4 ms·

He wasn’t prosecuted for scraping. He trespassed into a room with a router, plugged his laptop into it, downloaded papers as quickly as possible, and then rotat

He wasn’t prosecuted for scraping. He trespassed into a room with a router, plugged his laptop into it, downloaded papers as quickly as possible, and then rotated his MAC address to dodge the bans that the admin was trying to place on him. That’s very different from downloading a webpage on the open internet. I’m not saying he should or shouldn’t have been prosecuted, but there’s some kind of rose tinted glasses filter around what happened with Aaron, like he just was browsing the web and was suddenly prosecuted. He repeatedly broke in to a physical room and kept changing his MAC address to dodge bans. At least report it with its full context.

PenguinCoder 1mo ago
Information should be free.
- aeve890 1mo ago
  What's the point of statements so broad and ambiguous that they seem to disregard any kind of context or nuance? Do you really believe that _Information_ should be free? Which one? All of it?
- MattDamonSpace 1mo ago
  “People who generate valuable information should be uncompensated”
  - msftgreed 1mo ago
    You say this like it's related to the parent quote. We could absolutely compensate people and not charge for information. It's not that hard to imagine that we could feed, house, care for, and provide a small stipend to authors, artists, etc. and also make their work output free to everyone who wants it. Does that require changing some other things? Absolutely. Would it be hard to convince people to try? Probably (I'm guessing HN crowd won't like this comment, considering it unreasonable.) Has it been a suggested way to organize society for almost 200 years with a long and well argued set of principles behind it? Sure enough!
  - pdonis 1mo ago
    The scientists who wrote the papers that Swartz downloaded were compensated, with the public's tax dollars. That should mean that we the public should now have free access to what we paid for. Unfortunately the government prefers to let private companies keep those papers behind paywalls.
    - ajam1507 1mo ago
      JSTOR isn't just full of publicly funded work.
  - xigoi 1mo ago
    How much money do you think the scientists who wrote the papers are getting from the access fees? (Hint: it’s the only number that stays the same when you multiply it by sometting.)
- hk1337 1mo ago
  Agreed, to an extent, but that doesn't mean you can breach any barrier someone has in place preventing access, take it, and make it publicly available.
  - pdonis 1mo ago
    The information Swartz was downloading was scientific papers that we, the public, have already paid for with our tax dollars. The crime here is that the government allows JSTOR and other private companies to still hold those papers behind paywalls instead of releasing them into the public domain as they should have been.
    - s1artibartfast 1mo ago
      Doesn't matter if the public funded it. The public didn't mandate or pay for the publication rights or access. The public might donate food to the poor. That doesn't give them the right to go into their house and rummage through their fridge. Maybe there is a missed opportunity to require open access as a condition of public grant funding. That doesn't change the fact that it is not a stipulated condition.
      - pdonis 1mo ago
        > Doesn't matter if the public funded it. The public didn't mandate or pay for the publication rights or access. So when your tax dollars pay for a scientist to do research, you don't think the papers that document that research should be public property? If scientists want to keep their research private, they should find private funding. Note that, as in my previous post, I said "should". If you mean there isn't explicit language to that effect in the grants, see further comments below. > The public might donate food to the poor. That doesn't give them the right to go into their house and rummage through their fridge. Invalid comparison. The scientific papers in question are not the personal property of the scientists. > Maybe there is a missed opportunity to require open access as a condition of public grant funding. IMO this should be the case, and it's an outrage that it's not, since it should be an obvious requirement for any research that our tax dollars pay for. > That doesn't change the fact that it is not a stipulated condition. Maybe that wasn't written into the grants explicitly, but that just means our government is (once again) failing to act in our best interests.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
voakbasda 1mo ago
Wasn’t Meta found to be scraping from addresses that were not immediately traceable back to them?
- 9x39 1mo ago
  Maybe, but the prosecution that most people would say lead to his decision to end his life was from abuse of the MIT network over months until they had him on video. The rate of JSTOR content retrieved from MIT was a separate contract issue.
627467 1mo ago
> repeatedly broke in to a room > rotated his MAC address Do you really think these details drastically change how people should judge his actions vs those of a corporation?
- 9x39 1mo ago
  Yeah, intent matters. Evading security matters. It's a big point that his actions were intentional and not passive or accidental - not that IP infringement by corporations isn't its own discussion.
  - LostMyLogin 1mo ago
    How is Meta using BitTorrent to download over 80 terabytes of copyrighted books while avoiding using corporate IP addresses not evading security?
    - 9x39 1mo ago
      Torrents are openly accessible, even if .gov might enable infringement claims by the rights-holder. They're not hacking into networks. Changing your IP isn't a crime, even if it has the effect of making attribution to Meta more difficult. The thing with Aaron was that it went on for months to the point JSTOR's complaints had activated MIT's organizational antibodies, let's say, and the IS department was turned loose to investigate repeatedly. They went to the trouble of upgrading their load balancers and traffic analysis to narrow it down and installed a camera. At that point, the hook was firmly set and with digital and video evidence, the Secret Service had him red-handed abusing MIT. Keep in mind the thing that spiraled out of control was how Aaron (mis)used MIT resources persistently and with overwhelming evidence - in the end, the civil part with JSTOR was largely irrelevant. MIT called in the big guns with the FBI and Secret Service, and they ate it up. I'm not arguing in favor of it, I'm just familiar with the zeal they bring once they get on a trail.
      - LostMyLogin 1mo ago
