Hackers angry over suicide of Internet activist hijack U.S. sentencing guidelines website

By The Associated Press - Saturday, January 26, 2013 at 7:46 AM - 0 Comments

WASHINGTON – The hacker-activist group Anonymous says it hijacked the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide.

The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch, was taken over early Saturday and replaced with a message warning that when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago “a line was crossed.”

The hackers say they’ve infiltrated several government computer systems and copied secret information that they now threaten to make public.

Family and friends of Swartz, who helped create Reddit and RSS, say he killed himself after he was hounded by federal prosecutors. Officials say he helped post millions of court documents for free online and that he illegally downloaded millions of academic articles from an online clearinghouse.

What activist Aaron Swartz showed us

By Barbara Amiel - Wednesday, January 16, 2013 at 7:00 PM - 0 Comments

Michael Francis McElroy/ZUMA/KEYSTONE PRESS

Aaron Swartz knotted his belt and hanged himself in his New York apartment last week. He was 26 years old, a celebrity among Internet hackers, an activist for free online access. He suffered from depression. He was also in the crosshairs of the U.S. Department of Justice, charged with 13 felonies for accessing Massachusetts Institute of Technology computers to download nearly five million files from academic journals as part of his drive to make all information on the web free.

Suicide by hanging is unambiguous. One can’t hang by accident as in overdosing medication. Hanging is not a cry for help. The belt must be tied so that with gravity you will break your neck or alternately suffocate in a few awful minutes. Once the noose is in position, there is a brief moment during which its wearer must make the decision to kick off. I know more than I would prefer about depression and I have a passing acquaintance with that moment before jumping. Even before he made the decision, Aaron had left anything resembling this world for a cage of desperation that beggars description.

Swartz, a school dropout, was the founder of the online group Demand Progress, instrumental in defeating (or at the very least postponing) Congress’s Internet anti-piracy legislation last year. The word “copyright” rolls deprecatingly out of his mouth in now-macabre videos of him on the web. His speech cadences, so like the ones in movies about preppies, evidence his link with Harvard (he was a fellow at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics) which gave him legitimate use of MIT computers.

A lot of what he said so elegantly was youthful rubbish. He saw a conspiratorial and corrupt world run by multinational organizations and government at the cost of the First Amendment. He and fellow activists banged on about government censorship of the Internet and while not all of it was a lie it was a half-truth. They seemed not to understand that copyright makes content—it’s the lifeblood of a creative and informative web and not just the blunt tool of media companies or an instrument of greed. Without copyright, no writer or creator could earn a living.

Aaron had been on the run for some time. In 2008 he had written a program that put some 20 million legal documents online for free rather than the 10 cents per page the government charges through its Public Access to Court Electronic Records system. The FBI investigated but no charges were laid. The material Swartz allegedly downloaded illegally from MIT—articles from the subscription service Jstor—was already partially free. Jstor’s counsel, former Manhattan federal prosecutor Mary Jo White, had asked the lead prosecutor in the case against Swartz to drop the charges. “Stealing is stealing” was the answer. Trial was set for this April.

Conviction could have got sentences up to 35 years and huge fines though, since prosecutors throw anything at a defendant on the theory that the jury will give them something in return, he might have got a far lower sentence. Aaron was said to be worried about the mounting cost of lawyers. When the FBI first came sniffing around in 2009 he was cocky and mocked their stilted language in reports he obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. By 2012 he was bearing the full weight of a federal investigation and cracking under the burden.

A deal was said to have been offered if he would plead guilty to all 13 felonies. He would not. He was charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a controversial law in an evolving field. Swartz’s grief-stricken family blamed his death on “prosecutorial overreach.” But even good friend Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig had misgivings about Swartz’s methods, which if not illegal were, he felt, unethical.

