10 ms·

Federal law enforcement documents about Aaron Swartz, released under FOIA

361 points by pje 12y ago

sp332 12y ago
Did this just go up? It seems to be going down intermittently. Edit: The "zip file" link doesn't work now, although it seemed to before. Maybe they took it down to save bandwidth?
tdooner 12y ago
In case it's not loading for you, it looks like there's a mirror in the CoralCDN: http://swartzfiles.com.nyud.net/ http://swartzfiles.com.nyud.net/
couchand 12y ago
I'm very curious why they feel the need to redact the location of MIT's Office of General Counsel (see MIT Communications with US Attorney(1) [0]). That information is freely available on the OGC's website [1]. [0]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1355271-mit-communications-with-us-attorney-1.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1355271-mit-communic... [1]: http://ogc.mit.edu/ http://ogc.mit.edu/
- vonmoltke 12y ago
  It may be some blanket Personally Identifiable Information policy wherein they have to redact anything remotely related to PII, even if that information is easily obtainable from other sources.
  - bane 12y ago
    I think this is the correct answer. They also kill the sound when they're asking him his address and phone number in the arrest video.
alimoeeny 12y ago
Can I do this for myself? I mean can I submit a FOIA to see documents that fed gov has on me? Not that I am an important person, but I mean in general, what does it take?
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  A form, time (it isn't fast), and a nominal filing fee (requests are mostly processed by humans, especially on old documents) You may be disappointed though. When FOIA came about, plenty of "activists" requested their files, swelling with pride thinking of all the things that must be in there- only to find just one entry: 03/07/2012: Submitted FOIA request for personal file
  - malandrew 12y ago
    What about files which the government won't admit the existence of? For example, what will someone on the no-fly list see when they submit a FOIA for their files?
    - bbatsell 12y ago
      They'll receive a Glomar response. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response
      - whackedspinach 12y ago
        I received one of these when I submitted FOIA on myself.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - Alupis 12y ago
      FOIA is really just a way to make people think they get access to data about them or important things. Most FOIA's about real topics get flat-out denied or the govt pretends to not have anything about the subject.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  Anyone can. http://www.foia.gov/how-to.html http://www.foia.gov/how-to.html
sparkzilla 12y ago
For those wishing to catch up on the story, I made an archive of Swartz news: http://newslines.org/aaron-swartz/ http://newslines.org/aaron-swartz/
Elrac 12y ago
Pardon my laziness: is there anything to be seen from these documents/media that we didn't know before? Anything surprising/interesting? If so, a quick summary and/or a link would be appreciated.
- bane 12y ago
  Not really, the JSTOR document gives you some behind the scenes emails on the service degradation Aaron was causing and their interactions with MIT. If you were running a service scaled to handle a few hundred requests per minute and somebody starting downloading hundreds of thousands of things as quickly as possible, resulting servers crashing, etc....well it's the kind of email conversations you'd expect as they tried to deal with it, IP address locating, log file dumps, statistics, questions if it's like another previous case they dealt with, cutting off service to MIT, MIT asking why they did that, discussions back and forth over the license and service agreement, making the usage agreement more present for users, etc. There's surveillance photos of the setup Aaron was using, the room it was all in and him entering and leaving the room. There's a copy of the Swartz-JSTOR settlement agreement. Lawyer's emails back and forth, etc. To be honest, if you've ever been part of any kind of contractual or legal proceeding it's pretty banal stuff and appears pretty cut and dry: Aaron went where he wasn't supposed to go and did something he wasn't supposed to do, it involved 2 aggrieved parties and the local criminal code. There's not really anything terribly unusual about any of it. If Aaron hadn't taken his own life and hadn't been as well known, it wouldn't be notable in any particular way whatsoever.
  - spacemanmatt 12y ago
    So the felony network intrusion charges and overzealous prosecution are entirely lost on you? Suicide is the only thing that made the case notable?
    - bane 12y ago
      Felony network intrusion happens probably multiple times per day. There's absolutely nothing interesting about it. To be perfectly honest, I'd probably have tried to bulk download JSTOR if I had access to a network port somewhere on a campus that allowed for unfettered access. Why not? Would I have hidden a computer in a campus telecom room to do it for me? Probably not. Were the aggrieved parties over-the-top in the actions they took? Probably. Suicide also doesn't make this particularly notable. People in custody and under criminal charges are going to have a bad time. Unfortunately some of them do kill themselves as a response to that stress. In the end, Aaron, and the community around him is what makes this notable.
sethbannon 12y ago
Seeing Aaron made to stand shoeless, handcuffed to a metal bar for over 23 minutes as armed men rifled through his belongings and occasionally asked him questions, I can't help but think this process is designed to be demeaning. This is no way to treat someone who's not been found guilty of committing any crime. And I'm sure this wasn't the worst of it. If our criminal justice system had more concern for the dignity of the people that went through it, perhaps we'd see less tragedies like Aaron's.
- bane 12y ago
  I think if there's a lesson to be learned, one-size-fits all treatment of people is the dehumanizing factor. If the person in the video was a 270 pound guy on his 3rd arrest for B&E and had an arrest history that included violent assault, you'd want him to be chained to a bar without shoes while he was booked. Aaron was a slightly built kid, with no priors, on a non-violent arrest. But those kinds of details don't filter down to the booking officer, and most police stations are equipped to handle difficult "customers", that's why there's 3 inches of protective glass between the officer and Aaron. There's no special "well he looks like a nice kid" booking room. The police in the video appeared courteous and non-aggressive. Nobody was tased, beaten or abused. Aaron was arrested and was cuffed and detained, the same as for any other person. As they went through their processing of him, they asked him politely, thanked him for compliance, assured him things would go smooth and he'd be out pretty quick. They asked him about his medication, verified what it was, asked when he needed his next dose. In terms of police treatment of a person under arrest, this is pretty nice. Of course he's going to be handcuffed, he is in police custody after all. They're not going to just find a comfortable chair for him and ask him if he wants to share in the squadroom's latest pizza delivery while the booking officer runs out for lattes? This is what being under arrest actually looks like. Standing for 23 minutes is hardly cruel or unusual. He wasn't being badgered, they weren't using coercive tactics on him, they didn't even ask him any questions about his case. It was Aaron after all who admits to walking onto MIT's property without a question being asked of him! As tragic as what happened to Aaron is, and the feelings about it that I'm sure you and I both share on the subject. Messing around with other people's property and consequently the law enforcement the might come from that is not something you want to be doing ill prepared. Was MIT's handling poor? Was JSTORs? There's a healthy debate to be had about that. But w/r to the police and the circumstances of his arrest he was treated about as humanly as the system allows for now. In the end, Aaron took his own life. The same naïveté that caused him to look at a closed service door and think "that's a place I'm going to set a computer up and harvest hundreds of thousands of research papers, nobody will know" is also what caused him to buckle under the immense pressure of legal entanglement. He wasn't put to death, executed, beaten to death, tortured or any other horrible thing. He did something against the law and ended up in the grind of the system. The system, instead of treating him like a sensitive special snowflake like we'd like them to have, treated him like any of the other thousands of people it handles every day. It's a shitty way to be treated, but if you want to be in a public fight for your principles, it's something you have to be mentally prepared for. If what you are doing might get you arrested, this is how the legal system works. Be prepared.

