When I was in grad school, we had a "visitor" WiFi network available to people visiting campus. The network was only supposed to be used by guests; access was automatically cut off after two weeks to force students and staff to register for the main campus network. But registering was a bit of a hassle, so when I first got to campus I simply used the visitor network. When my two weeks ran out, I was still too lazy to register—so I spoofed my media access control (MAC) address and got another two weeks of free access.

Maybe that's why the federal government's aggressive prosecution of activist Aaron Swartz for "hacking" activities that include MAC address spoofing makes me so uncomfortable. A year ago, we wrote about the indictment of Swartz for spidering millions of academic papers from the JSTOR subscription archive. Now, the federal government has unsealed a new indictment, increasing the number of charges against Swartz from four to thirteen. If convicted of all charges, Swartz could be sentenced to decades in prison.

The document liberation front

Many universities pay hefty subscription fees to provide their users unlimited access to archives like JSTOR. Most non-academics pay by the article. Swartz, who was a fellow at Harvard University in the fall of 2010, was apparently unhappy about this situation and so joined neighboring MIT's WiFi network as a guest and began rapidly downloading JSTOR documents. He reportedly got 4.8 million of them.

When JSTOR blocked his IP address, Swartz allegedly connected with a different IP address. When MIT then cut off his laptop from the network, Swartz allegedly changed his MAC address to allow him to regain access. Eventually, the government says that Swartz entered an MIT networking closet and plugged his laptop directly into the campus network.

The updated indictment describes the scene when Swartz returned to the closet a few days later to pick up his laptop: "Swartz held his bicycle helmet like a mask to shield his face, looking through ventilation holes in the helmet. Swartz then removed his computer equipment from the closet, put it in his backpack, and left, again masking his face with the bicycle helmet before peering through a crack in the double doors and cautiously stepping out."

Certainly there's no excuse for breaking into a private network closet and installing equipment without permission. But the government seems to have lost all sense of proportion here. And the apparent legal theory behind the government's case—that using a website in a manner that violates its terms of use constitutes felony computer hacking—could have serious unintended consequences.

Abusing the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

Congress passed the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) in 1986 to deal with the then-new problem of malicious computer hacking. Because the law was passed when the Internet was still in its infancy, the exact scope of its provisions remains murky today. For example, there have been cases of employers suing employees under the CFAA for using their employer-provided credentials to access information on the corporate intranet that wasn't intended for them.

In 2008, the government prosecuted a woman under the CFAA after her "cyber-bullying" of a teenager contributed to her suicide. The government argued that the woman's actions violated the MySpace user agreement, and therefore constituted unauthorized access to MySpace servers. The woman was convicted, but her conviction was later thrown out by an appeals court.

The government seems to be making a similar argument in the Swartz case. It says he violated the CFAA when he "intentionally accessed computers belonging to MIT and JSTOR without authorization, and thereby obtained from protected computers information whose value exceeded $5,000—namely, digitized journal articles from JSTOR's archive." By breaking Swartz's actions up into five different date ranges and charging him under two different sections of the CFAA for each, the government has ginned up a total of 10 counts, each of which is theoretically punishable by five years in prison. For good measure, they also charged Swartz with one count of "recklessly damaging" a computer under the CFAA and two counts of wire fraud.

It's a stretch to say that Swartz gained unauthorized access to JSTOR's servers. Initially, he did have authorization to access both the network and the JSTOR website. But according to the indictment, "each user must agree and acknowledge that they cannot download or export contents from JSTOR's computer servers with automated computer programs such as Web robots, spiders, or scrapers." The government seems to believe that once Swartz ran afoul of this contractual requirement, he became an unauthorized user and therefore a felon under the CFAA.

But treating the violation of such use restrictions, or the evasion of efforts to enforce them, as a felony is overkill. Automated crawling of websites is an extremely common activity that can have social benefits. While crawling a public (or, in the case of JSTOR semi-public) website against the wishes of its owner is generally bad manners, it's hardly comparable to hacking into someone's computer to access private information.

Websites have been known to use their terms of use for anti-competitive purposes. And as security researcher Chris Soghoian has pointed out, website terms of service impose a wide variety of requirements—some of which are routinely ignored by users. Criminalizing such violations is a bad idea.

Keeping a sense of perspective

It's not clear that Swartz's actions caused any significant harm. While the indictment asserts that Swartz's spidering disrupted other users' access to the JSTOR site, it does not give any quantitative details about the extent of disruption. The most significant harm was likely JSTOR's decision to cut off access to the entire MIT campus for several days to stop Swartz's downloads, which was not Swartz's idea.

The government alleges that Swartz planned to distribute the documents on peer-to-peer networks. Swartz reportedly penned a 2008 Guerilla Open Access Manifesto that argued that "we need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks." But if this was Swartz's plan, he never carried it out. He has reportedly surrendered all copies of the downloaded files. And in any event, distributing copies of copyrighted works would be an offense under copyright law, not the CFAA.

JSTOR, the alleged victim, tells Ars Technica that it did not seek Swartz's prosecution and has only participated in the case as a subpoenaed witness. Of course, the government doesn't need a victim's permission to bring a criminal case against a defendant, but if JSTOR didn't feel Swartz's actions merited criminal prosecution, it seems like overkill for the government to pursue the case anyway.

Swartz clearly has history on his side. The current model for distributing academic works, in which academics in many fields surrender their copyrights to commercial publishers who re-sell them at a steep mark-up (the academics themselves are generally not paid for the work), is fundamentally broken. Swartz's actions caused no permanent damage, and he was trying to call attention to a very real problem.

This isn't to say that Swartz is wholly innocent. Assuming the facts in the indictment are true, Swartz is something like a digital trespasser. Under Massachusetts law, such trespassing is punishable by a $100 fine and up to 30 days in prison. That seems about right: if he's going to serve prison time, it should be measured in days rather than years.