First Portions of Aaron Swartz's Secret Service File Released 89
Despite attempts by MIT and JSTOR to block the release of files pertaining the Aaron Swartz investigation, the court has ordered the release of documents not referencing MIT or JSTOR. There are approximately 14,500 pages of documents that will be released over the coming six months, after having information that could lead to harm against MIT or JSTOR employees redacted. Wired has the full story, and the author uploaded the first hundred pages of files. The first batch reveals that the Feds had indeed been looking into Swartz since the publication of his 2008 'Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,' several years before being indicted for copying documents from JSTOR.
MIT/JSTOR redactions == cowardice (Score:2, Troll)
With that kind of cowardice, you could black out the nearly the entire document just for someone's sensitivies.
Now if that information is released, that would be telling.
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Agreed. I think people know that Prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz are the ones who need to pay for Aaron Swartz death by losing their jobs. Any MIT and JSTOR employees involved should be penalized by people remembering them and obstructing their promotion within those organizations, but tempers have cooled enough that they shouldn't be getting death threats now.
In any case, these documents will help focus anger back on Heymann and Ortiz. Example :
Prosecutor Stephen Heymann Compared Aaron Swar [firedoglake.com]
Released? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The assessment that people at MIT and JSTOR would be personally attacked and harassed by internet vigilante is realistic. You can just read the Slashdot articles calling for the hanging of everybody involved.
But bringing more suffering does not help Aaron. We need to create protections against the psychological, financial and social consequences of prosecutions that go on for years. People lose their jobs, sanity and social status due to being under investigation.
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The only person who participated in his death was Aaron Schwartz. He wasn't harassed. He was arrested for unlawful actions.
He was needlessly imprisoned as punishment for taking actions which really shouldn't even have been illegal. That's not just harassment, it's also punishment before a finding of guilt.
Re:Released? (Score:4, Insightful)
Swartz published PUBLIC DOMAIN documents on the internet that non-college students had to pay 10 cents a page for a copy. He was charged with computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer, all provisions of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, many of which were meant to protect ATM transactions before there was internet. If you haven't read this extremely over-broad law, which depending on interpretation makes the internet illegal (accessing any site without permission of the owner is illegal and a felony). In the aftermath, Aaron's law [wikipedia.org] was proposed to eliminate terms of service from the CFAA, which is what all of these charges were based on.
For that he was looking at 35 years in prison, forfeit of assets, and a 1 million dollar fine. To put that in perspective, he was looking at spending over half of his life in prison and could be 61 by release (without parole) and completely broke. That was for making free knowledge available to the public. I can understand being depressed and possibly suicidal faced with those charges and the very likely possibility of losing in court.
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That's what happens when you don't subscribe to a legal protection insurance.
Re: Released? (Score:3, Interesting)
Aaron's dad was right- the government murdered Aaron.
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Re: Released? (Score:1)
Re: Released? (Score:1)
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But bringing more suffering does not help Aaron.
You are of course correct.
But killing these fuckers and every friend they ever had while torturing their families for 3 generations might prevent it from ever happening again.
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But killing these fuckers and every friend they ever had while torturing their families for 3 generations might prevent it from ever happening again.
Unlikely.
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Will not happen though. The stupid fuckers we have can not even vote people out of office.
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You best get back on your medication before you hurt yourself or others. You have come real close to issuing the kind of threats that people are starting to take seriously.
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Seriously dude get back on the meds and power down your reality distortion field a bit. It's bad enough a young man killed himself, someone with admitted psychological issues, but laying the blame on others and threatening them with violence is probably not the best way to vent your anger.
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Also not placing blame for the suicide on them. Only placing blame on them for twisting the legal system to protect big money interests while harming the people the law is supposed to protect.
Since prosecutors are immune from prosecution even when they are clearly abusing their power the only type of justice that can ever come their way is via vigilantism. Which I think personally is wrong in most cases as law is supposed to be applied to them. Sadly they hav
14500 pages? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you guys competing with Stasi?
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Dot Matrix?! Hey!
If you can't afford a good laser printer then a dot matrix one can be useful. Inkjets suck, they dry out or the timer chips in the cartridges expire. They collect dust inside and start leaving streaks on the paper requiring difficult cleaning processes (or more likely just buying a new one) Ink is rediculous expensive!!
