… for “wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully acquiring information and recklessly damaging a protected computer.” He could get 35 years.
He’s just a tyke – came to court with Mom and Dad. The details of his ideology-driven theft of millions of JSTOR articles (I think he thinks he was liberating them) have a definite Hardy Boys feel to them:
Aaron Swartz, a 24-year-old researcher in Harvard University’s Center for Ethics, broke into a locked computer-wiring closet in an MIT basement and used a switch there to gain unauthorized access the college’s network…
When JSTOR blocked the MIT IP address Swartz used in September … the Harvard fellow allegedly incremented a single digit and resumed his wholesale downloading bing, which was streamlined with a custom Python script. JSTOR at times responded by blocking huge ranges of IP addresses, causing legitimate JSTOR users at MIT to be denied access.
Eventually, MIT responded by blocking the MAC address of his Acer laptop, so Swartz allegedly spoofed the digital serial number, again by incrementing a single character of the address.
According to authorities, Swartz hid the laptop and a battery of external hard drives under a box in the wiring closet so they wouldn’t be noticed by anyone who entered the enclosure. He then periodically swapped out the drives, taking pains to mask his face with a bicycle helmet to evade identification.
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Update: Nancy Scola, at TAPPED, briefly discusses the open information issue underlying this arrest.
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Lots of background here.
July 19th, 2011 at 4:39PM
This is a pretty intriguing case.
I think he’s less modeling himself after the Hardy Boys or erstwhile boy detectives than after politically lefty “liberators” of shackled information, your Julian Assanges or Mario Savios.
Fascinating times we live in . . .
July 19th, 2011 at 6:02PM
Check the most recent IRS 990 for the “non-profit” JSTOR. 8 execs making over $250,000 each:
http://www.uomatters.com/2011/07/go-thief-real-jstor-criminals-get-paid.html
July 22nd, 2011 at 12:15PM
Ahem. There is much to say about academic publishing: it is a system where authors don’t get paid (in fact, they often have to pay to get published – or rather they institution has to pay), then have to pay a lot to access other people’s articles. Don’t get me started on the work done by publishers: in some scientific domains, they basically require authors to typeset the articles, and the rest of the work is offshored to India. It thus looks like a system for siphoning taxpayer money off to a few publishing houses.
Regarding JSTOR, I’m indeed surprised that executives of this “nonprofit” make $250000 a year. That’s where my tax euros go.
Finally, I wonder how many of these articles were out-of-copyright?
July 23rd, 2011 at 5:32AM
I’ve read more about the Swartz case. True, the methods employed seem clumsy. I’m myself amazed that such a smart person (at least, he seems to be so) would do something as rash as downloading fast enough to overload JStor’s servers (but maybe this claim of overloading is an exaggeration, and they simply detected an unnatural amount of downloads from a single address).
I however note that nobody’s been harmed, that no property was damaged, that no computer database was compromised – at worst, what he did resulted in some slow service for JStor and inconvenience for JStor users at MIT. The fact that he would risk 35 years in prison for that probably says more about American criminal justice than about his actions.
One may argue that he was attempting to steal content. First, “stealing”, in its original meaning, implies that the rightful owner is deprived of his property. Here, nobody would be deprived of any property – he did not delete the downloaded files from JStor. The only deprivation is of revenue for JStor and some publishers.
Now, how come these publishers own this “intellectual property”? By forcing academics to sign “copyright releases”. If you don’t sign them, you don’t get published, and if you don’t get published you’re evaluated as a bad researcher, you don’t get hired, don’t get tenure and don’t get funding. Academic publishers have now largely consolidated into an oligopoly, which extracts maximal revenue from academic institutions, which are largely taxpayer-funded. Yah!
Now, Margaret, I suspect you will say that protesting abusive intellectual property is fine and dandy, but one should not break the law in doing so. First, there is a long history of breaking the law of the land in order to remedy a wrongful, but legal, situation, or at least to raise attention to it. Second, who writes copyright law? By and large, lobbyists and lawyers, not “we, the people”.
Margaret, as a person who spends a significant proportion of her time protesting abusive or absurd practices of banks and universities, I think you should be more tolerant of people who take action against other abusive practices.