I did not know Aaron Swartz, unless you count having copies of a person’s entire digital life on your forensics server as knowing him. I did once meet his father, an intelligent and dedicated man who was clearly pouring his life into defending his son. My deepest condolences go out to him and the rest of Aaron’s family during what must be the hardest time of their lives.
If the good that men do is oft interred with their bones, so be it, but in the meantime I feel a responsibility to correct some of the erroneous information being posted as comments to otherwise informative discussions at Reddit, Hacker News and Boing Boing. Apparently some people feel the need to self-aggrandize by opining on the guilt of the recently departed, and I wanted to take this chance to speak on behalf of a man who can no longer defend himself. I had hoped to ask Aaron to discuss these issues on the Defcon stage once he was acquitted, but now that he has passed it is important that his memory not be besmirched by the ignorant and uninformed. I have confirmed with Aaron’s attorneys that I am free to discuss these issues now that the criminal case is moot.
I was the expert witness on Aaron’s side of US vs Swartz, engaged by his attorneys last year to help prepare a defense for his April trial. Until Keker Van Nest called iSEC Partners I had very little knowledge of Aaron’s plight, and although we have spoken at or attended many of the same events we had never once met.
Should you doubt my neutrality, let me establish my bona fides. I have led the investigation of dozens of computer crimes, from Latvian hackers blackmailing a stock brokerage to Chinese government-backed attacks against dozens of American enterprises. I have investigated small insider violations of corporate policy to the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and have responded to break-ins at social networks, e-tailers and large banks. While we are no stranger to pro bono work, having served as experts on EFF vs Sony BMG and Sony vs Hotz, our reports have also been used in the prosecution of at least a half dozen attackers. In short, I am no long-haired-hippy-anarchist who believes that anything goes on the Internet. I am much closer to the stereotypical capitalist-white-hat sellout that the antisec people like to rant about (and steal mail spools from) in the weeks before BlackHat.
I know a criminal hack when I see it, and Aaron’s downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail.
The facts:
- MIT operates an extraordinarily open network. Very few campus networks offer you a routable public IP address via unauthenticated DHCP and then lack even basic controls to prevent abuse. Very few captured portals on wired networks allow registration by any visitor, nor can they be easily bypassed by just assigning yourself an IP address. In fact, in my 12 years of professional security work I have never seen a network this open.
- In the spirit of the MIT ethos, the Institute runs this open, unmonitored and unrestricted network on purpose. Their head of network security admitted as much in an interview Aaron’s attorneys and I conducted in December. MIT is aware of the controls they could put in place to prevent what they consider abuse, such as downloading too many PDFs from one website or utilizing too much bandwidth, but they choose not to.
- MIT also chooses not to prompt users of their wireless network with terms of use or a definition of abusive practices.
- At the time of Aaron’s actions, the JSTOR website allowed an unlimited number of downloads by anybody on MIT’s 18.x Class-A network. The JSTOR application lacked even the most basic controls to prevent what they might consider abusive behavior, such as CAPTCHAs triggered on multiple downloads, requiring accounts for bulk downloads, or even the ability to pop a box and warn a repeat downloader.
- Aaron did not “hack” the JSTOR website for all reasonable definitions of “hack”. Aaron wrote a handful of basic python scripts that first discovered the URLs of journal articles and then used curl to request them. Aaron did not use parameter tampering, break a CAPTCHA, or do anything more complicated than call a basic command line tool that downloads a file in the same manner as right-clicking and choosing “Save As” from your favorite browser.
- Aaron did nothing to cover his tracks or hide his activity, as evidenced by his very verbose .bash_history, his uncleared browser history and lack of any encryption of the laptop he used to download these files. Changing one’s MAC address (which the government inaccurately identified as equivalent to a car’s VIN number) or putting a mailinator email address into a captured portal are not crimes. If they were, you could arrest half of the people who have ever used airport wifi.
- The government provided no evidence that these downloads caused a negative effect on JSTOR or MIT, except due to silly overreactions such as turning off all of MIT’s JSTOR access due to downloads from a pretty easily identified user agent.
- I cannot speak as to the criminal implications of accessing an unlocked closet on an open campus, one which was also used to store personal effects by a homeless man. I would note that trespassing charges were dropped against Aaron and were not part of the Federal case.
In short, Aaron Swartz was not the super hacker breathlessly described in the Government’s indictment and forensic reports, and his actions did not pose a real danger to JSTOR, MIT or the public. He was an intelligent young man who found a loophole that would allow him to download a lot of documents quickly. This loophole was created intentionally by MIT and JSTOR, and was codified contractually in the piles of paperwork turned over during discovery.
If I had taken the stand as planned and had been asked by the prosecutor whether Aaron’s actions were “wrong”, I would probably have replied that what Aaron did would better be described as “inconsiderate”. In the same way it is inconsiderate to write a check at the supermarket while a dozen people queue up behind you or to check out every book at the library needed for a History 101 paper. It is inconsiderate to download lots of files on shared wifi or to spider Wikipedia too quickly, but none of these actions should lead to a young person being hounded for years and haunted by the possibility of a 35 year sentence.
Professor Lessig will always write more eloquently than I can on prosecutorial discretion and responsibility, but I certainly agree that Aaron’s death demands a great deal of soul searching by the US Attorney who decided to massively overcharge this young man and the MIT administrators who decided to involve Federal law enforcement.
I cannot speak as to all of the problems that contributed to Aaron’s death, but I do strongly believe that he did not deserve the treatment he received while he was alive. It is incumbent on all of us to figure out how to create some positive change out of this unnecessary tragedy. I’ll write more on that later. First I need to spend some time hugging my kids.
Edit 1: Fixed typo. Thank you @ramenlabs.
Posted from San Carlos, CA.
; (
The arrogant government prosecutors who, in effect, murdered Aaron, as well as the irresponsible academics who shrugged their shoulders in indifference and the various media outlets that casually reported on his arrest, should think carefully about the lack of proportion in the American criminal justice system, and the devastating impact it can have on real lives.
Authorities in New York have undertaken a similarly disproportionate assault on Internet freedom and academic whistle-blowing, arresting and prosecuting a blogger who sent out “Gmail confessions” in which a well-known New York University department chairman appeared to be eccentrically accusing himself of plagiarism. Again, there appears to be nothing but silence from the relevant communities. For further information on the case, see:
http://raphaelgolbtrial.wordpress.com/about/
Wouldn’t be surprised if he was murdered and they made it look like a hanging. Very easy to do and much less problems down the road with an activist that made many enemys.
It’s “enemies” and for the record, it’s unlikely that the government would kill Aaron; it would make their unpopular case against him even more.
Maybe you heard about the woman in Coronado CA who supposedly hung herself naked and through herself out the window while tied to a bed with her hands tied behind her back. The corrupt police called it a suicide, but anyone with a brain knows it was not. Big money can do amazing things. AAron made too many waves and the corrupt ended him.
Companys do crimes everyday.. But no one tell or take action..
More companies broke GPL license, but no one do anythingg..
I’m from Asia, and ur US political system sucks bad.. I mean actually, this kind of things, why anyone can’t stand up against this..
I appreciate you taking the time to explain the specifics this situation during what’s a really difficult tie for everyone involved. I am sorry for your loss.
Phil Ochs once wrote (and sang) a song about boots marching in a foreign land—I wonder what he would think if told that the foreign land was right here?
You might want to listen to Phil Ochs’ “Another Country”, he thought about it quite a lot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9Ty66Z3mvk
Thank you for sharing this information with us.
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Interesting, and thank you for your analysis.
Thank you for this.
Thank you for explaining the details that you would have shared at trial. The lack of perspective on the part of the prosecution truly concerns me. It is either the result of a lack of competent intellect require to grasp the situation at-hand. Or it is the result of a malicious disregard for the truth. Either scenarios are troubling to me. It is a very sad day if the best case scenario in the U.S. judicial system is to be put on trial by a system that is either too ignorant to understand the nuances of your defence, or too willfully malicious to want to do so.
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Aaron Swartz and I were in contact one single time, and I am sad to learn it if he has passed away.
What about the alledged MILLIONS in losses? You wanna know what I think?? (Sure, you really do) I think that someone held some sort of proprietary rights to all of those papers, then used some made up value to calculate the stuffed net worth of all of those student papers, and got some Savings and Loan to give them the amount with a loan secured by those papers. I bet to the tune of many many millions. Taking those papers and making copies rendered the value to zilch. So, that mythical “someone” had to claim they where robbed, to the order of millions of dollars. Follow the money. “Trust No One.”
this was amazing to read. You didnt have to do this but you took the time to make your view heard by eager lears, and in this world we need more people like you defending the rights of its citizens. I commend you for this piece and wish you godspeed in your future endeavors. well said.
Thanks for the analysis. Though I did not get all of the technical bits, yet, I have always intuitively thought that Aaron was being overcharged and the whole issue had gone out of hands with everyone overreacting a bit…
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Thanks for writing this. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family!
Reblogged this on Julia Clark and commented:
It is very sad to lose such a brilliant mind as Aaron. In his death he becomes a martyr. Without this prosecution, precedence is not set. God have mercy on him and his. Aaron’s torch has fallen, and God willing that torch lights hundreds of other torches. .
One more typo: “although we have spoken *at* or attended many of the same events.”
Thank you.
Thank you for your insight. Aaron is martyr in this long struggle against conglomerates hording as much as they can roll across.
Well except in this case the “conglomerate” was the federal government, JSTOR wanted nothing to do with the case.
JSTOR took a more pragmatic approach to the matter but the DOJ pushed on with tacit support from MIT. Prosecutors are supposed to take a complainant/’s views into account under prosecution policy but sometimes elect to ignore it or give it little weight.
Except this case would have set precedence.
Well, it certainly is doing that, Julia…Worldwide.
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You didn’t even in passing explain *why* he did it. What was his rationale? Was it for personal consumption, downloading 4 million academic articles? 4 million? It’s definitely not an offense deserving 35 years jail time (your inability to distinguish between the maximum for an offense and the likely sentence he’d have received IF found guilty is a little galling when you call yourself an expert witness — someone who’s allegedly done this frequently). But it clearly wasn’t for personal consumption. He was a great mind. Very influential and committed and honest. But you’re being outrageously disingenuous here.
As I explained I did not know Aaron and I cannot speak to his mindset or motivations.
The reference of 35 years of jail time is taken directly from the US Attorney’s press release announcing the charges against Aaron: “If convicted on these charges, SWARTZ faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million.”
I have updated my post to reference the US Attorney’s release.
Well you should update your entire self-serving star turn here to reflect that *six months plea offer*. You must have known about that. Therefore to be flogging the “35 years” was unconscionable.
I am a random guy who is sitting in a room with several terabytes of creative commons files and some terabytes of random websites I once crawled with some simple bash scripts. Why? Because I am/was bored and it is/was fun. There is no way I could ever personally consume all of this. But why would I delete it? It was a one time cost of maybe 1000 dollars for storage. Now it is free to keep.
