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Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case
- salimmadjd 14y agoThis could be very troubling for scrapers, as they frequently breach the terms of service. If successfully prosecuted it would encourage and empower sites with content that get scraped to push for criminal charges and win given this precedence.
- throwaway64 14y agothe idea that violating terms of service constitutes "hacking" is very dangerous in general. Get your pay-pal account suspended? you could now potentially be facing federal felony charges.
- tptacek 14y agoHow? How would getting your Paypal account suspended put you at risk for federal criminal charges?
- ksmiley 14y agoI didn't read the article, but I imagine the parent poster's logic is like this: if your Paypal account is suspended, you must have done something to violate the terms of service. If you violate the terms of service, you must be a hacker. If you are a hacker, you are at risk for federal criminal charges. Therefore, if your Paypal account is suspended, you are at risk for federal criminal charges.
- ef4 14y agoKeep in mind that his alleged actions go way behind scraping. He allegedly broke into an MIT network closet to install his own hardware, so as to avoid IP-based restrictions on the content. I sympathize with his goals, but I have to wonder what he was thinking. If the goal was liberating the information and I was in his shoes, I would have found a much more paranoid way to go about it. MIT is a very open environment, and I'm sure he could have recruited sympathizers with legitimate access. Which makes me wonder if he really cared about getting caught. Civil disobedience can be an effective tactic, but in this case it's simply too easy to paint him as an "evil hacker".
- bensw 14y ago>He allegedly broke into an MIT network closet to install his own hardware, so as to avoid IP-based restrictions on the content. Maybe you should read the original indictment instead of throwing around conclusions not found in evidence.
- danielweber 14y agoHuh? All those statements are in the original indictment. "Swartz contrived to ... break into a restricted computer wiring closet at MIT;" "Swartz connected the Acer computer to MIT's computer network" "JSTOR blocked the computer's access to its network by refusing communications from the computer's assigned IP address. ... Swartz obtained for his computer a new IP address on the MIT network ... and began again to download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR." (Sorry for typos, I have a PDF of the indictment that is images)
- bensw 14y agoWas referring to "Install...to avoid IP based restrictions"
- danielweber 14y agoAccording to the original indictment, he actively worked around IP-based restrictions. See section 18. When that didn't work, MIT put in MAC-level blocking, and he worked to evade that, too. See section 21, among others. He later brought in another computer. See section 22. He later brought the laptops when he connected inside the wiring closet and assigned himself IP addresses. See section 26. I don't see any error on ef4's part, much less one that warrants a "maybe you should read"-level response.
- bensw 14y agoI didn't mean to come off as aggressive--was left over pent-up rage from the errors in the article. I likely shouldn't discuss this topic any more
- biot 14y agoAre you suggesting that mere scraping alone would demonstrate sufficient intent to warrant prosecution? Can you elaborate? Various courts have had mixed interpretations on the enforceability of sites' terms of service. How would this impact the body of case law that has been building around automated scrapers such as the many "... vs Google" cases? Also, "precedence" is ranking something in priority; "precedent" is the legal term.
- danielweber 14y agoThere was a case where a company successfully got an injunction against a scraper that got pricing data, arguing that the scraper violated the federal unauthorized access statute. http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/EF_Cultural_Travel_v._Explorica http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/EF_Cultural_Travel_v._Explorica This is an area of law that is evolving rapidly so there may be other cases that supersede that one.
- tptacek 14y agoThe indictment goes into great detail as to how Swartz would have known his actions violated JSTOR's terms, and how he repeatedly took surreptitious steps to continue his plan despite the obvious efforts of both MIT and JSTOR to stop him. "Mere scraping alone" is unlikely to land you a federal charge; the prosecution needs to demonstrate your intent to act unlawfully. A far more typical outcome for a scraping case is a C&D from the site you scraped. For obvious reasons, JSTOR can't C&D Swartz once their content hits BitTorrent. Similarly, if you scrape a site and post it to file sharing networks, you might have something to be concerned about.
- thaumaturgy 14y agoJust FYI, this is often a prosecutorial bargaining tactic for dealing with an uncooperative defendant (based on personal experience, anyway). That said, I wish articles like this one would quit making the rounds. It's macabre theater and isn't doing aaronsw any favors.
- ajross 14y agoIs the goal to do aaronsw favors? This is pretty clearly newsworthy. I think you can ding the reporting for missing important subtleties and lacking context (i.e. the fact that the downloaded material wasn't covered by a JSTOR copyright somehow gets skipped!). But arguing that we should plug our ears to news about a case with clear impact to the community because it might look bad for the defendent is just ... weird. The point about this being a bargaining tactic makes sense though. They want a plea on something to avoid embarrassment, and it wouldn't surprise me if Aaron was refusing to deal.
- tptacek 14y agoHow does ratcheting up the charges minimize the embarassment to the DOJ if Aaron is ultimately vindicated?
- bonzoesc 14y agoThe DoJ isn't human and is not subject to emotions like "pride" or "embarrassment." Their goal is to win cases and enforce laws, and if the bureaucratic cost of adding more charges improves their chances of having the defendant found guilty on them, they're successful.
- tptacek 14y agoIf your point here is, "it doesn't", I agree. I don't think the extra charges were added to minimize embarrassment.
- ajross 14y agoThe DoJ is part of the executive branch, and ultimately answerable to elected officials who absolutely are sensitive to embarassment. No one wants to see a headline like "FBI wastes $2M on failed prosecution of harmless nerd" when it could be "Hacker gets jail time and fine". So they're throwing mud trying to get something to stick. If it looks like anything does, they'll offer a plea again. You can't really believe that politics have no impact on the case decisions in the DoJ, can you?
