7 Tales of Bureaucracy
public access libraries and upload them to the PACER recycling site.
Aaron Swartz, whom many of you may know as the editor of the RSS spec and a prolific contributor to the Internet, called up and said he'd like to join the Thumb Drive Corps. I told him to be careful, knowing he was technically astute and inclined to script things pretty, um, aggressively. I warned him to make sure he didn't violate any of the guidelines the courts had set: if they said don't download too many docs, don't download too many docs.
A few weeks later I got email saying he had some data, could he maybe get an account to upload his docs directly? Sure, no problem, we let him SSH in, and data started to come in, and come in, and come in, and soon there were 760 gigabytes of PACER docs, about 20 million pages.
Aaron evidently had super-sized his Thumb Drive, but he's a bright guy, so we weren't totally surprised.
Then, the stream abruptly stopped and I got email from Aaron saying we needed to talk. Right away.
The Administrative Office had evidently finally looked at their usage logs after two months—and then abruptly cancelled the public access program overnight, saying a security breach had occurred. The Superintendent of Documents at the Government Printing Office gave a speech and said that not only had a security breach occurred, the FBI had been called in to investigate.
Aaron and I talked again, and after grilling him, I was still convinced we had done nothing wrong. There were no signs or appropriate use statements saying this was