The JSTOR documents were academic papers that had been created (at least partially) with public money. He wanted to make them publicly available.
The plans to our Peacekeeper Missiles were also created with public money. Are we supposed to be making those publicly available too?
This is a nonsense idea. Just because something is created with public funding does not mean the public has a right to access it freely. I have no idea where this concept originated, but it does not make any sense; particularly when we have a representational government which makes such decisions through acts of Congress and copyright law.
Additionally, the work was not necessarily created exclusively with public money, where you might have a vaguely theoretical case for fair use. Indiscriminate download of millions of files is hardly that.
“The plans to our Peacekeeper Missiles were also created with public money. Are we supposed to be making those publicly available too?”
Well, I guess if Aaron had a missile or two at his disposal the prosecutors might have been more careful about how they charged him. But I think that an enforceable code of ethics for federal prosecutors might have worked too.
On the ‘why’ he did it – he was among our brightest young hacktivists. As to the ‘why’ the Feds were disproportionately after him – I’m guessing his leadership against the SOPA/PIPA internet censorship legislation. Glenn Greenwald has a good summary with many useful links:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/12/aaron-swartz-heroism-suicide1
Many, many thanks to you, Mr. Stamos. Your explanation will allow some of us to defend the young man against a great deal of nonsense that will no doubt roil the MSM waters…
To the MD post above (no link available):
None of the information was classified or involved national security in any way. If it did it would be in NO journals. There are rules for this, and USPTO checks everything accordingly. Also, the public access effect is already happening due to the funding agencies demanding public access. The deal some entities offer (NIH potentially being first) boils down to this, if you take public money then the public will know what you did if it is publishable. While his approach was unorthodox, Aaron’s view on public access to academic literature were not radical. In fact, if the journals were not integrated into the peer review process they likely would have been done away with a long time ago.
This is from his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (http://pastebin.com/cefxMVAy):
“There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
Aaron Swartz
July 2008, Eremo, Italy”
Thanks for posting this. It make it rather clear that Aaron intended to distribute the files freely – i.e. to go through with the crime.
It also makes clear that he saw this as civil disobedience. The most important factor in civil disobedience – that which gives the practice its moral force – is that one breaks an unjust law and willingly accepts the punishment demanded by the laws. That is the whole point – you take the suffering of the punishment upon yourself and then confront the society at large with the question – ” do all of you really believe that I deserve this”?
It makes no sense whatsoever to commit the crime and then to try to avoid the punishment. That is not civil disobedience. That is just common criminality.
Don’t get me wrong here please. I am not saying his suicide was an attempt to avoid punishment. I don’t know enough about the man to say that. But all his friends who are turning on the prosecutor are doing great disservice to Aaron if in fact he committed this crime as an act of civil disobedience. The prosecutor was simply playing his assigned role in the matter. In fact, if he did not prosecute, then there would be no real civil disobedience, and no opportunity to make the case to the society at large that the laws needed to be changed.
There’s something in the Constitution about this: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” It’s the Eighth Amendment in the Bill of Rights. Lately the government has been doing remarkable violence to the Bill of Rights, not only the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, but also the First and Second Amendments as well, so it’s no surprise that the Eighth is on the chopping block as well.
There are good reasons that countries become less free and turn into police states, and one of them is that people don’t fight governmental injustice, and won’t try to hold governments accountable when they won’t follow their own rules. Now, is 50 years in prison – hard time, a potential life sentence, he’d have been 76 when he walked out – and a $1 million fine – cruel and unusual punishment for copyright infringement? If you don’t really think so, then we don’t have much to talk about here.
I have a copy of the Wikipedia dump file, essentially a copy of Wikipedia. It’s about 40Gb of text, uncompressed. It’s unlikely I’ll be able to read it all in my lifetime. I keep it on my PDA with a search tool because not knowing what I will want to look up in future doesn’t mean that I never will. Having an offline copy means I can access it while anywhere, with or without web connection and without outside monitoring of my habits. I have the closest single thing to the sum of all human knowledge in my pocket, on a memory card the size of a fingernail. It is both humbling and amazingly useful.
An offline copy of these 4 million articles similarly tied to a simple desktop search tool sounds a similarly useful aid to research and understanding.
Please do not assume because you do not have a use for a thing, that no one does.
To Joe Citizen: “That is the whole point – you take the suffering of the punishment upon yourself and then confront the society at large with the question – ” do all of you really believe that I deserve this”? It makes no sense whatsoever to commit the crime and then to try to avoid the punishment.”
If you confront the society with that question you’re trying to avoid the punishment. So, you’re contradicting yourself in two sentences and don’t make any sense. Very bad trolling.
Good questiion, but you think (four million) files are large? Downloading just Ten Terabytes could hold the entire Library of Congress! Less than one Terabyte is all he used to download 4 million open journals and currently it can fit into a flash drive the size of a key chain recently advertised on the news.
These files are nothing more than digital ones and zeros condensed into a small space that can be downloaded into a very small space. So looking at it in that perspective, 35 years for open information is extreme.
It sounds to me that the attorney general is overreacting due to our terrorist scare since 9/11 combined with his age, I’m guessing he’s also moderately technologically illiterate. The kind of guy who comes home to see his grandkid navigating an I-pad at age four, much faster than he can use his television clicker to watch a football game.
Very well said, thank you for your insight !
Court is where people go to have both sides of an argument weighed and measured. Everyone is supposed to be equal in the eyes of the law. Our system today is more like Constantinople’s Grand Bazaar where the prosecution purposefully loads the charges with everything possible because they *know* they can only get a percentage of the charges to stick. The more charges, the better the negotiating later. It’s as if you want my half eaten waffle and I start our haggling at $100. I knew you will never pay that much for half eaten food, but if I start high, I have a better chance of ending high.
There is an argument to be made that judges should be the final arbiters of justice. But when one or both sides start from such skewed perspectives, the odds of true justice happening in our overtaxed system are, I suspect, significantly lowered.
HQ..
Say one of your favorite artists are giving out their latest album free of charge on the web. You have a vacation to go to, not much time to sample all the songs, so what do you do? You download all the songs and keep them for listening to later. Hey, the ones you don’t like can always be deleted later by you. This guy wrote code to download whole directories of articles. It’s like he programmed his own download manager. He would have again written a program to search and scrutinize the topic(s) he was interested in. MIT itself has never barred anybody from downloading articles. I think the legal office just couldn’t digest the fact that some whizkid got a majority of the articles in his possession and saw this case as a stepping stone to a great career if Aaron had got convicted.
Thanks Alex for the clarifications. May Aaron’s soul rest in peace!
To MD: it is sad that some people like yourself still have absolutely no idea what diffusion of knowledge is about and think about everything only in terms of money. That denotes a low, low mind.
This is about SCIENCE, not missiles, so it is PUBLIC, do you understand the difference ? Science is about discovery of new knowledge and the FREE diffusion of it to the public. Yes free as in free beer. Scientists do not seek of making money out of the knowledge they share in their articles, they are usually not money driven. This has been the case for centuries, there is no reason this should change, unless you want to slow down innovation to a crawl. Even privately funded science is freely diffused. Without the Bell labs, there would be no laser, no transistor, hence no digital electronics, etc.
Aaron Swartz wanted to keep public knowledge in the hands of the public, and not limited to the few institutions that can pay insane amounts of money to JSTOR and publishers to access it.
To MD: Oh, and BTW, please stop making believe that the federal law is on the side of your awfully blind POV.
Let me consider that this blogger probably has far more legitimacy in giving his own POV than you:
http://www.litigationandtrial.com/2011/07/articles/series/special-comment/aaron-swartz-computer-fraud-indictment/
It’s irrelevant if the sentence that would have been given is not near the maximum sentence (that the prosecutor was in any case bandying around) – for a “crime” like this the maximum sentence should be a fine, perhaps some community service and a misdemeanor charge. That there is a maximum sentence that is so disproportionate for this is utterly barbaric, especially when it is publically brandished by the prosecutor to browbeat the defendant.
This kind of disproportionate maximum sentence was bandied around in the extradition case of Gary McKinnon (which thankfully the British government finally had the sense to block) – if McKinnon were to be tried in his home country it’s doubtful the maximum possible sentence would be custodial.
Thank you for speaking out.
What? It seems like there are is a significant minority who take the (flawed) perspective that the prosecutor was just “playing her part” or doing what “she was supposed to do under the law” by prosecuting his act this way. It’s sad that anyone might think that any laws are written in such a way that there is no demand for the use of careful discretion by prosecutors and judges when interpreting the statues appropriately, ethically, and fairly. By dividing up what was at most one illegal action into several alleged felony offenses and further stretching and/or interpreting the law in such a way she did in order to threaten 30+ years in jail – and this isn’t an episode of law and order, she was not kidding or plea bargaining here it seems – for what was by any reasonable standard of interpretation a misdemeanor, literally, the prosecutor clearly abused her office for apparently political ends, and possibly, because of a grudge against Aaron.
I’m neither a lawyer nor a great writer (nor even an American) but I know enough to know that there is always, or almost always, a level of discretion inherent in the job of a prosecutor having to decide which laws and statues best fit the act, and while there may be no legal requirement to enforce the laws consistently from case to case (as there is for the court when choosing sentences, for instance) it seems clear there is an ethical requirement for the government to not arbitrarily stretch every definition and target one person in the manner in which it was applied here if it is not (and it isn’t) done in every other case, and maybe you could update your article to make more clear that this wasn’t a case of mandatory minimums, for example, but targeted, malicous, persecution by an actively campaigning politician. It seems like Aaron’s memory deserves this, and I I found suprisingly little in the five articles online about this tragedy, but I lack the U.S legal knowledge or the detailed familiarity with the case to better explain in detail what happened here, and why it was highly unusual and a huge legal stretch as far as I can see, to put it mildly. For those who think the U.S. attorney was just ‘doing her job’ or that Aaron ‘should have expected to pay the penalty’, I’d like to see someone tell the story of why this prosecution had nothing to do with the crime committed, and why all voters in MA should know about what happened and what this woman did to Aaron.
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Really good post. I had no idea who Aaron was until I learned he had died today. He seemed like a very intelligent person. RIP.
Thank you for sharing. Maybe it’s time someone file criminal charges against the DOJ for their Gestapo tactics.
Also, I hope the students and staff at MIT protest and demand the resignation of the MIT administrators.
I also hope that no prospective student of sense will try to study at this university, which once was legendary and the most open in the world. Now they have blood on their hands.
Unfortunately these thugs enjoy absolute immunity. Nifong only got a day in jail, suspended. This tells you everything you need to know about our system of “Just Us”.
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Reblogged this on Occupy The Polls.
Since the federal prosecutor obviously engaged in this massive prosecutorial overreach to further his own career, it seems only fair that career reap its just reward.
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If the technical details of this article is accurate, those charges are ludicrous. There are download plugins for every major browser that basically do the exact same thing, which any average layperson can use. One example: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/downthemall/
What’s next, claiming that AdBlock is inspecting and subverting Internet traffic, and hence a crime under the Wiretap Act?
