You mean corporate lobbyists wanting federal enforcement of contract terms and corporate interests had nothing to do with it?
Have we seen mass prosecutions under the CFAA at the behest of corporate interests?
I don't think that's the case, tons of people are violating various policies all the time and they're not being prosecuted.
SCOTUS was right in narrowing the focus, but I'm not sure the CCFA really was some corporate conspiracy, if it was ... they didn't make much use of it outside of some terrible, but still isolated incidents.
Even things like the abuse of arbitration agreements I think more likely stem from creative lawyers using existing laws to their advantage, not as much direct legislating as is often claimed.
The article has Aaron Swartz in the title, so yes. MIT and JSTOR lobbied the feds to pursue Swartz and there are many more examples.
I think the issue isn’t the total number but the potential total number. So if there’s mass violation and law enforcement picks and chooses who to prosecute that’s a problem. Although obviously it’s less a problem if they do that 1,000 times a year vs 1,000,000.
They can't do it to everyone because of simple logistics, but they can do it to anyone.
If you didn't get thrown in prison today, it's not because the problem doesn't apply to you and you are safe. It's only because no one decided it would be super convenient for them if you went away.
No, they didn't. Once Swartz turned over all the data he had collected and promised not to do it again, both MIT and JSTOR said they were satisfied and told the feds they did not want any further action taken. The feds chose to pursue Swartz anyway.
But I think that’s pretty weasily as having a neutral position while the government is prosecuting means endorsing the status quo. “Not proceeding with the assumption that MIT wanted Aaron Swartz to go to jail” is so BS. How about a statement of “We do not want AS to go to jail.” Or “We do not believe a crime has been committed” or “As the operator of the network, we do not consider this a violation of CFAA” or the million other useful things MIT could have said and done.
Many urged MIT to advocate to not prosecute and MIT chose not to.
Also MIT brought the charges of breaking and entering that led to Swartz’s arrest. And that’s pretty lame given MIT’s mission and what Swartz was doing.
If I was a student and my guest was arrested for B&E that would be bad.
MIT isn’t legally culpable, but they acted poorly and all they needed to do was say “hey don’t do that” instead it led to a large scale prosecution and a suicide.
Spinning this like MIT wasn’t responsible or JSTOR wasn’t responsible is so mealymouthed.
[0] https://news.mit.edu/2013/mit-releases-swartz-report-0730
That's because they didn't know who it was that was doing it. Their main purpose in getting the police involved was to find out.
> Many urged MIT to advocate to not prosecute and MIT chose not to.
Yes, that's a fair point (and IIRC the Abelson report makes a similar point), and it was an overstatement on my part to say that MIT asked that no further action be taken. (I believe JSTOR did, though.)
However, that's still very different from saying that MIT (or JSTOR) "lobbied the feds to pursue Swartz", which is what the post I was originally responding to claimed. Neither MIT nor JSTOR did any such thing.
> Spinning this like MIT wasn’t responsible or JSTOR wasn’t responsible is so mealymouthed.
I don't think either MIT or JSTOR were responsible for "pursuing" Swartz. They certainly weren't responsible for threatening him with decades in jail. That was the federal prosecutor.
One could argue that MIT was "responsible" because they didn't work harder to persuade the feds not to pursue Swartz. But that could just as easily have been because they couldn't wrap their minds around the idea that a federal prosecutor would go so overboard until after it had actually happened, at which point it was too late.
> all they needed to do was say “hey don’t do that”
It's not at all clear to me that that would have made a difference, given the attitude of the federal prosecutor. That's not to say MIT shouldn't have done it (I think they should have), but it's also not an argument, IMO, for MIT being responsible for what happened to Swartz. Prosecutorial overreach is the responsibility of the prosecutor--and of the government that empowers the prosecutor, and ultimately of all of us citizens who empower the government.
Also I think had MIT asked the prosecutor not to prosecute then the case would have been dropped. Without MIT and JSTOR saying Swartz committed computer fraud, the prosecution would have no case. Etc etc.
The case existed because MIT wanted it to exist.
Why not? He did that.
> Not charging him for cfaa charges.
MIT didn't do that. The federal prosecutor did.
> Not treating like a laptop plugged in is a felony.
MIT didn't do that either.
> I think had MIT asked the prosecutor not to prosecute then the case would have been dropped
I don't know what you're basing this on. Everything the prosecutor said at the time made it clear that they wanted to make an example of Swartz and would have done much the same thing no matter what MIT and JSTOR said.
> Without MIT and JSTOR saying Swartz committed computer fraud
Neither MIT nor JSTOR ever said that. Charging Swartz under the CFAA was the federal prosecutor's doing.
> The case existed because MIT wanted it to exist.
I think you are mistaken. I think the case existed because the federal prosecutor wanted it to exist. That's not to say MIT made no mistakes, but we should put the blame for the CFAA prosecution and the threat of decades in jail where it belongs.
It's nice to pretend someone's in charge of all the bad things that happen, but as They Might Be Giants reminds us, most of the world is described by individual actors doing what they can get away with in individual circumstances.
Remind me where they remind us? This is the crucial content I'm here for.
In the end, he is (likely) murdered and disappeared by the mayor of his small town for challenging the mayor's right to steal his property, because in reality there is no higher power checking his local government's authority. It's the lack of any massive conspiracy controlling events that kills him.
This is a case where a small number of people had a very profitable racket going, selling access to publicly funded scientific papers, and Swartz posed a threat to their racket.
https://theintercept.com/2021/02/15/marty-walsh-aaron-swartz...
Prosecutorial malfeasance is a serious problem in the US, probably worse than police shootings in sheer number of lives broken, notably due to the abusive plea deal system where innocent people have a Hobson's choice to accept a plea just to avoid the risk of draconian penalties if they take the chance of a trial and whatever attorney will be assigned to them.
Swartz posed a threat to the ability to privately profit off of publicly funded science.
You left off the "had nothing to do with it?” part, which was a rhetorical assertion of equivalent hyperbole, but not a direct claim. If you want to interpret it that way you should to include the question mark in the consideration of your response....
Look at all the recent Federal activity aimed at shutting down Sci-Hub.
>A reminder that Elsevier made $6 BILLION selling your academic journals and articles behind paywalls, and made more profit than Amazon, Google and Apple every year for YEARS...
And paid the academics who wrote the articles $0 And paid the reviewers of the articles $0
https://twitter.com/DrJessTaylor/status/1390798132632596488?...
CCFA beyond the situation described to me still serves a purpose / can be used responsibly.
Thus very popular with elected officials seeking a positive reputation among the electorate or seeking campaign funding.
I have trouble believing anyone pushing the CCFA somehow cared enough to be disingenuous about it... to me that require more than a randomly applied label.
I would not be surprised if the recent upticks are directly correlated with privatized prisons.
There’s a corporate interest right there! Having some experience from within (healthcare industry, original DRG implementations and TEFRA), I can say that not everything you can get Congress to implement (at the behest of lobbyists) works out beneficially for your particular corporate or industry interest.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/movies/wargames-and-cyber...