9 ms·

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 ridi

by 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.
    - ynniv 15y ago
      "mens rea" means that there was knowing intent to commit a crime. Clearly there was mens rea is this case as steps were taken to circumvent and conceal the act. mindcrime's point is that your comment suggests the crime could be escalated based on some possibility that the defendant might commit a more serious crime. This more serious crime was of course not committed, thus making it a crime of thought.
      - tptacek 15y ago
        We have our wires crossed; I see why: I'm writing message board comments, not essays. There are two issues of intent here: (1) There is the question of whether Swartz's repeated accesses of JSTOR were done knowing that access was wrong, or recklessly, or purposefully to accomplish an illegal end. This question, of "mens rea", is I think reasonably established in the charging documents by things like MAC address spoofing. (2) There is the entirely speculative question of whether Swartz had the intention of "liberating" all of JSTOR onto BitTorrent. Nobody knows whether this is true except Swartz and possibly the DoJ. My suggestion here is only that we don't know all the evidence, and perhaps some of the severity of the DoJ's response is based on evidence they have but have not yet disclosed to the public. The confusion here is my fault. Sorry. I certainly don't believe that Swartz should be prosecuted for thinking JSTOR should be liberated, or that the DoJ should be building a case based on what they think he was going to do next.
        firebones 15y ago
        Based on the text of the indictment, the establishment of his intent with the documents is the one claim that doesn't appear to established with any mention of supporting evidence. This stands in stark contrast to the meticulously detailed accounts of MAC address changes, computer purchase history and surveillance video describing his actions. The question that this hinges on is whether there is hard evidence of his intent; either there exists a clear statement from Swartz of his intention (e.g., say, a chat log from an informant where he expressed his intent, or an actual upload) and they didn't feel the need to share this info to get the indictment, or they're just trying to make up some circumstantial case (oooh, look, he had a BitTorrent client on a laptop we seized) to justify the harassment. I would guess that it must be something very weak, ambiguous and circumstantial which is why they didn't feel the need to substantiate the claim. But then again, given the long time frame (many months) and the rashness of some of the behavior Swartz displayed, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that someone got him to say something via electronic means that could be construed as an intent to P2P the documents.
- makmanalp 15y ago
  As a tangent, isn't it scary that you can effectively piss off entities such as the DoJ and they can hold a grudge against you? Or from the article: > Attorney Jerry Cohen, a Boston IP lawyer, suggests this aggressive use of criminal charges rather than civil charges is part of a trend in government prosecution of such cases, like taking “a sledgehammer to drive a thumb tack… It’s intended to terrorize the person who’s indicted and others who might be thinking of the same thing.“ Is it even legally okay to publicly make an example of someone like that?
  - tptacek 15y ago
    I guess. What do you expect? They're people just like everyone else. This isn't one of those "1,001 crimes you can commit in the morning while making orange juice" things from Reason magazine. Aaron went way out of his way to expose himself to this situation. It's possible that where you see an Internet folk hero, the DoJ sees someone bent on forcibly publishing every closed database pertaining to the public interest, laws be damned.† Let me add something else that I think some other HN people may be familiar with: My Confirmation sponsor is/was a criminal court judge (friend of the family). Very nice guy. Spectacularly nice guy. I babysat his kids once. I've seen him maybe twice in the past ten years, but I'd be surprised if he didn't remember the names of my kids. When I was younger, we saw him all the time. Every weekend. My dad played in the church folk group with him. I can't remember the particulars, it may have been 4th of July firecrackers (illegal in Chicago) or it may have been shaving cream on Halloween, but either way he caught me and some friends doing something technically illegal. It was NOT. OK. I remember the legality of the incident being taken VERY. SERIOUSLY. Entirely different demeanor. I've seen the same thing with friends' cop dads. I think people on HN don't fully appreciate the extent to which prosecutors and judges take the law seriously. They've dedicated their life to it. Our country is ruled by laws. There are definitely times when the law is wrong, or when its diligent enforcement doesn't ultimately serve the social good. This may very well be one of them. But I think it's a very bad idea to build a worldview around the notion that the criminal justice system is going to casually look past the law. The law is a big deal. † I don't know Aaron Swartz personally and am not asserting any of this to be true. †† To your later edit: there's no statute against "public example making". If you don't want to be an example, avoid felonies. That's going to get me downvoted, so can we assume good faith and accept this new emoticon I just made up: :#> as shorthand for "I don't really think the person we're talking about is culpable for a felony based on the information we currently have"? :#>! :#>! :#>!
