Activist charged with hacking

Allegedly stole 4.8m documents; supports free flow of Net data

July 20, 2011|By Milton J. Valencia, Globe Staff

Aaron Swartz, a Cambridge web entrepreneur and political activist who has lobbied for the free flow of information on the Internet, was charged in federal court with hacking into a subscription-based archive system at MIT and stealing more than 4 million articles, including scientific and academic journals.

Swartz, 24, who at the time of the alleged hacking in fall 2010 was a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, was charged in an indictment unsealed yesterday with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. He faces up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine.

According to the indictment, Swartz hacked into the MIT network so he could mass download millions of documents from an archive operated by the nonprofit group JSTOR. When computer security tried to block his access, he allegedly broke into a basement closet of an MIT building to hard-wire his computer to the network.

Prosecutors say Swartz violated JSTOR’s licensing agreement prohibiting mass downloading of documents and the use of those documents for anything other than personal work. Authorities said Swartz planned to distribute the information free on file-sharing websites, cheating the archive of subscription fees, some as high as $50,000.

Of the 4.8 million documents downloaded, 1.7 million should only have been available for purchase through a sales service.

“Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar and whether you take documents, data, or dollars,’’ US Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz said in a statement. “It is equally harmful to the victim, whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away.’’

By yesterday afternoon, however, Swartz had received an outpouring of support from colleagues and friends who took to blogs and websites to defend his work and maintain that the charges against him are heavy-handed. More than 15,000 people had signed a letter of support for Swartz on the website DemandProgress.org.

Swartz already had regular, licensed access to the database through his work at Harvard. But prosecutors said he was so committed to the immediate acquisition of materials that he used special software to enable the quick downloading. He changed the Internet protocol address on his computer several times to circumvent security guards, according to court records.

In one case in October 2010, he allegedly used two computers, and the download pace “was so fast that it brought down some of JSTOR’s computer servers,’’ the court records stated. As a result, users had difficulty getting access to the system, prosecutors said, and at one point licensed access for them was cut off.

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