Hacker News

points by piltdownman 2 days ago | 0 comments

And I presume the Anthropic CEO will be indicted on 13 felony counts under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and for wire fraud. Like Aaron Swartz, right?

Right?

N.B. JSTOR explicitly settled with Swartz, suffered no financial harm, and begged the federal government to drop the case. The government refused and prosecuted Swartz anyway. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion primarily because of the theft and storage of the files, but this was somehow a Civil issue...

[–] giancarlostoro 2 days ago

I've been saying the same thing, Aaron Swartz arguably contributed more meaningful things long before AI, and was basically forced to make one of the worst decisions a person can make (at least in my opinion).

If you're unaware of who he was, or what happened to him:

* He was one of 12 others who helped to spec out RSS' standard (when he was 14 years old).

* He is widely considered a co-founder of reddit, after merging with reddit, he rewrote the majority of its codebase from Lisp to Python.

* He was one of the reasons Reddit protested SOPA back in the day (the same day that good 'old Kim Dotcom was raided and arrested by the US, the irony of which being that they swore up and down that they needed SOPA in order to do what they did to Kim Dotcom).

* I didn't know this before: he also developed the markdown publishing format with John Gruber.

What happened to him?

He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems. He took his own life as a result of them throwing decades of prison time at him for what's hardly a serious hacking offense (seriously, Kevin Mitnick was way worse). Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.

It is abhorrent to me that we have people doing more malicious hacks that get no repercussions. Someone at OpenAI / Anthropic should be 100% liable for criminal charges of what their AI models do. Need I remind everyone, that these models can run way faster than what we common folk can see, the speed at which they run these models internally can go so quickly that by the time the model is discovered to have hacked someone, it could very well be too late. Just try the "fast" feature of Claude Code, now imagine Claude launching thousands of sub-agents at top speed internally, the capacity for unprecedented destruction is the most concerning thing to me, I say that as someone who uses Claude every week.

[–] 9x39 2 days ago

>He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems.

He did hack these systems and MIT's network. They had video of him in the MIT wiring closet and a mountain of circumstantial evidence. I'm not saying it wasn't pursued aggressively out of political motivations, which seems supported if you dig enough, but the facts of the case were about more than PDFs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz

[–] bayindirh 2 days ago

I don’t think plugging a laptop to an open switch port and launching a script to scrape webpages to get PDFs to an external drive is hacking per se.

If it was, impersonating home users en masse to scrape the whole web to train models would result in lifetime in prison. Now we call it fair use.

[–] 9x39 2 days ago

What if they get blocked from the network and repeatedly change accounts, IPs and then MACs repeatedly to get around progressively escalating blocks from the network admins?

What if they hide a laptop in a wiring closet and then try to come back for it while covering up their face to hide from a camera inside of it?

What if they run from the police who try to stop them?

In any case, we don't have to have quibble over shades of gray, it's all in the well-documented write ups and court docs. Mens rea is easily established here.

[–] adgjlsfhk1 2 days ago

> What if they get blocked from the network and repeatedly change accounts, IPs and then MACs repeatedly to get around progressively escalating blocks from the network admins?

If you think anyone who makes a new account in a videogame for getting an old account banned should be charged with felony hacking, that's certainly a position you can take...

> What if they run from the police who try to stop them?

Running from police officers isn't generally considered hacking.

[–] quadhome 1 day ago

What if they get blocked from the network and repeatedly change accounts, IPs and then MACs repeatedly to get around progressively escalating blocks from the network admins?

Was your response facetious? The AI labs literally do this, right now.

[–] Gud 1 day ago

Except on a much grander scale…

[–] shadowgovt 2 days ago

And ultimately, we'll never know what a court of law would have said because he chose (to the extent that anyone wrestling with the mental illness that is suicidal depression really chooses) to never have his day in court, unfortunately.

[–] demo4567 2 days ago

still not "hacking". you are grasping at straws

[–] spwa4 1 day ago

Are you trying to make the case against Anthropic stronger? Because these are not arguments against Swartz (and other people) but they apply much stronger against Anthropic.

But we all know: billionnaires don't have to face responsibility for their actions, and the justice system is fundamentally dishonest. To REALLY drive that point home, let's do what you suggest and go over the worst crimes of Aaron Swartz. You know, the reason the FBI drove him to suicide to force him

> What if they get blocked from the network and repeatedly change accounts, IPs and then MACs repeatedly to get around progressively escalating blocks from the network admins?

Anthropic has done this, and a LOT more than Aaron Swartz ever did.

> What if they hide a laptop in a wiring closet and then try to come back for it while covering up their face to hide from a camera inside of it?

Anthropic has done this, and a LOT more than Aaron Swartz ever did.

> What if they run from the police who try to stop them?

Anthropic has done this, and a LOT more than Aaron Swartz ever did.

But why stop there?

* What if despite all the above they KEPT hacking more?

Anthropic has done this.

* What if they did not just hack system, but tried to deceive humans into publishing malicious code into government systems, both succesfully and unsuccesfully

Anthropic has done this.

* Same as the above, but with physical treats against the safety of the software maintainers?

Anthropic has done this.

* What if after all that, they state that they would develop bioweapons?

Anthropic has done this.

Can you imagine a human hacker without money doing this? They would have been shot on the spot rather than arrested. Yet, somehow, I don't think Dario Amodei will face that sort of attention ...

[–] saidnooneever 2 days ago

mitnick also just logged into shit with default passwords and got ppl to send him source codes and give him access to stuff. by todays 20-stage crazy ass exploits its also not really hacking... these things change over time.