How are we to deal with this emerging group of young activists/idealists who, refusing to recognize certain kinds of property, steal it—even if not for profit? Without sanctions, you create a segment of society beyond the rule of law. Threatening with a vague ill-defined law in the hands of headline-seeking prosecutors leads only to abuses. Because he may have crossed the yellow line, the Swartz case is the wrong one to lift the rock on the rotting world of U.S. justice. Still that may be its singular importance. Everyone in Britain knew for years that the tabloid press was diseased but no move was made until a case involving a murdered young girl created a public uproar. Similarly, perhaps the suicide of a brilliant, unstable youth—even though middle-class and white—might force a look at prosecutorial tactics in the United States.

Had Swartz’s life been ruined in the usual way by a few years imprisonment only his subculture would have noticed. But the grisly suicide of a 26-year-old begs for tempered justice and decency. Look closer and you will see prisons as bleak as Piranesi’s etchings, overflowing with (largely) minority non-violent prisoners, disenfranchised, subject to uneducated and often callous guards, uncared for by a President of their own race, while their families live in impoverished misery.

In modern times excessive imprisonment and injustice have been the rich material of great writers—Zola, Hugo, Kafka, Dickens and Dreiser. A computer nerd is an unlikely protagonist but changing times create different heroes. The canvas awaits. As it is, all I can write is that suicide by hanging was a pretty low-tech exit for so high-tech a genius as Aaron Swartz. May he rest in peace.

Techno-McCarthyism and the death of Aaron Swartz

By Jesse Brown - Monday, January 14, 2013 at 1:26 PM - 0 Comments

Aaron, age 14, with Larry Lessig

When I spoke to Aaron Swartz in 2009, he had just learned that he’d been investigated by the FBI for “stealing” public court documents from a library and sharing them on the Internet. They had a file on him. They had staked out his mom’s house. He thought it was hilarious.

“The whole thing strikes me as ridiculous,” he said of his FBI file, which he had obtained through a Freedom of Information request. “Suspect lives on a heavily wooded dead-end street,” he read in a super-serious Dragnet voice, “making continued surveillance difficult.”

“Who are you,” I asked, “Jason Bourne?”

Aaron laughed.

It was no joke. His brilliant PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) hack put him on the FBI’s radar and likely contributed to the persecution he suffered when he struck again. Continue…

Reddit co-founder, 26, kills self in NY weeks before trial on charges he stole online articles

By The Associated Press - Sunday, January 13, 2013 at 11:32 PM - 0 Comments

NEW YORK, N.Y. – The family of a Reddit co-founder is blaming prosecutors for his suicide just weeks before he was to go on trial on federal charges that he stole millions of scholarly articles.

Aaron Swartz hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment Friday night, his family and authorities said. The 26-year-old had fought to make online content free to the public and as a teenager helped create RSS, a family of Web feed formats used to gather updates from blogs, news headlines, audio and video for users.

In 2011, he was charged with stealing millions of scientific journals from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in an attempt to make them freely available.

He had pleaded not guilty, and his federal trial was to begin next month. If convicted, he faced decades in prison and a fortune in fines.

In a statement released Saturday, Swartz’s family in Chicago expressed not only grief over his death but also bitterness toward federal prosecutors pursuing the case against him in Massachusetts.

“Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s Office and at MIT contributed to his death,” they said.

Elliot Peters, Swartz’s California-based defence attorney and a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan, told The Associated Press on Sunday that the case “was horribly overblown” because Swartz had “the right” to download from JSTOR, a subscription service used by MIT that offers digitized copies of articles from more than 1,000 academic journals.

Peters said even the company took the stand that the computer crimes section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston had overreached in seeking prison time for Swartz and insisting — two days before his suicide — that he plead guilty to all 13 felony counts. Peters said JSTOR’s attorney, Mary Jo White — the former top federal prosecutor in Manhattan — had called Stephen Heymann, the lead Boston prosecutor in the case.

“She asked that they not pursue the case,” Peters said.

Reached at his home in Winchester, Mass., Heymann referred all questions to a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston, Christina DiIorio-Sterling. She did not immediately respond to an email and phone message from the AP seeking comment.

A zealous advocate of public online access, Swartz was extolled Saturday by those who believed as he did. He was “an extraordinary hacker and activist,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international non-profit digital rights group based in California wrote in a tribute on its home page.

