11 ms·

Aaron Swartz v. United States

304 points by edsu 15y ago

mildweed 15y ago
Regardless of who was hosting them before and how much their hosting costs were that were used to justify the paywall, Google Scholar should be brought in to host them all going forward. They're out in the open, might as well put them to good use.
- lukeschlather 15y ago
  The NSF should host them free of charge. We shouldn't expect a private money-making corporation to host them as a public service.
- GHFigs 15y ago
  They're out in the open... They are not. You're thinking of the the torrent of public domain works released by Greg Maxwell, which isn't directly related. Aaron Swartz downloaded much, much, more, and according to JSTOR's statement: "We secured from Mr. Swartz the content that was taken, and received confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed."
mark_l_watson 15y ago
Empires in decline get progressively more brutal. Sounds like Aaron Swartz became an embarrassment so is being side-tracked from the good work he does. I am not 100% sure of this, but I think this is probably true: similar to the case of Eliot Spitzer who as governor of NY was investigating Wall Street. So, I think that Wall Street had their lackey the US Government (via the FBI) dig up something on Spitzer to bring him down. I believe that this situation is called a plutarchy.
- tptacek 15y ago
  This is tinfoil-hat stuff. Governors who frequent prostitutes can't expect to stay in office, full stop. The likelihood that Swartz does a single overnight in custody over this is practically nil. The brutality we are arguing about here is the possibility of him ending up with a felony on his record.
  - jordanb 15y ago
    To be honest, Swartz is independently wealthy so he won't have to worry about the felony impacting his ability to work for a living. In his post-liquidity-event career as an activist, a felony conviction will serve nicely as a bona-fide. So the only real downside for Swartz in this is that he spends time in jail, which as you say is quite unlikely.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      One wouldn't want to downplay the badness of having a felony record. For instance, Swartz may imagine one day running for office, or being a key person in a political campaign. Or needing to work directly with institutional investors.
      - nhangen 15y ago
        Makes getting any sort of security clearance a no-go. No buying weapons, etc.
        puredemo 15y ago
        Or, you know, voting.
    - misuba 15y ago
      There may still be fields of activism wherein a felony conviction is helpful, but it's not at all clear that information access is one of them. Nobody associates computers emotionally with the '60s.
  - mark_l_watson 15y ago
    Are you kidding? How many members of Congress routinely use prostitutes? Should they be kicked out of office? Are they ever? I think that Spitzer's mess-up should have stayed between him and his wife - she is the appropriate authority to dish out punishment in this case :-) If Spitzer had not been getting close to blowing the cover of dubious dealings on Wall Street (that affected the values of our stock portfolios during the crash a year later) I personally don't believe that the episodes with a prostitute being made public would have happened.
anonymous246 15y ago
Nice spin: he's been charged for "excessive downloading". Way to ignore the physical break-in to install a computer directly on a network switch. I, for one, hope that he gets a criminal record at the very least (plea deal). This really puts the crime in a different league. Unless I have my facts wrong, in which I'm willing to be corrected.
- pstuart 15y ago
  Way to ignore the notion of intent when evaluating a "crime".
  - tptacek 15y ago
    Actually, from the material in the charging document, Swartz's actions do go a ways towards demonstrating intent. He's clearly aware that JSTOR and MIT don't want him doing what he's doing, and devises an escalating series of tactics to evade their countermeasures. "Intent" is largely expressed in words like "purposefulness".
    - pstuart 15y ago
      I disagree -- I was referring to the "ultimate" intent of openness and transparency. Shall we focus on the intent of the Woolworth's lunch counter sit-in as a purposefulness to deprive white people of their midday repast? Edit (appending as reply chain is too deep): Thomas, I see you that your focus is computer security, so I can understand how you are focusing on the breach of security and not the end goal. Perhaps I'm naive, but from the posting this thread is discussing it appears that his intentions clearly are honorable.
      - tptacek 15y ago
        The sit-in directly targeted an unjust law; the sit in was both the means and the end. Swartz is accused of breaking laws as a means to a different end (unless he planned on dumping the database to BitTorrent, in which case the whole thing was a grand act of civil disobedience; for his sake, I hope that's not what's going on.) In either case, I don't have to agree with the prosecution to point out one obvious way it could be structured.
ender7 15y ago
I don't understand why people are bringing issues of the availability of scientific journalism into this. I agree that the prices and paywalls involves are ridiculous and a bad idea for a variety of reasons, but that seems orthogonal to the issue here. I don't think anyone is denying that Swartz committed a (possible series of) minor crimes. Claiming that "information should be free" doesn't stop them from being crimes. What's shocking is the response from the government, which appears to be using this incident for its own purposes rather than to preserve the rule of law. No one seems to really be asking why this is happening, and I think that is by far the more interesting question. Is the justice department trying to expand its reach, as the article suggests? Is this a deterrent for future "hackers"? Has one of Swartz's numerous hornet nest-kickings pissed off someone high up, who wants him removed from the playing field?