- SeanDav 14y agoEDIT:Make my point more clear Edited comment: It seems to me that Federal law is able to be applied to websites created by private individuals or businesses. As long as the ToS has knowingly been broken and the person doing the breaking has benefited materially then he is at risk of federal prosecution. I don't see a lot of comment about reasonable the ToS has to be. This just strikes as being completely irrational. Original comment: Riiiigght, so I can put together a website with some strange terms of service and then the FBI will come arrest anyone breaking those terms of service because it is a federal crime. Just what planet do these guys live on....
- tptacek 14y agoNo, you cannot do that. A prosecutor must demonstrate, first to a grand jury, then to a criminal jury, and simultaneously to a judge, that the accused not only violated the terms of service to a website, but in doing so caused material harm or found material gain, and that they did so knowing that they were violating the terms of the site.
- SeanDav 14y agoThe fact seems to remain that any private individual can create a website and have the force of federal government apply to a third party as long as said party has knowingly broken the ToS and gained materially somehow from that.
- tptacek 14y agoDon't knowingly break the terms of service of websites for profit or to harm others. Sounds straightforward to me.
- SeanDav 14y agoYet stealing a bar of chocolate from your corner shop is not a federal crime. Additionally if you hack a site and copy all their data but don't do anything with it, is that now not a federal crime because you have not benefited materially from it?
- logn 14y agoThis is potentially terrible precendent essentially allowing private entities to write federal law.
- drivebyacct2 14y agoUnfortunately, that precedent has been (being) set for some time now.
- tptacek 14y agoWhat?
- Domenic_S 14y agoStep 1: Write a ToS for your private entity Step 2: Catch someone violating it Step 3: Sic the Feds (government) on them for violating it (your private, unvetted agreement). (no comment from me personally, but I think that's what the GP was saying.)
- mukaiji 14y agoRANT: Anyone here interested in the underlying issue of academic publishing? To me, the very notion that publicly (or privately for that matter) funded academic research gets locked behind paywalls of organizations that have not contributed financially to the research endeavor published, seems like irony to me. In short, they pay not a single dime to produce the content, charge the researchers to have their submission reviewed and published, publish the content and make money off of the subscription they sell, and sue the hell out of anyone who tries to wrestle it back out of their control.
- tptacek 14y agoI agree. Researchers should stop entering into contracts with organizations like Elsevier.
- paulgb 14y agoMoreover, taxpayers should be upset that they're paying for research for which the copyrights are readily handed over to private organizations.
- danielweber 14y agoorganizations that have not contributed financially to the research charge the researchers to have their submission reviewed and published, As you point out, they are providing a valuable service. The research is peer-reviewed and published. You can argue that they aren't needed in the modern peer-to-peer wikiresearch napster world, where anyone can just publish their research wherever they want. If the researchers don't want their research behind the paywall, they are not forced into the transaction. They must be finding the value-add of the "peer-review and publish" significant enough to give up publishing rights elsewhere.
- Anechoic 14y agoThe research is peer-reviewed and published. IME, those organizations generally don't provide the peer-reviewers and the peer-reviewers aren't paid.
- mkhalil 14y agoAnons Unite.
- bensw 14y agoIt's embarrassing how much of this article is wrong.
- __del__ 14y agoI'm not sure I want to live in a society where reading too many academic papers too fast is a multi-felony. "Swartz’s program was so powerful…"
- gavinlynch 14y agoStraw man.
- nitrogen 14y agoNever let the truth get in the way of a good narrative. Your quotation reminds me of statements made in the case against the Wall Street quant who allegedly stole some source code from his former employer (was it GS?). The prosecutor was quoted as saying (paraphrased from memory), "This is so important, they call it their secret sauce." As if calling something "secret sauce" alone is enough to determine the importance of a trade secret.
- udpheaders 14y agoAs if Python was the most powerful language, heh. :) Maybe he was going for a world record of most citations in a single paper. Who's to say he wasn't just doing research? How many downloads is too many? I would be willing to bet that the JSTOR TOS do not give a specific number. e.g. "You may not download more than n papers in 24 hours." And if they don't state a maximum in the TOS, then why shouldn't they, for clarity?
- danielweber 14y agoIt sounds like you are trying to invoke Loki's Wager -- since you cannot define N where downloading N is too many and N-1 is not too many, there must not be such a concept as downloading too many. People who deal with the law don't have much patience for this.
- udpheaders 14y agoI'm not sure if I am interpreting your last sentence correctly. Can you rephrase it?
- rjurney 14y agoRemember the FREE KEVIN bumper stickers? FREE AARON. Just to elaborate... what it seems we have here is a brilliant engineer and idealist leftie that lost his grip on what is reasonable. He seriously fucked up, and then he seriously fucked up by getting caught. He isn't a hardened criminal, he wasn't stealing to make money and he can almost certainly be reformed with a light sentence, community service and probation. Only the oppositional system doesn't see things that way.
- nikcub 14y agoMitnick was imprisoned without charges
- tptacek 14y agoAaron isn't incarcerated.
- abecedarius 14y agoI have way more sympathy for aaronsw than I had for Mitnick. Maybe this would change if I looked into Mitnick's case, but my prior is that this analogy would not help Aaron.
- hollerith 14y agoSame here. The difference is that the motivation that caused Aaron to break the law is a genuine desire to improve the world -- and that's what advocates for Aaron in the arena of public opinion should focus on.
- arcand 14y agoA blatant criminal should face the heat. Make an example of him.