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
flatline 15y ago
As others have mentioned, he's crossed the Feds in the past, but I also must point out that there have been a ton of press as of late about "hacking" at large. Anonymous and LulzSec come first to mind: if federal enforcement is ramping up a broad campaign against computer crimes, a lot more people may get caught up in prosecution.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
gavinlynch 15y ago
The "Why" question? I don't know, to me it's pretty simple. It's their job. Justice? Sure that has a role somewhere in there, but let's be real: A prosecutor's job is to get convictions. They have a set of rules which they can shape around a group of facts which they use to get their convictions. In an era when digital security is such a hot topic, I'm not really surprised that someone in the Justice Department would be attempting to prosecute Aaron for as much as they can line up against him. I think that ascribing some larger legal agenda behind this is a reach, or even a political agenda targeted at "silencing" Swartz is a reach. Does the DoJ likely want to crack down on anything that smells of security issues? Sure. And I'm Not saying that the idea that legal and political agendas are pursued is ludicrous. I'm just not so sure this case is anything remarkable. He (allegedly) did what he did, the DoJ thinks they can make a case against him. So they will.
ohyes 15y ago
>I don't think anyone is denying that Swartz committed a (possible series of) minor crimes. If you read through the charges, it isn't cut and dry clear that he did actually commit any federal crimes. He didn't do anything special to get into JSTOR. Essentially he was web scraping with a bunch of different user-names and passwords. There is nothing specifically illegal about that. It isn't clear that it cost JSTOR anything or actually damaged JSTOR. It may have caused a disruption to the service, but it isn't clear the disruption was intentional. He didn't wake up one day and decide to DDOS JSTOR. Although he has a history of distributing documents, it isn't clear that he intended to distribute these particular documents. What I'm surprised about is that he did this so badly. There are a number of colleges around Boston and Cambridge all with libraries that have access to JSTOR. He had to have known that JSTOR and MIT wouldn't like this. Couldn't he have scraped the database slowly and from multiple points so that it blended in with the normal traffic?
- Estragon 15y ago
  He didn't do anything special to get into JSTOR. Essentially he was web scraping with a bunch of different user-names and passwords. What about trespassing in and tampering with MIT's network closet?
  - nkassis 15y ago
    Is that really a federal crime? the trans passing part? I would think that would be a rather minor thing.
  - gavinlynch 15y ago
    To the "so what, he just trespassed. You don't get the FBI involved for trespassing." If they just found him randomly wandering the halls where he should not be, obviously the FBI would not be involved. If they see him entering the network cages in order to mirror an asset worth $1.5 million dollars to his personal storage devices... I think they take the trespassing a bit more seriously and in a different context :p
    - ohyes 15y ago
ChuckMcM 15y ago
I suspect the reason the availability issue keeps coming up is that this restriction on research by third parties is considered a 'bad' thing by nearly everyone except the people benefiting from it. This 'social injustice' is a form of angst that keeps seeking expression. To you point about the government using the incident to its own purposes, this is not new. There is a tremendous amount of heat (we'll call it campaign dollars ;-) being put on representatives to 'protect' copyrights. Jason's case is convenient in that there seems to be a lot of evidence that he did in fact work around the existing licensing schemes, and those schemes are based on copyright. Perhaps the government is hoping to get a published decision to establish some case law here, or perhaps folks can point to it and tell their deep pocket contributors that they 'really took it to this guy.' Now that its out there and providing a nexus, it seems a good place to elevate the scientific research monopoly discussion.