- tptacek 15y ago
  If there's evidence yet to come that Swartz intended to anonymously push the corpus he took from JSTOR up to BitTorrent, the crime is no longer minor. I think I share Swartz's politics, but I'd like to believe that law enforcement would at least take a plan like that seriously. On the other hand, it's equally possible that there is no evidence Swartz was going to publish what he took from JSTOR, and that instead the DoJ is upset about the PACER incident, which it couldn't prosecute, and jumped on this case, which it clearly can prosecute. Swartz is lucky to have such well connected and influential friends.
  - mindcrime 15y ago
    If there's evidence yet to come that Swartz intended to anonymously push the corpus he took from JSTOR up to BitTorrent, the crime is no longer minor. Welcome to thought-crime, folks. 1984? Yeah right, man. That's a typo. Orwell is here now. He's livin' large. We have no names, man. No names. We are nameless! ~~ Cereal Killer
    - tptacek 15y ago
      If by "thought crime" you mean "establishment of mens rea", it's been 1984 since English common law.
rokhayakebe 15y ago
Correction: Aaron Swartz v Some Powerful Politicians or People Who Are Afraid Of What Playing With This Data May Reveal.
jrockway 15y ago
Why aren't Google and Bing going to prison every time one of their bots crashes some web server? (Perhaps because "systematic downloading" isn't actually a crime?)
- gavinlynch 15y ago
  When Google and Bing start sending 'human bots' out to Universities to facilitate the downloading of data, I'm pretty sure a lot of people will be going to jail. Just saying.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    Didn't Google recently get in a bunch of trouble recently for capturing raw data from public wifi networks?
    - gavinlynch 15y ago
      To me, there is no comparison. Inadvertantly capturing a few random packets from open, public Wifi signals while driving down the road? They changed wifi channels about 5 times a second. All investigations that I have read concluded that no meaningful data was retrieved. And to compare that to specifically circumventing physical and virtual restrictions after warning the user against a set of actions? Where the target data was not worthless, as in Google's case, but worth over $1 million dollars? I don't see the comparison.
      - ajays 15y ago
        It wasn't inadvertent. It was by design. Lets get that straight. If, for example, you're running tcpdump(1) with a packet capture size of 1500 (I don't know if G was doing that, but I'm giving an example), then you can't claim that you captured the packets' contents inadvertently. Many years ago, when writing web crawlers was the cool thing to do, I wrote one (like an idiot, I wanted to see how deep the web was). Unfortunately, I didn't have a good synchronization scheme, so it ended up beating on a poor website for too long. The operator of that site sent a stern email to our DNS contacts, complaining. And we shut the crawler down. Today, I fear I'd be indicted for "wire fraud"!
pmb 15y ago
This whole thing weirds me out. Here we are on Hacker News, and yet there is a super-large contingent of people going "Well, he DID technically commit a victimless crime...". So yes - he did do something that was against some terms of service. But jail time? For breaking a clickthrough "license" and computer hacking at MIT in the service of public knowledge? This sucks unutterably. MIT: Playful physical hacks okay, but don't try to mass harvest the knowledge of the world or the DOJ will come down on you like a sledgehammer. JSTOR: All the world's knowledge, as long as you don't try to access all of it. DOJ: We'll break you just because we can (or for other reasons that we are not stating). Hacker News: Well, they do have a point - he did access semi-public data in a non-approved way, and he had to plug into the network in a strange way to do it.
- tptacek 15y ago
  I think "he just broke a clickthrough license" greatly oversimplifies what he was alleged to have done. In fact, what he did was to devise an escalating series of tactics to evade the countermeasures that both MIT and JSTOR set up to stop him from doing what he was doing. And as has been pointed out elsewhere on this thread, the likelihood of him spending a single night in custody is very low.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - brlewis 15y ago
    That escalating series of tactics arguably did not include any federal crimes. I refer you to Max Kennerly's analysis, under the section "Did Aaron Swartz Really Commit Any Crimes?" http://www.litigationandtrial.com/2011/07/articles/series/special-comment/aaron-swartz-computer-fraud-indictment/ http://www.litigationandtrial.com/2011/07/articles/series/sp...
    - tptacek 15y ago
      Perhaps not, but if the DoJ's perspective is that mirroring JSTOR without permission ultimately constitutes wire fraud, then the series of tactics he took, legal or not, establish mens rea: they constitute evidence that Swartz' actions were knowing and purposeful. I like the article you cited, but it seems predicated on a lot of assumptions about the evidence the DoJ has. Like I've said elsewhere: if the only thing Swartz was doing was taking a shortcut to getting bulk documents to analyze, then this is clearly a misstep on the DoJ's part; an extreme overreaction. But if they have evidence that his plan was to dump them onto BitTorrent, they have a case. I hope they lose the case!
lisper 15y ago
