Aaron Swartz "JSTOR" case indictment revised/expanded

http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001476.html

by wglb • 14 years ago

159 81 14 years ago

revelation• 14 years ago

Here, the government is pursuing criminal charges for someone who has taken research papers (funded, by and large, through public research grants) to presumably make them available to the public.

In doing so, he wronged various publishers, who have not financially supported any research, who have not financially supported the scientific review of said research, who have financially gained by (likely) not only charging the original author for the submission but also the universities which provided the infrastructure critical to the majority of research.

Spearheading this noble effort to right the wrong and restore law and order is US attorney Carmen Ortiz, who is cited for the wise words: "Stealing is stealing".

Lets be reasonable here: a decently sized server farm could probably keep the entirety of documents hosted on JSTOR in RAM. Today alone, imgur burned through 50TB of traffic; it delivers a petabyte a week. I'm not going to believe a sob story about how distributing 100KiB PDFs to someone running 'wget -r' is DoSing their systems.

jrockway2• 14 years ago

But he recklessly damaged a protected computer. They're going to have to replace the fifty cent lock with a new fifty cent lock. That will cost over fifty US cents!

(Yes folks, it's true: pretty much everything is a federal felony if someone doesn't like you.)

jonursenbach• 14 years ago

Add in beaucratical paperwork, a multitude of companies bidding the lowest price to replace said lock and the salaries of the team of people who are going to be spending the next 2 years replacing it and it really starts to add up.

brucehart• 14 years ago

Not only that but I believe JSTOR has settled with Aaron Swartz and is not pressing for further prosecution.

bo10242• 14 years ago

One of the most important points. The only party you could really claim was "injured", does not want any further prosecution.

eli• 14 years ago

Hey, look, I'm a big fan of civil disobedience against unjust laws. But that typically means you get arrested.

fauigerzigerk• 14 years ago

Yes and hopefully it also means that many people take note and speak up against the law and against his harsh treatment.

And this is not just about the law by the way. The fact that governments around the world can be blackmailed or corrupted by a small number of ruthless publishers is a political issue as well. It's also a credibility issue for researchers to some degree, particularly those who have already made a name for themselves and still play along with this.

kyboren• 14 years ago

I completely agree with you.

However, he did 'break into' an MIT switch closet to run 'keepgrabbing.py' over a 1Gbit/s connection. He wasn't just downloading 100KiB PDFs, either. He downloaded at least two million documents. The indictment isn't clear exactly how many, and it sounds like he downloaded a lot more than 2 million, to boot. Not all of JSTOR's documents are neat 100KiB PDFs, either: a substantial portion are scanned images (1+ MiB PDFs) from old journals. So, we're looking at the TB range of data.

This is not to say that his intentions were ignoble...

nl3• 14 years ago

He downloaded at least two million documents.

So there is at least 2 million scientific documents that publishers are profiting from withholding.

I'm not generally anti-copyright, but I believe the profits publishers make on scientific publishing are unconscionable - not only do they impede progress, but in many cases (eg, medical research) they cost lives.

calpaterson4• 14 years ago

> Lets be reasonable here: a decently sized server farm could probably keep the entirety of documents hosted on JSTOR in RAM.

One largeish science publisher I worked with had 9-10TB of (pdf) document data. In addition to that there's a search engine, and image versions (of everything) to allow for look inside. Then there's dynamically generated HTML for online view. Electronic publishers do with large amounts of data and it isn't wholly static content. I don't know much about JSTOR but I think it's safe to assume that the implementation is non-trivial.

mbell2• 14 years ago

10TB isn't a large amount of data. I have more data than that sitting in my $1500 home NAS.

Zigurd2• 14 years ago

I believe Swartz's point is that 10TB of data is not something you can build a self-perpetuating bureaucracy around, anymore, and that this implementation is, in fact, simple enough that it can be made available and maintained for a tiny fraction of the cost of JSTOR.

gwern2• 14 years ago

> I don't know much about JSTOR but I think it's safe to assume that the implementation is non-trivial.

