Internet Activist Charged in Data Theft. Feds Charge Activist As Hacker For Downloading Millions of Academic Articles. Updated: The results of Swartz’s arraignment were added to the story July 19, 2011; 5 p.m. EDT Well-known coder and activist Aaron Swartz was arrested Tuesday, charged with violating federal hacking laws for downloading millions of academic articles from a subscription database service that MIT had given him access to via a guest account. If convicted, Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine.
Swartz, the 24-year-old executive director of Demand Progress, has a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls. Swartz, who was aware of the investigation, turned himself in Tuesday. Disclosure: Swartz is a co-founder of Reddit¹, which like Wired.com is owned by Condé Nast. According to the U.S. attorney’s office, Swartz was arraigned in U.S. The indictment alleges that Swartz, at the time a fellow at Harvard University, intended to distribute the documents on peer-to-peer networks. 1. Former Reddit co-owner arrested for excessive JSTOR downloads. Aaron Swartz, the 24-year-old wunderkind who co-authored the RSS specification at age 14 and sold his stake in Reddit to Condé Nast (which also owns Ars Technica) before his 20th birthday, was arrested Tuesday on charges of wire fraud, computer fraud, "unlawfully obtaining information from," and "recklessly damaging" a "protected computer.
" He is accused of downloading 4.8 million documents from the academic archive JSTOR, in violation of its terms of use, and of evading MIT's efforts to stop him from doing so. Swartz is a founder of the advocacy organization Demand Progress. In a statement, Demand Progress executive director David Segal blasted the arrest. "It's like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library," he said. According to the complaint, Swartz purchased a laptop in September 2010 and registered it under the name "Gary Host" (username: "ghost") on the MIT network. Swartz entered the networking closet for the last time in January. How he did it & why ? For a long time, it was the folks who downloaded music or movies illegally that faced the wrath of government prosecutors. So the unsealing of an indictment today against Aaron Swartz, former Reddit-er and founder of Demand Progress, for the illegal download of some 4 million-odd academic journal articles may sound a bit unusual.
Demand Progress has issued a statement suggesting Swartz's actions were akin to "checking too many books out of the library. " But the government clearly disagrees as the charges include wire fraud, computer fraud, and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer. Schwartz now faces up to 35 years in prison and up to $1 million in fines. How He Did It The indictment (a full copy is here) details Schwartz's purchase of a laptop, which he used to "systematically access and rapidly download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR. " In a statement today, JSTOR says that last fall and winter it "experienced a significant misuse of our database.
What would happen if you hacked into a library? We usually think of university libraries as a bastion of free thought, with scholarly publications that are freely shareable by all, but former Reddit staffer and digital activist Aaron Swartz has been arrested by federal prosecutors and accused of hacking into the library at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer network and downloading almost 5 million academic documents. If he is found guilty, Swartz could face up to 35 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million — penalties that seem inappropriate at best for a crime that appears to have no real victims. According to the indictment that was filed in Boston (PDF link), the 24-year-old programmer — who is the co-founder of a non-profit political action group called Demand Progress, and also co-authored the RSS specification when he was still a teenager — used a laptop and a number of software tools to hack into the MIT computer system and download more than 4 million scholarly papers and journal archives.
Aaron Swartz. Swartz Stole Academic Articles? Why Weren’t They Free In The First Place? Posted by Bob Warfield on July 19, 2011 Aaron Swartz, one of the founders of Reddit, is garnering a great deal of attention after having been indicted on charges he stole over four million academic documents. Being a quasi-celebrity and political activist, the indictment is prompting a number of articles in my blog reader, and it has certainly rung Techmeme’s bell more than once.
The details of the alleged theft are certainly titillating: This time around, Swartz circumvented MIT’s guest registration process altogether when he connected to MIT’s computer network. By this point, Swartz was familiar with the IP addresses available to be assigned at the switch in the restricted network interface closet in the basement of MIT’s Building 16. Swartz simply hard-wired into the network and assigned himself two IP addresses. He hid the Acer laptop and a succession of external storage drives under a box in the closet, so that they would not be obvious to anyone who might enter the closet. Show Your Support For Aaron. Show Your Support For Aaron WEDNESDAY MORNING UPDATE: The mainstream coverage of Aaron's arrest has turned in his favor -- and public support for him is an important part of the story. Here's a sampling of recent articles: BOSTON GLOBE: By yesterday afternoon, however, Swartz had received an outpouring of support from colleagues and friends who took to blogs and websites to defend his work and maintain that the charges against him are heavy-handed.
More than 15,000 people had signed a letter of support for Swartz on the website Demand Progress.org HUFFINGTON POST: JSTOR's the one that should be in prison, man, for locking up knowledge. NEW YORK TIMES: A respected Harvard researcher who also is an Internet folk hero has been arrested in Boston on charges related to computer hacking, which are based on allegations that he downloaded articles that he was entitled to get free.
Please demonstrate your support for Aaron by signing onto this statement: 33 GB of Scientific Papers - and a Manifesto - Uploaded to Pirate Bay. An archive containing over 18,000 scientific papers, downloaded from the academic journal database JSTOR, has been uploaded to The Pirate Bay, where they're now available as a torrent. The papers were uploaded by a user named Greg Maxwell who says that his decision to make the large quantity of scientific papers available was a response to the indictment earlier this week of early Reddit-er and Demand Progress founder Aaron Swartz. Swartz has been charged with felony hacking and computer fraud for downloading some 4.8 million papers from JSTOR.
While the government has labeled Swartz's actions as "stealing," some have questioned whether that's the right description for what Swartz did and whether a possible 35-year-sentence is warranted. Software engineer Kevin Webb has penned a post suggesting that some of the walls that universities put around content - including the paywalled services like JSTOR - are as much of a problem as Swartz's attempt to liberate that material.