8 ms·

>The two MIT officers and Special Agent Pickett then tried to stop Swartz, who jumped off his bike and ran away, only to be caught and handcuffed by the Secret

by Mizza 15y ago

>The two MIT officers and Special Agent Pickett then tried to stop Swartz, who jumped off his bike and ran away, only to be caught and handcuffed by the Secret Service Agent, according to the report. RUN FASTER. I really can't stress this enough. The reason he got caught is because he didn't run fast enough. If you're going to do stuff like this, LEARN TO RUN FAST. Cops are fat and slow. You can usually get away from them, especially in a place like MIT. http://i.imgur.com/2pMx2.jpg http://i.imgur.com/2pMx2.jpg Look at that kid! That is not a fast-looking person. Run faster, guys.

cschep 15y ago
Ha, I was just thinking the same thing. Also, if we're talking pure logistics, don't jump off the BIKE either. Perhaps we should consider the fact that the secret service was involved.. I bet that guy is pretty fast. I don't know why I think that though, just seems more "tough". Another thing: Aaron is a really important person to have writing/researching/hacking outside of prison. Surely it's a net win to just pay a faster/sneakier kid to do this for him? Do you think he thought for one second he might get caught? 35 YEARS IN PRISON? Avon Barksdale is only serving seven! :)
- nkassis 15y ago
  They might ask for 35 years but if the judge gives him 35 years i'd go out to the prison with some free Aaron signs and do a hunger strike. I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one. That would be outrageous. Actually any jail time would be ridiculous, he's not a dangerous person at all.
  - gst 15y ago
    There are many crimes for which you can go to jail even though you are not a dangerous person.
    - ma2rten 15y ago
      ... especially in the US
    - dsmithn 15y ago
      Yes, but crimes that have the potential to benefit people without hurting anyone else?
      - gst 15y ago
        Some of them - not all. Just look at all those drug-related laws.
        wisty 15y ago
        Drugs still hurt people. DOSing a library doesn't. Obviously that depends on which drugs and how many, and maybe the laws are a little "one-size-fits-all" here.
        moonlighter 15y ago
        It is just me, or does a 35 year old prison term sound CRAZY? Never mind the proposed monetary fine... the punishment just doesn't seem to fit the crime. It's outrageous. To put things into perspective... - Swartz, 24, faces 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine under the indictment. - Anders Breivik killed at least 76 people, and the maximum punishment under Norwegian law is 21 years (albeit with the option to extend it for 5 years each after that). Who committed the bigger and more serious crime here??
        smallblacksun 15y ago
        Its a false comparison due to different legal systems. In the US Breivik would be facing multiple life sentences or the death penalty.
    - burgerbrain 15y ago
      And all of those are instances of unjust punishment.
      - tedunangst 15y ago
        I'm reminded of the Boston Legal episode where the defendant kills his mother and they argue that he's not a danger to society because he only had one mother and is therefore not going to repeat his crime. More seriously, I'm not sure if I should interpret your statement to mean that white collar criminals are dangerous or that they should never go to jail.
        burgerbrain 15y ago
        Someone mentally unhinged enough to kill his own mother clearly is a danger to society though, unless there was a strong case that she deserved it. In that case, sure. No sense in putting him in physical harms way by putting him in jail. Imprisonment as a punishment is a horrendously barbaric concept, particularly considering the current state of the American prison system. White collar criminals, or any color collar, if not a physical danger to society, should never be sent into those hellholes. Prisons should be used solely for isolation. People like Charles Manson clearly need to be detained. Treatment, where deemed possible and necessary, should be done in proper medical facilities. People who don't need treatment and are not a danger to society should be in neither. If their crimes are financial, punish them financially. Strip them of their assets and garnish their wages. It works for deadbeat parents (who I absolutely oppose putting into prisons).
        nkassis 15y ago
        I agree with this. I think better ways could be found for them to repay their debt to society. It would be cheaper also.
  - bh42222 15y ago
    I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one. But I am sure you would be one of very few. This is sadly the world we live in.
- iends 15y ago
  You ruined The Wire for me. I just started watching season 1.
  - reitzensteinm 15y ago
    He ruined 1% of it. Keep going :)
  - idlewords 15y ago
    Dumbledore kills McNulty!
  - zeeg 15y ago
    Omar died :(
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  "35 YEARS IN PRISON? Avon Barksdale is only serving seven! :)" So... where is tptacek assuring us all that he won't spend a night in jail?
- wisty 15y ago
  35 years is the upper limit for wire fraud. Hopefully, that should only be used on people who cause serious privacy violations, national security leaks, massive data loss, etc. Actually, if he's accused of wire fraud, his lawyers might get him off; as I don't think he did anything fraudulent. At what point did he misrepresent a fact, which was relied upon by the victim causing losses? He lied about his name, but that didn't cause the loss. He lied about his IP number, but I think he simply represented his IP number to be a "John Doe" - any other number than the one that was blocked; not the IP number of a privileged user. I would debate that nobody expects your IP number to remain constant under all circumstances anyway, unless you have a privileged IP which the admins have specifically greenlisted. So how did his "lies" (dummy name, and maybe a dummy IP number) cause any losses? And is changing your IP number to some other random IP (once or twice, not in an automated way) really misrepresenting a material fact?