It's non-trivial, and it's also one of the smallest chunks of their budget. As a (bloated, inefficient, high-salary) non-profit, you can read JSTOR's financial filings for yourself:

- http://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2011/jstor-where-does-your... - http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2011-July/1092...

They spend ~$4m a year on all computer costs. (To put that in perspective, they spend $1.3m a year on 'travel' & 'conferences, conventions, and meetings'.)

geofft2• 14 years ago

Here, the government is pursuing criminal charges for someone who broke into locked facilities and committed a textbook case of computer fraud to do something that might be morally defensible. If he weren't illegitimately accessing these articles, it'd be a different story.

If you have a tip about an unsolved murder that you want to report anonymously, and you break into someone's house to do so, good on you for reporting the tip, but you still broke into someone's house.

Zigurd2• 14 years ago

Are you suggesting the case against Swartz is as serious as a burglary in Cambridge, Massachusetts? Or less serious, since he did not damage a lock or deprive the owner of the use of anything? Or is your argument that this is legitimately a high-profile federal case?

ig12• 14 years ago

Academics are completely free to submit their papers to open access journals, the reason they don't do so is because they want the brand value from publishing in prestigious closed-access journals and because submitting to those journals is free.

Building that brand value has risks and cost money to produce (due to editorial, etc costs) hence the publishers need to recoup that value. Open-access journals to recoup that cost either charge the authors or rely upon a subsidies from wealthy benefactors (universities, industrial sponsors).

pmb3• 14 years ago

There are no editorial costs. Editors are not paid. There are no authorial costs. Authors are not paid. There are a few copy-editing costs. Copy-editors get paid a few hundred bucks per article. There are a few administrative costs. The administrators get paid huge amounts. There is also no risk - the journals were set up a long time ago, and are the way they are due to inertia.

If you imagine for-profit academic journal publishers (especially Elsevier) as anything other than vicious monopolists defending their entrenched positions via copyright law and extortion of university libraries, then you have the wrong idea.

andreyf• 14 years ago

Could someone who knows about such matters comment on whether this is the usual consequence for what he did, or if it's likely that he's been given "preferencial" treatment for his political activism?

jrockway2• 14 years ago

I don't think it's for the political activism as much as it's for someone's friend at JSTOR.

nathanb2• 14 years ago

JSTOR have said that once they had a guarantee the articles had been secured--which I believe means that Aaron claims he no longer has them and has not, and will not distribute them--they had no more interest in pursuing the case. This is the feds acting on their own.

jahewson2• 14 years ago

JSTOR is a non-profit. They dropped their charges once it was clear the data had not been re-distributed. The state of Massachusetts also dropped its charges. Only the federal government is pursuing him now.

agwa3• 14 years ago

It's likely the government doesn't like him because a few years ago he released 18 million pages of public court records that the government ordinarily charges 8 cents per page to access.[1] As these were public records, what he did was not illegal nor, in my opinion, immoral. But the government didn't like being undercut, and now they have a good opportunity for some payback.

See http://blog.simplejustice.us/2011/07/20/swartz-caught-in-a-c... for some analysis from someone who doesn't support what Swartz did, but nevertheless sees this as a vindictive prosecution.

[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/swartz-fbi

additive3• 14 years ago

I'm pretty confident all the data in PACER will be made public at no cost at some point in time. I think the $.08/page charge is supposed to cover the administrative costs (like paying for photocopies) but the PACER program actually runs at a surplus. I think this may have even been part of the rationale for the trial they ran which Swartz used to do the downloads. The government wants to open up PACER.

But what struck me as partularly stupid about what Swartz did (besides the fact that the data will probably be released anyway, in due course, without the need for "activism") is that he installed stealth code on a computer in a Federal Court Law Library. Of all places he chose a federal building, and a Federal Court Law Library. This just sounds idiotic.