To paraphrase Feynman, this might have some relevance to the situation: "...he also worked with Shireen Barday at Stanford Law School to assess “problems with remunerated research” in law review articles (i.e., articles funded by corporations, sometimes to help them in ongoing legal battles), by downloading and analyzing over 400,000 law review articles to determine the source of their funding. The results were published in the Stanford Law Review."
- tptacek 15y ago
  I speculate that Pacer is more relevant: during a trial run of free public access to Pacer, Swartz is alleged to have mirrored almost 20% of the database; as (it is alleged) a result, the public trial of Pacer was shut down and an investigation launched into the security of the Pacer system. One possible narrative inside the DoJ: we can't launch public trials of open access to databases, because this Aaron Swartz guy has decided that his Python code will have the final say in any policy decisions we make. But that's not for him to decide! And here he is again, taking the same approach, this time to a commercial database that produces 7 figure annual recurring revenues. I don't agree with this mindset (:#>! :#>!) but I'd understand it.
  - djeikyb 15y ago
    Fwiw: JSTOR is non-profit, not commercial.
mrschwabe 15y ago
We must evolve & develop economic & political systems that eliminate the government's authority to railroad a person like this. It's disturbing and a blatant flaw in a free nation.
kgo 15y ago
I'm just curious why someone who did this is still a fellow at a center for ethics. It seems like the whole situation, even if it's been cleared up with MIT and JSTOR, is completely unethical, regardless of the legal case. Is the position tenured?
- thomaslangston 15y ago
  Could you comment more expansively on why you find this situation unethical? If so, can refrain from leaning on the legality of the situation. I haven't heard a good explanation that didn't use the legal ramifications as a central support.
- jellicle 15y ago
  What has he done that's unethical?
perfunctory 15y ago
> ... and Aaron faces a possible fine and up to 35 years in prison, with trial set for September. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14270655 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14270655 > Under Norwegian law, Mr Breivik faces a maximum of 21 years in jail if convicted... WTF.
- scythe 15y ago
  Two different law systems, two different legal philosophies. In the Nordic model, prison is largely rehabilitative. I don't think they even give life sentences. In America, prison is decidedly punitive, with little thought to rehabilitation, and the death penalty is commonplace.
  - carbonica 15y ago
    "the death penalty is commonplace." This is why you're being downvoted so heavily, in case you were wondering. Such flamebait is not appropriate.
    - yason 15y ago
      From what I read in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unite... I can certainly conclude that death penalty is commonplace. A majority of the states keep it legal.
      - tedunangst 15y ago
        "There were 46 executions in 2010". For some perspective, if you think the death penalty is commonplace, then you must think getting killed by lightning is very commonplace.
        yason 15y ago
        Commonplace as rare events go. Any American can get hit by a lightning; the actuality of suffering a death penalty concerns a much smaller number of people, namely a select few of those imprisoned for life. Especially in contrast to the OP's comparison to Norway, 46 versus 0 per year makes it pretty commonplace. There are over thousand people "on the list" in dozens of states at the moment.
there 15y ago
shouldn't that be United States v. Aaron Swartz because the US is bringing charges against him? Aaron Swartz v. United States makes it sound like he is suing the government, but there's nothing on that page that says he is.
- davorak 15y ago
  Yes it should, I read the title and thought there might be an interesting new twist when there was not.
mrich 15y ago
To me this looks like a career move by the prosecutor who wants to get some convicted hackers on his CV, which will look good when it comes to promotion time as these crimes get more and more relevant. The US justice system seems to have degenerated so that prosecutors do anything to get some people convicted, as long as they are a) popular or b) it helps them in some way, regardless of the quality of thee evidence or the merit of prosecution to the general public.
plainOldText 15y ago
I'm super curious to know if there is someone else out there who believes that there is a connection between Aaron's political activism and his indictment. Not that his political views would represent the major cause of his indictment, but still. Anyway, just ranting...
anigbrowl 15y ago
So he's suing the United States now, eh? Because usually the first person named is the complainant. Getting the simplest and most basic details wrong like this is a reliable indicator that everything which comes afterwards is going to be similarly ill-founded. This is a prime example of the yawning gulf between blogging and proper journalism. Kindly do not misread that as support for the legal status quo, JSTOR, or anything else.
darksaga 15y ago
Well, Mr.Swartz should probably thank Anonymous and Lulsec for provoking the US Government. They're fed up and have determined whoever they get their hands on (minor hacking or not) they're going to drag you into federal court and make an example out of them. This reminds of back in the 90's when there wasn't any laws in place to address hacking. But man, the Feds did not like kids making them look like fools. Once they got the laws of the books, it was open season on hackers. I'm pretty sure the next few years are going to see a major crackdown on hacking again. Just like the recent arrests of supposed Lulsec and Anon members. This guy will be lucky to get out of federal prison in 15 years.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