noonespecial 15y ago
How about the most basic IDS on the laptop? He really should have know it was taken from the closet (and its network connection) and then replaced. Personally, I'd have been more patient and used wifi. Or one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug
- cookiecaper 15y ago
  It's hard to believe they'd go to all of this effort to catch someone who'd placed a laptop in an unmarked closet. There was no indication that a student was not allowed in the area, according to my reading. In hindsight we can think of lots of ways to defend against this kind of detection, but which of us would really think they would get the Secret Service involved to catch a person who was downloading public domain documents under a legal license awarded to the library of one of the most tech-savvy places in the world? It really should have been expected that something like this would happen. It's almost conceivable that it's not really unusual to see MIT students going to a wired connection in a network closet if necessary. While there are lots of ways to keep things private, most of us aren't constantly on maximum guard. There has to be a cost-benefit analysis, and apparently someone at JSTOR has friends high up.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - GHFigs 15y ago
    ...person who was downloading public domain documents... I hate being pedantic[1] but I keep seeing people make this mistake: JSTOR is not just public domain works, and there is no indication that the downloading was limited to public domain works. I think people are getting confused due to the release (by someone else) of a torrent of public domain material from JSTOR, but that's not a torrent of what Aaron downloaded. [1] Not really, but I hate that I don't hate it.
    - carussell 15y ago
      "I hate being pedantic[1] but I keep seeing people make this mistake: JSTOR is not just public domain works, and there is no indication that the downloading was limited to public domain works." I'd like to tweak the presentation here. Many of the comments I keep seeing (including here on HN) seem to go with the take that 1. That it positively did include works that weren't in the public domain. There doesn't seem to be any indication that this is the case. 2. That Swartz intended to distribute content downloaded from JSTOR not in the public domain. Given the credentials and history of the person in question, it just doesn't seem to be a rational conclusion that Swartz's visions of the future included consciously distributing infringing material (nor the consequences that would go along with it).
showerst 15y ago
US Federal agents, particularly those deployed in the field, are generally not 'Fat and Slow' cops.
qq66 15y ago
"And real gangsta-ass niggas don't run for shit, 'cause real gangsta-ass niggas can't run fast" -- Geto Boys, "Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta"
pak 15y ago
I see the anti-cop contingent from reddit has finally arrived. Seriously, for your sake, I hope you are just trolling.
- _delirium 15y ago
  If you haven't noticed police skepticism on HN until now, you haven't been paying a lot of attention! It tends to go across the civil-liberties-leaning political spectrum. Before the left-leaning Reddit had a subreddit on cop abuses, the libertarian magazine Reason (reason.com) had them as a regular feature. And of course many of us read Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown as kids, and I wouldn't say that I mainly sympathized with the "crackdown" side when reading it...
  - pak 15y ago
    There's nothing wrong with police skepticism or discussing libertarianism. Calling cops dumb and fat and saying you can avoid arrest by running faster... ehmm... what the hell passes for intelligent discussion on here now?
    - burgerbrain 15y ago
      "saying you can avoid arrest by running faster" Is that false? If they cannot catch you, how can they arrest you?
      - tptacek 15y ago
        By ID'ing you from video from any of tens of cameras in the area, coming to your house, arresting you there, and then charging you with resisting arrest.
        burgerbrain 15y ago
        And in the (lets face it, relatively unlikely) case that you have some degree of fame already, that will likely work. However in the general case, elude arrest for the first initial hours after a non-news worthy crime and you will never be arrested. The best way to do this in the worst case scenario? Run. People have the tendency to greatly overestimate the usefulness of security camera footage in solving crime. Personally, I blame Hollywood. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/may/06/ukcrime1 http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/may/06/ukcrime1 http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23412867-tens-of-thousands-of-cctv-cameras-yet-80-of-crime-unsolved.do http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23412867-tens-of-... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Mabhouh http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Mab...
bootload 15y ago
"... RUN FASTER. I really can't stress this enough. The reason he got caught is because he didn't run fast enough. If you're going to do stuff like this, LEARN TO RUN FAST. Cops are fat and slow. ..." Got COM?
- Mizza 15y ago
  COM?
  - bootload 15y ago
    "... Repeat. - You got com? -All units ..." Translates as 'do you have communications?'. A standard Mil question you might be asked at any time, "Got Com?". If you do, this means any person giving chase will have the means to convey information for others to pursue. Making running away futile. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_%28film%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_%28film%29
VladRussian 15y ago
second lesson - use wireless. One laptop (or better - "gumstix" http://www.gumstix.com/ http://www.gumstix.com/ ) reads and transmits. Another, not physically connected, not in the same room, etc. - receives.