“Playing Mozart’s Requiem in honour of a brave and brilliant man,” tweeted Carl Malamud, an Internet public domain advocate who believes in free access to legally obtained files.

Swartz co-founded the social news website Reddit, which was later sold to Conde Nast, as well as the political action group Demand Progress, which campaigns against Internet censorship.

He apparently struggled at times with depression, writing in a 2007 blog post: “Surely there have been times when you’ve been sad. Perhaps a loved one has abandoned you or a plan has gone horribly awry. … You feel worthless. … depressed mood is like that, only it doesn’t come for any reason and it doesn’t go for any either.”

Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, faculty director of the Safra Center for Ethics where Swartz was once a fellow, wrote: “We need a better sense of justice. … The question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a ‘felon.’”

Before the Massachusetts’ case, Swartz aided Malamud in his effort to post federal court documents for free online, rather than the few cents per page that the government charges through its electronic archive, PACER. Swartz wrote a program in 2008 to legally download the files using free access via public libraries, according to The New York Times. About 20 per cent of all the court papers were made available until the government shut down the library access.

The FBI investigated but didn’t charge Swartz, he wrote on his website.

Three years later, Swartz was arrested in Boston. The federal government accused Swartz of using MIT’s computer network to steal nearly 5 million academic articles from JSTOR.

Prosecutors said Swartz hacked into MIT’s system in November 2010 after breaking into a computer wiring closet on campus. Prosecutors said he intended to distribute the articles on file-sharing websites.

JSTOR didn’t press charges once it reclaimed the articles from Swartz, and some legal experts considered the case unfounded, saying that MIT allows guests access to the articles and Swartz, a fellow at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics, was a guest.

Experts puzzled over the arrest and argued that the result of the actions Swartz was accused of was the same as his PACER program: more information publicly available.

The prosecution “makes no sense,” Demand Progress Executive Director David Segal said at the time. “It’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”

Swartz faced 13 felony charges, including breaching site terms and intending to share downloaded files through peer-to-peer networks, computer fraud, wire fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer, and criminal forfeiture.

JSTOR announced this week that it would make more than 4.5 million articles publicly available for free.

Swartz’s funeral is scheduled for Tuesday in Highland Park, Ill.

Suicide of Aaron Swartz raises questions about how harshly to prosecute computer crimes

By Daniel Wagner And Verena Dobnik, The Associated Press - Sunday, January 13, 2013 at 10:39 PM - 0 Comments

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz, who was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment Friday, struggled for years against a legal system that he felt had not caught up to the information age. Federal prosecutors had tried unsuccessfully to mount a case against him for publishing reams of court documents that normally cost a fee to download. He helped lead the campaign to defeat a law that would have made it easier to shut down websites accused of violating copyright protections.

In the end, Swartz’s family said, that same system helped cause his death by branding as a felon a talented young activist who was more interested in spreading academic information than in the fraud federal prosecutors had charged him with.

The death by suicide of Swartz, 26, was “the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach,” his family said in a statement Saturday.

Continue…

Family of Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz blames prosecutors for his death

By The Associated Press - Sunday, January 13, 2013 at 3:09 PM - 0 Comments

NEW YORK, N.Y. – The family of a Reddit co-founder who committed suicide weeks before he was to go on trial on federal charges that he stole millions of scholarly articles is blaming prosecutors for his death.

Aaron Swartz hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment Friday night, his family and authorities said. The 26-year-old had fought to make online content free to the public and as a teenager helped create RSS, a family of Web feed formats used to gather updates from blogs, news headlines, audio and video for users.

In 2011, he was charged with stealing millions of scientific journals from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in an attempt to make them freely available.

He had pleaded not guilty, and his federal trial was to begin next month. If convicted, he faced decades in prison and a fortune in fines.

In a statement released Saturday, Swartz’s family in Chicago expressed not only grief over his death but also bitterness toward federal prosecutors pursuing the case in Massachusetts against him.

“Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death,” they said.

