Aaron Swartz shows his FBI file

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/fbifile

by wglb • 17 years ago

224 85 17 years ago

tptacek• 17 years ago

Someone got the backstory here?

ajju3• 17 years ago

He crawled a bunch (780 Gigs / ~20 million pages) of 'public' court records that were behind some kind of auth (pay) wall via a free trial and opened them up. Likely as a result of this crawling, the free trial was shut down. The pages he crawled constitute 20% of the total records. The feds then started investigating him.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/steal-these-fede...

rguzman• 17 years ago

Court records are, in general, public. Not 'public'. Just go to the library. However, PACER costs money and so do the favored online vendors (westlaw and lexis-nexis).

Even if they aren't public. They should be. This stuff can be used as law -- precedents. The only valid objection I see is that there needs to be some process to protect the privacy of the people involved in the case. But that's second-order concern.

jpwagner• 17 years ago

But when lawyers told Mr. Malamud and Mr. Swartz that they appeared to have broken no laws, Mr. Malamud sent Mr. Swartz a message saying, “You should just lay low for a while.”

It's not illegal, so what's going on?

Trying to collect $1.5MM?

falsestprophet• 17 years ago

PACER data is now being collected and made available to the public by the RECAP project run by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton.

https://www.recapthelaw.org/how-it-works/

grhino2• 17 years ago

He's letting the report speak for itself. However, to save time, here's the URL to the New York Times article about what Aaron was doing http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13records.html?ref=tech...

sachinag• 17 years ago

Wait, I thought Aaron was still in Cambridge. Did he come back to Chicago?

aaronsw3• 17 years ago

Congratulations, you're better at finding me than the FBI.

aaronblohowiak• 17 years ago

I didn't realize you were on HN. Your blog is an inspiration, and you are a great writer.

arithmetic2• 17 years ago

I wonder if they're watching this HN post and going "Darn it! He's in Cambridge!" :)

biohacker42• 17 years ago

House is set on a deep lot, behind other houses on Marshman Avenue. This is a heavily wooded, dead-end street, with no other cars parked on the road making continued surveillance difficult to conduct without severely increasing the risk of discovery.

Good to know.

gojomo2• 17 years ago

Good thing it was just the FBI. The BATF might have classified this mysterious residence as some sort of cult compound and executed a no-knock raid with automatic weapons drawn.

mattculbreth• 17 years ago

And burnt down his house for good measure.

lg• 17 years ago

funny, this reminds me of the typical series of bugzilla comments i make when I'm debugging something. although this is a lot more detailed and thorough than I ever am...

jyothi• 17 years ago

and guess there is opportunity here. FBI agents can be excellent trainers for issue tracking and documenting projects. One of them should start a blog.

johnnybgoode• 17 years ago

This is a case where I want to upvote you if you were being sarcastic, and downvote you if you were not. :)

grhino2• 17 years ago

I'm curious about the entry "March 23, Manassas, VA". Did somebody from the FBI wonder why the case hadn't been closed yet?

aaronsw3• 17 years ago

It looks to me like the FBI was wondering why exactly this was a crime.

prawn• 17 years ago

Aaron, how did you know on Feb 13 that the FBI had opened a file on you? From my skim, the first contact was April 14, or was there something else before then?

ivankirigin3• 17 years ago

  The two accounts were responsible for downloading more than
  eighteen million pages with an approximate value of $1.5 million.

Ha! Just because they charge $0.08 a page doesn't mean millions of page views online cost the same amount.

This reminds of big drug catches that bring in tons of a controlled substance. The value is always given in street value, to make the efforts seem more substantial. Too bad they never publicize stats that show the police and FBI catch an infinitesimally small percentage of narcotics.

borism• 17 years ago

yeah, but I thought that's how judicial system in the US works - they add listed value of every single stolen/smuggled/whatever piece without any respect of mark-to-market for the whole batch?

and that's kind of understandable - court has no time/expertise/willingness to figure out what "market" value of stuff should be.

cliffy• 17 years ago

Yes, but if they determine punishment based on the value of 'goods' 'stolen', then hopefully they would get an accurate estimate of their value, not values inflated by law enforcement.

palish2• 17 years ago

Source?

ivankirigin3• 17 years ago

It is becoming common knowledge that the drug war is a total failure. I'll try to find some stats on the rates of apprehending supplies.

gcheong• 17 years ago

Penn and Teller covered it pretty well on their Bullshit! program: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3025396475247394113

ivankirigin3• 17 years ago

Numbers are higher than I thought, but still do nothing to stop traffickers, given their high margins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#Assorted_arguments...

NathanKP2• 17 years ago

This is what made me laugh:

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts reported that the PACER system was being inundated with requests. One request was being made every three seconds.

Inundated by one request every three seconds? That's pretty pathetic if you ask me. They must not have planned for the PACER system to be used very much by very many people.

riffer• 17 years ago

That's fair, but remember that if you scrape HN with a 'sleep 3' your IP gets throttled quickly and then eventually blocked ...

gcb• 17 years ago

The two accounts were responsible for downloading more than eighteen million pages with an approximate value of $12. and estimated profit loss of $1.499988 million.

there. fixed it for ya.

bootload3• 17 years ago

"... NCIS report for Aaron Swartz was negative ..."

excellent.

the other thing I don't get is flags should be going up if nothing bad is being turned up. as for being legal? I bet Pacer didn't think/want 20% of their records searched even if they opened them up. It's unstated but it would be fair to assume this.

rglullis• 17 years ago

Presumption of guilt?

bootload3• 17 years ago

"... Presumption of guilt? ..."