        > Changing your IP isn't a crime, even if it has the effect of making attribution to Meta more difficult. To borrow your words, intent matters. Also why are we acting as if Meta wasn’t doing this for over half a decade and that companies don’t actively take steps to try and prevent piracy?
ComplexSystems 1mo ago
So what crime was he guilty of that Meta isn't? "Scraping too unsophisticatedly?"
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- smt88 1mo ago
  Physical trespassing (as far as we know), but they’ve certainly done all of the rest millions of times.
colordrops 1mo ago
Why is that fundamentally different?
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
nextaccountic 1mo ago
So what's the maximum penalty for trespassing? The prosecution was looking for a disproportionate sentence About technical countermeasures to evade blocking.. you realize that everybody that does scraping at a large scale employs those, right? Including Meta Specially nowadays where large swaths of the web is behind captchas
- qingcharles 1mo ago
  If it was charged as trespassing, not something higher like burglary, then the level of his trespass was probably the lowest misdemeanor. Usually trespass is a sliding scale starting with a warning not to return. Being that it was on a campus, they can sometimes use that as an aggravating factor. I remember one case where a homeless person had a key for a vending machine and took out $30 in quarters, but since the land the vending machine was on was owned by a university he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. One of the few cases that got reversed for a constitutionally exceptional sentence.
  - 9x39 1mo ago
    Don't think they did trespassing: wire fraud computer fraud unlawfully obtaining info from a protected computer recklessly damaging a protected computer aiding and abetting criminal forfeiture https://web.archive.org/web/20130608041804/https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/09/swartzsuperseding.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20130608041804/https://www.wired...
josh_p 1mo ago
Yes, he did that. He also settled the problem with jstor, returned the files as part of a civil settlement. This was overzealous prosecution after the affected party got their remedy.
- 9x39 1mo ago
  MIT was another affected party, who reached out to the government for help.
  - protocolture 1mo ago
    Please sir, we lost entire megabytes of bandwidth as someone accessed free resources on the internet, we are such an aggreieved party.
    - 9x39 1mo ago
      Amusing, but a long string of rogue cyber intrusions coupled with Jstor blocking MIT altogether a few times isn’t something to ignore. Hard to imagine just ignoring the risks and potential of that unknown. MIT and Jstor had a bunch of incident response going on, and it isn’t a leap to consider Jstor would cut them off for good if the situation went unresolved.
      - josh_p 1mo ago
        Why do you seem so desperate to characterize Aaron as some amoral super-spy hacker? His ethics are well known. He took issue with Jstor's business model of gatekeeping tax-payer-funded research behind another pay wall, stole some articles, got caught, settled with jstor and MIT. Life could have gone on. The OP's blog post is about how the law isn't applied equally in the United States. Aaron was an individual and an easy target for the overzealous prosecutor. Meta's a faceless corporation, guilty in the court of public opinion, and they don't even get a timely investigation because they have the money to tie up the broken legal system indefinitely. Aaron was an example - if you're small enough, you will be caught, tried, and punished in whatever way we see fit to prove that the justice system "works". If you're a billionaire, do whatever you want wink wink.
maximinus_thrax 1mo ago
> and then rotated his MAC address to dodge the bans that the admin was trying to place on him And corporate scrapers never ever use proxy pools to rotate IPs to evade throttling and blacklisting. Meta is also scraping illegal content, such as pirated books. So I'm not sure what your argument is.
- silver_sun 1mo ago
  The difference here is that the scientific papers he downloaded weren't freely available to the public, like those scraped webpages would be. Corporate scrapers have been sued[0] in the past for scraping pages from behind a login page / paywall. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
  - maximinus_thrax 1mo ago
    Neither are the pirated books Meta is using for model training.
    - silver_sun 1mo ago
      I totally agree with you, and didn't mean to endorse that.
greyface- 1mo ago
> trespassed into a room A room with an unlocked and unmarked door, off of a hallway that was open to the general public. An INCREDIBLY tame act compared to other unprosecuted trespasses normalized and celebrated at https://hacks.mit.edu/ https://hacks.mit.edu/. > rotated his MAC address Not a crime; in fact now a widespread and default practice for consumer Wi-Fi/Bluetooth devices.
- FireBeyond 1mo ago
  Were those hackers MIT students? Was Aaron?
  - greyface- 1mo ago
    Both Aaron and "those hackers" were MIT community members.
    - FireBeyond 1mo ago
      That's an interesting spin that means precisely nothing. I'm not authorized to enter facilities or building maintenance spaces in buildings in my town because I'm a "community member".
      - greyface- 1mo ago
        The general public was authorized to enter the facilities 24/7. The exterior doors were unlocked and it was considered an "open campus". The access controls you see today have only existed since COVID. Whether he was a student at the time also means "precisely nothing".
        FireBeyond 1mo ago
        Really? The expectation was that they could go into facilities closets and plug into the core networking equipment?
Cabal 1mo ago
Thank you. It's absurd that we are comparing breaking into MIT and (physically) breaking into a network with scraping the web and scanning physical books.
rib3ye 1mo ago
The core argument makes a lot more sense when you compare Aaron’s pirating via network closet with Meta’s pirating via BitTorrent.
AngryData 1mo ago
To me his crime is the equivalent of sneaking into a public library with a photocopier and copying down books without having a library card. It is not and should not be that serious. Is it annoying? Yes. Should he have gotten in a bit of trouble? Sure. But nothing like what he was charged with or dealt with. They hammered down serious law on this guy for what should of at worse been a petty crime.
lofaszvanitt 1mo ago
And that warrants a 7-8 years sentence, without a plea? Maybe in a police state.