“What’s next, claiming that AdBlock is inspecting and subverting Internet traffic, and hence a crime under the Wiretap Act?” Well, content distributors certainly think so!
“Any time you skip a commercial, you’re actually stealing the programming.” Jamie Kelleher CEO, Turner Broadcasting
I have this vision of armed guards standing over Kelleher forcing him to read every advertisement in any magazine or newspaper on which he ever lays eyeballs.
unitron
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Aaron Swartz Timeline: http://newslines.org/wiki/category/computer-people/aaron-swartz/
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This wise contribution is greatly appreciated. I cannot but see the aggressive drive to convict this young man as little more than bullying designed to ‘set an example’. There is a rot at the heart of the ‘official’ system but it is for you Americans to sort it out. As for this Brit, he can only express truly heartfelt condolences to the family … the loss of such an exceptionally bright young man is something our global culture cannot afford, though perhaps we could do with a few less ambitious corporate types lacking any basic moral compass.
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I disagree with you, Alex: I think you’re extraordinarily eloquent here. Not to take anything away from Lessig, but I think your dispassionate marshaling of the evidence is much more damning than any amount of rhetoric could be. This whole thing makes me so cryingly, crazy-makingly mad.
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Great post — not often we get this perspective on cases. Those who are angry about the abuse of discretion in overcharging Aaron should check out this petition: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-states-district-attorney-carmen-ortiz-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck
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It’s really sad and scary to look at how careerists & bureaucracy have wasted both time and tones of tax payers money to ruin someone’s life, and for no reason. And not just anyone’s, but a life of a young, extremely smart and multi-talented person like Aaron. It’s nothing less than a real tragedy and I can only hope that someone, eventually, will answer for all this craziness…
May he rest in peace though his decent soul is indestructible, and Aaron will still work from the other side.
The prosecutor in this case has a name: Stephen Heymann. That name should be out there. Why do so many of the articles I have read today refer to him anonymously as ‘the federal prosecutor?’ I understand this guy may even have political ambitions in Massachusetts. His role in this should have consequences.
There is something self-serving about laying blame for Aaron’s suicide, or any suicide. It allows one to siphon off some of the terrible emotions that ensue afterwards. (And in this case there are people and institutions outside of Aaron that make good targets.) It also diminishes the dead person by assuming he or she was incapable of facing the problems or people confronting them. Does anyone who knew Aaron really believe he was defeated by the government? That he threw up his hands and showed the world they had won? Do you think he wanted to martyr himself?
This brilliant man no doubt knew how futile that would be. I believe whatever terrors the acts of the government or MIT or any other earthly things presented to Aaron, they were of little consequence compared to the unfathomable pain inflicted on him by his own brain chemistry. An even greater mystery is the nature of the chains binding him, preventing him from seeking whatever means in existence that could help him stay on earth.
We must learn more about depression, take more seriously its manifestations in our loved ones, and stand guard around them, inside their perimeters and their circle, to leave ourselves entirely open to their need and desire for assistance, support, whatever it takes. Maybe we’ll do better next time. Perhaps there’s someone you know right now…
Thanks for a comment system that protects my privacy.
Even if acquitted it costs around 1.5million US dollars to defend yourself against the feds. Money you dont get back. Depression yes, of course is a factor, a great one, but the pressure of this case was also unfair and disproportionate. It certainly not gonna make things easier for those already depressed. I agree with your sentiment on depression but lets not ignore the systematic injustice of our legal system. The DOJ and White House need to stop these kinds of witch hunts against those who are working for social change
Even assuming he racked up anything like the bill you predict – which I doubt since he had no money and was smart enough to arrange for legal aid – I just don’t think mere money trouble would bring him to the despair he finally succumbed to. He was a much bigger person than any of the people trying to make his life difficult. He seemed moved by far more important issues than the pestering he suffered at the hands of the legal system. It’s been demonstrated here they didn’t have much of a case against him, and I doubt seriously he would have spent time in jail. Ask yourself if YOU would have been brought to your knees by a situation such as his.
He was also facing 50 years of hard time in Leavenworth. That’s a life sentence, he would have been 76 when he got out. Murderers and rapists don’t get half that.
Speaking as the brother of a woman who attempted suicide twice, I can say that even I do not know what depression does to a person, to their mind. But I understand it’s power.
When my sister was first diagnosed, the parents my mother was friends with suggested that my mother take my sister through the cancer ward of a hospital, to make her see what ‘real’ suffering was like.
Put there is no suffering greater than depression, no opponent more potent that your own brain. Taking her through a cancer ward would have destroyed her, because she would have felt guilt over it, driven her ever further and ever faster to her attempt suicide.
The public does not need to know, for it cannot know, there is no metaphor or simile to describe it. But it needs to UNDERSTAND.
And couple depression, and all it’s crushing sickness and disorder, coupled with a (according to what I have read thus-far) VINDICTIVE WITCH-HUNTING TROLLOP of a prosecutor who seems to have taken the case purely in order to further his own political ambitions (perhaps as a bid for old-media donations) I cannot say I am surprised that this was the way it ended. I am saddened immeasurably, not I cannot say I am surprised.
@Casey Once you see a legal document that states “US Government Vs. YOUR NAME HERE” it will change you in a fundamental way. I say this from personal experience. It is profound. It is one thing to think about power in an abstract way. But once you, your family, your family’s finances are in serious jeopardy because THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT wants to prosecute you, things will never be the same. Do not dismiss the psychological effect of this. It will stay with you. It will fuck with you. Forever.
Casey, if your government is after you, surrounding you, stifling you, threatening you, it is less about defeat, and more about the despair of being one small person. You have your dad, your family, a few lawyers, and people like Alex on your side, and you know they love and care about you, but you also know that you alone could go to prison. To battle depression under these conditions would be unfathomable.
Aaron was only 26 years old. Brilliant, worldly, innocent, and in the end, alone, with the knowledge that his government, the United States government, the government of freedom and fairness, was against him. We lost a crusader.
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A true miscarriage of justice.
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Thank you so much for putting this information on the record so to speak.
I have to believe that Swartz knew how much support he had from the hacker community. I had corresponded with him a number of years ago(could it really be back in 2000?) about programming for online communities, and when I heard of his difficulties in July 2011 I sent him a note offering whatever help I could. He responded with his thanks, but I didn’t hear from him again; I assumed he was in good hands, but now of course I can’t help but ask myself if there was something further I should have done. No doubt many others ask themselves the same question.
I am angry at what I regard as clear abuse of power by the government prosecutors. If any positive change can come out of this, I want to see some of the responsible parties punished. Someone in the government needs to lose their job over how this case was handled. The kid-glove treatment of special interests (e.g., entertainment industry, banking) reeks particularly badly when compared with the malicious overkill of this case against someone who meant and did no harm to anyone.
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Reblogged this on Duffboy and commented:
I was unaware of Aaron Swartz’s case or recent death. This post is very humbling in many ways and should make us feel collectively ashamed for cornering someone into such despair.
The Australian government accused me of hacking into their systems to steal confidential information, even though they could not find my electronic fingerprints anywhere near the data. The accusation/threats were in the time frame where I was adapting to the fall out of being a whistle-blower, I was getting Satanic death threats from the so-called-victim-of my alleged ‘dabbling’ and while all protective equipment for my job was withdrawn or decommissioned, making death by homicide or suicide a likely outcome for me. It seems as if the same tactics were used on this poor chap.
I’ve known two to suicide after one being caught with a bit of weed and the police threatened one with the rest of her life in prison.
i tend to agree that it was a case of hounding and judicial overreach based on his successful campaigning against SOPA/PIPA, and his philosophy around creative commons, social justice, and equitable access to academic information created and funded by the Government but available at obscene rates to the wealthy few. Perhaps he would have been better off being your average porkbarrelling white collar criminal and the DOJ wouldn’t be on his back
i tend to agree that it was a case of hounding and prosecutorial overreach based on his successful campaigning against SOPA/PIPA, and his philosophy around creative commons, social justice, and equitable access to academic information created and funded by the Government but available at obscene rates to the wealthy few. Perhaps he would have been better off being your average porkbarrelling white collar criminal and the DOJ wouldn’t be on his back
Aaron Swartz was a dick whose selfish acts for an admirable cause shutdown JSTOR access to all MIT students for the time it took MIT sysadmins to pull the plug on his inelegant hack. A sensible prosecutor would have pled him out with a token sentence and financial restitution for MIT’s time and materials. The US prosecutor overreached and should be fired.
The “selfish act” is the one that you don’t talk about: the privatization of research paid for with taxpayer money. That’s *my* money. If government stops funding scientific research, then you might be justified, but right now, you’re stealing my money to benefit yourself. Screw MIT students. If we pay for it, we get the benefits of it.
@Raoul Duck
- well said on all counts
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Thank you, Alex. What is done in the name of law can kill good people, young fellows.
Thank you for clarifying . Such a tragedy.
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Reblogged this on bluepearlgirl's world and commented:
Its better to hear it from someone who actually knows about the case… RIP Aaron Swartz!
This is a really sad story.
I think the US legal system should learn something from this.
You probably already know this, but the reason prosecutors push such heavy charges is as leverage for a plea bargain. Yes it’s a problem, but by no means limited to these kinds of cases.
I doubt they were looking for a plea bargain in this case. They were looking to make a statement.
They offered a plea. He did not want a felony conviction.
Rest in Peace Aaron
What the duck said. There is plenty of blame to go around here. Overreaching prosecutors ….sure. But if you want to play the civil disobedience game then you have to be prepared to pay the price… and you don’t get to set the price, the Man does. That’s the world we live in and he shoulda known that. And this was a boy whose mental stability was known to be a bit on the shaky side, apparently. Someone who might not have held up that well in prison even for a short sentence. So he (and whoever of his friends and family who knew of his plans in advance) should have thought twice before embarking on this path. His cause may have been just but it seems like he wasn’t the man for this job.
There will never be a trial now to determine his guilt under the law, but Alex’s opinion notwithstanding, downloading 5 million copyrighted documents that you don’t own from a university that you don’t attend with the intention of making them public is more than just rude, it’s a crime. That the university, in the interest of making the network as useful as possible to students, didn’t have elaborate security (thanks to Aaron, I’ll bet the security is now tougher and more inconvenient) is irrelevant. If Alex doesn’t have seven deadbolt locks on the door to his house, is it OK to come steal all his stuff? To a federal prosecutor who has trouble getting her email program setup, python scripts and curl sound techie enough to constitute “hacking”.
Would Aaron have really been sentenced to 35 years in jail? No way. But that’s how the game (which as I said before, Aaron knowingly chose to play) is played – the prosecutor wildly overcharges you, your experts claim that you haven’t committed any crime at all and you end up somewhere in between. The Feds usual goal is to get you to plead guilty to some lesser offense. Apparently Aaron refused to plead guilty to ANY felony and so the Feds pressed on with their case. This goes on every day of the week in every state and the defendants don’t kill themselves.