by Mizza 15y ago

cschep 15y ago

Ha, I was just thinking the same thing. Also, if we're talking pure logistics, don't jump off the BIKE either. Perhaps we should consider the fact that the secret service was involved.. I bet that guy is pretty fast. I don't know why I think that though, just seems more "tough". Another thing: Aaron is a really important person to have writing/researching/hacking outside of prison. Surely it's a net win to just pay a faster/sneakier kid to do this for him? Do you think he thought for one second he might get caught? 35 YEARS IN PRISON? Avon Barksdale is only serving seven! :)

nkassis 15y ago
They might ask for 35 years but if the judge gives him 35 years i'd go out to the prison with some free Aaron signs and do a hunger strike. I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one. That would be outrageous. Actually any jail time would be ridiculous, he's not a dangerous person at all.
- gst 15y ago
  There are many crimes for which you can go to jail even though you are not a dangerous person.
  - ma2rten 15y ago
    ... especially in the US
  - dsmithn 15y ago
    Yes, but crimes that have the potential to benefit people without hurting anyone else?
    - gst 15y ago
      Some of them - not all. Just look at all those drug-related laws.
      - wisty 15y ago
        Drugs still hurt people. DOSing a library doesn't. Obviously that depends on which drugs and how many, and maybe the laws are a little "one-size-fits-all" here.
      - moonlighter 15y ago
        It is just me, or does a 35 year old prison term sound CRAZY? Never mind the proposed monetary fine... the punishment just doesn't seem to fit the crime. It's outrageous. To put things into perspective... - Swartz, 24, faces 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine under the indictment. - Anders Breivik killed at least 76 people, and the maximum punishment under Norwegian law is 21 years (albeit with the option to extend it for 5 years each after that). Who committed the bigger and more serious crime here??
        smallblacksun 15y ago
        Its a false comparison due to different legal systems. In the US Breivik would be facing multiple life sentences or the death penalty.
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    And all of those are instances of unjust punishment.
    - tedunangst 15y ago
      I'm reminded of the Boston Legal episode where the defendant kills his mother and they argue that he's not a danger to society because he only had one mother and is therefore not going to repeat his crime. More seriously, I'm not sure if I should interpret your statement to mean that white collar criminals are dangerous or that they should never go to jail.
      - burgerbrain 15y ago
        Someone mentally unhinged enough to kill his own mother clearly is a danger to society though, unless there was a strong case that she deserved it. In that case, sure. No sense in putting him in physical harms way by putting him in jail. Imprisonment as a punishment is a horrendously barbaric concept, particularly considering the current state of the American prison system. White collar criminals, or any color collar, if not a physical danger to society, should never be sent into those hellholes. Prisons should be used solely for isolation. People like Charles Manson clearly need to be detained. Treatment, where deemed possible and necessary, should be done in proper medical facilities. People who don't need treatment and are not a danger to society should be in neither. If their crimes are financial, punish them financially. Strip them of their assets and garnish their wages. It works for deadbeat parents (who I absolutely oppose putting into prisons).
        nkassis 15y ago
        I agree with this. I think better ways could be found for them to repay their debt to society. It would be cheaper also.
- bh42222 15y ago
  I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one. But I am sure you would be one of very few. This is sadly the world we live in.
iends 15y ago
You ruined The Wire for me. I just started watching season 1.
- reitzensteinm 15y ago
  He ruined 1% of it. Keep going :)
- idlewords 15y ago
  Dumbledore kills McNulty!
- zeeg 15y ago
  Omar died :(
burgerbrain 15y ago
"35 YEARS IN PRISON? Avon Barksdale is only serving seven! :)" So... where is tptacek assuring us all that he won't spend a night in jail?
wisty 15y ago
35 years is the upper limit for wire fraud. Hopefully, that should only be used on people who cause serious privacy violations, national security leaks, massive data loss, etc. Actually, if he's accused of wire fraud, his lawyers might get him off; as I don't think he did anything fraudulent. At what point did he misrepresent a fact, which was relied upon by the victim causing losses? He lied about his name, but that didn't cause the loss. He lied about his IP number, but I think he simply represented his IP number to be a "John Doe" - any other number than the one that was blocked; not the IP number of a privileged user. I would debate that nobody expects your IP number to remain constant under all circumstances anyway, unless you have a privileged IP which the admins have specifically greenlisted. So how did his "lies" (dummy name, and maybe a dummy IP number) cause any losses? And is changing your IP number to some other random IP (once or twice, not in an automated way) really misrepresenting a material fact?

