Anon hacked the USSC web site.

[Rabbit of Caerbannog]

You could have just said "Not impressed" and spared the needlessly long rebuttal. Especially since their goals are not to permanently shut down government Web sites (or the WBC one for that matter). It's hacktivism, and it's meant to spur other people to action.

There goal is change, which they have caused little in the way of.  Seldom do they accomplish anything other than taking down websites, and mostly ones no one cares about.

I think you're conflating immediate change with gradual changes. Leaking videos of the rapists in Steubenville might not get justice for the victim but it put media focus on the town and on the culture of rape and misogyny that pervaded it. It got people angry, and it may get people talking about violence against women and the justice system. Anonymous, more than anything, brings stories of injustice to the front page for everyone to see. They air out dirty laundry that was previously hidden by passwords and firewalls. And they take down Web sites and (sometimes) careers in the process. I also dispute the idea that the sites for the Department of Justice, FBI, CIA, etc. are sites "no one cares about." I think you're treating high-profile targets as if they were, well, this site. (No offense to the FSTDT community. Please don't "Fuck no" me for it )

[m52nickerson]

I don't know about this site, but I guarantee there are a hell of a lot of sites that get more visits each day than the U.S. Sentencing Commission.  Yes, once in a while they do something right, like Steubenville.

Thing is going after larger targets like the US government is a losing proposition.  The justice system is not going to change punishments because of threats from them.  If anything they will get stiffer because of acts like this.  Plus if they pull the trigger on their threats and chaos does not in sue it will only make them look impotent. 

[Rabbit of Caerbannog]

I don't know about this site, but I guarantee there are a hell of a lot of sites that get more visits each day than the U.S. Sentencing Commission.  Yes, once in a while they do something right, like Steubenville.

Thing is going after larger targets like the US government is a losing proposition.  The justice system is not going to change punishments because of threats from them.  If anything they will get stiffer because of acts like this.  Plus if they pull the trigger on their threats and chaos does not in sue it will only make them look impotent.

You're right when you say the U.S. government won't change because of Anonymous' threats. But if their threats spur other people to complain and protest then it becomes serious. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, and maybe the folks at Anon really are just hackers with big egos who think they can topple whole regimes armed with a laptop, but I think most of what they do is an effort to take issues and make them news items that other people will take notice of.

[Lt. Fred]

As has been pointed out to you, M52, he was perfectly entitled to download as many academic articles as he chose. Please do not lie again.

[m52nickerson]

As has been pointed out to you, M52, he was perfectly entitled to download as many academic articles as he chose. Please do not lie again.

Yes he was entitled to download as man as he wanted, just not the way he did it.  That's what made it illegal.

[chitoryu12]

As has been pointed out to you, M52, he was perfectly entitled to download as many academic articles as he chose. Please do not lie again.

So, were all of the articles he downloaded available for free to others? Was he legally entitled to give away unlimited copies to others?

And please don't try to get around it by saying "They're freely available on other websites." Just because one man gives you a car for free doesn't mean you can take a car that another man loans you and do whatever you want with it. The articles were not available for free (a small amount have been made available for limited free viewing, not downloading, since the case began), and the terms of use agreement makes it clear that you're not to distribute the articles to non-authorized users. It is ALSO against the terms of use to use the program he used to download those millions of articles.

The content is effectively on loan to those who have a JSTOR account, and by using the program to rapidly download those articles (without even getting into the legality of him accessing the server cabinet to directly attach his laptop) he violated the terms of use and his account was null and void at that very moment. It also meant that every single article he downloaded after this violation could very easily be legally interpreted as theft, as those without an account could not have accessed the data.

It would help if someone could find good, hard evidence that Swartz planned on releasing this data to P2P sharing sites, but what I can definitely confirm immediately is that he released the 19.8 million pages of data he downloaded from PACER (I believe taking advantage of a free trial at the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago and using a Perl script to download them). He went about the act almost exactly as he did the JSTOR one, and saying that his intent with the millions of JSTOR articles was something other than releasing them to the public is willful ignorance. If a man steals hundreds of cars and takes them to a chop shop, it would hardly be unreasonable to assume that when you catch him in another stolen car that he's planning on heading there.