Everything you wrote here lets the prosecution off the hook. It’s apparently not their fault this confused kid just didn’t realize they didn’t REALLY want to send him to prison for 35 years. They were just sayin’ that, for, you know, strategy and stuff. Oops, he went and killed himself before we could tell him it was just ‘a game.’
“He shoulda known that” – You can say that about most victims.
That is a ridiculous argument. Is there a sentient being alive in this country who doesn’t understand that prosecutors overcharge in order to leverage a plea bargain so that they can resolve a case without the expense of a trial? If this supposed genus kid didn’t understand that, then he certainly had dozens if not hundreds of friends and lawyers too who no doubt explained it all to him.
What is the legal status of that? If you have a copyrighted work, and stapled it to all the telephone poles in the neighbourhood, is that hacking? There is implied permission for him to access it. Nobody “broke” into ‘the house’ to use your analogy, they left the goods out on the sidewalk, unsecured, and intended that people on the campus not retransmit it to other people off the campus but there was no fair use policy (in the discovery documents).
The fact that this is common practice doesn’t make it just or ethical. To force innocent people to plead guilty to a crime they didn’t commit – which is common – is a miscarriage of justice; to force people guilty of a minor crime – which should be a civil matter between MIT, JSTOR, and Aaron – into a guilty plea for a major crime is also a gross miscarriage of justice. To do the latter when the defendant is known to suffer from major depressive disorder is unspeakably evil – especially considering that the prosecution which had originally charged him with four felonies in 2011 upped the number to 13 in September 2012. In short, they hounded and bullied him to death and they damned well knew what they were doing.
Your comment is outrageous. There’s a reason that the US is turning into a police state and you’re part of it.
there is a number of outreagously wrong things in your comment.
First, browsing the web, even automatically, is not a “crime” : raping, killing are crimes ; browsing is not.
Second, your definition of stealing is somewhat doubtful. When you steal something, the other party doesn’t have it anymore. In this sense, Aaron hasn’t stolen anything : JSTOR still have the documents. If I copy your first sentence “What the duck said. There is plenty of blame to go around here”, I didn’t steal from you and I shall not be prosecuted for that.
Third, noone should go in jail from intention, and your supposed “intention to broadcast all the documents” is just that : did he or did he not broadcast the documents? Point. I often “have the intention to kill a little bastard who is saying bad things” : do I do it ? no. That’s all that needs to be known.
Fourth, the fact that he attends the university or the documents are copyrighted is not a fraud. The network is open access for good reasons, and if he plans to keep these documents for personal use or no use at all, then copyright is overruled by “fair use”. Being a researcher, I can state that these copyrights are largely unethical either : the research is done by researchers with public money, articles are written by researchers with public money, peer reviewed is done by other researchers with public money and just optionnally, careerwise, researchers commonly use journals that claims for the copyright of these documents (why should they claim for the copyright?). Ethically, there are many wrong things in paying portals such as JSTOR which makes his “offense” largely not a “crime” like you say.
Finally, about the fact that “he wasn’t the man” : would *you* have been the man to do it ? Did *you* do it ? If not to any of these questions, then he was just right to do his actions, and encourage the large dissemination of culture and publicly paid research (if it was his goal to release the documents at all). His work on creative common is largely in this direction and should be encouraged. It’s easy to say “he wasn’t the man” and do nothing about it.
Nick,
A lot of people are not only devining his intention but they seem to then further want to punish these thought crimes they are imputing to Aaron. Mens rea and actus reus. You have to have both. As you point out browsing isn’t a crime, the network was open and there is a lot of moral judgement being splashed around as to what is manly based on ignorance and arrogance.
He didn’t “browse” Nick. Read the indictment, read his guerilla manifesto, and read the name of the hacker script he wrote: KEEPGRABBING.py
You don’t name something “KEEPGRABBING.py” if you are just “browsing”.
This isn’t about “intention”; it’s about *deed*. It was an accomplished fact that Swarz “liberated” 4 million documents using a script deliberately designed to attack the system to access it in ways not intended. That *is* hacking and hacking *is* a crime.
Your notion that there is some civil disobedience justified here against some “evil” system is ludicrous given that it was a system he could access for free as a student, and JSTOR is a nonprofit making documents available to university as a service.
@Jack Dee
- very well said.
- and for the others calling him ‘a confused kid’, no he wasn’t. he knew exactly what he was doing. and he snuck around to do it. a laptop in a closet? really? just like in the movies.
- he’d done something like this before and gotten away with not being prosecuted so he failed to learn his lesson about potential consequences
- was he overcharge this time around? yes.
Yes, I’m glad you and Joe Citizen are accentuating this aspect of the story. So often the young hipsters today don’t really want to do civil disobedience — which means non-violence and going limp and accepting the arrest at the end of your sit-in — they want to do anarchic direct action and then pretend that they did civil disobedience but that it’s wrong to punish them.
It’s really a terribly disingenuous if not sinister hustle and I call it out again and again, whether with Occupy Wall Street or WikiLeaks. Do the crime? Do the time.
It really is a crime to steal 4 million documents *to make a propagandistic point in the service of a coercive, anarchic belief system*. It’s not just “taking out too many library books”. It’s not just “accessing unrestricted files” as the script kiddies keep claiming on Twitter on all the Anonymous persona accounts.
It’s about anarchic assault on the rule of law and creating an authoritarian system where the Internet can only be used in the way that unscrupulous hackers believe it should be used — and no one has the *choice* to have walled gardens or paid content walls — they have to be forcibly collectivized.
There is no 35 years. There was a plea bargain offered of 6 months. 6 months! This is reported now today. And the defense wouldn’t accept it.
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you get the government you demand.
Reblogged this on Swapnil's homepage.
I’m curious as to how the statement “This loophole was created intentionally by MIT and JSTOR” can be true if, after the discovery of the actions, steps were taken to prevent this action from happening again? Seems to me that the design falls more under “unintended consequences” than “intentional”.
Thank you for all the clarifications and the post – very informative.
They changed their intentions. Bet you do such things too.
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The technical is not important. The intent is what matters and it is what matters in court. Computer people must learn to understand that your intent is often more important than your technique or method.
well yeah if you only limit the discussion to what’s presently the tone of society relative to computers then yeah that’s the truth. you could say the same thing then about the literally million people now in jail for drugs. since Nixon was in office there has been a tenfold (X10) increase in # imprisoned in the US though. in the past decades there have been events occurring like mandatory minimums for crack cocaine possession etc.
it’s not just all about the technicalities of computers. the whole point of the internet, as i took it when it took off in the 90s, was about the ability to disseminate on a whole new level information, not to control it just for profits’ sake. of course, money became the name of the game rather quickly. and it’s been a battle ever since. control of identity, editorial, censorship; openess vs. hiddeness. big business has a large part to play in that battle. they have a lot to hide.
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Reblogged this on Meneandoneuronas – Brainstorm and commented:
El perito informático contratado por su defensa explica los entresijos del del caso de Aaron Swartz. Desmonta la acusación echa por el Departamento de Justicia de EE.UU
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We live in a society that lets O.J. Simpson go free and hangs a young student for downloading too many free PDFs.
He hung himself.
oh my God. when i used to work “in industry”, we used to make fun of the “lead people” who in their efforts to “rise above”, would sell out and take these actual courses the corp paid for, i used to see them on the printer sometimes, it was unbelieveable, “How to deal with the disgruntled worker…” etc. I mean i can see the need for such classes, were it not for the fact that everyone working there had already proven and reproven their company loyalty over and reover. They would tell you that “Oh they like the way you’re dressed today!,” to which we would respond “Say anything, Carol!” To their face, and they had no idea what you were talking about. But, in the spirit of that preface, your comments would definitely receive a “Very concerned!!”
Reblogged this on TecHunger and commented:
I was ‘affected’ from inside, after reading this article on why Aaron Swartz didn’t commit a crime serious enough, that would have kept him in jail for 35 years.. :/ leave serious crime, it was never a crime, considering MIT’s rules and regulations on digital journals and downlad limits..
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Thank you Alex Stamos… you are apparently one of the good guys… your integrity is a treasure that is so lacking in the prosecutors of this case…The whole thing i find despicable and fills me with nothing but contempt for the Prosecutors office and its henchmen.. but i believe the sickness of government abuse runs deep in all this and many other cases these days…
Thank you for your willingness to share.
I’m really sorry for his friends and parents. It’s really sad.
Thanks for the article.
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I have a serious question— in your post you say:
“I know a criminal hack when I see it, and Aaron’s downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail.”
But this is an equivocation of sorts. You don’t ever actually come out and say what he did wasn’t criminal, or that there wasn’t any validity to the charges. It sounds to me like you’re making arguments for overcharging, etc… but I’m not sure what the point of that is? To me it indicates you cannot make the argument for innocence, and that given his death you are seeking the strongest possible response? While 35 years was presented by the US attorneys unless that is a fair representation of what his lawyers informed he would likely serve if convicted, it is simply here nor there as to whether it was a factor in his suicide, and therefore here nor there as a component of your statement.
You appear to be building a very particular straw man, so I need to ask was it a crime? or wasn’t it a crime? Because the quotes in your headline implies perhaps it wasn’t, but you never actually say that— which to me implies it was since it would strengthen your statement significantly.
I really don’t want to hash this out here or at this time, but your article seems to be getting a lot of attention; it was cited to me elsewhere. You downplay many components; such as changing a MAC address and putting the laptop in a closet but conveniently ignore, or claim ignorance, of what these details would be used to demonstrate. Obviously none of these are illegal, but to me and likely in a trial, they would be used to suggest an understanding that such behavior would not be openly accepted; a guilt of mind. If he simply downloaded the files openly in a computer lab on his laptop, or even in the library at a cubicle, I could believe that not only was he doing what he thought was right, but that as you imply but don’t state, he had no reason to believe it was unacceptable use and that he was not violating any terms of use posted. It is tough for me to believe one takes such steps to hide “inconsiderate” use, and while you state you are not speaking to his state of mind since you don’t know it, that is pure sophistry since your argument discusses facts in a manner which suggest state of mind. You don’t get to discredit components of the prosecutions case which target something you admit you have no knowledge of and are not speaking to. That is pure nonsense.
Furthermore, you say a lot of loaded things, like he “did not hack for all reasonable definitions of hack.” Which is also, pure nonsense. Was there a folder on an FTP site containing all these files to be downloaded? No. The intended use of the site was manually clicking through links to find what you needed; any form of automation of these process, no matter how rudimentary which I agree this was, is a hack because it is an unintended use. While it may not constitute a break in, it certainly constitutes inelegant but effective use. As to whether this inelegant use became criminal, the US prosecution believed it could make its case, particularly with regard to the intended use of the files.
This doesn’t even begin to touch an absurd emotional interjections, such as going to hug your kids, which I don’t know what that even means, or why it is in such a post, except to induce an emotional response by having the reader reflect upon what it would be like to have their own child or parent prosecuted and commit suicide; independent of the validity of the charges or the facts of their actions.
