Hacker News

points by giancarlostoro 2 days ago | 0 comments

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.

[–] 15155 1 day ago

This is legally irrelevant to the statute.

[–] 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.