Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com