by ender7 15y ago

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.
  - ynniv 15y ago
    "mens rea" means that there was knowing intent to commit a crime. Clearly there was mens rea is this case as steps were taken to circumvent and conceal the act. mindcrime's point is that your comment suggests the crime could be escalated based on some possibility that the defendant might commit a more serious crime. This more serious crime was of course not committed, thus making it a crime of thought.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      We have our wires crossed; I see why: I'm writing message board comments, not essays. There are two issues of intent here: (1) There is the question of whether Swartz's repeated accesses of JSTOR were done knowing that access was wrong, or recklessly, or purposefully to accomplish an illegal end. This question, of "mens rea", is I think reasonably established in the charging documents by things like MAC address spoofing. (2) There is the entirely speculative question of whether Swartz had the intention of "liberating" all of JSTOR onto BitTorrent. Nobody knows whether this is true except Swartz and possibly the DoJ. My suggestion here is only that we don't know all the evidence, and perhaps some of the severity of the DoJ's response is based on evidence they have but have not yet disclosed to the public. The confusion here is my fault. Sorry. I certainly don't believe that Swartz should be prosecuted for thinking JSTOR should be liberated, or that the DoJ should be building a case based on what they think he was going to do next.
      - firebones 15y ago
        Based on the text of the indictment, the establishment of his intent with the documents is the one claim that doesn't appear to established with any mention of supporting evidence. This stands in stark contrast to the meticulously detailed accounts of MAC address changes, computer purchase history and surveillance video describing his actions. The question that this hinges on is whether there is hard evidence of his intent; either there exists a clear statement from Swartz of his intention (e.g., say, a chat log from an informant where he expressed his intent, or an actual upload) and they didn't feel the need to share this info to get the indictment, or they're just trying to make up some circumstantial case (oooh, look, he had a BitTorrent client on a laptop we seized) to justify the harassment. I would guess that it must be something very weak, ambiguous and circumstantial which is why they didn't feel the need to substantiate the claim. But then again, given the long time frame (many months) and the rashness of some of the behavior Swartz displayed, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that someone got him to say something via electronic means that could be construed as an intent to P2P the documents.
makmanalp 15y ago
As a tangent, isn't it scary that you can effectively piss off entities such as the DoJ and they can hold a grudge against you? Or from the article: > Attorney Jerry Cohen, a Boston IP lawyer, suggests this aggressive use of criminal charges rather than civil charges is part of a trend in government prosecution of such cases, like taking “a sledgehammer to drive a thumb tack… It’s intended to terrorize the person who’s indicted and others who might be thinking of the same thing.“ Is it even legally okay to publicly make an example of someone like that?
- tptacek 15y ago
  I guess. What do you expect? They're people just like everyone else. This isn't one of those "1,001 crimes you can commit in the morning while making orange juice" things from Reason magazine. Aaron went way out of his way to expose himself to this situation. It's possible that where you see an Internet folk hero, the DoJ sees someone bent on forcibly publishing every closed database pertaining to the public interest, laws be damned.† Let me add something else that I think some other HN people may be familiar with: My Confirmation sponsor is/was a criminal court judge (friend of the family). Very nice guy. Spectacularly nice guy. I babysat his kids once. I've seen him maybe twice in the past ten years, but I'd be surprised if he didn't remember the names of my kids. When I was younger, we saw him all the time. Every weekend. My dad played in the church folk group with him. I can't remember the particulars, it may have been 4th of July firecrackers (illegal in Chicago) or it may have been shaving cream on Halloween, but either way he caught me and some friends doing something technically illegal. It was NOT. OK. I remember the legality of the incident being taken VERY. SERIOUSLY. Entirely different demeanor. I've seen the same thing with friends' cop dads. I think people on HN don't fully appreciate the extent to which prosecutors and judges take the law seriously. They've dedicated their life to it. Our country is ruled by laws. There are definitely times when the law is wrong, or when its diligent enforcement doesn't ultimately serve the social good. This may very well be one of them. But I think it's a very bad idea to build a worldview around the notion that the criminal justice system is going to casually look past the law. The law is a big deal. † I don't know Aaron Swartz personally and am not asserting any of this to be true. †† To your later edit: there's no statute against "public example making". If you don't want to be an example, avoid felonies. That's going to get me downvoted, so can we assume good faith and accept this new emoticon I just made up: :#> as shorthand for "I don't really think the person we're talking about is culpable for a felony based on the information we currently have"? :#>! :#>! :#>!
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