361 points by pje 12y ago

sp332 12y ago

Did this just go up? It seems to be going down intermittently. Edit: The "zip file" link doesn't work now, although it seemed to before. Maybe they took it down to save bandwidth?

tdooner 12y ago

In case it's not loading for you, it looks like there's a mirror in the CoralCDN: http://swartzfiles.com.nyud.net/ http://swartzfiles.com.nyud.net/

couchand 12y ago

I'm very curious why they feel the need to redact the location of MIT's Office of General Counsel (see MIT Communications with US Attorney(1) [0]). That information is freely available on the OGC's website [1]. [0]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1355271-mit-communications-with-us-attorney-1.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1355271-mit-communic... [1]: http://ogc.mit.edu/ http://ogc.mit.edu/

vonmoltke 12y ago
It may be some blanket Personally Identifiable Information policy wherein they have to redact anything remotely related to PII, even if that information is easily obtainable from other sources.
- bane 12y ago
  I think this is the correct answer. They also kill the sound when they're asking him his address and phone number in the arrest video.

alimoeeny 12y ago

Can I do this for myself? I mean can I submit a FOIA to see documents that fed gov has on me? Not that I am an important person, but I mean in general, what does it take?

sliverstorm 12y ago
A form, time (it isn't fast), and a nominal filing fee (requests are mostly processed by humans, especially on old documents) You may be disappointed though. When FOIA came about, plenty of "activists" requested their files, swelling with pride thinking of all the things that must be in there- only to find just one entry: 03/07/2012: Submitted FOIA request for personal file
- malandrew 12y ago
  What about files which the government won't admit the existence of? For example, what will someone on the no-fly list see when they submit a FOIA for their files?
  - bbatsell 12y ago
    They'll receive a Glomar response. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response
    - whackedspinach 12y ago
      I received one of these when I submitted FOIA on myself.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - Alupis 12y ago
    FOIA is really just a way to make people think they get access to data about them or important things. Most FOIA's about real topics get flat-out denied or the govt pretends to not have anything about the subject.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
Anyone can. http://www.foia.gov/how-to.html http://www.foia.gov/how-to.html

sparkzilla 12y ago

For those wishing to catch up on the story, I made an archive of Swartz news: http://newslines.org/aaron-swartz/ http://newslines.org/aaron-swartz/

Elrac 12y ago

Pardon my laziness: is there anything to be seen from these documents/media that we didn't know before? Anything surprising/interesting? If so, a quick summary and/or a link would be appreciated.

