Hacker News

points by sillysaurusx 2 days ago | 0 comments

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.