Code Swaraj
post-release condition for a so-called hacker is also that you can’t touch a computer or the Internet, a horrifying thought for somebody like him. The U.S. Attorney was bound and determined to take this all the way, and told Aaron’s attorney there would be no plea bargain without a jail sentence.
What Aaron had done was simply download a large number of articles. Downloading articles was allowed on the JSTOR service. Any student was allowed to read JSTOR journal articles as part of the campus-wide service. The problem was that Aaron was reading too fast. It still baffles me that this became an allaged crime.
Aaron didn’t release those articles, though it was clear that is what the U.S. Attorney was convinced that this was what was about to happen. I was not so convinced. When Aaron downloaded PACER docs, he handed them to me to scrub and release. He didn’t run servers, he leaned on people like me and Brewster for that. He had made no move to release the JSTOR data.
Perhaps he would have also taken steps to release those articles at some later date, but there was no evidence that he would have done so and he certainly would not have taken those steps without working with somebody like me or one of his many other friends on the net.
He had previously downloaded a large number of law journal articles from West, and he didn’t release those either. Instead, he did a big data analysis on the articles and co-authored a seminal paper showing how law professors often received grants from corporate interests to write favorable articles on their issue, such as legal liability for pollution, and those articles were then used in court cases.
Aaron told Clay Johnson, a close friend of both of ours, that he was going to analyze the JSTOR articles for evidence of corruption in climate change research. Aaron’s words to Clay after he were arrested were, as best as Clay can remember the conversation several years later, were “sure, the data should be free, but I just wanted to do a fucking analysis of funding for climate change articles.” That sounds like Aaron.
With Aaron arrested and me digging deeper and deeper into the issue of technical standards, I wasn’t sleeping well, and I spent countless nights reading. When Aaron committed suicide in January 2013, the entire Internet grieved, especially those of us who had the privilege and honor to work with him. I still grieve.
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