Elliot Peters, Swartz’s California-based defence attorney and a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan, told The Associated Press on Sunday that the case “was horribly overblown” because Swartz had “the right” to download from JSTOR, a subscription service used by MIT that offers digitized copies of articles from more than 1,000 academic journals.

Peters said even the company took the stand that the computer crimes section of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston had overreached in seeking prison time for Swartz and insisting — two days before his suicide — that he plead guilty to all 13 felony counts. Peters said JSTOR’s attorney, Mary Jo White — the former top federal prosecutor in Manhattan — had called Stephen Heymann, the lead Boston prosecutor in the case.

“She asked that they not pursue the case,” Peters said.

Heymann did not immediately respond to an email from the AP seeking comment.

A zealous advocate of public online access, Swartz was extolled Saturday by those who believed as he did. He was “an extraordinary hacker and activist,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international non-profit digital rights group based in California wrote in a tribute on its home page.

“Playing Mozart’s Requiem in honour of a brave and brilliant man,” tweeted Carl Malamud, an Internet public domain advocate who believes in free access to legally obtained files.

Swartz co-founded the social news website Reddit, which was later sold to Conde Nast, as well as the political action group Demand Progress, which campaigns against Internet censorship.

He apparently struggled at times with depression, writing in a 2007 blog post: “Surely there have been times when you’ve been sad. Perhaps a loved one has abandoned you or a plan has gone horribly awry. … You feel worthless. … depressed mood is like that, only it doesn’t come for any reason and it doesn’t go for any either.”

Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, faculty director for Safra Center for Ethics where Swartz was once a fellow, wrote: “We need a better sense of justice. … The question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a ‘felon.’”

Before the Massachusetts’ case, Swartz aided Malamud in his effort to post federal court documents for free online, rather than the few cents per page that the government charges through its electronic archive, PACER. Swartz wrote a program in 2008 to legally download the files using free access via public libraries, according to The New York Times. About 20 per cent of all the court papers were made available until the government shut down the library access.

The FBI investigated but didn’t charge Swartz, he wrote on his website.

Three years later, Swartz was arrested in Boston. The federal government accused Swartz of using MIT’s computer network to steal nearly 5 million academic articles from JSTOR.

Prosecutors said Swartz hacked into MIT’s system in November 2010 after breaking into a computer wiring closet on campus. Prosecutors said he intended to distribute the articles on file-sharing websites.

JSTOR didn’t press charges once it reclaimed the articles from Swartz, and some legal experts considered the case unfounded, saying that MIT allows guests access to the articles and Swartz, a fellow at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics, was a guest.

Experts puzzled over the arrest and argued that the result of the actions Swartz was accused of was the same as his PACER program: more information publicly available.

The prosecution “makes no sense,” Demand Progress Executive Director David Segal said at the time. “It’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”

Swartz faced 13 felony charges, including breaching site terms and intending to share downloaded files through peer-to-peer networks, computer fraud, wire fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer, and criminal forfeiture.

JSTOR announced this week that it would make more than 4.5 million articles publicly available for free.

Swartz’s funeral is scheduled for Tuesday in Highland Park, Ill.

Reddit co-founder, mass downloader of scholarly work, faces 13 felonies

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, September 20, 2012 at 3:38 PM - 0 Comments

(Fred Benenson/Flickr/Wikimedia Commons)

And now the curious case of 25 year-old Aaron Swartz.

By any measure, he is a brilliant kid. He co-wrote the specs for RSS 1.0 (really simple syndication) when he was 14. When he hit 20, Swartz sold Reddit, the social news site he co-founded, to Condé Naste for some small fortune, and then dedicated himself to non-profit work for the public good.

His philanthropy didn’t involve gala fundraisers. Swartz became an aggressive activist, an agitator, and depending on your view of things, a data radical.

One major project was Demand Progress, his PAC (political action committee). The group pioneered online activism tactics and was a major player in the successful campaign against SOPA and PIPA, proposed legislation that would have curbed civil rights online. But this isn’t what got Aaron Swartz into trouble.

