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Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

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Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#41

Post by biot »

salimmadjd wrote: post #2

This could be very troubling for scrapers, as they frequently breach the terms of service. If successfully prosecuted it would encourage and empower sites with content that get scraped to push for criminal charges and win given this precedence.

Are you suggesting that mere scraping alone would demonstrate sufficient intent to warrant prosecution? Can you elaborate? Various courts have had mixed interpretations on the enforceability of sites' terms of service. How would this impact the body of case law that has been building around automated scrapers such as the many "... vs Google" cases? Also, "precedence" is ranking something in priority; "precedent" is the legal term.

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#42

Post by ajross »

bonzoesc wrote: post #14
tptacek wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does ratcheting up the charges minimize the embarassment to the DOJ if Aaron is ultimately vindicated?

The DoJ isn't human and is not subject to emotions like "pride" or "embarrassment." Their goal is to win cases and enforce laws, and if the bureaucratic cost of adding more charges improves their chances of having the defendant found guilty on them, they're successful.

The DoJ is part of the executive branch, and ultimately answerable to elected officials who absolutely are sensitive to embarassment. No one wants to see a headline like "FBI wastes $2M on failed prosecution of harmless nerd" when it could be "Hacker gets jail time and fine". So they're throwing mud trying to get something to stick. If it looks like anything does, they'll offer a plea again.

You can't really believe that politics have no impact on the case decisions in the DoJ, can you?

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#43

Post by tptacek »

SeanDav wrote: post #31
tptacek wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you cannot do that. A prosecutor must demonstrate, first to a grand jury, then to a criminal jury, and simultaneously to a judge, that the accused not only violated the terms of service to a website, but in doing so caused material harm or found material gain, and that they did so knowing that they were violating the terms of the site.

The fact seems to remain that any private individual can create a website and have the force of federal government apply to a third party as long as said party has knowingly broken the ToS and gained materially somehow from that.

Don't knowingly break the terms of service of websites for profit or to harm others. Sounds straightforward to me.

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#44

Post by nullc »

danielweber wrote: post #24
mukaiji wrote: post #17

RANT: Anyone here interested in the underlying issue of academic publishing? To me, the very notion that publicly (or privately for that matter) funded academic research gets locked behind paywalls of organizations that have not contributed financially to the research endeavor published, seems like irony to me. In short, they pay not a single dime to produce the content, charge the researchers to have their submissio…

organizations that have not contributed financially to the research charge the researchers to have their submission reviewed and published, As you point out, they are providing a valuable service. The research is peer-reviewed and published. You can argue that they aren't needed in the modern peer-to-peer wikiresearch napster world, where anyone can just publish their research wherever they want. If the researchers d…

The journals do not provide the peer reviewers, it's _peer_ review after all. The reviewers are more unpaid academics. The journal's involvement is running an automated submission system that passes draft publications between authors and reviewers, and maintaining a list of reviewers (mostly built from previously published authors).

Some journals have paid editorial staff however, that do useful things like copyediting. In exchange, the public has to pay $15-$30/ea (or whatever, it depends on the journal and field) for access to your papers; probably forever.

It's a rent seeking industry that would make even the the music recording companies blush. Yes, they do some useful facilitation, but it's not commensurate with the (completely externalized) cost.

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#45

Post by danielweber »

ek wrote: post #33
danielweber wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

organizations that have not contributed financially to the research charge the researchers to have their submission reviewed and published, As you point out, they are providing a valuable service. The research is peer-reviewed and published. You can argue that they aren't needed in the modern peer-to-peer wikiresearch napster world, where anyone can just publish their research wherever they want. If the researchers d…

Unfortunately, this is something that has to occur as a systematic change. Individual researchers are not to blame, necessarily. When you are told by your university that you must publish or face not getting tenure, what they mean is that you must publish in a peer-reviewed journal (or conference, since most of what we talk about here is CS and CS is still a conference field mostly). We could realign the review proce…

I've heard a number of times of people starting "open access" peer-reviewed journals for various fields. The persistence of journals that demand permanent exclusive rights means either those fields are still waiting for some enterprising person to do the heavy work to create the new journal (and manage its reputation), or that the old-fashioned journals are still providing some value that the new guys can't replicate.

Even Nature, one of the most awesome-est journals in the world, demands certain restrictions, like not publishing in another journal. They don't want to do all the work of vetting the article only to find out that it's also in Joe's Fishing And Particle Physics Papers.

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#47

Post by davidbrent »

logn wrote: post #7

This is potentially terrible precendent essentially allowing private entities to write federal law.

Ever heard of Operation Fastlink, Buccaneer, Site down, etc... The BSA, MPAA and the RIAA's of America have been doing this for years.

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#48

Post by michael_nielsen »

mukaiji wrote: post #17

RANT: Anyone here interested in the underlying issue of academic publishing? To me, the very notion that publicly (or privately for that matter) funded academic research gets locked behind paywalls of organizations that have not contributed financially to the research endeavor published, seems like irony to me. In short, they pay not a single dime to produce the content, charge the researchers to have their submissio…

Here's a previous discussion on HN. It begins with a summary of what's already going on with open access to academic papers -- a lot has already happened, far more than many people are aware!:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3174407

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#49

Post by SeanDav »

tptacek wrote: post #43
SeanDav wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact seems to remain that any private individual can create a website and have the force of federal government apply to a third party as long as said party has knowingly broken the ToS and gained materially somehow from that.

Don't knowingly break the terms of service of websites for profit or to harm others. Sounds straightforward to me.

Yet stealing a bar of chocolate from your corner shop is not a federal crime.

Additionally if you hack a site and copy all their data but don't do anything with it, is that now not a federal crime because you have not benefited materially from it?

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#50

Post by danielweber »

bensw wrote: post #39
ef4 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that his alleged actions go way behind scraping. He allegedly broke into an MIT network closet to install his own hardware, so as to avoid IP-based restrictions on the content. I sympathize with his goals, but I have to wonder what he was thinking. If the goal was liberating the information and I was in his shoes, I would have found a much more paranoid way to go about it. MIT is a very open environment,…

>He allegedly broke into an MIT network closet to install his own hardware, so as to avoid IP-based restrictions on the content. Maybe you should read the original indictment instead of throwing around conclusions not found in evidence.

Huh? All those statements are in the original indictment.

"Swartz contrived to ... break into a restricted computer wiring closet at MIT;"

"Swartz connected the Acer computer to MIT's computer network"

"JSTOR blocked the computer's access to its network by refusing communications from the computer's assigned IP address. ... Swartz obtained for his computer a new IP address on the MIT network ... and began again to download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR."

(Sorry for typos, I have a PDF of the indictment that is images)

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