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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

#81

Post by udpheaders »

danielweber wrote: post #74
udpheaders wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As if Python was the most powerful language, heh. :) Maybe he was going for a world record of most citations in a single paper. Who's to say he wasn't just doing research? How many downloads is too many? I would be willing to bet that the JSTOR TOS do not give a specific number. e.g. "You may not download more than n papers in 24 hours." And if they don't state a maximum in the TOS, then why shouldn't they, for clari…

It sounds like you are trying to invoke Loki's Wager -- since you cannot define N where downloading N is too many and N-1 is not too many, there must not be such a concept as downloading too many. People who deal with the law don't have much patience for this.

I'm not sure if I am interpreting your last sentence correctly. Can you rephrase it?

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

#82

Post by aggronn »

tptacek wrote: post #61
aggronn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a restaurant had a 'terms of service' that said no reselling of food that they make, should you be open to federal prosecution if you stopped by to pick up food for yourself and some co-workers? Especially if someone gave you a few dollars for the trouble of running the errand? And even more, if the restaurant has their own delivery service? Am I missing an important distinction here? Should private companies be a…

I can't reply to this because no part of the example you provided constitutes a federal crime under the CFAA. On the other hand, the criminal aspect of using a university's noncommercial JSTOR access to scrape a substantial portion of the entire database so you can put it on BitTorrent is not hard to understand.

It was unclear if what you were implying was that you shouldn't violate a ToS for your own profit (or at someone's expense) because it was a federal offense. (I can see now that that was not what you were trying to get at)

What are your thoughts on PadMapper vs CL? What is the distinction between scraping that data vs scraping this data that makes one worthy of federal prosecution, but not the other? Considering in both cases it was done for profit or detriment

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

#83

Post by ja27 »

tptacek wrote: post #59
SeanDav wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Stealing a bar of chocolate from a website is also not a federal crime.

Yes it is because it is interstate commerce. Even if you are located in the same building as the server, just being connected to the internet raises the potential for it to be interstate commerce so it falls into the federal domain.

18 USC 1030(a)(4): (a) Whoever— ... 4. knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access, and by means of such conduct furthers the intended fraud and obtains anything of value ...

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

#84

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #79
sp332 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm a student, and there's a switch in the teachers' lounge that connects to the same network that I am allowed to access in the rest of the school, then I can illicitly enter the teachers' lounge and plug in to that network with the same authorization that I would have outside. Edit: doesn't have to be wifi.

I don't follow, but then, we're not talking about wifi networks.

[deleted]

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

#85

Post by tptacek »

Karunamon wrote: post #80
tptacek wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even need Lori Drew to arrive at this conclusion. The CFAA doesn't create strict liability crimes. You have to know you're violating the ToS, and, more than that, you have to benefit (or materially harm someone).

"Materially harm" is such a broad term (it's been used to escape one-penny raises in phone bills) that, in the context of CFAA, it might as well be strict liability. Depending on how big of a dick legal is feeling like on a given day, they could make the argument that having the sysadmin dig up logs was materially harming.

Harm has nothing to do with strict liability.

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

#86

Post by tptacek »

aggronn wrote: post #82
tptacek wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't reply to this because no part of the example you provided constitutes a federal crime under the CFAA. On the other hand, the criminal aspect of using a university's noncommercial JSTOR access to scrape a substantial portion of the entire database so you can put it on BitTorrent is not hard to understand.

It was unclear if what you were implying was that you shouldn't violate a ToS for your own profit (or at someone's expense) because it was a federal offense. (I can see now that that was not what you were trying to get at) What are your thoughts on PadMapper vs CL? What is the distinction between scraping that data vs scraping this data that makes one worthy of federal prosecution, but not the other? Considering in b…

Elements missing from a CFAA case for PadMapper include at least interstate commerce and intent to defraud.

Swartz's prosecution alleges --- credibly, given what Swartz allegedly posted prior to scraping JSTOR --- that Swartz intention was to liberate data from a commercial database onto file sharing networks, making intent a much easier case to prove. Moreover, the indictment is at pains to point out that MIT and JSTOR repeatedly attempted to stop Swartz from continuing his plan, and found themselves in a cat-and-mouse game with Swartz eventually trespassing to maintain access.

PadMapper found itself having exceeded Craigslist's terms, found out by having its access withdrawn and becoming the target of a civil suit, and did not (directly, at least) attempt to evade the countermeasures Craiglist applied to prevent them from obtaining further access.

Whether or not you believe Swartz did something wrong here (I do) or whether you think he should get a felony conviction for doing it (he probably shouldn't), you can see pretty clearly how JSTOR had no straightforward civil remedy to what Swartz was doing. Swartz was playing chicken with them, and he lost --- or rather, his bicycle collided with JSTOR's semi truck at high speed.

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

#87

Post by sophacles »

tptacek wrote: post #59
SeanDav wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Stealing a bar of chocolate from a website is also not a federal crime.

Actually, it may well be. Depends on where you are, where the website is hosted, and whether any of the fiber(etc) your packets traverse cross state lines...

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

#88

Post by danielweber »

udpheaders wrote: post #81
danielweber wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you are trying to invoke Loki's Wager -- since you cannot define N where downloading N is too many and N-1 is not too many, there must not be such a concept as downloading too many. People who deal with the law don't have much patience for this.

I'm not sure if I am interpreting your last sentence correctly. Can you rephrase it?

Courts have a very long history and lots of people have tried lots of really weird things over the years. Swartz will hopefully have a good lawyer, and a good lawyer won't even try to something along the lines of "there wasn't a preset limit on X therefore my client didn't do anything wrong" when his use of X was over a hundred times the combined consumption of all the legitimate users over two months.

Judges are not computers. If counsel presents them with a bad enough argument, they might get insulted that counsel thinks the judge is dumb enough to fall for it. Things that depends on the judge's mood (like purposefully obtuse arguments) are not a good courtroom strategy.

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

#89

Post by raldi »

sp332 wrote: post #72
raldi wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asserting that it's legal for you to plug your computer into a piece of networking infrastructure that's clearly not intended for general public use, without the permission of that network's owner? I'm going to have to slap a [citation needed] on that.

It's the same network that's available elsewhere on campus, so it's not like he was connecting without authorization. Aside from possibly trespassing, what kind of crime would it be?

The whole reason he (allegedly) plugged into it was that it wasn't the same network. There were rate limits and / or other access restrictions on the wifi that weren't in effect when you plugged directly into the equipment in the closet.

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

#90

Post by danielweber »

ja27 wrote: post #83
tptacek wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stealing a bar of chocolate from a website is also not a federal crime.

Yes it is because it is interstate commerce. Even if you are located in the same building as the server, just being connected to the internet raises the potential for it to be interstate commerce so it falls into the federal domain. 18 USC 1030(a)(4): (a) Whoever— ... 4. knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access, and by means of such conduc…

A "protected computer" has a specific definition, and "a website" doesn't necessarily meet it.

tptacek knows the CFAA pretty well for a non-lawyer. It doesn't mean he's always right, but you should be careful if you're trying to trip him up.

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