Somewhere along the way he began using data analysis research to track corruption. He crunched a data set of over 400,000 law review articles to determine the source of their funding.  This led to a fellowship at the Harvard Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption. That gave him access to MIT’s libraries, which in turn had access to JSTOR, a non-profit online database of journal articles.

Continue…

Just because it should be free, doesn’t mean you can steal it

By Alex Derry - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 4:56 PM - 11 Comments

Photo by Chris Devers c/o Flickr Creative Commons

Aaron Swartz was arrested last week after allegedly breaking into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s computer network to play Robin Hood—stealing academic journals from the ivory tower and making them available for free online. The 24-year-old online activist and then-fellow at Harvard now stands accused of fraud. The prosecution, led by U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Carmen M. Ortiz, alleges that between September 24, 2010 and January 6, 2011, Swartz repeatedly broke into M.I.T.’s restricted computer wiring closet, accessed the network using an anonymous email address (at one time shielding his face with a bicycle helmet to hide his identity from security), and illegally hacked his way into the school’s JSTOR account to download 4.8 million articles. At one point near the end of his heist, according to the indictment, Swartz fled M.I.T. security officials attempting to question him.

Swartz, an early contributor to reddit and the co-founder of Demand Progress, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization specializing in online campaigns for progressive causes, including protecting internet freedom and protesting the Patriot Act, may have disclosed a possible motivation behind his alleged actions three years ago. In his “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” released in 2008, he rallied against what he saw as the private monopoly of public culture:

“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks.”

Open access ‘hacktivists’ like Swartz argue that academic journals constitute open data that should be freely available for the benefit of public knowledge. As Matt Blaze, a computer scientist at Princeton University, puts it, expecting authors to release their intellectual property to copyright is “quaintly out of touch with the needs of researchers and academics who no longer expect the delay and expense of seeking out printed copies of far flung documents.” The New York Times even lauded Swartz for a similar hack in 2009, when he and “a small group of dedicated open-government activists teamed up to push the court records system into the 21st century,” by downloading and releasing to the public over 19 million pages of court documents from the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, described as “cumbersome, arcane and not free.” While government officials were beside themselves, Swartz and his crew had broken no laws.

Matt Ingram of Gigaom.com finds Swartz’s recent indictment disturbing, and argues that what the online activist did was no worse than when Mark Zuckerberg downloaded photos from Harvard’s network to create the beta version of Facebook. “It’s certainly nowhere near the kind of espionage that the government is alleging occurred in the case of WikiLeaks and the diplomatic cables it published, or the hacking that groups such as Anonymous and Lulzsec are accused of being involved in. What could possibly [be] gained by going after a young programmer for trying to liberate academic research from a library?” In a statement, Demand Progress Executive Director David Segal said that Swartz’s indictment was “like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”

But in reading the indictment, “liberating academic research” is not the charge he is facing. The four counts leveled against Swartz are for wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. Timothy B. Lee of Forbes.com also notes that M.I.T. students’ access to JSTOR was cut off for several days following the Mission Impossible-inspired data breach, no doubt providing students much-needed fodder for the old “hacker ate my homework” excuse. Like the comedian who threw a pie at Rupert Murdoch and succeeded only in victimizing a man who was doing just fine making himself look bad, such actions make JSTOR “look like an injured, even magnanimous, party and gives them an excuse to make their policies more restrictive.”

Swartz wasn’t arrested for reading under the covers with a flashlight after bedtime. He faces allegations of deliberately breaking into someone else’s bedroom and re-wiring the lighting completely before even getting under the covers, all while wearing a mask. While the purpose of distributing JSTOR’s content for free on file-sharing sites may seem bizarre grounds for federal charges, fraud and trespassing aren’t.

Whether Swartz should be facing felony counts that could bring him up to 35 years in prison for actions, which while perhaps brazen and illegal, harmed no one, is another question altogether—JSTOR is not pursuing legal action against him and say they have no interest in doing so because the articles have been re-secured (although plenty of documents have already appeared online). However misguided such methods may be, it seems unfair to punish someone so severely for wanting to help the general public access a science journal, which would normally be available only to an elite group of graduate students.