PenguinCoder 1mo ago

Information should be free.

aeve890 1mo ago
What's the point of statements so broad and ambiguous that they seem to disregard any kind of context or nuance? Do you really believe that _Information_ should be free? Which one? All of it?
MattDamonSpace 1mo ago
“People who generate valuable information should be uncompensated”
- msftgreed 1mo ago
  You say this like it's related to the parent quote. We could absolutely compensate people and not charge for information. It's not that hard to imagine that we could feed, house, care for, and provide a small stipend to authors, artists, etc. and also make their work output free to everyone who wants it. Does that require changing some other things? Absolutely. Would it be hard to convince people to try? Probably (I'm guessing HN crowd won't like this comment, considering it unreasonable.) Has it been a suggested way to organize society for almost 200 years with a long and well argued set of principles behind it? Sure enough!
- pdonis 1mo ago
  The scientists who wrote the papers that Swartz downloaded were compensated, with the public's tax dollars. That should mean that we the public should now have free access to what we paid for. Unfortunately the government prefers to let private companies keep those papers behind paywalls.
  - ajam1507 1mo ago
    JSTOR isn't just full of publicly funded work.
- xigoi 1mo ago
  How much money do you think the scientists who wrote the papers are getting from the access fees? (Hint: it’s the only number that stays the same when you multiply it by sometting.)
hk1337 1mo ago
Agreed, to an extent, but that doesn't mean you can breach any barrier someone has in place preventing access, take it, and make it publicly available.
- pdonis 1mo ago
  The information Swartz was downloading was scientific papers that we, the public, have already paid for with our tax dollars. The crime here is that the government allows JSTOR and other private companies to still hold those papers behind paywalls instead of releasing them into the public domain as they should have been.
  - s1artibartfast 1mo ago
    Doesn't matter if the public funded it. The public didn't mandate or pay for the publication rights or access. The public might donate food to the poor. That doesn't give them the right to go into their house and rummage through their fridge. Maybe there is a missed opportunity to require open access as a condition of public grant funding. That doesn't change the fact that it is not a stipulated condition.
    - pdonis 1mo ago
      > Doesn't matter if the public funded it. The public didn't mandate or pay for the publication rights or access. So when your tax dollars pay for a scientist to do research, you don't think the papers that document that research should be public property? If scientists want to keep their research private, they should find private funding. Note that, as in my previous post, I said "should". If you mean there isn't explicit language to that effect in the grants, see further comments below. > The public might donate food to the poor. That doesn't give them the right to go into their house and rummage through their fridge. Invalid comparison. The scientific papers in question are not the personal property of the scientists. > Maybe there is a missed opportunity to require open access as a condition of public grant funding. IMO this should be the case, and it's an outrage that it's not, since it should be an obvious requirement for any research that our tax dollars pay for. > That doesn't change the fact that it is not a stipulated condition. Maybe that wasn't written into the grants explicitly, but that just means our government is (once again) failing to act in our best interests.