From what I've read here they (fbi) are doing simple background checks and want to talk. An interview/Talk doesn't imply a presumption of guilt. Having said that the fact that the "pacer" usage may have been excessive & someone has complained means anyone with excessive usage is going to be looked at.

There is no black and white here but shades of grey. The records probably should be in public hands. The means used so far might be illegal. The tussle is "public access" vs "payment" and the action taken is making the right waves to hightlight the need for the former ~ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13records.html

bootload3• 17 years ago

"... In his call to action, Mr. Malamud pointed to the free trial Pacer was offering and called for a “Thumb Drive Corps” to go to libraries with small-but-capacious “thumb drives,” plug them into computers, download as many court documents as they could, and send them to Mr. Malamud so that he could translate them them into a format that Google’s search software can read and put them on line. ..."

There's a bigger picture (activism) here & maybe that's why the fbi has some interest. Having read this article ~ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13records.html I can now see why.

ZeroGravitas• 17 years ago

I learned a new word: exfiltrated

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/exfiltrated

LeChuck• 17 years ago

Did you know of defenestration? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestration

drenei• 17 years ago

Bill Waterson's Calvin & Hobbes poem introduced "defenestration" to me when I was young young young: "The monster, in his consternation, Demonstater defenestration". Its such a great word, and he was such a brilliant person, and a great inspiration. (sorry, completely off topic)

babyshake• 17 years ago

For any of us using hosting services from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. this should be a wakeup call.

Next time we should coordinate, and pull a "Spartacus".

tsally• 17 years ago

Balls of steel mate. Respect.

EDIT: Apparently your webserver is a little less resilient though. :-p

jrockway2• 17 years ago

I love how the case was closed as soon as his lawyer got involved. "Oh damn, now we have to decide which law he broke."

Luff• 17 years ago

I'm mostly fascinated by their attempt to trick him to give up compromising information about his actions, by asking him for help on how to secure the system. If they would've asked me before reading this, I would've probably been too naive to ask for assurance that what I said wouldn't be used against me.

jrockway2• 17 years ago

Yeah, the police are good at this. I was investigated by the Secret Service once. Long story involving a sarcastic non-anonymous slashdot comment that was misinterpreted as a threat on the President's life. (Yeah, America is a strange place.)

Anyway, the agents came to my house, made a vague accusation, and asked me if I knew anything about this. Having watched a bit of Law & Order, my answer was, "I think I need to talk to my lawyer". They persisted, and provided me with a lot of false information. At this point, I was annoyed at how wrong they were and said "yeah, I wrote this" and pulled up the comment in question.

(Resolution: they read the comment, realized that someone Higher Up totally overreacted, and went away.)

Basically, detectives are trained to extract information, and they are good at doing so. (Worth noting that after they got the information they wanted, they were generally pleasant people. Real life can be very much like television. :)

kirubakaran3• 17 years ago

Don't talk to the police : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

[just in case there is someone who hasn't seen this before]

DanielStraight2• 17 years ago

Why does the guy sound like it's all a joke though?

jdbeast00• 17 years ago

this was well worth my time, thank you

Shooter• 17 years ago

I really wish I knew this information about 16 years ago when I was still unbelievably naive. I was raised to answer police officers honestly, and to assume that they were also honest. And I still thought our criminal justice system worked properly and everyone was actually interested in justice. My first lesson that the world wasn't like Mayberry was a bit harsh.

apollo• 17 years ago

Mr. Swartz is known to frequent "Hacker News," an underground forum operated by the "partner in crime" of convicted computer criminal Robert Tappan Morris.

kiba• 17 years ago

Where did it say that in the FBI report? I took a look over it like 2-3 times and I can't find such mention.

markerdmann2• 17 years ago

Apollo is just making a joke.

redcap• 17 years ago

Based on the FBI's discovery of the subject's Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, they haven't yet found the subject's interest in the underground BBS known as 'Hacker News'.

ttol• 17 years ago

If you would like to request your own FBI file, if you have one, the link with step-by-step instructions are: http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cjisd/fprequest.htm

pyre2• 17 years ago

I had to request my FBI file once, and there was none. But the papers they send you are woefully misleading. It says something to the effect of 'Below are all the documents:' and under the rest of the page is blank. A 'None exist' would have been a little helpful. I kept thinking that they forgot to mail me some other page, but I was able to get by with what they gave me.

IIRC the cost was $18. But don't send a personal cheque, or you'll get a call from some FBI processing person directing you to fax them credit card authorization or to completely refile the request. Mine took like 7 or 8 months to process. It was 3 or 4 months after I sent off the request before I got the call about the issue with payment through a personal cheque, which gives you an idea of what the backlog was probably like. This was around 2 years ago.

there• 17 years ago

and you have to give them your fingerprints which i'm assuming will then be on file for any other law enforcement agency to use.

aristus• 17 years ago

"A search for wages for Swartz at the Department of Labor was negative."

:) I wonder how they will deal with more and more hacker-type people of independent means.

joseakle• 17 years ago

What´s the Long-Term Planning Committee for the Human Race ?

arithmetic2• 17 years ago

The Big Brother is watching. Who'd have thought?

zandorg• 17 years ago

I'm a UK citizen and I apparently have none, because I requested for me and Don Simpson (the deceased film producer), and they only said 'No file on Don Simpson' - didn't even say 'No file on [Zandorg]'.

eli2• 17 years ago

Wow, that's quick. I thought it typically took years to get a file out of the FBI.

Aaron Swartz shows his FBI file

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