On July 19th, 2011, 24 year-old Aaron Swartz, Reddit cofounder and former Executive Director at Demand Progress, was arrested and charged with violating federal hacking laws. Swartz allegedly broke into multiple MIT buildings in order to hide laptops that could be used to automatically download journal articles from JSTOR, a service that normally charges many thousands of dollars for access to its database of journal articles but is offered free of charge to MIT students and faculty. The indictment goes on to suggest Swartz intended to redistribute the journal articles for free on the internet.LulzSec and Anonymous have been wreaking havoc over the last few months and gain more attention from major news outlets with every stunt they pull. Those news outlets, however, haven’t yet had the opportunity to report any significant progress in the dismantling of either organization. Moreover, a recent report from the FBI claiming that they’d arrested the leader of LulzSec was immediately countered via the group’s official Twitter account saying:Seems the glorious leader of LulzSec got arrested, it’s all over now… wait… we’re all still here! Which poor bastard did they take down?As if on cue, along comes Aaron Swartz, ethics-wielding internet hero, who wants to liberate a few million scholarly journals locked – immorally, says Lawrence Lessig – behind a paywall. His mission spans several months during which time he used a bicycle helmet to break into server closets (remember the sweaty nerd in Ocean’s Eleven?) and evades MIT’s network admins by, wait for it, changing the MAC address of his network card. Sounds pretty cool and dangerous, but, when you think about it, Swartz’s antics can more aptly be likened to Sterling Archer’s baby town frolics than an elaborate heist. But surely he hacked into JSTOR?, you ask. Unfortunately, no, those articles are freely available to anyone on the MIT network. Hacking wasn’t necessary, only a script to automate the downloading process.So is he guilty? Well, probably. We’ll have to see what prosecutors have in terms of evidence but it seems pretty straightforward. Swartz didn’t take many clever steps to hide his trail and the steps he did take could have been learned in a few minutes of Googling. But with all the internet crime going on these days (Netflix only recently surpassed BitTorrent as the #1 traffic hog), why arrest Swartz? Why not focus resources on protecting the power grid or hunting down LulzSec or educating companies on how to better protect themselves against cyber attacks?The answer seems simple: Swartz is an easy target and he can be used as an example to others. It’s moments like this where the FBI, the Secret Service, and whoever else investigates Internet crimes to hold a press conference and say something like, “We’re tough on Internet crime.”In reality they’re just tough on the little fish; the big fish get to sit back and laugh.
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