Why Did The Secret Service Take Over Aaron Swartz's Case? | Hacker News Reader

Why Did The Secret Service Take Over Aaron Swartz's Case?

techdirt.com

133 pointshonzzz37 comments

In Techdirtland, the reason is clearly because Swartz opposed Obama's kill lists, and the administration needed to find a plausible way to have him killed.

In reality, it's because the Secret Service is for historical reasons the federal law enforcement agency most responsible for handling computer crimes. It's been this way since at least the 1980s, when the Secret Service was at the heart of the Sun-Devil Raids.

As anyone who's ever watched Law & Order can inform you: "two separate but equally important groups, the police and the district attorneys". In federal computer crimes, you can often substitute "Secret Service" for "police", and "US Attorney" for "district attorney".

As I understand it, the Secret Services' role in computer crimes investigations work is less central today than it was 2 decades ago, but they're still an important repository of investigatory talent for these kinds of cases.

Understanding that the Secret Service's involvement in the case was legitimate in no way means that you approve of the way the US Attorney's coordinating group for computer crimes led by Stephen Heymann handled the prosecution. That's a disclaimer I shouldn't have to write, but since this story is being voted rapidly to the top of the site, it's clear that I do need to write it.

The Secret Service also has jurisdiction over various types fraud - including telecommunications fraud and computer fraud. Given that the primary charge against Swartz was for Wire Fraud, it would certainly seem like something that could fall under their jurisdiction, or at the very least something that they'd be interested in enough to check if it should fall under them or should be left to another branch of law enforcement.

Do you know anything about the legislative and constitutional history of this? Why them and not the FBI or something? Seems very odd, but maybe just one of those weird government quirks.

The short of it is, USSS was, as "the Treasury police", responsible for counterfeiting investigations, and so inherited wire fraud. In the '80s, authority over wire fraud became authority over computer crime; as you can see, even in 2012, computer crime charges are often connected to wire fraud charges.

The irony is that whilst they're best known for protecting the President and other dignitaries, that they do so is the historical quirk and has nothing to do with what they were originally set up to do. From what I can tell, even today, their primary focus in terms of manpower is on fraud and counterfeiting, even if it's not their most visible side.

Tracking wire/mail fraud (interstate financial fraud, for the most part) was actually their original purpose. When a presidential protection unit was first being put together, the FBI didn't exist yet, so the Secret Service was the only police agency under Federal control, and they got the protection detail as a kind of side job. These days, they're best known as bodyguards, but they still have their original mission to deal with.

Let's imagine MIT was working on some kind of defense-related project ala Whirlwind. Could it be possible that the Secret Service gets called in on any possible suspicious activity on any network connected to such a thing?

IOW any network connected to the Internet, which would basically be almost all civilian networks and many military networks.

Someone has to handle it.

Depends if it were dod as a whole or a specific branch. If it involved one branch it would probably be NCIS for navy and marines or the respective CIDs for air force or army. The dod angle had crossed my mind. You can not hold a position above l1 help desk at Georgia tech without top secret clearance. All due to the defense research conducted at GT.

18 U.S.C. 3056 may be instructive here: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/3056

It could also be that the Secret Service swallowed the "copyright math" bullshit, and treating is as a case of significant economic impact.

"important repository of investigatory talent"

I had to smile. My firsthand experience is that they are like an elephant in a china store. They probably bullied Aaron like they bullied us. Instead of asking me to take down a form they preferred to take down 2 million forms by suspending our domain.

Suspension of our domain was extremely stressful for me. I had the support of my family and employees. But I can definitely understand Aaron. The stress of not knowing what will happen on a case like this can be too harsh for a young emotional person. He was being charged with 35 years. We don't know what kind of bullying he was taking.

We know who bullied Aaron: Stephen Heymann, the deputy chief of the criminal division for the US Attorney's office in Boston. It was his decision to hammer Aaron with 13 charges and refuse any reasonable plea bargain, not USSS. His name and signature are on the filings.

It's the mark of a talentless publication to piggyback on real reporters' work, and is especially distasteful for this topic, of which a site with the word "tech" in it should have their own angle on already.

Go to the original, Techdirt adds nothing:

http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/01/13/two-days-before-cambrid...

Actually its the mark of talentless publication to piggyback on a very real tragedy with a senseless link-baitey story that they could have answered for themselves in a completely non-conspiratorial way if they noted that every case involving CFAA is investigated by and/or handled by the Secret Service.

Didn't stop emptywheel though, nor Techdirt. They got what ever the paranoid equivalent of rage views is.

I thought the most interesting item in this story was not about the secret service, but rather the MIT counsel's decision to turn over evidence without a warrant or subpoena, in contravention of its policy. (Though it's possible they had a warrant and court order preventing its disclosure.)

I am sure the truth will come out.

There is one thing only revealing information about your legitimate users under warrant or court order. It is another to restrict yourself from providing information in the event that you have been attacked by someone who is not a member of your organisation.

Note that this does not mean that judgement should not have changed their behaviour in this case but that a rules based prohibition on voluntary cooperation seems like the wrong argument to me.

very good point. it seems like it would hinge on whether the act was defensive (MIT asking for help) or in reaction to an FBI request.

