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In an ironic turn of events, Aaron Swartz, 24, of Cambridge - a former fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Ethics - has been charged with stealing more than four million documents from the academic papers archive JSTOR by hacking into MIT.
According to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Carmen M. Ortiz, Swartz could be subject to 35 years in prison and a fine of $1 million if convicted. Because JSTOR is not located in Massachusetts, the alleged electronic theft of documents occurred across state lines, making it a federal crime.
The indictment says that Swartz broke into a computer wiring closet at MIT to get access to the MIT network multiple times from Sept. 24, 2010, to Jan. 6, 2011. Since MIT paid JSTOR for access to their archives - as nearly all colleges and universities do - Swartz allegedly used that connection download “a major portion” of the archive.
At times, Swartz’s alleged downloading efforts were so network intensive they “impaired computers used by JSTOR to service client research institutions and threatened to misappropriate its archive.”
According to his website, Swartz is the founder and director of Demand Progress, a nonprofit political action group. While he lists himself as a co-founder of Reddit on the site, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian told the website Gizmodo.com that he was not a founder, but that Reddit bought a company he did found shortly after Reddit launched. In 2006, Mass High Tech reported that then 19-year-old Swartz joined Reddit as an early employee.
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