[–] shadowgovt 2 days ago

We've been impersonating home users en masse to scrape the whole web to verify ad network integrity for I think two decades now, at least.

[–] anuptalwalkar 2 days ago

I am only kidding, but if he would have used AI, or just said agents did it, in todays day and age he would be raising capital for his company.

[–] grafmax 8 hours ago

Where is the jail time Sam Altman faces for unleashing AI worms across the internet? Nowhere. Billionaires don't face jail time.

[–] thin_carapace 2 days ago

putting morality to the side in favor of legal pragmatism , certain jurisdictions classify the act of accessing data without prior authority as data espionage

[–] exe34 2 days ago

What annoys me is that when I asked Claude to use code I had already written with selenium to scrape a web page, it refused and told me it wasn't going to get into an arms race with cloudflare. One rule for them and another for us.

[–] 15155 2 days ago

If you leave the door to your house unlocked, am I welcome to come in, pop on into your utility closet, plug into a switch port and take everything your machines allow me to fetch?

I don't disagree with what he was doing from a moral standpoint or a hacker standpoint, but it's very easy to convict him.

This discussion typically devolves into an argument about what is "publicly accessible." No reasonable person (i.e. those who serve on juries - not autistic software engineers) would agree that someone who isn't even a student at a school is legally entitled to enter a building (unlocked or not), venture into their utility room and access protected computer resources.

Everyone loves to make this about JSTOR: they weren't the only victim. MIT was far more aggrieved; JSTOR blocking his Harvard account access and him proceeding to breach their TOS ("clickwrap agreements aren't law!!!") and circumvent their defenses isn't required to convict him of CFAA violations.

Why can't I go into a bank, sit down at a personal banker's desk who is away on vacation, plug into a switch port and do whatever I want? There's no lock on his cubicle, the door was open! This is the legal equivalent of "neener neener, I'm not touching you."

Mens rea is an important thing people love to sweep under the rug with this case:

• First and foremost: Why did he have to go to into a closet at MIT to fetch documents? Why not do it at home or a public library?

  • Because of rate limits and/or authentication requirements. He *knew* he could not obtain the access he needed through other means, so he had to trespass to do it.

• Why did he cover his face with his bicycle helmet... just when passing by cameras?

  • He wasn't some weirdo who liked to wear his helmet that way: he stopped immediately when he believed he didn't need to conceal his identity any further. He *knew* he shouldn't be there.

• He registered his guest account using false credentials: "Gary Host" and "Grace Host" - "Ghost"

  • Why wouldn't he just use his real name if he believed what he was doing was legitimate?

• When MIT blocked his IP, he released/renewed and fetched a new one. Fine, no problem on its own, hard to prove intent there. When MIT subsequently blocked his MAC address, he proceeded to change one character and kept on downloading.

  • Computer people will try to reduce this to "MAC addresses aren't legal identifiers blah blah blah." The beliefs of zealous third parties are completely irrelevant: direct measures were taken to prevent his access, he recognized and immediately circumvented them. He *knew* what he was doing. That's what matters.

• Why hide his hardware under boxes? In absence of all of the other facts, sure, one could argue that he didn't want students at this ultra-prestigious Ivy League school to steal his shit, but to a reasonable person weighing the totality of the circumstances: he was again concealing his actions because he knew they were wrong.

[–] supermatt 2 days ago

No one is sweeping mens rea under the carpet. That he knew what he was doing isnt in dispute - its that the punishment didnt fit the crime. If that standard were applied evenly, then the CEOs of certain AI companies would each be facing millennia in prison for the volume of copyright infringement they knowingly and wilfully performed.

[–] 9x39 2 days ago

If you had them on camera doing it and proof they did it knowingly and willingly, then you could.

Discovery forces evidence to be turned over, but only if it exists and you know about it. Does the evidence exist?

It did in Swartz’s case, unfortunately for him. We don’t excuse an individual just because it’s harder to hold a corporation accountable. States have immense power over corps old and new, btw, it’s a failure of the people to not demand that be exercised, but this whole discussion is a non sequitur already.

[–] bayindirh 2 days ago

> If you had them on camera doing it and proof they did it knowingly and willingly, then you could.

Better yet, they confessed it: "Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'" [0][1]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752056

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-s...

[–] supermatt 2 days ago

> proof they did it knowingly and willingly

But the emails from MZ explicitly approving LibGen leeching don’t count?

Limited liability doesn’t shield execs from personal accountability for illegal acts - money and power does.

[–] exe34 2 days ago

> he was again concealing his actions because he knew they were wrong.

No, you conceal your actions if you believe others will try to stop you. It has nothing to do with right or wrong.

[–] 15155 2 days ago

> you conceal your actions if you believe others will try to stop you

Which is conveniently exactly what the statute requires to establish criminality: knowingly exceeding authorized access. They have a lawful right to stop you (revoking authorization), you do not have a right to proceed anyway. This is the "wrong" and is accordingly a federal felony.

[–] emayljames 2 days ago

Did the university at any point specifically communicate to him that he is refused access? I find that a very defining point.

Automated limiting, or blocking is not the same as explicitly saying you as a specific person or entity are forbidden.

[–] demo4567 2 days ago

that is not hacking.

[–] EleKtr1X 2 days ago

by the way, a year after swartz worked on RSS (so when he was 15) he joined the creative commons foundation and helped create the technical architecture for it. what a guy

[–] giancarlostoro 2 days ago

Honestly, none of the AI execs will ever impress me the way Aaron Swartz did, its possible, but he did a lot of things himself.