And the irony of it all, at least to me, is I just downloaded his Superceded Indictment for free from archive.org. It appears others are succeeding in making court documents publicly available without installing stealth code on federally-owned computers. Maybe they do not have everything in PACER yet, but I think it's only a matter of time. Courts are perhaps a little slow to change with new technology but despite their budget constraints they are definitely making progress. And publicresource.org seems to be getting bulk data with the blessing of the courts and without installing any stealth scripts on Law Library computers.

If one really wanted to engage in some sort of activism to free up (what should be free) legal documents, maybe a better focus is Lexis-Nexis. A true monopoly, founded on a dubious intepretation of copyright law. Can you copyright court decisions? They managed to do it. And the founder is on the Forbes list.

bstar772• 14 years ago

Despite what Aaron's intentions were, he clearly knew he was doing something illegal. He broke into a building (closet?), setup a computer illegally and transferred information illegally. In addition to all of that, he tried to evade security when he knew he had been discovered.

It seems like there were many other (more reasonable) avenues that he could have taken to accomplish his goal. He's really the only one to blame for getting himself into this mess. I sincerely hope that he gets the punishment he deserves which should be a firm slap on the wrist. I'm uncomfortable with the idea of him getting any jail time, but if it comes to that then he'll have to deal with those consequences.

mquander• 14 years ago

I disagree that there are other, more reasonable avenues to achieve the goal of putting as much information as possible into the public's hands. Breaking into a closet that you think you can access and downloading a lot of it is undeniably faster and more effective than lobbying or voting or petitioning companies or building alternative publishing mechanisms (all of which are also avenues which he has personally taken, to great effect.)

If ten thousand people took Aaron's approach and simply got caught less, society would be significantly better off for it.

sp332• 14 years ago

He knew that people didn't like what he was doing. That's why he was hiding etc. That's the not same as knowing that it's illegal.

jahewson2• 14 years ago

True, but the prosecution won't spin it that way, which won't look good to the jury at all.

nl3• 14 years ago

Swartz is smart and has interned for (law professor) Larry Lessig.

I doubt he's even going to try to make the case he didn't know it was illegal.

This is civil disobedience against unjust laws at its best.

To quote Wikipedia's summary of Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail"

Against the clergymen’s assertion that the demonstration was against the law, he argued that not only was civil disobedience justified in the face of unjust laws, but that "one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Birmingham_Jail

agwa3• 14 years ago

Indeed, one of the facets of civil disobedience is that you have to be willing to accept the consequences. As much as we may like the activist, we can't support making an exception to the law, because that would invite anarchy.

However, this logic rapidly breaks down when the prosecution is vindictive and the consequences disproportionate, as they are in this case. Before the indictment was expanded, he was facing up to 35 years in prison.[1] Even if he doesn't get that, he'll likely bankrupt himself and his family defending himself, and suffer consequences for years to come. No one should have to "deal with" this. It's the government that deserves the blame for his fate, not him.

[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/swartz-arrest/

bstar772• 14 years ago

My biggest concern is a vindictive prosecution... pushing for 35 years in prison is absurd.

beagle3• 14 years ago

> we can't support making an exception to the law, because that would invite anarchy.

Exceptions to the law are made every day - it is hardly applied at all when the violators are politicians, big media organizations, and bankers. I'd agree we don't already make exceptions to the law when high profile connected public figures (eg the ex-head of MFG and the guy who authorized F&F) are indicted for anything.

btipling• 14 years ago

> I sincerely hope that he gets the punishment he deserves which should be a firm slap on the wrist.

A felony, even without any jail time, is an irreversible and life changing punishment. He will no longer be able to vote or (possibly?) leave the country, or work at various organizations and corporations that automatically do not hire felons.

