Aaron Swartz charged with data theft
Swartz co-founded Reddit. Nick Bilton:
In a press release, Ms. Ortiz’s office said that Mr. Swartz broke into a restricted area of M.I.T. and entered a computer wiring closet. Mr. Swartz apparently then accessed the M.I.T. computer network and stole millions of documents from JSTOR.
Demand Progress, which Swartz founded, has a different angle:
“This makes no sense,” said Demand Progress Executive Director David Segal; “it’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”
“It’s even more strange because JSTOR has settled any claims against Aaron, explained they’ve suffered no loss or damage, and asked the government not to prosecute,” Segal added.
So bizarre. The bit about MIT/JSTOR asking not to prosecute is weird. There’s definitely more to this story.
Update: Here’s a copy of the indictment. (Thanks to Nelson Elhage.) Immediate thoughts:
- While I’ve done my share of screen scraping, the volume here is pretty outstanding. 4.8 million articles.
- The part that immediately caught my attention was the bit about breaking in to the networking closet and leaving his laptop there. Seems crazy to me.
- Why Swartz did any of this in the first place left is unclear. They mention twice that Swartz intended to distribute the articles on “various file-sharing sites”, but there’s no further discussion of how they arrived at that conclusion.