[–] tzs 2 days ago

> He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems. He took his own life as a result of them throwing decades of prison time at him for what's hardly a serious hacking offense (seriously, Kevin Mitnick was way worse).

None of the federal charges really had anything to do with copying the files [1].

> Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.

You are comparing the ridiculous DOJ press release number [2] for Swartz to Mitnick's actual sentence. You should compare like to like, so should be comparing 35 years for Swartz to the ridiculous DOJ press release number for Mitnick which was 200 years.

[1] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20130211030902/https://www.popeh...

[–] TFNA 2 days ago

Do you have a citation for the claim that Schwartz was only copying "publicly funded research papers"? My understanding is that he was trying to pull all of JSTOR, which would be copyrighted papers going back to all kinds of funding models from many countries, not just US public-funded research.

Don't get me wrong, as a researcher myself most of us see him (and his successors in piracy) as heroes that make our work a lot easier by making everything so easily accessible, usually even more convenient than our own institutional libraries. But your claim sounds like inaccurate myth-building.

[–] georgemcbay 2 days ago

I'm not the person you replied to, but I assume it was more of an overly broad generalization than an intentional attempt at "myth-building".

A lot (but yes, not all) of that research is publicly funded and then locked away behind corporate paywalls.

[–] TFNA 2 days ago

JSTOR is a major repository of twentieth-century humanities publications. When these come from the US, they are usually privately funded research. HN is dominated by a STEM crowd that tends to think only about that scholarship, which is often publicly funded, but in a discussion like this one needs a good familiarity with what JSTOR is and what it contains.

[–] exe34 2 days ago

Eh, I assume the humanities are a tiny portion of the funding for academia. Their equipment is what, coloured pencils and expensive tea? Hardly anything compared to a large hadron collider.

[–] TFNA 2 days ago

The humanities being cheaper than STEM is irrelevant to this thread about Schwarz bulk-downloading a source of myriad copyrighted papers.

[–] exe34 2 days ago

I was referring to the comment about private vs public funding. Yes, the only relevant fact is about the morality of hiding knowledge behind exorbitant pay walls. Academics submit papers freely, and sometimes pay for the privilege, peer reviewers work for free, and then the rent seekers charge everybody to read it. It's immoral. I agree.

[–] exreddit 2 days ago

> He is widely considered a co-founder of reddit, after merging with reddit, he rewrote the majority of its codebase from Lisp to Python.

Internally, this was not the case in 2013. u/kn0thing and u/spez were considered the founders, their retired jerseys hung on the wall, and no one ever mentioned Aaron Swartz.

[–] IncreasePosts 2 days ago

He was offered a 6 month plea deal. He took his own life due to depression. Something he tried to do multiple times in the past

[–] giancarlostoro 2 days ago

Sure, but he also denied that plea deal, so he was definitely looking at possibly 7 years in prison. This corporal treatment or whatever you want to call it, of our legal system is a bit ridiculous... "Take our offer or its worse!"

It basically treats you guilty until proven innocent, which I hate. I know Aaron Swartz very likely did, it was an activist level "hack" but what if someone else "did it" and they threw the book at them, and they took the felonies despite not actually having done it? Lots of people have taken plea deals because its less costly than fighting the law in court.

[–] artursapek 2 days ago

Why did he deny the plea deal? I hadn't heard that part of this story before.

[–] tourmalinetaco 2 days ago

In the US you have two types of legal systems, the state and federal level. Within each, you have misdemeanors and felonies. Misdemeanors are the lower level and cover non-serious crimes (vandalism, theft, minor traffic violations), and typically are fines or imprisonment of up to a year. They have no bearing on your rights as an American on either level. Some federal misdemeanors exist (poaching at natural parks or defacing monuments) but most federal crimes are felonies, leaving misdemeanors to the state’s discretion.

Felonies, however, impact your rights as an American. You cannot own firearms, you cannot vote, you cannot hold public office, and you are a “high risk” economically and socially, making loans and employment difficult. State-level non-violent felonies can normally be expunged/sealed over time for otherwise lawful citizens, but federal felonies never go away.

He denied the plea deal because he, as an activist, did not want to suffer losing those rights. The prosecution wouldn’t budge and was adamant in making an example out of him because he was a figure of hacktivism. They also desperately wanted the CFAA (a poorly worded law written by tech illiterates in 1986) to maintain its broad power.

For further context, this was a response to Anonymous and other would-be hacktivists, coming right off the heels of Anonymous’s Arab Spring campaign and the hack of HBGary. The Obama administration targeted Swartz to make an example out of him and scare future hacktivists, coinciding with the arrest of Sabu (the co-founder of LulzSec) and him becoming an informant to round up the current group.

[–] BobaFloutist 2 days ago

> you cannot vote

This is left up to the states.

> you cannot hold public office

Our current president is a convicted felon.

[–] tourmalinetaco 2 days ago

> This is left up to the states.

Sure, but almost every state blocks it for the duration of your time in prison, at minimum. A fair portion are longer, and some states make it almost impossible for federal felons to vote.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/can-...

> Our current president is a convicted felon.

That’s federal, which has no barriers. It’s left up to the states to decide how state level offices work, and being a convicted felon is a knife in the back of any potential political career. In NY specifically (where Swartz lived) you need a “Certificate of Good Conduct” or else you can’t run, and it would have taken (assuming he got convicted with 7 years as was threatened) 8-13 years for him to be legally able.

The exact specifics don’t even matter for Swartz’s case though, because for him it was more ideological than practical.