Edit: didn't know that felons could still get passports. They can have trouble getting visa's for sure though.

rdtsc• 14 years ago

> He will no longer be able to vote or leave the country,

Why leaving the country would be a problem? I haven't heard of that one before. Say what if wants to fly to Europe for vacation, he can't because he was convicted of a felony?

adestefan2• 14 years ago

This is one of the biggest misconceptions about voting out there. The suspension of your voting rights is dependent on the state in which your felony is committed. There are only 12 states where it can be suspended for life and even then it's usually dependent on the crime (i.e. in Nebraska only those convicted of treason will lose the right for life.) Voting rights are restored in all other states under different conditions.

nahname• 14 years ago

He already cannot leave the country due to the charges.

additive3• 14 years ago

While I do not disagree, one point I would like to add regarding the notion of "breaking into a computer closet, etc.". Someone, a Harvard student, recently posted to HN a "love letter" to MIT. The letter went into detail about how liberal MIT is with its resources for students. And how that really has benefitted her studies. It seems MIT is somewhat unique, at least vis-a-vis other universities in the region, in their approach to making resources available to "almost anyone" (i.e. you do not need to be an MIT student) for academic purposes.

Is it possible that if he were to have tried this stunt at another institution he would not have so easily succeeded? Was he simply taking advantage of MIT's liberal policies with respect to computer resources? Or is MIT's "do whatever you need to do" environment irrelevant... as we ponder thoughts of "breaking and entering". Just a thought. Maybe it's irrelevant. What do you think?

geofft2• 14 years ago

MIT alum here. Lots of MIT resources are accessible to almost anyone. That doesn't mean they all are -- it's easy to get into our computer labs, but the network closets are actually off-limits to anyone other than network admins. Some things are more liberal, but that's not a free license to do whatever you want.

Nor does it mean it's acceptable to abuse MIT's trust. In particular, presumably as a result of this case, JSTOR now requires strong authentication from the individual MIT account holder, instead of permitting access from MIT's IP address space as they used to.

Finally, yes, MIT does have an "it's better to ask forgiveness than permission" culture. But that very clearly only applies to legitimate MIT affiliates. I know of at least one other legal case (of perhaps equivalent importance) where MIT's lawyers said, if this guy were an MIT student or staff member, we'd go to bat for him, but since he's not, take the content down.

calibraxis• 14 years ago

> He's really the only one to blame for getting himself into this mess.

Not historically, due to principles of solidarity. In decent leftist movements, activists expect assistance from others. I heard one way to assess a leftist movement is how much support incarcerated people get.

(Imagine blame-oriented workplaces where people are completely on their own if something goes wrong. Who'd want to work in such a toxic, self-defeating environment?)

After all, prison is often kind of a limited death penalty, imposed by the state. You're stripped away from social bonds and freedom. (Particularly in the US; though fortunately Aaron is wealthy and white, a great advantage. Not to mention that he was engaged in a rather elite crime.)

barry-cotter• 14 years ago

Leftist is completely redundant in the above comment. If you don't have a committed hard core of true believers you have a talking shop not a poitical mvement; left or right.

keithvan• 14 years ago

As a result of Swartz's conspiracy to release JSTOR articles to the public, it led to the company making many articles free for public for viewing. A lot of good has come about from what Swartz did, even if the morality of his illegal actions are under dispute. There has been a lot of recent criticism against academic journals and their publishing companies whose business model is keeping all science and research behind gated walls and away from the public. Even if the research was funded with public money!

jkn• 14 years ago

it led to the company making many articles free for public for viewing

That is a nice result indeed, do you have a reference?

_delirium2• 14 years ago

They've decided to make pre-1923 articles from American journals, and pre-1870 articles elsewhere, available publicly (w/o any subscription or even a free account needed): http://about.jstor.org/service/early-journal-content-0

Their original FAQ on it used to have a question about whether this was related to the "Swartz situation", where the answer could be paraphrased as "no but sort of yes", basically that they had been planning it all along but may have moved up some initiatives in response to the publicity. Doesn't seem that their current FAQ has that question anymore.