304 points by edsu 15y ago

Regardless of who was hosting them before and how much their hosting costs were that were used to justify the paywall, Google Scholar should be brought in to host them all going forward. They're out in the open, might as well put them to good use.

lukeschlather 15y ago
The NSF should host them free of charge. We shouldn't expect a private money-making corporation to host them as a public service.
GHFigs 15y ago
They're out in the open... They are not. You're thinking of the the torrent of public domain works released by Greg Maxwell, which isn't directly related. Aaron Swartz downloaded much, much, more, and according to JSTOR's statement: "We secured from Mr. Swartz the content that was taken, and received confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed."

mark_l_watson 15y ago

Empires in decline get progressively more brutal. Sounds like Aaron Swartz became an embarrassment so is being side-tracked from the good work he does. I am not 100% sure of this, but I think this is probably true: similar to the case of Eliot Spitzer who as governor of NY was investigating Wall Street. So, I think that Wall Street had their lackey the US Government (via the FBI) dig up something on Spitzer to bring him down. I believe that this situation is called a plutarchy.

tptacek 15y ago
This is tinfoil-hat stuff. Governors who frequent prostitutes can't expect to stay in office, full stop. The likelihood that Swartz does a single overnight in custody over this is practically nil. The brutality we are arguing about here is the possibility of him ending up with a felony on his record.
- jordanb 15y ago
  To be honest, Swartz is independently wealthy so he won't have to worry about the felony impacting his ability to work for a living. In his post-liquidity-event career as an activist, a felony conviction will serve nicely as a bona-fide. So the only real downside for Swartz in this is that he spends time in jail, which as you say is quite unlikely.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    One wouldn't want to downplay the badness of having a felony record. For instance, Swartz may imagine one day running for office, or being a key person in a political campaign. Or needing to work directly with institutional investors.
    - nhangen 15y ago
      Makes getting any sort of security clearance a no-go. No buying weapons, etc.
      - puredemo 15y ago
        Or, you know, voting.
  - misuba 15y ago
    There may still be fields of activism wherein a felony conviction is helpful, but it's not at all clear that information access is one of them. Nobody associates computers emotionally with the '60s.
- mark_l_watson 15y ago
  Are you kidding? How many members of Congress routinely use prostitutes? Should they be kicked out of office? Are they ever? I think that Spitzer's mess-up should have stayed between him and his wife - she is the appropriate authority to dish out punishment in this case :-) If Spitzer had not been getting close to blowing the cover of dubious dealings on Wall Street (that affected the values of our stock portfolios during the crash a year later) I personally don't believe that the episodes with a prostitute being made public would have happened.

