[Infowarrior] - FBI Investigated Coder for Liberating Paywalled Court Records

[Richard Forno]

Threat Level Privacy, Crime and Security Online
FBI Investigated Coder for Liberating Paywalled Court Records
	• By Ryan Singel
	• October 5, 2009  |
	• 8:48 pm  |
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/swartz-fbi/
When Aaron Swartz, a 22 year-old programmer, decided last fall to help  
an open government activist amass a public and free copy of millions  
of federal court records, he did not expect he’d end up with an FBI  
agent trying to surveil his house.

But that’s what happened, as Swartz found out this week when got his  
FBI file through a Freedom of Information Act request. A partially- 
redacted FBI report shows the feds mounted a serious investigation of  
Swartz for helping put public documents onto the public web.

The FBI ran Swartz through a full range of government databases  
starting in February, and drove by his home, after the U.S. court  
system told the feds he’d pilfered some 18 million pages of documents  
worth $1.5 million dollars. That’s how much the public records would  
have cost through the federal judiciary’s paywalled PACER record  
system, which charges eight cents a page for most legal filings.

“I think its pretty silly they go after people who use the library to  
try to get access to public court documents,” Swartz said. “It is  
pretty silly that instead of calling me up, they sent an FBI agent to  
my house.”

The feds also checked Swartz’s Facebook page, ran his name against the  
Department of Labor to figure out his work history, looked for  
outstanding warrants and prior convictions, checked to see if his  
mobile phone number had ever come up in a federal wiretap or pen  
register, and checked him against the records in a private data  
broker’s database.

The Great Court Records Caper began last year when the judiciary and  
the Government Printing Office experimented with giving away free  
access to PACER at 17 select libraries around the country.  Swartz  
decided to use the trial to grab as many of the public court records  
as he could and, perversely, release them to the public.

He visited one of the libraries — the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of  
Appeals library in Chicago — and installed a small PERL script he’d  
written. The code cycled sequentially through case numbers, requesting  
a new document from PACER every three seconds. In this manner, Swartz  
got nearly 20 million pages of court documents, which his script  
uploaded to Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service.

Or, as the FBI report put it, the public records were “exfiltrated.”

The script ran for a couple of weeks — from September 4 to 22, until  
the court system’s IT department realized something was  wrong.  
Someone was downloading everything. None of the records, of course,  
were private or sealed, and Lexis Nexis has a copy of of PACER’s  
database that it sells a high markup. But Swartz wasn’t paying anything.

The Government Printing Office abruptly shut down the free trial and  
reported to the FBI that PACER was “compromised,” the FBI file  
reveals.  The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts told the FBI in  
March that Swartz had gained unauthorized access to the free PACER  
account.

“AARON SWARTZ would have known his access was unauthorized because it  
was with a password that did not belonged [sic] to him,” reads the FBI  
report summarizing the judiciary’s position.

Swartz says his script only ran on the library computer. It didn’t use  
a password at all, but used the PACER authentication cookie set in the  
PC’s browser.

He donated the 19,856,160 pages to public.resource.org, an open  
government initiative spearheaded by Carl Malamud as part of a broader  
project make public as many government databases as Malamud can find.  
It was Malamud who previously shamed the SEC into putting all its  
EDGAR filings online in the 90s, and he used $600,000 in donations to  
buy 50 years of documents from the nation’s appeals court, which he  
promptly put on the Internet for anyone to download in bulk.

The Washington bureau of the FBI opened their investigation of Swartz  
just a week or so before the New York Times published its account of  
the caper. The bureau didn’t contact him then, but in April, the FBI  
asked to interview the code jock– saying it needed his help to close  
the “security hole” he’d exploited. When Swartz declined, on the  
advice of counsel, the feds dropped the investigation after the  
Justice Department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section  
closed the case.

Swartz, an early employee of Reddit - a sister company of Wired.com —  
requested his FBI file in August, and describes it as the “usual mess  
of confusions that shows the FBI’s lack of sense of humor.” (Threat  
Level notes that the FBI’s filled Swartz’s FOIA request at an  
admirable speed that would have been unheard of as recently as last  
year.)

That’s how Swartz leaned that a Chicago-based FBI agent got Swartz’s  
driver’s license photo, and considered a stakeout of his home. But any  
surveillance, the agent concluded, would be conspicuous, since so few  
cars were parked on Swartz’s dead end street in Highland Park, Illinois.

The feds evidently identified Swartz in the first place by approaching  
Amazon, which provided his name, phone number and address. It’s not  
clear if the feds got a subpoena to learn his identity, but they may  
not have needed one; Amazon’s user agreement for its cloud computing  
solutions gives it the right to turn over customer information to the  
government on request.

Amazon did not reply to a call and online request for comment.

Two months after opening an investigation, the feds finally called  
Swartz on April 14. He declined to speak to them, and demured again  
through his lawyer two days later.

The investigation was closed on April 20.

PACER records still cost eight cents a page, but now Pacer users  
running the Firefox browser can donate their downloads to the public  
domain with a simple plug-in called RECAP.

Use of the plug-in is not likely to start an investigation of you. But  
then again, who knows.