Finally, I just want to assert that I believe this type of response to a suicide in all but the rarest of circumstances is inappropriate. Suicide is a personal choice and aside from statements of clear public protest, it is improper to draw conclusions or to attempt to influence external events by casting someone as a martyr, whether you use that word or not.
He believed information should be free in a society which does not yet accept that proposition. He took actions which while consistent with his beliefs, conflicted with those of societies and its laws. Whether or not his prosecution or treatment was just depends highly on your views of how justice should function, and the validity of his beliefs, but the fact of his suicide should not influence any of those beliefs. If you believed he should be prosecuted before, you still should, but you imply otherwise, and I think that is absurd.
I do not share his beliefs but I do share his ideals. I believe our society is not ready to transition to the state he desire because as long as our economy relies upon scarce resources for survival; food, water, shelter, etc, we must impose artificial scarcity on our information work product in order to be able to convert the abstract tasks necessary to generate this information into physically scarce goods required for survival. I think that not understanding this simple fact of life, is not just potentially disruptive, but legitimately dangerous for us as individuals and as a society.
Dangerous ideas are not illegal; but actions consistent with dangerous ideas often are. Like Manning, like Assange, he chose to act on beliefs for which the punishment is very clear, and the zeal of the leviathan rarely matched. To minimize this fact and to say what happened to him was simply unfair is to treat him as a child. He did what he did and I can respect that, but I can also expect it to be punished up until the moment we collectively shift our stance.
I hope you take the time to answer my initial questions and invite you to respond with any other thoughts you have.
tl;dr. basic troll opus
If money limits knowledge, then money corrupts progress.
MD
He didn’t make attempts to hide it. The MAC address thing is a very minimal form of security however, but it is more like a flow regulator. But this isn’t the problem. He could have legitimately, with or without changing the MAC addresses, got the URL addresses. He would have just had to have downloaded them fewer at a time. That isn’t the question. Because of his changing of the MAC addresses he was able to do it on a scale that was hard to ignore. He is not however doing anything that other students who did attend the campus might do. If you interviewed any MIT student, I would assume that they would have downloaded articles and sent them to MIT and non-MIT students alike, via email most likely or even maybe transferred them through FTP or even published them on the internet. The difference is the scale, but there was nothing which impermissible in what he did in terms of the downloading based on the published terms of use. The problem I have with making a big deal of the MAC address is that they would be indicative if he was doing it in furtherance of the commission of a crime. He could have gotten the addresses without doing that. It just would have been less convenient. It is not proximal to what he then did which I don’t believe was criminal or in furtherance of a crime.
I’m sorry Adele, but I just disagree with pretty much everything you said.
On the surface, it does seem like he hid it, and, US Copyright law is specifically about scale. It becomes criminal, not just civil, when the scale of what you do crosses a $1000 threshold, and fair use defenses often fly out the window at that point as well.
Convenience is also a huge issue; computer security fundamentally relies on a lack of convenience. It is inconvenient to factor incredibly large numbers and might take the length of the known universe to do so. RSA isn’t actually secure, its just functionally secure. It is also inconvenient to download millions of files four at a time with limited bit rates. If you know your users are limited to x at a time at y capped transfer rate, then they are implicitly limited to z files per year. Even if that theoretical limit is high, to assume that is not an intentional limitation on acceptable use which was circumvented is utter nonsense. You will detect people constantly downloading files and be able to deal with it.
Sure, he could have gotten them without doing that, and if he had, maybe he wouldn’t have been charged, but the DMCA doesn’t provide safe-harbor for the use of automated systems and techniques when the user has knowledge of what he is doing and the intent of redistributing copyrighted work, and he did use such tools to circumvent a practical barrier to his task. Furthermore, it absolutely is proximal to what he did because he would not have sat there and done it manually or even at the speed and number of connections one MAC address allowed; in fact, it could not be done because it would’ve been detected as anomalous even more quickly.
While I’ve never been a student at MIT, I’ve been one at several universities in the same class. I would’ve known this would be considered to be wrong, and I really have a hard time believing he didn’t know the university would not like it, and that he wanted to do it because it was consistent with his beliefs.
Let’s see. The bulk of research published on JSTOR is paid for by government grants. Where do you suppose “government money” comes from? Oh, that’s right, the taxpayers. The same public which is expected to pony up $35 per article (in electronic form) for the results of research WHICH THEY PAID FOR, ALREADY. This little phenomenon is known as “socializing the costs and privatizing the profits.” It’s a corrupt practice, and if the government weren’t already grossly corrupt already (Remember how HSBC, the bank the Mexican drug gangs use to launder their money, got off scot free a week ago or so?), it would be shocking. But if it’s OK for the US Government to blast 16-year-old kids into smithereens, it’s probably OK to drive vulnerable people to suicide by means of an absolutely outrageous prosecution. Not.
“It becomes criminal, not just civil, when the scale of what you do crosses a $1000 threshold….” Imagine, in the digital world, how easy it is to copy a file worth ten cents or a file worth $1M. What is the difference, really, in the digital world? Oh, and who gets to set the price? That’s right. The prosecution. How convenient.
I understand your point of view, MD. I just have difficulty understanding WHY you wish to express it. I suppose if we want to change this system, we should get ourselves elected to school boards and join committees. That would be the responsible course of action, right? Speak at a Rotary Club meeting, maybe?
People like Aaron have a lot of things they want to accomplish and would like to see changed. They are impatient. They will piss off suits. And some of those suits have a lot of power. It’s very easy to defend power and wag your finger at mavericks and visionaries who wish to make a better world. But go ahead and wag. Someone always has to.
So you can devine his intent; namely to distribute these articles on a commercial scale and make a lot of money from articles whose commercial value on the open market would be negligible. Contract trumps copyright. Open access, no acceptable use policy. Government funded work of authors compensated very little for their work. If they want an open system, and don’t put any restrictions in place, then what he did was not ‘hacking’. Agree with Aaron that he could at the highest be labelled ‘inconsiderate’. You aren’t admitting that the actions of the DOJ were grossly disproportionate to his conduct and that he had incurred the wrath of many people for his successfully campaigning against two failed legislative initiatives (SOPA/PIPA). It is called payback.
Read the indictment. He broke into a cabinet. He made a fake account and fake name. He hid his face with a bicycle helmut so the security cameras couldn’t see him.
None of those acts are consistent with someone just using the system as intended.
Accelerated downloading on this level — this scale — is not an intended use of the system and in fact it paralyzed the system. Of course it was criminal, and in furtherance of his overall criminal goals as indicated in his anarchist guerilla manifesto.
Bravo, sir, and sincere thanks. Very comforting to see someone doing the right thing.
Their real concern was copyright. Be honest about it.
Of course the concern is copyright, but who’s not being honest about it? The reason he wasn’t charged with it is because he was fortunately stopped before he could commit the crime. They charged him with the crimes he did commit.
Copyright is fundamental to our economic system. Arguing for the cause of free information is one thing, actually going out and taking and distributing that information is destabilizing and dangerous.
Copyright monopoly is a cancer in our economic system. It should be abolished.
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm
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This habit of massive over-charging is, apparently, a common feature of the US ‘justice’ system and a standard method of feeding the Prison Industry. The aim is to terrorise the suspect to the extent that he’ll plead guilty to something he is innocent of simply to avoid the massive threats of disproportionate punishment. It’s no wonder that the US has one of the largest prison populations on the planet with such blatant dishonesty and cruelty an essential part of the system.
It is a great tragedy that this wickedness has led to this wrongful death. In a fair country the prosecutor would face charges for bullying, as should MIT and JSTOR.
Putting public research behind a payment wall (and JSTOR is not cheap) limits public knowledge and inhibits the availability of research – thus hampering future research. This is, ultimately, an anti-intellectual, luddite fetter on human knowledge.
Let’s hope that this terrible, unnecessary death results in the opening up of this public knowledge to everybody.
The aim of overcharging is obviously not to terrorize suspects into pleading guilty to something they are innocent of, but to terrorize suspects into pleading guilty to something they are guilty of – and actually something considerably less serious than what they are really guilty of – so that the case can be resolved quickly and the prosecutors can move on to the next case.
Whether Aaron’s actions should be illegal or not is a separate question. That they are illegal under current law seems rather clear. The prosecutor has an obligation to prosecute actual crimes, and I see nothing here that indicates that he acted in any way improperly.
It is a sad situation whenever someone takes their life, but it is really ugly to lash out at others and attempt to lay the blame on them.
did you read the above article?
sorry. LOL!
The fact that this is common practice doesn’t make it just or ethical. To force innocent people to plead guilty to a crime they didn’t commit – which is common – is a miscarriage of justice; to force people guilty of a minor crime – which should be a civil matter between MIT, JSTOR, and Aaron – into a guilty plea for a major crime is also a gross miscarriage of justice. To do the latter when the defendant is known to suffer from major depressive disorder is unspeakably evil – especially considering that the prosecution which had originally charged him with four felonies in 2011 upped the number to 13 in September 2012. In short, they hounded and bullied him to death and they damned well knew what they were doing.
Your comment is outrageous. There’s a reason that the US is turning into a police state and you’re part of it.
Forcing innocent people to plead guilty to a crime they did not commit is certainly unjust. But that is clearly not the case here. Aaron did commit a crime. The usual practice in plea bargains is for the criminal to plead to a significantly lesser charge than what he is actually guilty of. The criminal gets reduced charges and a lighter sentence, and the prosecutor gets to resolve the case quickly and move on to other cases. That was obviously the case here.
It is absurd to claim that a prosecutor has no right to pursue a case because the defendant suffers from depression. What kind of ridiculous standard is that? And how would the prosecutor know that the defendant really suffered from such an ailment, or that it would inevitably lead to his suicide? How, in fact, do you know that any of this played a role in his suicide?
Look, the kid may well have been a great person in many ways. It certainly is sad beyond words that he took his life. But he did something really dumb, clearly illegal (and he clearly knew it), and he had to face the consequences. It makes no sense lashing out at the prosecutors, or the law, or society in general. Even in your utopia, there will be laws that need to be followed, and consequences for those who violate them.
Nobody wants to get harsh on a kid who died so tragically, but his supporters here are trying to elevate their normal feelings of sadness and support for Aaron into political statements and vicious attacks on anyone who got in his way of stealing other people’s property. That is going way too far.
Let’s see. The bulk of research published on JSTOR is paid for by government grants. Where do you suppose “government money” comes from? Oh, that’s right, the taxpayers. The same public which is expected to pony up $35 per article (in electronic form) for the results of research WHICH THEY PAID FOR, ALREADY. This little phenomenon is known as “socializing the costs and privatizing the profits.” It’s a corrupt practice, and if the government weren’t already grossly corrupt already (Remember how HSBC, the bank the Mexican drug gangs use to launder their money, got off scot free a week ago or so?), it would be shocking. The “other people’s property” you’re talking about isn’t JSTOR’s property – they’re putting a paywall around property which belongs to the taxpayer and collecting money for property which was never theirs in the first place. It’s like fencing the commons. It’s not legit in the first place.