anonymous246 15y ago

Nice spin: he's been charged for "excessive downloading". Way to ignore the physical break-in to install a computer directly on a network switch. I, for one, hope that he gets a criminal record at the very least (plea deal). This really puts the crime in a different league. Unless I have my facts wrong, in which I'm willing to be corrected.

pstuart 15y ago
Way to ignore the notion of intent when evaluating a "crime".
- tptacek 15y ago
  Actually, from the material in the charging document, Swartz's actions do go a ways towards demonstrating intent. He's clearly aware that JSTOR and MIT don't want him doing what he's doing, and devises an escalating series of tactics to evade their countermeasures. "Intent" is largely expressed in words like "purposefulness".
  - pstuart 15y ago
    I disagree -- I was referring to the "ultimate" intent of openness and transparency. Shall we focus on the intent of the Woolworth's lunch counter sit-in as a purposefulness to deprive white people of their midday repast? Edit (appending as reply chain is too deep): Thomas, I see you that your focus is computer security, so I can understand how you are focusing on the breach of security and not the end goal. Perhaps I'm naive, but from the posting this thread is discussing it appears that his intentions clearly are honorable.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      The sit-in directly targeted an unjust law; the sit in was both the means and the end. Swartz is accused of breaking laws as a means to a different end (unless he planned on dumping the database to BitTorrent, in which case the whole thing was a grand act of civil disobedience; for his sake, I hope that's not what's going on.) In either case, I don't have to agree with the prosecution to point out one obvious way it could be structured.

ender7 15y ago

I don't understand why people are bringing issues of the availability of scientific journalism into this. I agree that the prices and paywalls involves are ridiculous and a bad idea for a variety of reasons, but that seems orthogonal to the issue here. I don't think anyone is denying that Swartz committed a (possible series of) minor crimes. Claiming that "information should be free" doesn't stop them from being crimes. What's shocking is the response from the government, which appears to be using this incident for its own purposes rather than to preserve the rule of law. No one seems to really be asking why this is happening, and I think that is by far the more interesting question. Is the justice department trying to expand its reach, as the article suggests? Is this a deterrent for future "hackers"? Has one of Swartz's numerous hornet nest-kickings pissed off someone high up, who wants him removed from the playing field?

tptacek 15y ago
If there's evidence yet to come that Swartz intended to anonymously push the corpus he took from JSTOR up to BitTorrent, the crime is no longer minor. I think I share Swartz's politics, but I'd like to believe that law enforcement would at least take a plan like that seriously. On the other hand, it's equally possible that there is no evidence Swartz was going to publish what he took from JSTOR, and that instead the DoJ is upset about the PACER incident, which it couldn't prosecute, and jumped on this case, which it clearly can prosecute. Swartz is lucky to have such well connected and influential friends.
- mindcrime 15y ago
  If there's evidence yet to come that Swartz intended to anonymously push the corpus he took from JSTOR up to BitTorrent, the crime is no longer minor. Welcome to thought-crime, folks. 1984? Yeah right, man. That's a typo. Orwell is here now. He's livin' large. We have no names, man. No names. We are nameless! ~~ Cereal Killer
  - tptacek 15y ago
    If by "thought crime" you mean "establishment of mens rea", it's been 1984 since English common law.

rokhayakebe 15y ago

Correction: Aaron Swartz v Some Powerful Politicians or People Who Are Afraid Of What Playing With This Data May Reveal.

jrockway 15y ago

Why aren't Google and Bing going to prison every time one of their bots crashes some web server? (Perhaps because "systematic downloading" isn't actually a crime?)