Perhaps for the same reason that the Secret Service raided (and nearly put out of business) Steve Jackson Games in 1990 because the author of their GURPS FRP module called "Cyberpunk" was a known "hacker".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._Un...

This isn't all that out of the ordinary. Back in 1995 I had the SS visit my family's home due to some of my childish behavior at the time. No fun, and luckily nothing ever came of it, but the SS was involved from the very beginning as far as I know. I never heard from any other law enforcement about the issue.

What did you do?

I accessed a network without permission from its owner, and my actions interrupted the normal operation of the network. That's about all I really want to talk about. I was very young and stupid at the time, and have since learned better :)

http://www.secretservice.gov/ectf.shtml

"Significant impact" is a clause wide enough to drive a truck through just by itself.

If anyone has ever read The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll it gives some insight as to why the government might want to have an organization with the remit to "bring together not only federal, state and local law enforcement, but also prosecutors, private industry and academia."

I think it speaks more to the fear Obama et al have of information exploits such as those embarked upon by Manning and Swartz.

The government has a lot of classified information they'd like to keep that way, and computers are a technology that civilians currently have more practical power over than governments. Compare civilian vs. governmental computer skills to, say, ballistic firepower. This is a fact, regardless of where your personal preferences are for the line to be drawn for government privacy, classification, etc.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with Obama, or Bush, or even Clinton. It's an arrangement that has existed for decades.

Read "The Hacker Crackdown" by Bruce Sterling for the background on this:

http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html

"The United States Secret Service is responsible for maintaining the integrity of the nation's financial infrastructure and payment systems. As a part of this mission, the Secret Service constantly implements and evaluates prevention and response measures to guard against electronic crimes as well as other computer related fraud. The Secret Service derives its authority to investigate specified criminal violations from Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 3056."

The scope of this is enormous, the SS webpage gives the following examples:

"Criminal investigations can be international in scope. These investigations include: counterfeiting of U.S. currency (to include coins); counterfeiting of foreign currency (occurring domestically); identity crimes such as access device fraud, identity theft, false identification fraud, bank fraud and check fraud; telemarketing fraud; telecommunications fraud (cellular and hard wire); computer fraud; fraud targeting automated payment systems and teller machines; direct deposit fraud; investigations of forgery, uttering, alterations, false impersonations or false claims involving U.S. Treasury Checks, U.S. Saving Bonds, U.S. Treasury Notes, Bonds and Bills; electronic funds transfer (EFT) including Treasury disbursements and fraud within the Treasury payment systems; Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation investigations; Farm Credit Administration violations; and fictitious or fraudulent commercial instruments and foreign securities. "

From: http://www.secretservice.gov/criminal.shtml

> The scope of this is enormous, the SS webpage gives the following examples

If this wasn't assigned to USSS to investigate it would simply be assigned to some other component of the DOJ.

You might claim instead that the government shouldn't have the purview to investigate "computer crime" at all, but computers have become far too important for that to be realistic. It might be better instead to explicitly disclaim some areas as barred from Federal investigation due to the risk to civil liberties, but even that would be a hard slog in today's America I think.

Is there any precedent to bar certain types of criminal investigations due to civil liberty concerns? I can imagine implementing stricter requirements but I'm at a loss completely barring certain investigations.

The closest I've seen is legislation that is worded to the effect "notwithstanding any other provisions of this section, this does not give the Department of Foo the authority to prosecute crimes covered under (b) above where the estimated damage is less than $5,000".

Basically it's a "we told you to do this generic thing, but that doesn't mean this is included in that".

That is "as close to" as an apple is close to an orange. Yes there are legislative carve outs for a myriad of reasons. I am suggesting that a complete bar against criminal investigations due to civil rights concerns is not one of them.

Is there any precedent to bar certain types of criminal investigations due to civil liberty concerns?

The 2nd Amendment open-carry situation in many states comes to mind. Most (western) countries would hogtie three ways from Sunday for you walking around with a holster just-because.

While I'm not a big gun guy, I've long thought the online community could take a few lessons from the NRA in beating back government past a larger boundary. Case in point: online media distribution could be left as a business problem for copyright interests rather than getting the FBI involved (let alone the Secret Service).

If this wasn't assigned to USSS to investigate it would simply be assigned to some other component of the DOJ.

To be sure, the SS isn't part of Justice, it's in the DHS, and part of Treasury before that. Maybe it could be seen as a problem that it's not under Justice.

Using the "Significant economic or community impact" clause, one could easily have enlisted the secret services into that investigation, saying the downloaded material represents thousands of man-years of work from the nation's top researchers. That statement is entirely true, however it has nothing to do with the zero-sum game it leads the uneducated eye to believe.

The secret services should have been apt enough to figure out from the start that the reported "crime" was no worse than having a kid loose in the library of Congress taking pictures of every public documents. They should never have equated it to stealing - removing - the material.

They didn't take it over 2 days before his death, they took it over 2 YEARS before his death.

which is two days before his arrest.

I'm guessing Techdirt had a breathless headline typo, since fixed.

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