[–] giancarlostoro 2 days ago

My assumption is he did not want to plea guilty to a bunch of felonies, I think I read that this was part of it. It's rather extreme to throw that many years at someone like him AND felonies, I don't think he should have gotten a complete slap on the wrist, but what he did was literally web scraping PDFs, the kind that OpenAI and Anthropic do all the time and get away with, only instead of them being some authors IP, they were publicly funded in many, many cases.

[–] digitaltrees 2 days ago

Why do you need to add that last sentence?

[–] IncreasePosts 2 days ago

Because it's true, and he tried when he wasn't being prosecuted. The point has that some people are unfortunately prone to chronic suicidal episodes. It doesn't make sense to blame some external factor in cases like these.

If he was cut off in traffic and then went home and committed suicide, would you say that the driver that cut him off was responsible for his suicide. You might say that's because no normal person would commit suicide over that act, but no normal person would commit suicide when offered a 6 month house arrest.

And if you were going to commit suicide because of a long prison sentence you would probably do it after you were found guilty, like the guy who drank poison right as he was found guilty of something that would put him in jail for most of the rest of his life

[–] digitaltrees 1 day ago

That’s a disingenuous presentation of why you added it. Stated clearly, you added it to discredit him, the severity of the contribution that the charges played in harm to him, up to and including contributing to his suicide and to shift the burden from the government and its use of selective coercion to what others are arguing is a victim.

The government was or should have been aware of his mental health history and could have tailored the punishment accordingly so as to not risk pushing him over the edge. The constitution protects against cruel and unusual punishment which includes punishment in excess of the underlying crime, no one would argue his crime warrants death but by proceeding with the threat of excessive punishment on a person know to have suicidal tendencies the government is culpable in the consequences.

To use your example, the government knew he had a history of saying he would drink poison and said “here’s our finest selection of artisanal poisons, we will leave them right here next to your bed”.

The consequences of 6 months house arrest also came with having a felony record which would permanently affect his life making it harder to get a job and a broad set of consequences. And most people wouldn’t think breaking into a broom closet would have resulted in that. I had friends break into the computer lab, use the teachers password to copy games off school computers and get caught: should they face federal felony charges? Definitely not.

[–] Aurornis 2 days ago

> He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems.

The Aaron Swartz case is important to know about and has catalyzed some good discussions about CFAA reform, but that specific case is a lot more complicated than your summary.

Before I begin: I agree that the punishment was too significant for the crime. I completely agree on that count. Discussing the facts of the case draws a lot of angry downvotes, so to be clear: I'm not saying he deserved any of these sentences nor that the laws are written well. I'm trying to explain the facts.

The PDFs were open to downloads on the MIT network. Straightforward downloading of the PDFs wouldn't have been a CFAA violation. The case became complicated because he started circumventing restrictions on the downloads. This escalated to breaking into a wiring closet and hiding a laptop in the closed-off infrastructure. Once someone breaks into physical infrastructure to circumvent access restrictions, it gets really hard to argue that they weren't doing a form of unauthorized access.

> He took his own life as a result of them throwing decades of prison time at him for what's hardly a serious hacking offense (seriously, Kevin Mitnick was way worse). Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.

This is another part of the story that gets confused. Kevin Mitnick took a 5 year plea deal. The Swartz case plea deal was 6 months. The maximum sentencing numbers are repeated because they're shocking, but maximum sentencing was never on the table due to the low severity.

The plea deal (the correct comparison to Kevin Mitnick's case) would have been 6 months, not 35+ years.

[–] dannyobrien 2 days ago

One thing to note is that Aaron was, at the time, increasingly working in traditional politics, through his activist group Demand Progress[1] and his work with up-and-coming progressive politicians. I think he had come to the conclusion -- rather presciently -- that working in mainstream politics was the most effective thing he could do. Any criminal sentence would have severely hampered that work. I heard that played on his mind a lot.

There's a what-if story here: one of the people Aaron worked most closely with in this part of his life was a young Ben Wikler[2]. They shared a lot of views about how things should change, and how to change them. Watching Ben's career since then, I can't help but feel that Aaron would have followed a similar path. By 2025, Ben was senior enough in the Democratic Party to be a competitive candidate for Chair of the DNC.

I often wonder whether Carmen Ortiz[3], the U.S. Attorney whose office prosecuted the case, or any of the rest of that generation, realise what they did to the Democratic Party's future chances by unjustly targeting one of its most promising figures.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_Progress

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Wikler

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Ortiz

[–] mrheosuper 2 days ago

>Any criminal sentence would have severely hampered that work. I heard that played on his mind a lot.

If only he continued the work, he would be POTUS someday.

[–] shadowgovt 2 days ago

It's one of the parts of the story that highlights the tragedy of it: Swartz going through the process and out the other side could have bent mainstream politics. His story restonated, and continues to do so, with a technocratic community that itself gained a lot of political sway in the subsequent decades.

Sadly, we'll never know.

[–] giancarlostoro 2 days ago

> This is another part of the story that gets confused. Kevin Mitnick took a 5 year plea deal. The Swartz case plea deal was 6 months. The maximum sentencing numbers are repeated because they're shocking, but maximum sentencing was never on the table due to the low severity.

I'm aware, though I will note, in the case of Kevin Mitnick the crimes were abhorrent, and I am sure Aaron was 100% in the wrong, and I don't think he should have gotten a slap on the wrist, but felonies + prison time for a few publicly funded PDFs is a bit drastic.