gavinlynch 15y ago
When Google and Bing start sending 'human bots' out to Universities to facilitate the downloading of data, I'm pretty sure a lot of people will be going to jail. Just saying.
- tptacek 15y ago
  Didn't Google recently get in a bunch of trouble recently for capturing raw data from public wifi networks?
  - gavinlynch 15y ago
    To me, there is no comparison. Inadvertantly capturing a few random packets from open, public Wifi signals while driving down the road? They changed wifi channels about 5 times a second. All investigations that I have read concluded that no meaningful data was retrieved. And to compare that to specifically circumventing physical and virtual restrictions after warning the user against a set of actions? Where the target data was not worthless, as in Google's case, but worth over $1 million dollars? I don't see the comparison.
    - ajays 15y ago
      It wasn't inadvertent. It was by design. Lets get that straight. If, for example, you're running tcpdump(1) with a packet capture size of 1500 (I don't know if G was doing that, but I'm giving an example), then you can't claim that you captured the packets' contents inadvertently. Many years ago, when writing web crawlers was the cool thing to do, I wrote one (like an idiot, I wanted to see how deep the web was). Unfortunately, I didn't have a good synchronization scheme, so it ended up beating on a poor website for too long. The operator of that site sent a stern email to our DNS contacts, complaining. And we shut the crawler down. Today, I fear I'd be indicted for "wire fraud"!

pmb 15y ago

This whole thing weirds me out. Here we are on Hacker News, and yet there is a super-large contingent of people going "Well, he DID technically commit a victimless crime...". So yes - he did do something that was against some terms of service. But jail time? For breaking a clickthrough "license" and computer hacking at MIT in the service of public knowledge? This sucks unutterably. MIT: Playful physical hacks okay, but don't try to mass harvest the knowledge of the world or the DOJ will come down on you like a sledgehammer. JSTOR: All the world's knowledge, as long as you don't try to access all of it. DOJ: We'll break you just because we can (or for other reasons that we are not stating). Hacker News: Well, they do have a point - he did access semi-public data in a non-approved way, and he had to plug into the network in a strange way to do it.

tptacek 15y ago
I think "he just broke a clickthrough license" greatly oversimplifies what he was alleged to have done. In fact, what he did was to devise an escalating series of tactics to evade the countermeasures that both MIT and JSTOR set up to stop him from doing what he was doing. And as has been pointed out elsewhere on this thread, the likelihood of him spending a single night in custody is very low.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- brlewis 15y ago
  That escalating series of tactics arguably did not include any federal crimes. I refer you to Max Kennerly's analysis, under the section "Did Aaron Swartz Really Commit Any Crimes?" http://www.litigationandtrial.com/2011/07/articles/series/special-comment/aaron-swartz-computer-fraud-indictment/ http://www.litigationandtrial.com/2011/07/articles/series/sp...
  - tptacek 15y ago
    Perhaps not, but if the DoJ's perspective is that mirroring JSTOR without permission ultimately constitutes wire fraud, then the series of tactics he took, legal or not, establish mens rea: they constitute evidence that Swartz' actions were knowing and purposeful. I like the article you cited, but it seems predicated on a lot of assumptions about the evidence the DoJ has. Like I've said elsewhere: if the only thing Swartz was doing was taking a shortcut to getting bulk documents to analyze, then this is clearly a misstep on the DoJ's part; an extreme overreaction. But if they have evidence that his plan was to dump them onto BitTorrent, they have a case. I hope they lose the case!

lisper 15y ago

To paraphrase Feynman, this might have some relevance to the situation: "...he also worked with Shireen Barday at Stanford Law School to assess “problems with remunerated research” in law review articles (i.e., articles funded by corporations, sometimes to help them in ongoing legal battles), by downloading and analyzing over 400,000 law review articles to determine the source of their funding. The results were published in the Stanford Law Review."