bane 12y ago
Not really, the JSTOR document gives you some behind the scenes emails on the service degradation Aaron was causing and their interactions with MIT. If you were running a service scaled to handle a few hundred requests per minute and somebody starting downloading hundreds of thousands of things as quickly as possible, resulting servers crashing, etc....well it's the kind of email conversations you'd expect as they tried to deal with it, IP address locating, log file dumps, statistics, questions if it's like another previous case they dealt with, cutting off service to MIT, MIT asking why they did that, discussions back and forth over the license and service agreement, making the usage agreement more present for users, etc. There's surveillance photos of the setup Aaron was using, the room it was all in and him entering and leaving the room. There's a copy of the Swartz-JSTOR settlement agreement. Lawyer's emails back and forth, etc. To be honest, if you've ever been part of any kind of contractual or legal proceeding it's pretty banal stuff and appears pretty cut and dry: Aaron went where he wasn't supposed to go and did something he wasn't supposed to do, it involved 2 aggrieved parties and the local criminal code. There's not really anything terribly unusual about any of it. If Aaron hadn't taken his own life and hadn't been as well known, it wouldn't be notable in any particular way whatsoever.
- spacemanmatt 12y ago
  So the felony network intrusion charges and overzealous prosecution are entirely lost on you? Suicide is the only thing that made the case notable?
  - bane 12y ago
    Felony network intrusion happens probably multiple times per day. There's absolutely nothing interesting about it. To be perfectly honest, I'd probably have tried to bulk download JSTOR if I had access to a network port somewhere on a campus that allowed for unfettered access. Why not? Would I have hidden a computer in a campus telecom room to do it for me? Probably not. Were the aggrieved parties over-the-top in the actions they took? Probably. Suicide also doesn't make this particularly notable. People in custody and under criminal charges are going to have a bad time. Unfortunately some of them do kill themselves as a response to that stress. In the end, Aaron, and the community around him is what makes this notable.

sethbannon 12y ago

Seeing Aaron made to stand shoeless, handcuffed to a metal bar for over 23 minutes as armed men rifled through his belongings and occasionally asked him questions, I can't help but think this process is designed to be demeaning. This is no way to treat someone who's not been found guilty of committing any crime. And I'm sure this wasn't the worst of it. If our criminal justice system had more concern for the dignity of the people that went through it, perhaps we'd see less tragedies like Aaron's.

bane 12y ago
I think if there's a lesson to be learned, one-size-fits all treatment of people is the dehumanizing factor. If the person in the video was a 270 pound guy on his 3rd arrest for B&E and had an arrest history that included violent assault, you'd want him to be chained to a bar without shoes while he was booked. Aaron was a slightly built kid, with no priors, on a non-violent arrest. But those kinds of details don't filter down to the booking officer, and most police stations are equipped to handle difficult "customers", that's why there's 3 inches of protective glass between the officer and Aaron. There's no special "well he looks like a nice kid" booking room. The police in the video appeared courteous and non-aggressive. Nobody was tased, beaten or abused. Aaron was arrested and was cuffed and detained, the same as for any other person. As they went through their processing of him, they asked him politely, thanked him for compliance, assured him things would go smooth and he'd be out pretty quick. They asked him about his medication, verified what it was, asked when he needed his next dose. In terms of police treatment of a person under arrest, this is pretty nice. Of course he's going to be handcuffed, he is in police custody after all. They're not going to just find a comfortable chair for him and ask him if he wants to share in the squadroom's latest pizza delivery while the booking officer runs out for lattes? This is what being under arrest actually looks like. Standing for 23 minutes is hardly cruel or unusual. He wasn't being badgered, they weren't using coercive tactics on him, they didn't even ask him any questions about his case. It was Aaron after all who admits to walking onto MIT's property without a question being asked of him! As tragic as what happened to Aaron is, and the feelings about it that I'm sure you and I both share on the subject. Messing around with other people's property and consequently the law enforcement the might come from that is not something you want to be doing ill prepared. Was MIT's handling poor? Was JSTORs? There's a healthy debate to be had about that. But w/r to the police and the circumstances of his arrest he was treated about as humanly as the system allows for now. In the end, Aaron took his own life. The same naïveté that caused him to look at a closed service door and think "that's a place I'm going to set a computer up and harvest hundreds of thousands of research papers, nobody will know" is also what caused him to buckle under the immense pressure of legal entanglement. He wasn't put to death, executed, beaten to death, tortured or any other horrible thing. He did something against the law and ended up in the grind of the system. The system, instead of treating him like a sensitive special snowflake like we'd like them to have, treated him like any of the other thousands of people it handles every day. It's a shitty way to be treated, but if you want to be in a public fight for your principles, it's something you have to be mentally prepared for. If what you are doing might get you arrested, this is how the legal system works. Be prepared.