I was really regretting that I didn't keep a dot matrix printer myself. For a while I was looking for a nice used one to print out pdf manuals, ebooks and stuff like that.
Missing info from the summary (Score:4, Funny)
It was in an 86pt font.
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I suspect there will be page after page of
suspect woke up at 06:55. Alarm played I'm Free by the Who
suspect entered bathroom at 06:56
suspect farted
suspect got dressed Jeans (faded levi's) and white T shirt at 07:04
suspect descended stairs at 07:05 and yawned
suspect said good morning to
etc etc etc
He must have been a 'very naughty boy' (with homage to Monty Python) to have made the feds take that level of interest in him. It is a pity that in doing do, they took their eyes off of other even badder people in
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The US does not have a justice system. It has a legal system. Wherever you see the term "justice" applied, you can infer it to mean, "Whatever the government wants."
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Be careful when you are publishing something entitled "Manifesto" or "Guerilla"
This people takes this words just as serious as saying bomb in a plane.
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What the hell? How much of 14500 pages could have been relevant to the trial?
Are you guys competing with Stasi?
Don't underestimate the arousal experienced by many a government bureaucrat as they compile volumes of information about any person of interest. And the malicious behaviour of government employees is rarely punished; in fact, such behaviour is encouraged.
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That's the same reason the NSA doesn't think there's anything wrong with spying on the world. Still believe that?
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Actually I think they are.
Read the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. [archive.org] This is what got the feds' attention on Swartz. Now what in there could possibly have anything to do with state security?
Why were the feds interested in someone because they said these things? I can only come up with three possibilities, and none of them are good:
1. They are policing IP issues
2. They are acting as rent-a-cops to protect the profits of certain corporations, on taxpayer money (this is subtly different than #1)
3. They simply se
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Help an uneducated (Score:2)
How was Swartz charged with unauthorized access when he had a JSTOR account?
Re:Help an uneducated (Score:5, Insightful)
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act treats both "unauthorized access" and "exceeding authorized access" as essentially equivalent. The second case is where you had an account but used it in unauthorized ways. This has some obvious vagueness and overreach problems. Did the CFAA drafters really mean to criminalize ToS violations, for example?
Here [pdf] [volokh.com] is a proposed amendment to the law from law professor Orin Kerr.
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The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act treats both "unauthorized access" and "exceeding authorized access" as essentially equivalent. ...
Isn't that what the NSA has done to us?
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Possibly, but the FISA statute probably supersedes the CFAA.
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FISA applies to foreign surveillance and signed into law by Carter and was actually put in place because Nixon used federal resources to spy on domestic activities in violation of the Fourth Amendment. So the original intent was to make sure federal resources were only used for international spying. CFAA was put in place to prevent computer crimes such as hacking (the bad kind) and protect ATM transactions. Politicians had very little idea what (peer-to-peer) modems were, much less packet networks when they
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I don't see how that is relevant here. Swartz evaded attempts to remove him from the network and he installed hardware on a physical network on private property. Neither of those is a ToS violation, it's gaining access illegally. The copying itself also wasn't just a ToS violation, it was a criminal copyright violation (but he wasn't even charged with that AFAIK).
CFAA is far too vague and far too expansive. But Swartz would have ru
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He (allegedly) violated the terms of service by downloading articles in bulk automatically, hammering JSTOR's servers. It was a distinctive enough pattern of misuse that JSTOR asked for it to be stopped and MIT tried to implement local blocks on his access (i.e. some kind of network filtering), which Swartz then circumvented by eventually plugging a laptop directly into the MIT network in a data closet. None of this was settled in court, because it never got to trial, but I think those basic facts of the
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There are so many rules, regulations and laws in the USA that one must "break" one of these. Many of these rules, regulations and laws contradict others so that to keep one of these is to break another of these rules, regulations and laws.
This has, at least, two purposes:
(1) Every person is made a "law-breaker" and can be persecuted at any time for a wide variety of "crimes".
(2) Every person, being a "law-breaker", can be fined (Government and/or Business), disciplined (G&B), or imprisoned (G & B
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There's nothing contradictory about the laws in question. It was copyrighted material. JSTOR had it on their site. Access to that material was under specific terms, including not using automated bots to download articles in bulk. He broke those terms. When MIT tried to block his access as they were obliged to do according to JSTOR's license contract, Swartz entered a closet with network gear and plugged a computer directly into the network to circumvent the blocks.