noonespecial 15y ago

How about the most basic IDS on the laptop? He really should have know it was taken from the closet (and its network connection) and then replaced. Personally, I'd have been more patient and used wifi. Or one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheevaPlug

cookiecaper 15y ago
It's hard to believe they'd go to all of this effort to catch someone who'd placed a laptop in an unmarked closet. There was no indication that a student was not allowed in the area, according to my reading. In hindsight we can think of lots of ways to defend against this kind of detection, but which of us would really think they would get the Secret Service involved to catch a person who was downloading public domain documents under a legal license awarded to the library of one of the most tech-savvy places in the world? It really should have been expected that something like this would happen. It's almost conceivable that it's not really unusual to see MIT students going to a wired connection in a network closet if necessary. While there are lots of ways to keep things private, most of us aren't constantly on maximum guard. There has to be a cost-benefit analysis, and apparently someone at JSTOR has friends high up.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- GHFigs 15y ago
  ...person who was downloading public domain documents... I hate being pedantic[1] but I keep seeing people make this mistake: JSTOR is not just public domain works, and there is no indication that the downloading was limited to public domain works. I think people are getting confused due to the release (by someone else) of a torrent of public domain material from JSTOR, but that's not a torrent of what Aaron downloaded. [1] Not really, but I hate that I don't hate it.
  - carussell 15y ago
    "I hate being pedantic[1] but I keep seeing people make this mistake: JSTOR is not just public domain works, and there is no indication that the downloading was limited to public domain works." I'd like to tweak the presentation here. Many of the comments I keep seeing (including here on HN) seem to go with the take that 1. That it positively did include works that weren't in the public domain. There doesn't seem to be any indication that this is the case. 2. That Swartz intended to distribute content downloaded from JSTOR not in the public domain. Given the credentials and history of the person in question, it just doesn't seem to be a rational conclusion that Swartz's visions of the future included consciously distributing infringing material (nor the consequences that would go along with it).

showerst 15y ago

US Federal agents, particularly those deployed in the field, are generally not 'Fat and Slow' cops.

qq66 15y ago

"And real gangsta-ass niggas don't run for shit, 'cause real gangsta-ass niggas can't run fast" -- Geto Boys, "Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta"

pak 15y ago

I see the anti-cop contingent from reddit has finally arrived. Seriously, for your sake, I hope you are just trolling.

_delirium 15y ago
If you haven't noticed police skepticism on HN until now, you haven't been paying a lot of attention! It tends to go across the civil-liberties-leaning political spectrum. Before the left-leaning Reddit had a subreddit on cop abuses, the libertarian magazine Reason (reason.com) had them as a regular feature. And of course many of us read Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown as kids, and I wouldn't say that I mainly sympathized with the "crackdown" side when reading it...
- pak 15y ago
  There's nothing wrong with police skepticism or discussing libertarianism. Calling cops dumb and fat and saying you can avoid arrest by running faster... ehmm... what the hell passes for intelligent discussion on here now?
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    "saying you can avoid arrest by running faster" Is that false? If they cannot catch you, how can they arrest you?
    - tptacek 15y ago
      By ID'ing you from video from any of tens of cameras in the area, coming to your house, arresting you there, and then charging you with resisting arrest.
      - burgerbrain 15y ago
        And in the (lets face it, relatively unlikely) case that you have some degree of fame already, that will likely work. However in the general case, elude arrest for the first initial hours after a non-news worthy crime and you will never be arrested. The best way to do this in the worst case scenario? Run. People have the tendency to greatly overestimate the usefulness of security camera footage in solving crime. Personally, I blame Hollywood. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/may/06/ukcrime1 http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/may/06/ukcrime1 http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23412867-tens-of-thousands-of-cctv-cameras-yet-80-of-crime-unsolved.do http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23412867-tens-of-... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Mabhouh http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Mab...

bootload 15y ago

"... RUN FASTER. I really can't stress this enough. The reason he got caught is because he didn't run fast enough. If you're going to do stuff like this, LEARN TO RUN FAST. Cops are fat and slow. ..." Got COM?

Mizza 15y ago
COM?
- bootload 15y ago
  "... Repeat. - You got com? -All units ..." Translates as 'do you have communications?'. A standard Mil question you might be asked at any time, "Got Com?". If you do, this means any person giving chase will have the means to convey information for others to pursue. Making running away futile. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_%28film%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_%28film%29

VladRussian 15y ago

second lesson - use wireless. One laptop (or better - "gumstix" http://www.gumstix.com/ http://www.gumstix.com/ ) reads and transmits. Another, not physically connected, not in the same room, etc. - receives.