Different types of cyber-attacks are perpetrated by different cyber-crime groups and the motivations for these activities are different. Some are known as white-hat hackers who try to hack networks to find the defects in them so that they can be patched. The black-hat hackers do the same activity for monetary or other gains. Others call themselves hacktivists and they do the hacking activities for socially and politically motivated purposes. While the legal response for some of the acts is straightforward, it is not so in all cases. The following case is one which brings about various ambiguities in the cyber law. There is still a raging debate going on as to who is at fault.
The case of Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz was found stealing 4.3 million journal articles from the online repository JSTOR, using its connections from MIT. He returned the documents to JSTOR and they did not proceed legally. However, the federal authorities prosecuted him and he was going to be imprisoned for 35 years if convicted. He committed suicide due to the harassment. Details of the case are in the Appendix.
Those who oppose the position of the Government on the Swartz’s case said that he had been championing the cause of sharing information on the internet and hence he was opposed to information repositories like JSTOR, which do not do any original work, charging for work that should be available free of cost to the people. Most of the research, he opined, is from institutes which are publicly funded and hence the reports should be freely available to the public. His supporters claim that he had reached an agreement with JSTOR and had returned all the material that he had downloaded. This was a victimless crime. JSTOR did not want to take any legal action. However, the federal authorities wanted to jail him for more than 35 years for a victimless crime or reduce the sentence if he pleads guilty to all charges, but Swartz’s beliefs and goals made this an untenable proposition.
In “Do artifacts have politics?” Langdon winner states that technological advancements have intended and unintended consequences. The advancements have some hidden agenda that is to skew the skew the landscape in favor of a few while outwardly professing to change the system for the genuine benefit of all. Aaron Swartz and his supporters say that the similar thing happened with the establishment of online repositories. They were set up to collect, scan, and arrange them in such a way that they are available for all to access. Without the intervention of these repositories, the information would not be available for all. JSTOR, for example, makes millions of journals available for faculties, students, and researchers of more than 7000 institutions in more than 153 countries, most of them free. However, Aaron Swartz states that since information is power, some of the people want to keep it all to themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage that has been published over the past centuries is being digitized and locked by a few individuals. He feels that sharing this information is not immoral but it is the only moral thing to do.
JSTOR had some technical protections to stop misuse of its documents, which would also limit the capability of downloading multiple documents serially. Aaron Swartz had circumvented these programmatically. According to the law, it is illegal. However, fair use allows this. So what fair use gives, is taken away by some technicality. Fair use is about intent. According to some, Aaron would have deliberated before he decided what to do with the documents and, in any case, he had returned them. However, others say that he intended to leak them if he had not been caught, so it is theft. The case raises issues such as the right of JSTOR to make the information available for only some of the users while many of the authors who had done the research had utilized public funds to do the research. Did Aaron really commit theft? Was it unethical for JSTOR to erect a paywall around the scholarly resources? Downloading the journals was not illegal. Automating the downloads involved bypassing a flag, which was illegal. So was Swartz really the culprit or the victim of an overzealous prosecutor? Were the Federal authorities right in trying to prosecute Aaron on charges such as unlawful entry, misuse of MIT property, and similar charges so that his total period of incarceration could reach 35 years for what was essentially a victimless crime? Why are a lot of renowned professors and distinguished people supporting Aaron Swartz, if he was wrong? Were the university library authorities wrong in monitoring the accounts of Aaron Swartz when the code of ethics of library’s all over the world profess to uphold the right of patrons?
These are moral, ethical, legal dilemmas that are present in this case. The debate still goes on.
References
Kizza, J. M. (2014). Computer network security and cyber ethics (4th ed.). Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc.
Lessig, L. (2006). Code version 2.0. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Winner, L. (Winter, 1980). Do artifacts have politics? Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity?, 109(1), 121-136. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652
Appendix
Aaron Swartz Case:
Aaron Swartz was a genius who had a part in inventing RSS 1.0 (Rich Site Summary) at 14, won an Ars Digita prize, cofounded Infogami, which later merged with Reddit, and also cofounded the advocacy organization Demand Progress. He dropped out of Stanford but earned a position as a fellow at Harvard’s Edmond. J. Safra center for Ethics. He was also one of the architects of Creative Commons and OpenLibrary.org. He was at the oral arguments of the failed Supreme Court case Eldred vs Ashcroft that challenged the constitutionality of copyright extension act. While under indictment, he took leadership role in stopping the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protech IP Act (PIPA).
Aaron Swartz was indicted for downloading more than 4 million academic articles from the online academic repository, JSTOR, using the connection that MIT had. This was done over three distinct series of attacks with the first one happening in September 2010. He entered MIT as guest and downloaded the articles after modifying access protocols of JSTOR, and due to the volume of the downloads, the entire C class network had to be blocked. The next attempt was less than two weeks later, which resulted in the JSTOR blocking the entire MIT campus. For the third attempt, he walked into a basement, broke the locks of a box of network switches, and connected directly to download these documents. It was there for a month and downloaded about 4.3 million documents. The system admin found the laptop and the authorities installed hidden webcams to catch Swartz while approaching the laptop. He settled with the JSTOR by giving away the hard disk containing all the documents and they stopped against taking any action. However, federal prosecutors went ahead and charged him on 13 felony counts. He killed himself at when he was 26 due to the mental harassment.