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

voakbasda 1mo ago

Wasn’t Meta found to be scraping from addresses that were not immediately traceable back to them?

9x39 1mo ago
Maybe, but the prosecution that most people would say lead to his decision to end his life was from abuse of the MIT network over months until they had him on video. The rate of JSTOR content retrieved from MIT was a separate contract issue.

627467 1mo ago

> repeatedly broke in to a room > rotated his MAC address Do you really think these details drastically change how people should judge his actions vs those of a corporation?

9x39 1mo ago
Yeah, intent matters. Evading security matters. It's a big point that his actions were intentional and not passive or accidental - not that IP infringement by corporations isn't its own discussion.
- LostMyLogin 1mo ago
  How is Meta using BitTorrent to download over 80 terabytes of copyrighted books while avoiding using corporate IP addresses not evading security?
  - 9x39 1mo ago
    Torrents are openly accessible, even if .gov might enable infringement claims by the rights-holder. They're not hacking into networks. Changing your IP isn't a crime, even if it has the effect of making attribution to Meta more difficult. The thing with Aaron was that it went on for months to the point JSTOR's complaints had activated MIT's organizational antibodies, let's say, and the IS department was turned loose to investigate repeatedly. They went to the trouble of upgrading their load balancers and traffic analysis to narrow it down and installed a camera. At that point, the hook was firmly set and with digital and video evidence, the Secret Service had him red-handed abusing MIT. Keep in mind the thing that spiraled out of control was how Aaron (mis)used MIT resources persistently and with overwhelming evidence - in the end, the civil part with JSTOR was largely irrelevant. MIT called in the big guns with the FBI and Secret Service, and they ate it up. I'm not arguing in favor of it, I'm just familiar with the zeal they bring once they get on a trail.
    - LostMyLogin 1mo ago
      > Changing your IP isn't a crime, even if it has the effect of making attribution to Meta more difficult. To borrow your words, intent matters. Also why are we acting as if Meta wasn’t doing this for over half a decade and that companies don’t actively take steps to try and prevent piracy?

ComplexSystems 1mo ago

So what crime was he guilty of that Meta isn't? "Scraping too unsophisticatedly?"

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
smt88 1mo ago
Physical trespassing (as far as we know), but they’ve certainly done all of the rest millions of times.

colordrops 1mo ago

Why is that fundamentally different?

deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]

nextaccountic 1mo ago

So what's the maximum penalty for trespassing? The prosecution was looking for a disproportionate sentence About technical countermeasures to evade blocking.. you realize that everybody that does scraping at a large scale employs those, right? Including Meta Specially nowadays where large swaths of the web is behind captchas

qingcharles 1mo ago
If it was charged as trespassing, not something higher like burglary, then the level of his trespass was probably the lowest misdemeanor. Usually trespass is a sliding scale starting with a warning not to return. Being that it was on a campus, they can sometimes use that as an aggravating factor. I remember one case where a homeless person had a key for a vending machine and took out $30 in quarters, but since the land the vending machine was on was owned by a university he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. One of the few cases that got reversed for a constitutionally exceptional sentence.
- 9x39 1mo ago
  Don't think they did trespassing: wire fraud computer fraud unlawfully obtaining info from a protected computer recklessly damaging a protected computer aiding and abetting criminal forfeiture https://web.archive.org/web/20130608041804/https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/09/swartzsuperseding.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20130608041804/https://www.wired...

josh_p 1mo ago

Yes, he did that. He also settled the problem with jstor, returned the files as part of a civil settlement. This was overzealous prosecution after the affected party got their remedy.