To be fair, I'm trying to remember things that happened over a decade ago, I could get some things wrong. I think me and you agree for the most part either way.

[–] Aurornis 2 days ago

> To be fair, I'm trying to remember things that happened over a decade ago, I could get some things wrong.

The reason I know these things is because I remembered it the same way you did up until a few years ago. Then I re-read the case and was surprised at how much it differed from the version that has been repeated everywhere for years.

[–] tzs 2 days ago

> [...] for a few publicly funded PDFs is a bit drastic.

It was 4.8 million PDFs, which I think is a bit more than "a few".

[–] bayindirh 2 days ago

In today’s world, this is both a few and fair use. You just need to claim that you’re going to train models for research purposes.

[–] derektank 2 days ago

This is a serious misunderstanding of the Bartz case, which resulted in a $1.5B settlement on the part of Anthropic to authors whose works they pirated from LibGen

[–] jacquesm 2 days ago

Oh that's ok then. /s

ffs

[–] johnnyanmac 2 days ago

even back then, having 1 day in prison can forever impact your employment aspects. Perhaps the rising trend of internet influencer could have gotten around it, but it's less about the sentence and more about the federal government choosing to prosecute a young man over a situation both parties already settled.

Meanwhile, Claude does the same thing and it is deemed "progress" when the federal government profits from it.

[–] m4xp 1 day ago

Just dont look at early life section on wikipedia.

[–] redanddead 2 days ago

Who specifically was involved in that and what are they up to now?

[–] Onavo 2 days ago

Who were the prosecutors and lawyers involved in the Aaron Swartz case? Where are the pitchforks for them? You can't just hide behind "The Government".

[–] tourmalinetaco 2 days ago

Apparently, at least some of the people involved were Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann. While pitchforks did come, they were in no way punished directly for this case and were allowed to ride off into the sunset at the minor cost of their political careers.

[–] Onavo 2 days ago

According to Wikipedia, Heymann was involved in two computer programmer suicides? Just what the hell are they doing there? Isn't Mass a liberal state?

[–] raxxorraxor 1 day ago

Reddit more or less distanced itself from him though. Since then the platform thoroughly degraded too in my opinion.

But yes, if the US government would want to appear at least partially "just", it would apply the same pressure here. Somehow that is very doubtful.

And again shame on reddit for being that spineless.

[–] Aurornis 2 days ago

The Aaron Swartz case is not an analog of these claims.

The Anthropic class action was already settled. It's what they mention in the opening of the article. Anthropic got in trouble for downloading the books (pirating) but it was determined to be fair use to use the content for training.

Aaron Swartz was not charged with piracy or downloading PDFs, even though that's how the story has been told. The charges were related to him breaking into a private wiring closet, hiding a laptop, and circumventing access controls on a system.

The Aaron Swartz charges were ridiculous. I'm not disputing that. However, there isn't an equivalent charge in this Anthropic case. Even if you or I get caught downloading pirated PDFs of eBooks from a torrent, the CFAA would not apply.

The main class action suit was already decided. The Stanford professors in this story opted out of the class action and are trying to get higher individual settlements with their own lawyers.

[–] aleph_minus_one 2 days ago

> The Aaron Swartz case is not an analog of these claims.

Indeed: the prosecution of Aaron Swartz drove him to suicide, while Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei is still alive.

[–] soulofmischief 2 days ago

One of the issues a lot of people have is that if Aaron had formed an LLC and hired someone to connect the laptop for him, jailtime would never have been under the table and he wouldn't necessarily be directly liable for any large fines he couldn't pay.

There is a general sentiment that it is wrong for licensed organizations of people to get away with crimes ranging from these to supporting literal child labor, when an unlicensed group or individual faces decades in prison for the same offenses.

And there is another sentiment that Swartz would not have had to do what he did in the first place if copyright and the DMCA hadn't been erected only to be weaponized and discriminately applied,

[–] JumpCrisscross 2 days ago

> if Aaron had formed an LLC and hired someone to connect the laptop for him, jailtime would never have been under the table

Yes, it would. Ortiz was pushing a novel interpretation of the CFAA under which ToS violations constituted criminal access. It has no legal precedent but was in vogue at the time. (After Swartz, it fell completely out of favor.)

[–] sillysaurusx 2 days ago

Aaron broke into a network closet and actively circumvented MAC address bans. The comparison isn't meaningful. Anthropic downloaded theirs from libgen:

> Similar to the claims in Bartz, the plaintiffs allege that Anthropic illegally downloaded, reproduced and distributed their copyrighted books from “shadow libraries” like LibGen and PiLiMi, and that Anthropic broke the law by downloading and storing the pirated files in a central library.

[–] Vaushite 2 days ago

Libgen got them from Aaron Swartz in the network closet. Different stages of the same pipeline.

[–] 15155 2 days ago

And only a crime in one of them.

[–] malfist 2 days ago

Why isn't the comparison meaningful? Aaron broke the law and circumvented protections, Anthropic broke the law and circumvented protections. Regardless of if Aaron broke into a network closet or anthropic broke DRM, anthropic took explicit action to receive knowingly stolen goods.

[–] sillysaurusx 2 days ago

The CFAA is for unauthorized access to a computer system. Downloading from libgen isn't unauthorized access that can be prosecuted under the CFAA.

Say you have a network. You want to keep someone out of it. The tool for that is the CFAA.

If you have a book, and you want to stop someone from reproducing it, the tool for that is copyright.

They cover different domains. If you're not breaking into a network, you're unlikely to be charged under the CFAA.