Jun8• 14 years ago

It's not the morality but the legality of his actions that are being disputed, sometimes these disagree widely as many comments here explain.

tptacek• 14 years ago

The government --- and a grand jury.

                   A TRUE BILL

                   b r e n d a   l    h a n n o n
                   _________________________________
                   Foreperson of the Grand Jury


    scott l garland             9 - 12 - 12
    _______________             ___________
    Assistand United States Attorney  

    DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS
    September 12, 2012
    Returned into the District Court by the Grand Jurors and filed.

Granted: grand juries rarely refuse to indict. But it's not just the prosecutors behind this decision.

ryanmolden• 14 years ago

As someone who has served on a federal grand jury this is true (the rarity of a false bill), but is most likely due to two factors I saw over and over again:

1) The government generally doesn't bring borderline or weak cases in front of a grand jury. They have limited time and budget and don't want to pursue a case they don't feel is a sure thing (or, more accurately, a sure deal with the defendant as most cases do not go to trial).

2) Grand jury decisions need not be unanimous, only simple majority. I voted against indictment in a couple of cases I felt were weak, but they were indicted none-the-less. Further the burden of proof is not beyond a reasonable doubt but rather a preponderance of evidence[1], which is a lower bar.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_Burden_of_Proof#Preponder...

abecedarius2• 14 years ago

This made me wonder how often. http://www.freedomlaw.com/archives/oldsite/GRANDJRY.html says 0.6% in 1984.

adestefan2• 14 years ago

Part of this is because the federal criminal case load is so heavy that there's no use to even waste money and time taking a case to a grand jury that can't lead to an indictment.

_delirium2• 14 years ago

Minor correction: 0.4% (the article reports a 99.6% indictment rate).

RockyMcNuts• 14 years ago

Good men must not obey laws too well - Emerson

(not that I equate JSTOR to slavery)

chimeracoder2• 14 years ago

> (not that I equate JSTOR to slavery)

Not to belabor the analogy too much, but in academia at large, there's a decent argument to be made....

rabidsnail• 14 years ago

No.

Having to pay for access to papers and being forced to pick cotton in the blinding sun every day of your life under pain of the whip are not the same thing.

kanzure• 14 years ago

Wow, I didn't know that the government compelled Quinn Norton and Alec Resnick on this one too. What exactly is aaronsw's defense going to be?

plausibledenial• 14 years ago

Copied from "Show Dead"

To me the Largest Sadness is that he did not succeed in releasing the corpus to the public, which I presume was his real goal. Making this information accessible would be one of the largest contributions an individual could make to the world, possibly worth the trade of spending the rest of one's life in prison. The tragedy is doing so without the reward.

The only greater contribution I can immediately come up with that is definitely accessible to some of the readers of this board would be leaking the Google Books archive. Depriving the world of life saving knowledge for purpose of profit is as great a sin as genocide. Sometimes conscience must trump the law.

Sincerely,

A long time member resorting for the first time to an anonymous account.

danboarder• 14 years ago

As Aaron is a founder of http://demandprogress.org I am not surprised by this. Their campaign emails are highly critical of the current political establishment fighting SOPA, PIPA, NDAA and related issues quite effectively through social media. This is deliberate over-reaction to petty protest crime. Like WikiLeaks, I imagine he has developed enemies due to these efforts. This entire situation reminds me of the treatment of political protest punk band Pussy Riot in Russia recently.

billswift• 14 years ago

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.

- - Charles Beard

nl3• 14 years ago

One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Martin Luther King, 16 April 1963, "Letter from Birmingham Jail"[1]

[1] http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.h...

Zuider2• 14 years ago

The Nuremberg laws are a prime example of laws that were so intrinsically wrong that disobeying them was a moral imperative.

andrevoget• 14 years ago

It was mentioned in the blog post, but probably not everyone will read it. There's a legal defense fund for Aaron Swartz: https://free.aaronsw.com/

Aaron Swartz "JSTOR" case indictment revised/expanded

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