Feds Add 9 Felony Charges Against Swartz For JSTOR Hack

Last year Aaron Swartz was indicted on four felony counts for allegedly stealing millions of academic journal articles from JSTOR. Today, Federal prosecutors piled on nine additional felony charges. The charges (PDF) are mostly covered under the 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and are likely to test the legislation's limits. According to Wired, "The indictment 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. The grand jury indictment also notes that Swartz didn't provide a real e-mail address when registering on the network. 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.'"

I hide my face from security cameras all the time

[Anonymous Coward]

I am ugly

Re:Spoofing the MAC address?

[PPH]

So it may demonstrate intent to access a system without authorization. But by itself, why is it illegal?

to gain access to a computer that otherwise doesn't want you accessing it.

The computer doesn't want? Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate that.