charges Swartz faced: http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/ http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/ http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-aaron-swartz-part-2-prosecutorial-discretion/ http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-agains... Prosecutors in the Swartz case were actually asking for about 7 years, which was still much higher than they were likely to get. Swartz's own lawyer thought that he'd probably just get probation if convicted. The DOJ really needs to stop using this stupid method of writing press releases. They wrote the indictment and so they sure as hell better know exactly what they are charging and what facts they are alleging, so they should be able to figure out the guideline sentence that would result if they won on all counts. That's what should be in the press release.