[–] mountainb 2 days ago

This is correct. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030

[–] Moomoomoo309 2 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50263074 This comment explains how they did break the CFAA multiple times, got caught red-handed, and got a slap on the wrist.

[–] troupo 2 days ago

The same libgen which is illegal in the US and whose sources include those obtained by Aaron Swarz? That libgen?

[–] sillysaurusx 2 days ago

Yes. This isn't even controversial. Aaron broke into a network to obtain papers. The CFAA is applied when someone breaks into a network. Downloading from libgen isn't breaking into a network.

[–] piltdownman 2 days ago

Well if you really want to get into legal rather than moral distinctions, the company has already admitting to breaching the CFAA twice.

(1) They admitted its Claude models had breached the systems of three companies since April; including Huggingface.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-30/anthropic...

(2) More to the point, it 100% breached the CFAA by securing unauthorised access to a U.S. state government website hosting election-related data, pulling aggregate vote-count statistics from a gated government dashboard. The state government itself confirmed the access was entirely unauthorised.

https://seekingalpha.com/news/4657023-anthropics-claude-bypa...

If a human security researcher had deployed an agent that behaved this way, it would constitute a textbook felony under the CFAA for accessing those systems without authorisation.

Unfortunately different rules apply when you have the power to buy off Congress and the Appeals Courts.

Most recently a US appeals court ruled on 5 August that Amazon was unlikely to succeed on a claim that Perplexity's AI agents violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by covertly accessing private Amazon customer accounts.

https://www.rte.ie/news/technology/2026/0807/1586941-artific...

RIP Aaron Swartz.

[–] k12sosse 2 days ago

big money hoarders don't care about details. great picture you've painted here.

[–] Vaushite 2 days ago

Did he even break into a network? Seems to me he was on the student network he was authorised to be on, he just needed a safe place to hide his laptop with power and networking, so he left it in a server closet, instead of leaving it behind a radiator in the student library.

[–] FireBeyond 2 days ago

Let's ignore every other aspect of this case.

Criminal law, "beyond a reasonable doubt", doesn't mean "there exists, however implausible, an explanation".

He did break into the network - he was spoofing MAC addresses. You don't have a level of technical sophistication allowing you to do this, and then say "oh, I assumed the server closet with an "Authorized access only" sign, usually locked, seemed like a safe place, that's all, and since I was there, I figured I might as well just plug directly into a network switch in there."

Many judges are not technical. Most judges are not idiots.

[–] Vaushite 1 day ago

It downgrades the charge from felony computer network intrusion to misdemeanor trespassing.

[–] FireBeyond 1 day ago

How so?

Spoofing a MAC address because IT security has specifically sought to block you from network access (whether you think they "should" or not) just magically handwaved away because "he was really just looking for somewhere to keep his computer secure" (while it circumvented network access controls).

It did no such thing.

[–] davrosthedalek 2 days ago

I think Aaron was not an MIT student. So not really authorized on that network in the first place.

[–] lossolo 2 days ago

What matters is how you got it. Accepting a watch someone freely offers you is different from breaking into a house to steal it, even if the watch you were given turns out to be stolen.

[–] piltdownman 2 days ago

In reference to the laws handling stolen goods; the law holds you accountable if a reasonable person in your exact situation would have suspected the item was stolen.

For example, if the item was derived from a repository of stolen goods that was already illegal in the US on the basis of it being a repository of stolen goods.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/09/pirate-library-m...

[–] 15155 2 days ago

Which is why GP should never have attempted the "theft" analogy. No part of what Aaron Swartz did was theft - so every single statute you can cite regarding knowingly receiving stolen property is irrelevant.

[–] lossolo 2 days ago

The act of theft in my analogy is irrelevant, you can pick theft or any other analogy you like. What matters is that, under the law, there was another unlawful act in that process, one that falls under a different section and constitutes a different crime. That's what makes these cases different. You can agree or disagree with that, but that's how the law works and how it's interpreted.

[–] 15155 2 days ago

Receiving stolen property is a specific, enumerated crime - which statute are you alleging that Anthropic knowingly and intentionally violated?

[–] DannyPage 2 days ago

It seems like you believe it was wrong for Swartz to have been prosecuted. It doesn't seem like it would serve justice to prosecute other people in the same malicious way. Doing the wrong thing now just because a wrong thing happened in the past is not how a just society operates.

[–] NegativeLatency 2 days ago

The difference here is that you have an individual with no profit motive being hounded by the government, vs a corporation with a profit motive and evidence of a continued pattern being let off with a slap on the wrist. To me that is not a just society.

[–] smallmancontrov 2 days ago

Yeah, the "profit motive makes it right" idea that permeates our culture and law is bass ackwards.

[–] fasterik 2 days ago

There is also a "profit motive makes it wrong" idea permeating at least parts of the culture, which is equally suspect. We should apply standards consistently and judge the ethics by the amount of harm that was caused.

[–] __MatrixMan__ 2 days ago

It's not equally suspect. Profit seeking behavior, left unchecked, yields problematic outcomes rather quickly. Unmonetized actions don't seem to have this tendency. Like, nobody volunteers to distribute contaminated food, but people will do so quite readily in service to their bottom line. Until we can find a way to bias our economic outputs away from things that harm and towards things that help, guilty until proven innocent is the right heuristic for profit seekers.

[–] gbacon 2 days ago

> Like, nobody volunteers to distribute contaminated food, but people will do so quite readily in service to their bottom line.

Who? Name names. You are making a bold, broad claim. Who are these specific people against whom you have specific evidence of their willingness to “distribute contaminated food … quite readily in service to their bottom line”?