tptacek 15y ago
I speculate that Pacer is more relevant: during a trial run of free public access to Pacer, Swartz is alleged to have mirrored almost 20% of the database; as (it is alleged) a result, the public trial of Pacer was shut down and an investigation launched into the security of the Pacer system. One possible narrative inside the DoJ: we can't launch public trials of open access to databases, because this Aaron Swartz guy has decided that his Python code will have the final say in any policy decisions we make. But that's not for him to decide! And here he is again, taking the same approach, this time to a commercial database that produces 7 figure annual recurring revenues. I don't agree with this mindset (:#>! :#>!) but I'd understand it.
- djeikyb 15y ago
  Fwiw: JSTOR is non-profit, not commercial.

mrschwabe 15y ago

We must evolve & develop economic & political systems that eliminate the government's authority to railroad a person like this. It's disturbing and a blatant flaw in a free nation.

kgo 15y ago

I'm just curious why someone who did this is still a fellow at a center for ethics. It seems like the whole situation, even if it's been cleared up with MIT and JSTOR, is completely unethical, regardless of the legal case. Is the position tenured?

thomaslangston 15y ago
Could you comment more expansively on why you find this situation unethical? If so, can refrain from leaning on the legality of the situation. I haven't heard a good explanation that didn't use the legal ramifications as a central support.
jellicle 15y ago
What has he done that's unethical?

perfunctory 15y ago

> ... and Aaron faces a possible fine and up to 35 years in prison, with trial set for September. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14270655 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14270655 > Under Norwegian law, Mr Breivik faces a maximum of 21 years in jail if convicted... WTF.

scythe 15y ago
Two different law systems, two different legal philosophies. In the Nordic model, prison is largely rehabilitative. I don't think they even give life sentences. In America, prison is decidedly punitive, with little thought to rehabilitation, and the death penalty is commonplace.
- carbonica 15y ago
  "the death penalty is commonplace." This is why you're being downvoted so heavily, in case you were wondering. Such flamebait is not appropriate.
  - yason 15y ago
    From what I read in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unite... I can certainly conclude that death penalty is commonplace. A majority of the states keep it legal.
    - tedunangst 15y ago
      "There were 46 executions in 2010". For some perspective, if you think the death penalty is commonplace, then you must think getting killed by lightning is very commonplace.
      - yason 15y ago
        Commonplace as rare events go. Any American can get hit by a lightning; the actuality of suffering a death penalty concerns a much smaller number of people, namely a select few of those imprisoned for life. Especially in contrast to the OP's comparison to Norway, 46 versus 0 per year makes it pretty commonplace. There are over thousand people "on the list" in dozens of states at the moment.

there 15y ago

shouldn't that be United States v. Aaron Swartz because the US is bringing charges against him? Aaron Swartz v. United States makes it sound like he is suing the government, but there's nothing on that page that says he is.

davorak 15y ago
Yes it should, I read the title and thought there might be an interesting new twist when there was not.

mrich 15y ago

To me this looks like a career move by the prosecutor who wants to get some convicted hackers on his CV, which will look good when it comes to promotion time as these crimes get more and more relevant. The US justice system seems to have degenerated so that prosecutors do anything to get some people convicted, as long as they are a) popular or b) it helps them in some way, regardless of the quality of thee evidence or the merit of prosecution to the general public.

plainOldText 15y ago

I'm super curious to know if there is someone else out there who believes that there is a connection between Aaron's political activism and his indictment. Not that his political views would represent the major cause of his indictment, but still. Anyway, just ranting...

anigbrowl 15y ago

So he's suing the United States now, eh? Because usually the first person named is the complainant. Getting the simplest and most basic details wrong like this is a reliable indicator that everything which comes afterwards is going to be similarly ill-founded. This is a prime example of the yawning gulf between blogging and proper journalism. Kindly do not misread that as support for the legal status quo, JSTOR, or anything else.

darksaga 15y ago

Well, Mr.Swartz should probably thank Anonymous and Lulsec for provoking the US Government. They're fed up and have determined whoever they get their hands on (minor hacking or not) they're going to drag you into federal court and make an example out of them. This reminds of back in the 90's when there wasn't any laws in place to address hacking. But man, the Feds did not like kids making them look like fools. Once they got the laws of the books, it was open season on hackers. I'm pretty sure the next few years are going to see a major crackdown on hacking again. Just like the recent arrests of supposed Lulsec and Anon members. This guy will be lucky to get out of federal prison in 15 years.

deleted 15y ago

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