Federal Government Indicts Former Demand Progress Executive Director For Downloading Too Many Journal Articles

Moments ago, Aaron Swartz, former executive director and founder of Demand Progress, was indicted by the US government. As best as we can tell, he is being charged with allegedly downloading too many scholarly journal articles from the Web. The government contends that downloading said articles is actually felony computer hacking and should be punished with time in prison.

Demand Progress is a prominent organizer of civil opposition to US government efforts to curtail freedom of information on the internet, including the kill switch and blacklist bills. They are political threat to a paranoid, cynical, and technologically ignorant worldview—and nothing else. If a member of their leadership has indeed been arrested on trumped up charges, it is disturbing to say the least.

Update: here’s what JSTOR says happened:

Last fall and winter, JSTOR experienced a significant misuse of our database. A substantial portion of our publisher partners’ content was downloaded in an unauthorized fashion using the network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of our participating institutions. The content taken was systematically downloaded using an approach designed to avoid detection by our monitoring systems.

So that’s their side of the story. What constitutes “unauthorized” here, and what legal penalties apply for accessing data in a way that was not anticipated remains to be seen. It’s hard to know if this aggressive prosecution is targeted, since aggressive prosecution of anything computer related is the norm. But the laws that enable such disproportionate use of government power are of course exactly the ones Demand Progress organizes democratic opposition to.