Unfortunately, you’re using phrases here like “are guilty” too easily.
The aim of overcharging is to terrorize suspects into pleading guilty to something less serious then what *the prosecutors believe them to be guilty of*.
The thing is, that is itself a grave injustice. One person’s opinion and evaluation of the evidence shouldn’t be enough to deprive you of your liberty.
A truly innocent person, with money, a good lawyer, a good story, and luck, may be able to stand against something like a life sentence and come out clean — though a good bit poorer, unless they had a very very good public defender.
But they might just get the book thrown at them, and so they have to do something that they should *not* ever have to do in a just society.
They have to consider if standing up for their innocence is worth it. On the one hand, they can accept some smaller period of misery and loss of freedom (not to mention violence and quite often, rape) — and come out the other side branded a felon, denied basic rights everyone else enjoys,… or risk what amounts to the rest of their life in such conditions.
The odds are supposed to be stacked in the favor of the accused, it is *supposed* to be hard for the government to lock someone away. Massive overcharging to leverage plea bargains reverses the tables and puts the burden on the accused, not the government..
No longer is it the duty of the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt what you actually did: now it is a bureaucracy burying you until you can’t breathe or risk standing up for yourself.
That’s *wrong*.
The prosecutor has a duty to prosecute *actual* crimes. Overcharging takes the actual crime, and piles all kinds of other crimes and criminal things on top of it. That’s improper, unethical, and frankly disgusting.
Legal and done all the time in our system, yes. But it’s still *wrong* as all hell.
A sad loss indeed.
Thank You for your time in helping so many of us understand this situation. The “charges” brought against this extremely bright young man seem inflated only to intimidate & pressure him. His death is truly tragic. It’s so odd that in a time when a “Stop Bullying” Campaign runs rampant through schools,on tv,etc. (for good reason). This young man seemed targeted & bullied by our own government… Tragic.
(Probably a bunch of spelling/grammar type-o’s..my bad)
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Agree with the comments relating to the abuse of prosecutorial discretion and the overzealous simplistic comments of the US Attornies in this case to the effect that theft is theft ‘whether it be dollars or data’. Invoking this kind of rhetoric is irresponsible. Database vendors have been lobbying the US Congress now for misappropriation type copyright type protection for years now based on the resurrection of an old tort doctrine in a 1928 case (INS News). They are in fact trying to attain a perpetual copyright type protection over what is ‘data’ or ‘information’, over everything from DNA sequences to other raw data, stifling research and the advancement of knowledge over so many areas of human endeavour. Although the US Attornies’ comments were not apposite in this particular case, they strike at the heart of what is happening; increasingly these purveyors of information are locking up ‘facts’ and ‘knowledge’, and as Judges said in the old copyright map-making cases in the 18th century, in doing so, “manacling science”.
What evidence is there that any active scientist has ever had their research impaired by an inability to access scientific articles? It is standard practice for universities and other research institutions to pay for blanket subscriptions for all their students and researchers to access all articles. That is why Aaron was able to access all this stuff – anyone at MIT, or Harvard, or any other institution has free access. Meanwhile, with the institutions paying for the subscription, the publishing houses and the authors are compensated as well.
Yes it is true that some copyright lawyers try to push for locking up more and more information, beyond the point of reason, fairness or practicality. That certainly should inspire pushback, but it does not justify going to the opposite extreme.
Here’s a short article which will turn the lights on – unless you refuse to see: http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Journal_publishing_reform
Reblogged this on James Calbraith and commented:
A good lawyer (I know, I know) speaks about Aaron Swartz
Such scintillating drama!
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Sad for Aaron..
Sometimes feel like where should we feel free to do something…where on the earth?
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Seems to me like this would actually be two different cases: one, a very bright and intelligent kid committing suicide. two, (potentially) overreaching prosecutors with unclear motives to do so, possibly political ones. Both cases raise important questions (eventually also public policy questions) and of course I cannot exclude that eventually there might be some links to be found between the two cases (or not!). However, to mix both cases at such an early time after the suicide and on the basis of so little knowledge does not do them justice and is, in my perception, quite unfair towards all actors involved. Did anybody ever consider that all this blaming might be a way too fast, easy, and convenient answer as to why a seemingly very bright kid struggles with himself and our world and society (i.e. us!) (or only one of those elements) so much as to kill himself? And if that prosecutor has half a heart (and or half a brain), and I am sure he or she has – so far I have found one in every human being – this must be a terrible shock for him/her and his/her staff, too. Imagine you would sue someone fully believing in your case and the opposite party would commit suicide…
Anyhow, and regarding case 2, did Mr. Swartz ever redistribute or even sell the files? As an absolute layman I have a hard time figuring out what damage he has done?!
There is no proof that he intended to distribute them. He had a history of analyzing large databases (e.g. which lawyers were paid to write papers) as well as distribution (e.g. PACER). In any case, this was rendered moot when he was arrested and turned in the hard drives.
This seems incredibly disingenuous. He was part of a movement for liberating information. He often and eloquently spoke of his mission to distribute this data. From his own “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” reference in a comment above:
“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world….We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks.”
Why are you trying to deny what this is all about?
Joe, you’re all over this weblog. Is this a job for you?
Incidentally, here’s the full document. Note that most if not all of the research on JSTOR is paid for by the taxpayers, and to force them to pony up $35 for an eight page article which they already paid for is frankly despicable.
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.
“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
Aaron Swartz
July 2008, Eremo, Italy
http://pastebin.com/cefxMVAy
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On some internet Forums, posting a single dot is a mark of respect, a placeholder for mournful silence.
.
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Agree John Doe, he handed the drive back. Jonathan, all of this moral posturing over copyright is overshadowing the tragic fact that a young person killed themselves.
He handed the drive back when he was arrested.That doesn’t count for much. He was very much on the record that his motivation in these types of action was to distribute these documents freely.
I think it is more the case that many people here are trying to use this tragedy to obscure the moral questions involved, to deny that there are any moral issues with these actions, and to blame others – the prosecutor – for a personal tragedy.
The prosecutor was doing his job – enforcing the laws that our democracy has put into place. If you don’t like the laws, then work to change them. If you choose the route of civil disobedience, then the whole point of that is to willingly take upon yourself the prescribed punishment. It makes no sense whatsoever to be blaming the prosecutor for any of this.
well not everybody has the strength to face the possibility of years in prison. people can blame exactly who they will.
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Freedom of information is a threat to those in the establishment that abuse public power in the shadows.
The hounding of Aaron Swartz by the establishment is threat to all of us who want a more transparent and a less corrupt world.
Should we, again, emphasize the need of a limited government and the dangers of a system that does everything to punish but so little to restore?
RIP Aaron.
thank you. i tried yesterday to leave a few pro-Aaron comments on the boing boing article, but they were “comment trimming” and mine were deleted. but you have provided a much more detailed analysis. i’m sorry for the loss to everyone. rare person.
Alex, thanks for this article… Sounds like the prosecutor is guilty and should be put away for 20 years because he (in my opinion) has violated the Hobbs AntI Corruption Act of 1951 (interfering with commerce and threats under the Color of right)… Why is it this creeps is not put in jail? In my world, (my opinion again) I would go to charge him with AARON’s death too…
The fact this young and very smart man took his life, had to be feeling so cornered by these vicious GOVERNMENT CREEPS…
This is how it started in Syria in 1973 and we can stop it (here in USA) by DEMANDING the arrest and prospecting ALL government workers Servants acting like TYRANTS
Reblogged this on No Dice At All and commented:
Thank you Alex Stamos, CTO of Artemis Internet, for “defending a man that can no longer defend himself”. Your post shed light on the truth and will hopefully be the neutralizer of any amount of ignorance on the web.
https://artemis.net/about-artemis.html
Baruch dyan emet, blessed is the true judge, as in G-d. This is what Jews say when they hear terrible news that we cant explain from our four dimentional perspective.
Who knows the story of Sodom and Gamorra? Bet you were told in sunday school it was G-d nuking a bunch of homosexuals… WRONG!!
It was a story G-d nuking a place where there was no kindness, every interaction was the powerful oppressing the weak with the assistance of the judiciary, if you were an unconnected stranger even your body could be violated with official sanction, yep those good looking angels visiting Lot were fresh meat without any known friends in high places, fair game.
So baruch dyan emet, I can’t call it suicide, I call it murder by induced depression. This prosecutor, in a way he can never be criminaly charged for, took Aarons reason to live. With a MIT student looking at a good life suddenly facing conviction rates approaching 90%, a 35 year sentence; nearly all of his fruitful life for career, marrige, and kids; where prisoner on prisoner physical and sexual abuse is considered by many a feature not a bug, and parole or early release no longer part of the federal system I could see many reasonable people succumbing to the hopelesness and ultimate unfairness and power imbalance of the situation.
If anyone wants to say the blessing is off of America we can say it is because the powerful can crush the underlings at a whim, when will we see the true judgement? I think is already happening.
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Bullies come in all shapes and sizes. They aren’t all kids or teenagers. Cases like these are where they learn these methods.
It’s funny that the modern information age hasn’t made it any easier for people to get the story behind the incident. It’s looking for and more like the ideal tool for revenge damn the consequences.
Good luck telling this story. I admit I was swayed at one point by the “noise” out there, but I find it odd that threats to his person included such draconian sentences. What exactly were they trying to accomplish, and what was their endgame? It’d be nice to know because copyright protection seems to lean towards similarly draconian punishments.
There is a real fear in there when such large sticks are brandished…what exactly is the fear?
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Government overreach has been a common epidemic for quite some time. This bad publicity from a young man’s suicide is a mere impermanent pimple on the ass of Big Brother. It is society’s duty to keep it inflamed.
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Pff, I think the US government has fallen off its rocker. They seem hungry to prosecute anyone that has a computer anymore… So glad I live in the UK.
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Since your piece should (and I hope will) be widely distributed, and often cited, I’ll note one more typo: “registration by any vis~tor.”
Reblogged this on Insomniacs II.
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Thanks for making this info public.
Americans often seem to persecute those who tell you the truth and encourage, or worse, resource/support, those who lie to you.
Reblogged this on Ratliff Rants.
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Wanna know what’s really sad? ANYONE can get a Boston Public Library Card and remotely access JSTOR via BPL’s website.
JSTOR was pretty much open access anyway if you could find your way to Boston and get a card.
I’m nearly certain this is an unconstitutional law because it makes breach of contract (an adhesion contract at that) a felony
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The openness of MIT’s network makes Swartz look *worse*, not better. He took advantage of MIT’s kindness to facilitate his acts. Just because I keep my doors unlocked because I want guests to drop in does NOT make it OK to take my things without permission.