[Lt. Fred]

Aaron Swartz did not upload a single article to any P2P service. Not one.

Edit to add: If you're going to charge him with conspiracy to do so, that's largely based on mind-reading- and, of course, completely trivial, a few hundred dollars fine at worst.

[chitoryu12]

On a somewhat related note, I still don't get why people are treating Anonymous like it's a real group. Anonymous -- in the sense of it being a cabal of "hacktivists" working to help the common man and enact change in society -- does not exist. It's a lot of unrelated people who possibly congregate on some of the same websites and claim that their individual actions occur under the Anonymous banner. The concept of Anonymous being an actual organization of any kind, rather than a lot of vaguely affiliated teenagers and angry IT guys, is spread by them after the infamous Fox KTTV report treating them like a domestic terrorist organization. They want to create the aura of this shadowy cabal who will strike out against tyranny and injustice wherever it hides, and the "We Are Legion" moniker is meant to scare people into thinking that anyone they know may be part of it. In reality, it's all a lot of hot air. The guys who took down the USSC site could have just as easily claimed to be part of Gorilla Hacks or whatever the hell they wanted to call themselves today. Attributing it to a nonexistent group that tries to scare ignorant people with the illusion of a hive mind just happened to fit their goal that day.

Aaron Swartz did not upload a single article to any P2P service. Not one.

So do you deny that he had any intent to do so?

[m52nickerson]

Aaron Swartz did not upload a single article to any P2P service. Not one.

Edit to add: If you're going to charge him with conspiracy to do so, that's largely based on mind-reading- and, of course, completely trivial, a few hundred dollars fine at worst.

No it is based on logic.  Would there be any other reason for him to download more documents than he could go through in a life time?

Plus he could have argued his case in court.  Yes the maximum he could have gotten was 35 year, but in no reality would have if convicted.   

[Itachirumon]

As has been pointed out to you, M52, he was perfectly entitled to download as many academic articles as he chose. Please do not lie again.

Thank you - again, all I know is what I've heard on /x/, I admittedly haven't been following it. But it was my understanding he only grabbed up court documents. I'll remind you that court documents are public domain and so for JSTOR to charge for them in the first place and try to prevent people from accessing them otherwise constitutes quite a bit of unethical behavior. If he planned to distribute the files to the public, the only rules he broke were JSTOR's own. Public domain is public domain. So charge him the $x00 and let him be on his way. If they'd done that, nobody would be bitching (at least, as loudly). It's the miscarriage of justice people are upset about - that the government went psycho on him to the point he took his own life. That anger I can easily get behind, it's fucked up what they did to him, full stop, end of story.

[m52nickerson]

Thank you - again, all I know is what I've heard on /x/, I admittedly haven't been following it. But it was my understanding he only grabbed up court documents. I'll remind you that court documents are public domain and so for JSTOR to charge for them in the first place and try to prevent people from accessing them otherwise constitutes quite a bit of unethical behavior. If he planned to distribute the files to the public, the only rules he broke were JSTOR's own. Public domain is public domain. So charge him the $x00 and let him be on his way. If they'd done that, nobody would be bitching (at least, as loudly). It's the miscarriage of justice people are upset about - that the government went psycho on him to the point he took his own life. That anger I can easily get behind, it's fucked up what they did to him, full stop, end of story.

Perhaps you should go outside /x/ because JSTOR stores academic journals and articles, not court documents.  So no they are not public domain.

[Lt. Fred]

They are publically owned, of course. And, in fact, many of them are public domain (because they are so old).  But, for some reason, JSTOR gets a medieval-style government monopoloy on something they don't own.

[chitoryu12]

I'll remind you that court documents are public domain and so for JSTOR to charge for them in the first place and try to prevent people from accessing them otherwise constitutes quite a bit of unethical behavior.

Selling access to public domain content is not illegal or unethical. Public domain only means that the copyright on the content is expired/nonexistent, but it doesn't mean that people are not allowed to sell access to it. William Shakespeare has long since been in the public domain, but anyone can tell you that it's perfectly legal and ethical to sell copies or compilations of his stories. You can find them for free with no difficulty, but you can just as easily find them for sale or on loan.

