Reddit Co-Founder Indicted For Stealing 4 Million

[EmptyTimCup]

not sure how I feel about this,


are the FEDS Making a 'major' hacking case out of 'downloading' too many documents in a month ......

Reddit Co-Founder Indicted For Stealing 4 Million Documents from M.I.T. and JSTOR


Reddit Co-founder Aaron Swartz could face up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted on charges filed by the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney alleging that the 24-year-old programer stole over four million documents from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and JSTOR, the popular article archiving site. The New York Times reports:

“Demand Progress said on its site that it appeared Mr. Swartz was ‘being charged with allegedly downloading too many scholarly journal articles from the Web.’ It quoted the group’s executive director, David Segal, as saying, ‘It’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.’

The charges filed against Mr. Swartz include wire fraud, computer fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer and criminal forfeiture.

‘Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars,’ said Ms.Ortiz (Massachusetts U.S. Attorney) in the press release.”​

The press release elaborated that Mr. Swartz broke into a restricted area of M.I.T. and entered a computer wiring closet where he apparently accessed the M.I.T. computer network and took millions of documents from JSTOR. JSTOR is a subscription-based not–for–profit service that provides scholars, researchers, and students, use of a wide range of content from thousands of academic journals and scholarly publications.

Upon early news of the arrest, some in the tech community have come to Swartz’s defense.Wired.com‘s Ryan Singel seemed puzzled, and claims the government is charging a well-known coder for violating federal hacking laws for downloading articles from a subscription database service that M.I.T. had given him access to.

“The feds clearly think they have a substantial hacking case on their hands, even though Swartz used guest accounts to access the network and is not accused of finding a security hole to slip through or using stolen credentials, as hacking is typically defined.

In essence, Swartz is accused of felony hacking for violating MIT and JSTOR’s terms of service. That legal theory has had mixed success — a federal court judge dismissed that argument in the Lori Drew cyber-bullying case, but it was later re-used with more success in a case brought against ticket scalpers who used automated means to buy tickets faster from Ticketmaster’s computer system.”​

Off to read the Wired Story ........

 

[EmptyTimCup]

Demand Progress Executive Director Aaron Swartz was indicted by the US government

As best as we can tell, he is being charged with allegedly downloading too many journal articles from the Web. The government contends that downloading so many journal articles constitutes felony computer hacking and should be punished with time in prison. We disagree.

The charges are made all the more senseless by the fact that the alleged victim has settled any claims against Aaron, explained they've suffered no loss or damage, and asked the government not to prosecute.

James Jacobs, the Government Documents Librarian at Stanford University -- where Aaron did undergraduate work -- denounced the arrest: "Aaron's prosecution undermines academic inquiry and democratic principles," Jacobs said. "It's incredible that the government would try to lock someone up for allegedly looking up articles at a library."

 

[EmptyTimCup]

how do you 'return' DIGITAL Copies of documents

Threat Level Privacy, Crime and Security Online


Disclosure: Swartz is a co-founder of Reddit¹, which like Wired.com is owned by Condé Nast. He is also a general friend of Wired.com, and has done coding work for Wired.

The grand jury indictment accuses Swartz of evading MIT’s attempts to kick his laptop off the network while downloading more than four million documents from JSTOR, a not-for-profit company that provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals. The scraping, which took place from September 2010 to January 2011 via MIT’s network, was invasive enough to bring down JSTOR’s servers on several occasions.

According to the U.S. attorney’s office, Swartz was arraigned in U.S. District Court in Boston this morning where he pled not guilty to all counts. He is now free on a $100,000 unsecured bond. His next court date is Sept. 9, 2011 and he’s represented by Andrew Good of Good and Courmier.

The indictment alleges that Swartz, at the time a fellow at Harvard University, intended to distribute the documents on peer-to-peer networks. That did not happen, however, and all the documents have been returned to JSTOR.

JSTOR, the alleged victim in the case, did not refer the case to the feds, according to Heidi McGregor, the company’s vice president of Marketing & Communications, who said the company got the documents, a mixture of both copyrighted and public domain works, back from Swartz and was content with that.

As for whether JSTOR supports the prosecution, McGregor simply said that the company was not commenting on the matter. She noted, however, that JSTOR has a program for academics who want to do big research on the corpus, but usually faculty members ask permission or contact the company after being booted off the network for too much downloading.

“This makes no sense,” said Demand Progress Executive Director David Segalin a statement provided by Swartz to Wired.com before the arrest. “It’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”

“It’s even more strange because the alleged victim has settled any claims against Aaron, explained they’ve suffered no loss or damage, and asked the government not to prosecute,” Segal said.

JSTOR doesn’t go quite as far in its statement on the prosecution — though there are clear hints that they were not the ones who wanted a prosecution, and that they were subpoenaed to testify at the grand jury hearing by the federal government.

We stopped this downloading activity, and the individual responsible, Mr. Swartz, was identified. We secured from Mr. Swartz the content that was taken, and received confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed.

The criminal investigation and today’s indictment of Mr. Swartz has been directed by the United States Attorney’s Office.​

In essence, Swartz is accused of felony hacking for violating MIT and JSTOR’s terms of service. That legal theory has had mixed success — a federal court judge dismissed that argument in the Lori Drew cyberbullying case, but it was later reused with more success in a case brought against ticket scalpers who used automated means to buy tickets faster from Ticketmaster’s computer system.

“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,” said United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz in a press release(.pdf).

The indictment (.pdf) accuses Swartz of repeatedly spoofing the MAC address — an identifier that is usually static — of his computer after MIT blocked his computer based on that number. Swartz also allegedly snuck an Acer laptop bought just for the downloading into a closet at MIT in order to get a persistent connection to the network.

Swartz allegedly hid his face from surveillance cameras by holding his bike helmet up to his face and looking through the ventilation holes when going in to swap out an external drive used to store the documents. Swartz also allegedly named his guest account “Gary Host,” with the nickname “Ghost.”

 

[EmptyTimCup]

The courts reported him to the FBI, which investigated whether the public records were “exfiltrated.” After in-depth background searches, a luckless stakeout and futile attempts to get Swartz to talk, the FBI dropped the case.

The same anti-hacking statute was used to prosecute Lori Drew, who was charged criminally for participating in a MySpace cyberbullying scheme against a 13-year-old Missouri girl who later committed suicide. The case against Drew hinged on the government’s novel argument that violating MySpace’s terms of service was the legal equivalent of computer hacking and a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

A federal judge who presided over the prosecution tossed the guilty verdicts in July 2009, and the government declined to appeal.

hmm back to that legal trickery

 

[aps45819]

“This makes no sense,” said Demand Progress Executive Director David Segalin

Somehow I doubt if this is the first time someone has said this about Eric Holder's justice department