And he knew he was doing something illegal (although he may have believed it should not be), as evidenced by the actions described in the indictment. If you don’t want to read a long legal document, you can get the facts in an easier-to-read format right here (although I’m guessing you know this already):
http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N30/swartz.html
> Aaron did nothing to cover his tracks or hide his activity…
Really?! Providing a fake guest name when connecting? Trespassing to hide a computer in a place that would be hard to find? Changing the MAC address a dozen times to get around being blocked? “Changing a MAC address is not illegal” is a disingenuous statement, because he was doing so to get access to files he was not supposed to otherwise have.
And his actions in the physical world make him look even worse: Hiding his face behind a helmet when trespassing? Dropping his bike and trying to run away when he came across cops? Please.
The law is very concerned with *intent*. (“Mens rea”; look it up.) This is why attempted murder is a crime even if no harm actually occurs. And from all his actions, Swartz very well knew he was doing something wrong.
We can debate whether the current cybercrime laws or copyright laws are fair, but please — let’s not try to make Swartz look like he did not know it was wrong.
@skeptic
You wrote: “… let’s not try to make Swartz look like he did not know it [his action in respect of his actions] was wrong.”
This comment is so idiotic I don’t know where to start, but I will make this brief.
“wrong” legally? Of course he knew, as do we all. But the law is an ass. Morally and ethically, I have no issue with his actions at all.
Please do yourself and everyone a favour and check out common fallacies. In particular Straw Man.
Thanks.
His comment is not idiotic at all. Yours is.
You go on to admit that he, and everyone knows that Aaron’s action was legally wrong. So, in the space of two sentences you claim that Skeptic’s point is idiotic, and correct.
Skeptic was obviously discussing “wrong” in the legal sense, so your reference to moral and ethical standards (or your lack thereof) is irrelevant.
What he did was illegal and thus there is no rational basis for blaming the prosecutor from doing his job to uphold the laws.
You think the law “is an ass”? Then you work to change the law. If you think that people should be free to break any law they disagree with, then you preclude the possibility of ever having a peaceful and decent society.
I think Joe Citizen is “Ken M”‘s new gig.
http://horseysurprise.tumblr.com
If so, love your work, Ken. If not, Joe, you might like to at least acknowledge that you have special powers of detection i.e. you somehow “know” exactly what people mean when they use language subjectively.
Oh, Lucretia’s suggestion is a good one too …
Dear “Joe Citizen” — the phrase “the law is an ass” is a quote from “Oliver Twist” by Charles Dickens. You might want to familiarize yourself with what it implies.
Here’s the specific sentence I was refuting:
> Aaron did nothing to cover his tracks or hide his activity…
Throughout the article, the author is trying to imply Swartz thought he did nothing wrong and was only “exploiting a loophole” and simply “being inconsiderate”. His actions clearly belie that implication.
And yes, let’s conveniently ignore this sentence of mine, which makes it clear what kind of “wrong” I was talking about:
> And he knew he was doing something illegal (although he may have believed it should not be)…
I think I’m not the one who needs to read up on what a Strawman is.
By the way, note that this is not a minor point of confusion, and the author is probably not making it in error, which is why I brought it up. As an expert witness, he probably has experience in these matters and so probably knows that the law is all about *intent*. If Swartz could have proven that, in his mind, he was not doing something illegal, as the author is trying to imply, he very likely would have been let off lightly.
So did he know he was doing something illegal? We’ll never know, and even after a trial, would have never truly known. But again, his actions, in the physical world and digital, make that it pretty clear that he did.
Was Swartz charged with trespassing? (how about the homeless man who was storing his stuff in the same closet?)
When connecting your computers to a network, what do *you* set your host name to be?
Are Swartz’s alleged crimes worth decades in prison and being labeled a felon?
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Rest easy Aaron… its a sad day for all. Its a damn shame that prosecution is usually fueled by furthering their careers when taking part in these witch hunts… My condolences to the family and friends of this young man.
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does anyone know what he intended to do with the information he obtained? was it for monetary gain, or for shits and giggles?
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> Aaron did nothing to cover his tracks or hide his activity
The entire purpose of going to MIT and using their network was to avoid having the downloads linked to himself. Otherwise he could have accessed JSTOR at Harvard where he was a Fellow at their Center for Ethics. He knew that he wasn’t authorized to download anywhere near the number of articles he wanted and that people would try to stop him so we went to a place that he figured would allow him get away with what he wanted to do without being caught.
He used the fictitious name “Gary Host,” account “ghost,” and DHCP identifier “ghost laptop” (how clever.) After repeatedly changing his MAC address to get around the roadblocks erected by MIT network admins to stop his activity on the wirless net, he entered a wiring closet and hid his computer among the gear there in an attempt to continue using the JSTOR service without authorization. He was worried someone would find his computer so *he covered his face with his bike helmet to avoid being identified by video from a camera trained on the closet door.*
For three months Swartz didn’t get the hint that JSTOR and MIT wanted him to stop. How much longer should they have kept playing whack-a-mole before calling the exterminator? If his actions caused no damage why did they eventually call the authorities at all?
who cares? everybody and their brother and sister sees that the way to the future is openess. even very prestigous schools are giving their classes, though in an online and certainly not as high a quality level education as really “being there”, but still. wake up.
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Reblogged this on gdigger02 and commented:
A sad commentary on the way that our government continues to go after pointless prosecutions of the “little guy” while you have people responsible for the financial crisis dining at the White House.
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I am older and understand virtually no part of the computer explanation you provided. I do understand this though, our Government says we need students to gravitate toward “Science and Math” if we are to compete with other countries. I have heard the President speak on this subject many times. For the very same Government to prosecute this young man so aggressively for excelling in his field of study is madness. I send comfort to the family. I send curses to the prosecution.
But of course he was not prosecuted for excelling in his field of study. He was prosecuted for taking documents that he had no right to take and threatening to distribute them in a manner that would deny a large amount of money to a legitimate business.
JSTOR isn’t a “legitimate business”, it’s taking information paid for with taxpayer money, and charging the same taxpayers exorbitant amounts of money for access to their own property. They’ve never been properly challenged, and now with this action of the government, as usual, taking the side of a large corporation and bullying to the point of suicide someone who could raise an effective case against this practice, it’s unlikely to ever happen.
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/
Copy of the manifesto :
http://sebsauvage.net/paste/?e59d72ee5e477ab6#TJSnuZAod0c4ZZeJZT3GIKqV5wecHOb9lluiSWMjx+g=
I’m happy to allow a free-flowing conversation here, but only as long as it is on-target and respectful. Any posts referring to the ethic or religious backgrounds of the parties involved and responses to those posts will be removed.
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I think the trial should continue. We should have court cases where dead people can defend themselves against other dead people. If you don’t need victims then you don’t need a defendant either?
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Reblogged this on wyrdsis.
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Mr. Stamos, this is a beautifully written post. It saddens me that you never had the opportunity to testify to this on the stand, in front of Aaron.
I keep typing more only to delete it. There are those who will understand what you’ve said here and the import of it… and those who never will, because to do so would provide a cognitive dissonance. Something Aaron once wrote eloquently about. May he rest in peace.
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McCarthyism lives. Aaron kills himself. I don’t think even Bush/Cheney administration would have done this to Aaron.
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Reblogged this on Corazón E-Books and commented:
Sleep in Peace…
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Aaron was a big player in stopping sopa. A much bigger player than most know (maybe the author knows
). Why is no one considering that maybe someone (or a few alphabet soupers we know) who were irked about sopa were lining this attorney’s pockets to make an example of Aaron.
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Asst US Attorney Stephen P Heymann (US vs. Swartz) DOX http://pastebin.com/DUgS0QTw
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Aaron was an activist for freedom and the sharing of knowledge. The US is currently attempting to set limits on the internet and is punishing anyone who has the courage and conviction to argue for information freedom. Aaron and many others put themselves in the firing line when they fought against the draconian measures of SOPA. The US Government needed an excuse and they pounced even though he did nothing illegal.
So disproportionate and unjust are the charges and penalties imposed by US authorities that the “law and order” party in the UK recently refused to extradite Gary McKinnon to the US and we have also Mr Assange holed up in a room in a foreign embassy in London.
I didn’t know Aaron but I wish I had. His work and his commitment show a rare combination of intelligence, compassion and justice and I have no doubt he would have helped shape the world and make it a better place. It is tragic that we lost him.
The US Government is as responsible for this injustice as if they had targeted Aaron with a drone. Maybe this will help people wake up to the way that the US is destroying lives, maybe something positive can come of this. I know that’s what Aaron would have hoped, his writing is full of wisdom that espouses understanding mistakes and learning from them. If only he had known how much he was admired, respected and loved by people who didn’t even know him.
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Dear Mr. Stamos:
Thank you for setting (most of) the facts straight regarding Aaron’s “crime”. I would like to add a few clarifications.
I briefly worked at JSTOR during the the time Aaron was doing the massive downloads from JSTOR. I was not the principal engineer involved, but I did work on a daily basis with the person who was in charge. I saw many of the relevant server logs from these events. (I no longer work for JSTOR, nor are any of my comments in any way representative of JSTOR or anyone else involved.)
You are 100% correct that there was no “hack” involved.
There *was* some incidental harm to JSTOR and JSTOR users, in that Aaron’s downloads caused several servers to start thrashing. Call it a (presumably) accidental DDoS. So the access of a substantial number of users was seriously degraded. Plus the waste of (my estimate) several person-days of time trying to track down and resolve the problem.
You characterization of “silly overreactions such as turning off all of MIT’s JSTOR access” is not factual, is purely speculative — and you are missing relevant information. It may be obvious in hindsight what happened, but at the time it was a serious issue, and the MAC addresses were changing in such a way that could have been a truly distributed attack. Perhaps more importantly, my perception was that MIT was being very unhelpful in diagnosing the problem. (Frankly, the attitude sounded like “we’re the world’s best engineers, there must be something wrong with *your* network.”) I suspect that closing off all of MIT’s access was as much a wake-up call to MIT as it was an attempt to stop the downloading.
Your statement that “Aaron did nothing to cover his tracks or hide his activity” is dubious at best. Yes, changing the MAC addresses is pretty simplistic — but they *were* changed, and pretty clearly by intent.
The saddest part of all of this, is that Aaron could have had many, possible most, of the documents in question — just BY ASKING. At the time, JSTOR had previously made arrangements with academics for large bulk downloads or transfers of documents.
Other than these factual clarifications, I completely agree with your article. My understanding is that JSTOR did not press charges, and certainly did not countenance the absurd prosecution (nay, persecution) that followed. Certainly the sense of the staff at JSTOR that I encountered, was that he deserved a slap on the wrist and a couple of days of community service, to make up for the severe inconveniences that he caused.
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As for the folks who have been complaining about JSTOR… your grief and anger about Aaron’s death are very understandable. But please get the facts straight before you jump to (sometimes wild) conclusions.
JSTOR provides an indexing, search, and retrieval service for a wide variety of historical and academic documents. Some of them are in the public domain. Some are copyrighted, and are made available to JSTOR users by arrangement with the copyright owners. (You pay JSTOR, JSTOR pays the copyright owner.) Some are the result of taxpayer-funded research (both in the US and from other countries).