And of course, this actually applies to the PACER case. PACER is what had to do with court documents, not JSTOR. Just felt like emphasizing that yes, his actions with PACER were illegal even though the trial was suspended to investigate the program closer.

JSTOR wasn't doing anything even vaguely unethical and I doubt that they're the sole source for everything that Swartz downloaded. Regardless of the documents being in the public domain or publicly owned, they charged for a service and provided a product to those who paid, and they made the terms of use for those who paid them. Swartz massively violated the terms of service, and his download of the articles afterward without paying was very much illegally taking products.

But, for some reason, JSTOR gets a medieval-style government monopoloy on something they don't own.

Can I get a source on that "monopoly" claim?

[Itachirumon]

Thank you - again, all I know is what I've heard on /x/, I admittedly haven't been following it. But it was my understanding he only grabbed up court documents. I'll remind you that court documents are public domain and so for JSTOR to charge for them in the first place and try to prevent people from accessing them otherwise constitutes quite a bit of unethical behavior. If he planned to distribute the files to the public, the only rules he broke were JSTOR's own. Public domain is public domain. So charge him the $x00 and let him be on his way. If they'd done that, nobody would be bitching (at least, as loudly). It's the miscarriage of justice people are upset about - that the government went psycho on him to the point he took his own life. That anger I can easily get behind, it's fucked up what they did to him, full stop, end of story.

Perhaps you should go outside /x/ because JSTOR stores academic journals and articles, not court documents.  So no they are not public domain.

No, really? Because I wasn't aware of their function before last week. As a university student and former AP student, I've never ever visited JSTOR before or been informed of their contents.

And, gee, I'd love to do a more thorough search of the story, but of course as a university student I have very little time and all the lovely political sites I used to visit seem to have gone out of business one by one. Also, as Lt. Fred has so helpfully pointed out, the story as I've heard it isn't exactly in opposition to the facts. So until you actually give me something that actually suggests he WAS downloading files that aren't in the public domain already I have no reason to believe otherwise.

Oh, and as for journal articles? Pubmed comes to mind.

[chitoryu12]

Thank you - again, all I know is what I've heard on /x/, I admittedly haven't been following it. But it was my understanding he only grabbed up court documents. I'll remind you that court documents are public domain and so for JSTOR to charge for them in the first place and try to prevent people from accessing them otherwise constitutes quite a bit of unethical behavior. If he planned to distribute the files to the public, the only rules he broke were JSTOR's own. Public domain is public domain. So charge him the $x00 and let him be on his way. If they'd done that, nobody would be bitching (at least, as loudly). It's the miscarriage of justice people are upset about - that the government went psycho on him to the point he took his own life. That anger I can easily get behind, it's fucked up what they did to him, full stop, end of story.

Perhaps you should go outside /x/ because JSTOR stores academic journals and articles, not court documents.  So no they are not public domain.

No, really? Because I wasn't aware of their function before last week. As a university student and former AP student, I've never ever visited JSTOR before or been informed of their contents.

And, gee, I'd love to do a more thorough search of the story, but of course as a university student I have very little time and all the lovely political sites I used to visit seem to have gone out of business one by one. Also, as Lt. Fred has so helpfully pointed out, the story as I've heard it isn't exactly in opposition to the facts. So until you actually give me something that actually suggests he WAS downloading files that aren't in the public domain already I have no reason to believe otherwise.

Oh, and as for journal articles? Pubmed comes to mind.

If you have the time to take a stance on the issue and make posts of these size about it, you have time to sit down and look more closely at the issue and make a more informed decision.

And once again, "They're in the public domain" doesn't mean that what he did was not theft if he violated the terms of use for something that is ordinarily a pay service. JSTOR is legally able to charge people for accessing the content and decide on the terms of use for its access. "Public domain" only means that it CAN be made available for free, not that it HAS to be. Again, the people who sell the Complete Works of William Shakespeare are not doing anything unethical. Even if Shakespeare was not legally available from any other source but one repository, they would be 100% entitled to sell the stories. They couldn't claim copyright infringement if someone put them up for public viewing, but they could easily make terms of use for their product and punish those who violated it.