I just got this email:
"Shocking news: Moments ago former Demand Progress Executive Director Aaron Swartz was indicted by the US government. As best as we can tell, he is being charged with allegedly downloading too many journal articles from the Web. The government contends that downloading so many journal articles constitutes felony computer hacking and should be punished with time in prison."
OK. Here's the rundown. Aaron Swartz apparently has a habit of downloading massive amounts of data, and either using it for research, or for republication. He had access to subscription database service from MIT, and he downloaded millions of academic articles from that database.
This is from Wired Swartz Arrest
"The grand jury indictment accuses Swartz of evading MIT’s attempts to kick his laptop off the network while downloading more than four million documents from JSTOR, a non-for-profit company that provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals. The scraping, which took place from September 2010 to January 2011 via MIT’s network, was invasive enough to bring down JSTOR’s servers on several occasions.The indictment alleges that Swartz, at the time a fellow at Harvard University, intended to distribute the documents on peer-to-peer networks."
OK, I guess that sounds kind of bad, though a 1 million dollar fine and a possible prison sentence of up to 35 years seems a little severe as a punishment for such behavior. Here's the kicker, though: the documents were never distributed. They were returned to JSTOR. In fact, JSTOR did not refer the case to the feds, and apparently have no problem with Swartz at all:
"JSTOR, the alleged victim in the case, did not refer the case to the feds, according to Heidi McGregor, the company’s vice president of Marketing & Communications, who said the company got the documents, a mixture of both copyrighted and public domain works, back from Swartz and was content with that."
Swartz seems not to be even guilty of hacking, as hacking is classically defined, as he did not find a weakness in JSTOR's security to exploit nor did he use stolen credentials and pretend to be someone with access. He is being accused of violating their terms of use.
So the victim of what is, in my view, somewhere between a case of digital bad manners and a case of copyright infringement, is perfectly happy with having gotten their documents back and with the knowledge that the documents were not distributed to anybody. The organization affected by Mr. Swartz' misconduct has settled the matter, apparently amicably. In that case, one might ask, who is prosecuting this case? Why, the U.S. attorney's office.
I'm not ready yet to decide whether this government-initiated prosecution of Ben Swartz for downloading too much data is being undertaken simply because he is an activist, and because his role at Demand Progress has become annoying to someone powerful. I'd need more evidence for that. It's too soon to claim conspiracy, though the uses to which Mr. Swartz has put his downloaded data in the past, to wit, uncovering the links between industry and what is essentially scholarly legal opinion for hire, demonstrates that he has a gift for putting his hand in a beehive and stirring vigorously.
But it is certain that in an era of demands for governmental austerity, an era in which real white-collar criminals regularly go unprosecuted and unpursued by federal law enforcement, spending government money to prosecute a guy for downloading too much data can be seen, at the very least, as a waste of money, federal man-hours, and time. It remains to be seen whether this is also an attempt to discourage political action.