The laws around this are complicated, but here’s the simple part. If an article is either public domain, OR is covered by relevant laws that require free disclosure (which applies to many US-funded research projects), THEN you, or Aaron, or anyone, are perfectly free to download them from JSTOR and publish them anywhere! Yes, you have to pay JSTOR — once! — because you are paying for the **service** — not the content. If you want to then give it away, you can. (Of course, YOU have to pay for the server, the network connection, the electricity, the maintenance… you get the idea.) There’s nothing wrong, or greedy, or un-American, or un-Internet about JSTOR’s business model. Even public libraries charge fees, or get tax-payer dollars.
There’s more information at the Wikipedia JSTOR article, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jstor
and the fees JSTOR charges are prohibitively expensive – 8 pages for $35? And so on. Give me a break. http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Journal_publishing_reform The article is mostly about Elsevier’s odious practices, but there are references to JSTOR below.
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Alex, thank you for writing this. As others have pointed out, you did not have to do this but it is very very helpful, especially your observations about open access to the network / lack of limits on downloads (thus no reasonable argument of theft) / MIT having no terms of use/abuse.
I’ve linked to your essay in the two posts I’ve made about this:
http://www.geekwire.com/2013/untangling-justice-case-aaron-swartz/
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And thank you for allowing the free flow of comments Alex. Even the ones questioning of Aaron. That is in my lowly opinion the best tribute you could do for him. I never knew him but I would like to think that he would have liked that. Correction, might like it.
Frank Herbert was wrong. Law is not the ultimate science.
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Reblogged this on EditorEtc LLC and commented:
The more we know about this tragedy, the more angry we become…
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I can’t find the logic;it saddens me to think that a genius like him has to go .I think the court should review the case big time!
Aaron Swartz,I believe….
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Thanks a lot for sharing such insightful information with the world.
Having such benign ministrant with him in his troublesome days, I just can pray that Aaron’s soul rest in peace..
At the same time, you being so close to all the information, I think its only you who can find/investigate if Aaron actually committed suicide or can there be any conspiracy behind this. I am reading that he was fighting depression and had whole lot of other problems with him, but I seriously doubt that a person like him would do something like killing himself just to run away from the fear of punishment.
I seriously smell something is wrong somewhere, may be I am too skeptical, but something is surely amiss !!
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Reblogged this on Gautam Ghosh and commented:
Detailed explanation of why Aaron Swartz’s “crime” wasn’t actually one – by the man who was the expert witness at his trial.
Eliminate copyright and patent. Especially for any organization that receives public money of any kind. It’s OUR stuff.
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I didn’t know Aaron…I didn’t know who he was until yesterday….I began to pick up the pieces of his life and struggles in a mosaic of blogs and letters and posts and video’s…he embodied the bright light…a light so powerful a threat that the darkness pursued him and sought to extinguish his fire….he fought for freedom…be it the internet or the injustice of a system bent on hoarding resources and entitlements for the few…he was smart…a scrapper for freedom…relentless in his quest to share knowledge with all of us…he was authentic….he was all heart…
So if you feel that burning desire to free yourself… to rage at the machine..then in some way you know Aaron too….and maybe just maybe….his passing will remind of us what we know….out most brilliant light is fleeting and we should forge the mosaic while it shines….I pray we carry the torch as well as you did….Rest well in peace Aaron…
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I am of two minds on this matter. I have a little experience with law enforcement on Massachusetts and I think there is a problem in that state with over charging. Prosecutors may be building their careers by going extra tough on crimes that are not terribly serious.
On the other hand, I once was a prosecutor and it seems that Mr. Swartz was being fast and loose with the law. He deserved some attention from law enforcement, but perhaps not the major felonies he was charged with.
I was once prosecuting a case that started off as a minor misdemeanor for shoplifting. Unfortunately, the defendant tried to escape, wrestled with a police officer, seriously bit the officer’s thumb, then grabbed the officer’s gun. For that, we charged her with a 1st degree felony. She pleaded guilty and later committed suicide. I did not want her to die and felt sad, but I did not feel responsible.
I feel sorry for the pain Mr. Swartz endured. I feel very sorry for his family.
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Felony disruption of a dubious business model. MPAA and RIAA do it all the time.
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I can’t understand how the justice department had the time, staff, and understanding to pursue this case. If only they would pursue the REAL crimes committed in our financial sector that did real harm with such vigor. To listen to them, those cases are too “difficult” to prove. Much harder than hounding a young genius to death.
I looked briefly the the indictment via techdirt.com and noted the following items:
#31: “intended to distribute… one or more file-sharing sites” — how was this known or inferred besides 2008′s “Gorilla Open Access Manifesto”?
#16: “impair” others users’ access. The indictment does not mention this but via The Tech “several JSTOR servers crashed”. What was the scale and scope of any diminished performance or partial/total outage as supported by JSTOR logs?
#24: “restricted network interface closet”. Was this an unlocked closet with no video monitoring until wrongdoing was suspected?
#15: “JSTOR’s computerized efforts to restrict the volume of individual user downloads”. Later: “JSTOR spotted the access” — this implies a manual vs. automated control.
Can someone versed in law/policy/other stakeholders provide comment about the Federal involvement even thought JSTOR and MIT were not interested in pursuing criminal charges?
“Aaron did nothing to cover his tracks or hide his activity”
Aaron entered a restricted networking room, attached his laptop directly to the network switch, hid the laptop under a box and then apparently aware that the networking room might be under video surveillance, hid his face behind a bicycle helmet.
Oh, and when confronted by the police, Aaron attempted to flee.
This is what is know in law enforcement as “consciouness of guilt”
Yes. I agree 100%.
The only criminals in this affair, are the Federal prosecutors. They deserve to go to prison for decades.
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I think the one thing you’re omitting is the implication of what it means to be on MIT’s 18.x network. I am not familiar with MIT’s policies, but if the use policies of the network permit anyone off the street to plug-in and access the JSTOR resources, then Aaron did nothing wrong. If the policies are meant to only allow access to people who have a direct relationship with MIT; such as students or faculty, then he did do something wrong. What are the policies?
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Reblogged this on My Blog.
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If he wanted to distribute the documents at JSTOR, maybe he should have done the common sense thing to do first when you want to share something that isn’t obviously yours: ask for permission.
Rather than just ask, and do things the right way, it seems that he felt that he could do whatever he wanted, and he was above common sense, common courtesy, and any rules implicitly or explicitly commonly abided by in the MIT community.
The simple facts appear to be that he did something wrong and he was being prosecuted for it.
The prosecuting US attorney, Carmen Ortiz, said “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away.”
Is it a shame that he did something wrong and that we’ve clearly lost a genius? Yes. Does it change the fact that he clearly appears to have been trying to do something that was at least inconsiderate and at most highly illegal? No.
How different is this from Napster a while ago… when people shared copyrighted music to others who hadn’t bought their own copy? Just because you want everything to be free and all information to be free doesn’t mean it is. Information has value! That’s why we have copyright law and the notion of intellectual property.
He may have done something wrong, almost everyone agrees with that.
The simple facts appear to be that may have done something wrong, and should have been charged with a crime. A misdemeanor at most. Not 13 felonies, not something whose maximum could earn him 35 years in prison, not something that could have a million dollar fine. The simple facts appear to be that this whole thing should have, by any reasonable standard, been plead out to days or weeks in county jail and a thousand hours of community service and probation.
The simple facts are that the US attorney went so far beyond reasonable in abusing her discretion by demanding that he plea to not one but 13 felonies — forever forfeiting important personal rights — and insisted on hard jail time for an offense that has no complaining victim.
How different is this from Napster? Its hard to find a way in which they’re similar at all. JSTOR does not have copyright on the content he was “stealing”, does not in any way — even indirectly — actually pay for the content to be produced (unlike record labels, in theory), and despite all of this, did not want this to be prosecuted at all.
The outrage isn’t that he was being prosecuted for doing something “wrong”: the outrage is that what he was being prosecuted for was so absurdly out of proportion for what he actually did that it was *in itself* an act of injustice to put him through it.
As to her quote, “Stealing is stealing” is nonsense. We have intellectual property and copyright law, but to equate copyright violation with theft is absurd. If I steal your car, you are deprived of that car. You have suffered a direct, actual loss, and I have benefited by acquiring a value.
If I copy a file you wrote and give it to someone, it is true you *may* have suffered a loss — that person *may* have, were it not for my copying, bought the file from you. But they may not have. The loss you suffer is in theoretical maybe-sales, which is *not* the same thing as the loss you suffer from an actual theft… and I may gain no value at all as a result.
I’m not saying copyright violation shouldn’t be punished on some scale, taking into account the nuances of the situation– but equating it to theft and stealing (and piracy!) is nonsensical propaganda. Stealing has almost no nuance. Saying “stealing is stealing” and equating copyright violation with theft is at best intellectually flawed, more likely dishonest if not an outright lie.
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Aaron Swartz was nothing more than a damned thief.
That is his legacy.
Franklin and Jefferson were nothing more than damned rebels and Thomas Paine was nothing more than a seditionist, by your logic. Aaron’s legacy is far broader, I’ll bet, than yours could ever hope to be:
1. RSS
2. Reddit
3. The successful fight against Internet Censorship – the defeat of SOPA, PIPA, COICA, and the rest of that trash.
4. the Open Library (http://openlibrary.org/)
5. Shaming JSTOR into partially opening its extensive files of public domain information to … the public
6. Doing the same, we hope, for PACER
7. Raising awareness of the (misnamed) USA PATRIOT Act and its pernicious consequences for American liberty
and quite a lot else, these are the small set of things which come to mind.
Aaron Swartz was a true American patriot, after the examples set by Jefferson and Franklin and Paine. Never forget that, sir.
To honor his memory, other patriots should take up where he left off: http://www.filmsforaction.org/takeaction/in_memory_of_aaron_swartz_here_are_14_ways_to_fight_back_against_the_intellectual_property_racket/
Streamfortyseven, thank you. Alex Stamos, thank you. RIP Aaron Swartz
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Sly, manipulative and cunning nonsense from start to finish. I refute it point by point here:
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/01/why-alex-stamos-is-completely-wrong-about-aaron-swartz.html
Like so many of Swartz’s highly self-interested supporters, you don’t grant him the significance of his own convictions and his “propagganda of the deed,” and you don’t concede the criminality in this major hacking attack on the system to smash the ability of universities to have walled gardens and paid content walls.
Apparently you do this sort of thing fairly often:
“The reason you see so much vandalism of my record on the Internet is that the earliest forms of Anonymous that got their start in Second Life targeted me because of my critique of the open source extremists and anti-capitalists/technocommunists, and constantly harassed me, griefed me, and crashed my servers, trying to harm my little micropayments business (no, I’m not some kind of virtual tycoon, I have an extremely modest little operation on only a dozen servers — the real estate magnates like Anshe Chung in this world have hundreds of servers).”
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/google_witch_hunters.html
For every Rebel, there’s got to be a Tory, I suppose. What was it that Samuel Adams once said? Here:
“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
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