9x39 1mo ago
MIT was another affected party, who reached out to the government for help.
- protocolture 1mo ago
  Please sir, we lost entire megabytes of bandwidth as someone accessed free resources on the internet, we are such an aggreieved party.
  - 9x39 1mo ago
    Amusing, but a long string of rogue cyber intrusions coupled with Jstor blocking MIT altogether a few times isn’t something to ignore. Hard to imagine just ignoring the risks and potential of that unknown. MIT and Jstor had a bunch of incident response going on, and it isn’t a leap to consider Jstor would cut them off for good if the situation went unresolved.
    - josh_p 1mo ago
      Why do you seem so desperate to characterize Aaron as some amoral super-spy hacker? His ethics are well known. He took issue with Jstor's business model of gatekeeping tax-payer-funded research behind another pay wall, stole some articles, got caught, settled with jstor and MIT. Life could have gone on. The OP's blog post is about how the law isn't applied equally in the United States. Aaron was an individual and an easy target for the overzealous prosecutor. Meta's a faceless corporation, guilty in the court of public opinion, and they don't even get a timely investigation because they have the money to tie up the broken legal system indefinitely. Aaron was an example - if you're small enough, you will be caught, tried, and punished in whatever way we see fit to prove that the justice system "works". If you're a billionaire, do whatever you want wink wink.

maximinus_thrax 1mo ago

> and then rotated his MAC address to dodge the bans that the admin was trying to place on him And corporate scrapers never ever use proxy pools to rotate IPs to evade throttling and blacklisting. Meta is also scraping illegal content, such as pirated books. So I'm not sure what your argument is.

silver_sun 1mo ago
The difference here is that the scientific papers he downloaded weren't freely available to the public, like those scraped webpages would be. Corporate scrapers have been sued[0] in the past for scraping pages from behind a login page / paywall. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
- maximinus_thrax 1mo ago
  Neither are the pirated books Meta is using for model training.
  - silver_sun 1mo ago
    I totally agree with you, and didn't mean to endorse that.

greyface- 1mo ago

> trespassed into a room A room with an unlocked and unmarked door, off of a hallway that was open to the general public. An INCREDIBLY tame act compared to other unprosecuted trespasses normalized and celebrated at https://hacks.mit.edu/ https://hacks.mit.edu/. > rotated his MAC address Not a crime; in fact now a widespread and default practice for consumer Wi-Fi/Bluetooth devices.

FireBeyond 1mo ago
Were those hackers MIT students? Was Aaron?
- greyface- 1mo ago
  Both Aaron and "those hackers" were MIT community members.
  - FireBeyond 1mo ago
    That's an interesting spin that means precisely nothing. I'm not authorized to enter facilities or building maintenance spaces in buildings in my town because I'm a "community member".
    - greyface- 1mo ago
      The general public was authorized to enter the facilities 24/7. The exterior doors were unlocked and it was considered an "open campus". The access controls you see today have only existed since COVID. Whether he was a student at the time also means "precisely nothing".
      - FireBeyond 1mo ago
        Really? The expectation was that they could go into facilities closets and plug into the core networking equipment?

Cabal 1mo ago

Thank you. It's absurd that we are comparing breaking into MIT and (physically) breaking into a network with scraping the web and scanning physical books.

rib3ye 1mo ago

The core argument makes a lot more sense when you compare Aaron’s pirating via network closet with Meta’s pirating via BitTorrent.

AngryData 1mo ago

To me his crime is the equivalent of sneaking into a public library with a photocopier and copying down books without having a library card. It is not and should not be that serious. Is it annoying? Yes. Should he have gotten in a bit of trouble? Sure. But nothing like what he was charged with or dealt with. They hammered down serious law on this guy for what should of at worse been a petty crime.

lofaszvanitt 1mo ago

And that warrants a 7-8 years sentence, without a plea? Maybe in a police state.