
More Than 35,000 Sign Petition In Support Of Aaron Swartz - apgwoz
http://blog.demandprogress.org/2011/07/more-than-35000-sign-petition-in-support-of-aaron-swartz/
======
dlikhten
I'm sorry its a bit hard to have this knee-jerk reaction without at least
having some background into the matter. Did Aaron in fact break into any
systems? Or did he legitimately access data and then get "flagged" for knowing
too much? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Knew_Too_Little>

~~~
shareme
no he circumvented the MIT guest system to download those JSTOR DOCs..

~~~
apgwoz
"circumvented the MIT guest system"? If by circumvented you mean, registered a
fake name, clicked accept and got an address via DHCP, then yes.

 _edit_ removed the "I bet you're guilty.." and added the below:

Should Aaron have asked for permission from JSTOR first? They seem to have
asked the feds not to prosecute, they _might_ have been willing to help
originally. Maybe he should have, but JSTOR is unlikely to say "yes."

So Aaron did what _most_ of us would have done. He wrote a script to acquire
the information he wanted to--fine. Have you ever mirrored a website? It's
likely that you felt guilty doing so, and maybe even went to your local
coffeeshop to do it on their network instead. You don't want _your_ IP banned.

Aaron seems to have done basically the same thing, but instead of a
coffeeshop, which wouldn't allow him access to JSTOR, since the access is via
proxy, he went to a neighboring college campus that likely had a JSTOR
subscription.

Now, the thing that's troublesome to me is that MIT didn't stop him while he
was doing it in the first place. Surely they'd have noticed 30,000+ requests
from the same IP to a protected resource, no?

------
tghw
_Mainstream media coverage has also turned in Swartz’s favor._

Not really. The quotes they provide are either neutral at best, from decidedly
not "mainstream" media, or are just the news outlets quoting DemandProgress.

I can kind of sympathize with Aaron's goal, but I can't really get behind the
methods. If the charges in the indictment are anywhere near true, they're
pretty damning.