[–] __MatrixMan__ 2 days ago

The incident I had in mind is described here: https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/investi...

A quote from that page:

> FDA’s leading hypothesis remains that this was likely an act of economically motivated adulteration.

Maybe the cinnamon case was an isolated incident, but the use of lead compounds to change a food's color is a trend. Per https://www.npr.org/2024/10/24/nx-s1-5119336/cinnamon-lead-f...

> We're aware of this practice in turmeric, where lead chromate has been added to enhance the color

Are you actually going to argue that people don't do things that are unsafe for others when money is on the line? We're living in an ocean of evidence that it happens.

[–] preg_match 2 days ago

It's a thing, it's called food fraud. Happens commonly these days with various spices, which are often cut with metals to increase their weight. Sometimes those metals are heavy metals, which are obviously bad for you.

Historically this happened to basically all food. Meat was sold rotten, meat was pumped with water for volume, people lied about what meat they were selling, meat was glued together with other meat to create reconstituted cuts that were sold as whole, and on and on. We had exposes, The Jungle, and now that basically doesn't exist because of the FDA.

But, in countries without an FDA equivalent, you can imagine that food fraud runs wild. It ran wild in the US, too, and I think it's fair to say that the only thing limiting it isn't morals, it's the FDA and regulatory framework we've built.

[–] fasterik 2 days ago

"Guilty until proven innocent" is an authoritarian, quasi-Stalinist view. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with seeking profit, and most people who do so are completely within ethical bounds. For the ones who do unethical things, we have laws and courts to decide that and to punish them appropriately.

[–] __MatrixMan__ 2 days ago

Maybe not intrinsically, but until it stops hurting people in practice, we are going to remain suspicious.

[–] gbacon 2 days ago

It is not profit motive but public choice economics, from which we see that state actors and agencies act in their own interest. The difference is a defenseless individual being bullied by an overly zealous official who thought she had something to gain by beating up a nerd versus an organization picking on someone their own size.

[–] throwitaway222 2 days ago

I actually think we should maximally punish people for breaking the law if the law exists. And remove or edit the law if it no longer serves the people. The way we go about this stuff is that we let people break laws until it serves some purpose. Instead we should remove or edit the laws.

Otherwise we're creating a system where it is unfair for some people.

[–] Vaushite 2 days ago

I think they're just pointing out how the wrong thing always happens to the little guy.

[–] acuteaura 2 days ago

You’d have some standing if Anthropic actually acted in the interest of the public.

[–] TheCoelacanth 2 days ago

Anthropic has ample resources to fight this law if it is unjust. They should get vigorous, to-the-letter enforcement of the law to stress-test it for people who don't have the same level of resources.

Selective application of the law in favor of the rich and powerful is a perversion of justice, even if it does sometimes result in more just outcomes in individual cases.

[–] bsimpson 2 days ago

FWIW, the Aaron Swartz thing happened because an egomaniacal politician thought it would bolster her career. It was a fluke (her office was only involved by coincidence) with disastrous consequences.

We shouldn't be using that as precedent; in fact, it should be the opposite.

[–] iJohnDoe 2 days ago

Name her and her office.

[–] bsimpson 2 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Ortiz

[–] ecocentrik 2 days ago

Three prosecutors and MIT leadership were responsible for the charges. Most US Attorney's are scummy attack dogs because their work requires it, so I would blame MIT for wanting to make an example of him instead of handling it like a disciplinary matter and a teachable moment.

[–] bsimpson 2 days ago

I know one of the people involved. It wasn't MIT's call.

[–] shimman 2 days ago

No, we should absolutely use it to attack these anti-human technologists. The precedent has been set and we can fight back against these extremely anti-democratic death cults using the tried and true method of state sanctioned lawfare.

[–] JumpCrisscross 2 days ago

> precedent has been set

No precedent was set. Nothing went to court. To the extent there is precedent it’s in the prosecutor’s career having been ruined by that stain. Using that failed prosecution to attack anyone risks it becoming actual precedent.

[–] shimman 2 days ago

Of course precedent has been set, the government is able to litigate civil infractions into full blown felonies if they decide to.

You're thinking of something unrelated.

We can totally take these civil crimes and turn them into a variety of felonies, with any luck we could put some software devs in federal prison too. Maybe after a few dozen of them get locked away for 10 years our profession might take ethics seriously.

[–] JumpCrisscross 2 days ago

> Of course precedent has been set, the government is able to litigate civil infractions into full blown felonies

Swartz "was prosecuted for multiple violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA)" and wire fraud statute [1]. The CFAA angle specifically rested on a legal theory around escalating terms-of-service violations into felonies. That theory never found precedent because it literally never went to court. As a matter of prosecutorial discretion, it has never been brought up again because it tanked Ortiz's career.

> You're thinking of something unrelated

What do you think I'm thinking of?

> We can totally take these civil crimes and turn them into a variety of felonies

We can. It would mean reviving that legal theory. If it results in a conviction it becomes real legal precedent. That, in turn, means we get more prosecutions like Aaron Swartz's.

> Maybe after a few dozen of them get locked away for 10 years our profession might take ethics seriously

Cutting off the nose to spite the face.

Why not go after them directly with taxes and prosecution under non-harebrained schemes?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz

[–] shimman 1 day ago

Nothing you stated here is against what I am proposing: legalized state sanctioned lawfare against extremely undemocratic and anti-human organizations.