This is a very simple law: you don't c
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Besides, most states have laws ensuring property owners have access to their property. That's why you can't keep the power company off your land when they want to read your meter. Why can't that apply here, too?
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Hmm... I had heard the documents were in the public domain, but MIT charged 10 cents a page to see them. Swartz wanted to make the public domain documents publicly available on the internet and not blocked by MIT's ivy wall and MIT went to find out what could be done to stop it. Someone (not sure who, prosecutors or the United States government) suggested using CFAA, which essentially makes terms of service a binding contract, and making these documents available on the internet violated that contract. They
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This is more like you having the complete works of William Shakespeare including four previously unknown plays and I happened to see it and quickly copy it taking phone snapshots of each page for the benefit of the public and then you accused me of stealing it and having me arrested for it. I didn't actually take anything from you, and the document was in the public domain, just not freely available.
The only way to get the NSA off your back (Score:5, Interesting)
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Don't be so sure. You may still be a valuable link on another person's web of contacts, so information collected about you will still be extensively mined.
I guess, with even more impunity. Are dead people protected by the Fourth?
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yet
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Generally the officers making arrests or searching homes are not trained computer forensics experts, so they can't be expected to know what is and isn't of potential interest. The policy then is to just take everything vaguely computer-related just in case, and have the specialists back at the station look at it all to find the real evidence.
Plus is can financially and personally cripple the suspect, applying more pressure for them to agree to a plea bargain. Prosecutors love that bit.
Redacted? (Score:1)
Um, the whole fucking point is to release the information that could and should cause harm to JSTOR and MIT.
Oh, it's been redacted. Must be nice to not be one of the peasants like us.
AC
Re:Nobody cares about this suicidal loser (Score:5, Insightful)
Really tired of all the Aaron Swartz stories, it got old months ago.
Really tired of some people whining about all the Aaron Swartz stories. If you're not interested, don't read them. I am interested because this is an important ongoing story, and this article does contain new information.
Feds had good reason to be investigating (Score:3)
The first batch reveals that the Feds had indeed been looking into Swartz since the publication of his 2008 'Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,'
While I appreciate his point of view. He wrote a manifesto specifically desiring to persuade people to break the law, and implying that he had.
It's impressive and scary that the feds discovered and interpreted this manifesto --- I would of thought it beyond their level of intelligence to be capable of understanding it.
But it's not surprising or wrong, that he was to be investigated for publishing something so explicitly begging people to break the law and essentially confessing to copyright breaking.
Expressing such a message is sure to get you extra scrutiny -- that's the way the world works.
Everything you do after publishing such a document, and anyone anybody can find you've done in the past -- better be on the up-and-up, or you risk arrest.
And you better be prepared to be found guilty, too; maybe, even if the charges were bogus and contrived by our dark overlords to suppress the throes of rebellion.
obquote (Score:2)
"It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word."
--Andrew Jackson
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As you're apparently unaware of the difference between "of" and "have," I wouldn't go making fun of the intellect of others...
Are you claiming an ability to draft a 133 word comment on the first go, that nobody will ever claim there is an 'error' in?
Come try writing your comment in my native Basque or Ainu (Japanese).
If you claim your writing is deemed error-free by everyone; then you are not taking on enough challenges, which is intellectually tragic.
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good reason or not i have a feeling that the rest of the world has just about had it with us.
The whole world has a lot to learn; including the US, and including the rest of the world that is not the US.
Anyways; it doesn't matter other country's opinions about how the US handles its internal affairs.
The US is sovereign. If they want to abolish free speech; and prefer copyright.... It would be very disappointing and contrary to their founding ideals ---- however, it would be their rights to do
Stephen Heymann & Carmen Ortiz (Score:4)
The OP is false. (Score:2)
THE OP says that the FBI was looking at Schwartz since 2008 b/c of his manifesto. If you follow the link, it refers you to Wired. The Wired article does not say this. It says they were going to use that 2008 manifesto against him when they prosecuted him.
If I am mistaken on this, please link me, but I don't think I am.
It's a big diff. In one case the feds are building a (pathetic) case. In the other one, the feds are starting to track people for exercising their 1st Amendment rights.
Maybe they do. They have