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Comment by walid | Hacker News Reader

In your first point you skip that the reason why Aaron was able to get into the system was that MIT was a breeding place for the hack culture and didn't clamp down on security like keeping the door of the switches closet open and allowing highly privileged access to its network. If it was locked or entry was prohibited then it would have been outright against set rules. It wasn't. This means according to MIT's followed traditions he did what everyone else was capable of doing and it was not against the law because heavy use of the network and access to the switches room was allowed.

As for your second point it doesn't hold. The kerfuffle around the NSA is partly because it was collecting data from the ISPs without a warrant and 4th amendment rights are being violated. In this case MIT is in the same position as the ISPs while not having immunity over their actions like ISPs did.

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For your first point, Aaron was not an MIT student or MIT faculty so whatever traditions MIT might have regarding their lax security, they didn't apply to him.

Either way MIT made it actively clear to Aaron that his presence was unwelcome on their subnet. Keep in mind that your logic would excuse essentially any amount of computer crimes and actual vandalism if applied in general to anyone who cared to go to MIT. Note further that MIT 'hacks' are also famous for having the hackers treat the campus with great care to include not interfering with the rest of the students' study and cleaning up after themselves when they were done. And student 'hacks' certainly didn't last over a period of weeks and months.

As for your second point, MIT was the ISP (at least to the point of their network peers and upstreams) and since MIT is not the government the Fourth Amendment never applied between MIT <-> Aaron. Aaron's Fourth Amendment rights (which range Aaron <-> government) could never be violated by MIT unless MIT were working directly at the behest of the government, which is not something that happened here.

Rather MIT voluntarily cooperated with the prosecution after completing their own investigation (which is always the right of the victim of a crime). But ISPs don't get a separate legal immunity; if you are an ISP and act like an ISP (including following the law as an ISP) then you would have the same legal rights as any other "ISP".

Your first rebuttal point is totally eviscerated by the fact that regardless of whatever "hacker culture" May or May not exist at the largest non-profit defense contractor in the country, it is always the right of a private institution to revoke a right to use private property. MIT did precisely that. And Aaron knew his right to use the property had been revoke, otherwise he wouldn't have continued to access the property while disguised. He also violated the terms of use of MIT's network, which specifically mention copyright infringement.

Your second rebuttal point is simply a misstatement of the law. Only the government can violate your 4th amendment rights, not private parties like MIT, unless they're acting as agents for the government. But 4th amendment rights are not violated when a private party freely shares it's own documents with the government. The 4th amendment is only implicated when the government accesses your documents and you don't consent.

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