flatline 15y ago

As others have mentioned, he's crossed the Feds in the past, but I also must point out that there have been a ton of press as of late about "hacking" at large. Anonymous and LulzSec come first to mind: if federal enforcement is ramping up a broad campaign against computer crimes, a lot more people may get caught up in prosecution.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

gavinlynch 15y ago

The "Why" question? I don't know, to me it's pretty simple. It's their job. Justice? Sure that has a role somewhere in there, but let's be real: A prosecutor's job is to get convictions. They have a set of rules which they can shape around a group of facts which they use to get their convictions. In an era when digital security is such a hot topic, I'm not really surprised that someone in the Justice Department would be attempting to prosecute Aaron for as much as they can line up against him. I think that ascribing some larger legal agenda behind this is a reach, or even a political agenda targeted at "silencing" Swartz is a reach. Does the DoJ likely want to crack down on anything that smells of security issues? Sure. And I'm Not saying that the idea that legal and political agendas are pursued is ludicrous. I'm just not so sure this case is anything remarkable. He (allegedly) did what he did, the DoJ thinks they can make a case against him. So they will.

ohyes 15y ago

>I don't think anyone is denying that Swartz committed a (possible series of) minor crimes. If you read through the charges, it isn't cut and dry clear that he did actually commit any federal crimes. He didn't do anything special to get into JSTOR. Essentially he was web scraping with a bunch of different user-names and passwords. There is nothing specifically illegal about that. It isn't clear that it cost JSTOR anything or actually damaged JSTOR. It may have caused a disruption to the service, but it isn't clear the disruption was intentional. He didn't wake up one day and decide to DDOS JSTOR. Although he has a history of distributing documents, it isn't clear that he intended to distribute these particular documents. What I'm surprised about is that he did this so badly. There are a number of colleges around Boston and Cambridge all with libraries that have access to JSTOR. He had to have known that JSTOR and MIT wouldn't like this. Couldn't he have scraped the database slowly and from multiple points so that it blended in with the normal traffic?

Estragon 15y ago
He didn't do anything special to get into JSTOR. Essentially he was web scraping with a bunch of different user-names and passwords. What about trespassing in and tampering with MIT's network closet?
- nkassis 15y ago
  Is that really a federal crime? the trans passing part? I would think that would be a rather minor thing.
- gavinlynch 15y ago
  To the "so what, he just trespassed. You don't get the FBI involved for trespassing." If they just found him randomly wandering the halls where he should not be, obviously the FBI would not be involved. If they see him entering the network cages in order to mirror an asset worth $1.5 million dollars to his personal storage devices... I think they take the trespassing a bit more seriously and in a different context :p
  - ohyes 15y ago

ChuckMcM 15y ago

I suspect the reason the availability issue keeps coming up is that this restriction on research by third parties is considered a 'bad' thing by nearly everyone except the people benefiting from it. This 'social injustice' is a form of angst that keeps seeking expression. To you point about the government using the incident to its own purposes, this is not new. There is a tremendous amount of heat (we'll call it campaign dollars ;-) being put on representatives to 'protect' copyrights. Jason's case is convenient in that there seems to be a lot of evidence that he did in fact work around the existing licensing schemes, and those schemes are based on copyright. Perhaps the government is hoping to get a published decision to establish some case law here, or perhaps folks can point to it and tell their deep pocket contributors that they 'really took it to this guy.' Now that its out there and providing a nexus, it seems a good place to elevate the scientific research monopoly discussion.