We are absolutely not cutting our noses off, what a dishonest reply. These engineers already broke the societal pact and they openly display deeply anti-human beliefs. Society does not agree with these beliefs and society should reflect this by having the full force of the government going after these companies that vast majorities of the public hate.

FWIW every single state has their own version of the CFAA laws. Some of which are drastically easier to litigate against these devs too as the services being impacted have users in every state.

[–] esnyder9 2 days ago

Aaron Swartz ran so the labs could sprint. Markdown is ginormous. Every answer on Stack Overflow is licensed under Creative Commons 2.0. 20 years of human exchange on Reddit. And finally, the knowledge he decided should be free for all mankind can be sold back to us, through a meter, by the token.

If he were still here, he would be 40 in only a couple of weeks.

[–] legitster 2 days ago

The distinction (besides Anthropic being too big to be thrown in jail) is that Aaron Schwartz was intentionally pirating research papers with intent to redistribute, and was publicly attacking copyright laws.

Anthropic training their model outside of public sight without intent to redistribute, and had a large paper trail that expressed they believed they were acting within fair use.

[–] __bjoernd 2 days ago

Are you saying Aaron Swartz should have just left a similar paper trail documenting that he believed to do the right thing in the interest of society? I don't believe this would have saved him from the wrath of the copyright industry.

[–] 15155 2 days ago

> The distinction is that Aaron Schwartz was intentionally pirating research papers

And, you know, all of the intentional, physical, artfully-planned means by which he did so.

[–] JumpCrisscross 2 days ago

> government refused and prosecuted Swartz anyway

A case which never went to trial and tanked the prosecutor’s career resulting in no more prosecutions of its kind to date.

Let’s not hanker for a return to that.

[–] john_strinlai 2 days ago

the cfaa is extremely broad, but it doesn't cover downloading books from libgen and the like. there is no alleged unauthorized system access (in this case).

[–] ashkankiani 2 days ago

Thank you for not forgetting about him. I bring up this insane and tragic persecution and prosecutorial injustice and hypocrisy whenever I can.

I don't understand how people have just moved past all these various obvious flaws in the foundations of our society. It's like finding a bug and saying "we don't need to patch it" and then building on top of it, all while knowing it exists. We all know that something is fundamentally wrong.

[–] SR2Z 1 day ago

It's a civil issue because the criminal case doesn't exist; training an LLM is fair use.

[–] 2OEH8eoCRo0 2 days ago

Swartz made the mistake of not using it to make lots of money.

[–] waffletower 2 days ago

Aaron Swartz should not have been prosecuted. Full stop. His case should not (and I am fairly certain will not) be seen as legal precedent for employees at Anthropic. Each time I have read the headline for this story today on HN I clicked below the up arrow wishing that there was a way to downvote stories. Intellectual property bullies are not only aggressively boring, their clamor adds nothing constructive to society: it is purely parasitic and uninteresting discourse.

[–] aleph_minus_one 2 days ago

> N.B. JSTOR explicitly settled with Swartz, suffered no financial harm, and begged the federal government to drop the case

... and the course of action of Carmen Ortiz', the responsible Attorney General, drove Aaron Swartz into suicide.

[–] josh_p 2 days ago

Everyone in this thread arguing the legalese of what Aaron did vs what Anthropic did is missing the damn point.

Yes, the exact crimes are not the same.

Aaron was a vulnerable individual and a very easy target for an overzealous prosecutor. Anthropic is a large company with the money and resources to shield any individual working there from meaningful punishment. No one at anthropic is facing jail time for crimes that should carry a sentence. The crimes are similar and involve theft of copyrighted resources. Aaron’s point with JSTOR is that all that research had already been paid for by American taxpayers. JSTOR was just gatekeeping for profit.

The message from Alsup is clear: if you have money, pay the fine and you can keep doing what you like. If you’re a single person without that, you will be caught and maliciously prosecuted.

[–] alex1138 2 days ago

The replies to you and giancarlostoro are of course disgusting, typical for "hacker" news (please the man, serve the man)

[–] a3w 2 days ago

does n.b. mean nota bene?

[–] digitaltrees 2 days ago

Thank you for saying this. I am getting tired of current SV speed running culture that actually like the means justify the end. And anyone that says “but ai will save so many lives every day delay is a genocide” spare me, you can’t prove that is true and you don’t get to violate established moral and legal principles in service of some vague and impossible to quantify future utopia.

And to be clear, Aaron should not have been charged under the circumstances.

[–] orochimaaru 2 days ago

Thank you for pointing this out. I always make this comparison when saying these people are thieves and should be subject to the same prosecution.

But the rich buy “justice”. Us plebes are meant to “face justice”.

[–] orochimaaru 2 days ago

Why the downvote? Anthropic and OpenAI leadership are thieves and profiting off things they don’t own. Aaron was doing it for the betterment of humanity, there wasn’t a profit motive involved there.

[–] stackghost 2 days ago

Of course nothing will happen. The wealthy play under a different set of rules in America.

[–] igl 2 days ago

“Corrupt third-world country” is what we’ll end up calling most Western countries if we keep applying double standards in our justice systems.

[–] RobotToaster 2 days ago

The USA is a third world country in a Gucci belt

[–] Vaushite 2 days ago

"Third-world" means "not allied with the US or with Russia"

[–] GolfPopper 2 days ago

That was the original meaning, yes.

In casual conversation in America English, it a derogaty term used to mean "poor and lacking in quality of life, freedom, and/or democratic governance."

[–] paimapi 2 days ago

Thanks, Obama! (literally - https://www.techdirt.com/2013/03/07/holder-doj-used-discreti...)