This meets your "halfway credible" standard, although I can't vouch for its ultimate accuracy:

http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/

This blog describes a scenario in which JSTOR blocked Aaron's IP, then MIT blocked his MAC address, then JSTOR blocked an MIT IP range after he kept circumventing their attempts to cut him off. Ultimately, "Swartz broke into a closet in the basement of a building at MIT and connected his computer directly to the network — hiding his computer under a box so no one would see it."

It's worth noting that Prof. Kerr stated that he used the indictment as a significant source of the facts in his legal analysis. I would be inclined to trust it a lot less as an account of what actually happened than for the analysis of what the law says given the facts he describes.

"Hiding his computer under a box so no one would see it."

That's always the part on TV where the defense objects to the prosecution drawing inferences or something like that.

Even if we saw him on authentic video placing a box over a computer, it's still something very different to say it was so no one else would see it.

Exactly. Even if it was "so no one else would see it", for all we know that "someone else" to Aaron was the homeless person that kept his stuff in that closet.

I wouldn't have thought that hiding his face with a bike helmet would have mattered. After all, I do weird things any time I know I'm being watched by a camera; there's one on the elevator at the garage that I habitually cover.

Orin Kerr said that stuff matters at trial.

As I posted elsewhere, it seems that "sneaky" and "strange" are equal to "wrong" and "guilty" in most people's eyes.

Okay, that tears it! Somebody has replaced tptacek.

What did I say? Did you really think of me as someone who thought it was important to be forthcoming with surveillance cameras?

No, I hadn't. It's your emphasis and attitude that come across as completely different. I kept trying to tell ya, the legal machine looks a lot different when you examine it as if you're the one at odds with it.

By abusing computer fraud laws to needlessly persecute Aaron Swartz, these Boston prosecutors have done grave damage to the entirely legitimate enterprise of having the state help protect individuals and businesses from criminals who can and do hire out superior security talent. Look at HN over the last two days: anyone who's ever been convicted of a computer crime, even if that crime involved the mass theft and subsequent resale of credit cards, is a newly minted hero of the cause of openness. That's Boston's doing.

The law cannot hope to capture every possible nuance of all conceivable offenses. As every lawyer who's ever argued with a Hacker on HN has pointed out, the law is not a programming language and courts aren't computer architectures. We want our rules, laws, and metalaws to provide every protection to the accused that they reasonably can, but at some point it's always going to come down to the discretion of humans appointed to positions of authority. Those authorities need to be equal to the task, or we delegitimize the whole effort.

I'm sad about what happened to Aaron. I look at the photos of him in his teens hanging out with Dave Winer and Lawrence Lessig; he was a small kid, and I have a big 13 year old. I exchanged an email or two with him, but my wife didn't know him at all and she's upset, as I would assume any parent reading about this would be. And obviously in light of what happened, I'm a little harsh on how I interacted with Aaron online --- not on the prosecution threads, but you know, on threads about "hollywood launches" and stuff like that.

But beyond that, what happened offends me in principle. If they're not the exact same principles that you've had offended, that doesn't matter much, does it? The justice system seems to have achieved a pretty high level of coverage in offended principles.

> anyone who's ever been convicted of a computer crime, even if that crime involved the mass theft and subsequent resale of credit cards, is a newly minted hero of the cause of openness

Specifics? I don't recall seeing this, but maybe I'm just unobservant.

> The law cannot hope to capture every possible nuance of all conceivable offenses

On the other hand, the point of having the law instead of The Decider is that acceptability of a particular behavior can be reasonably foreseen. And for the long standing laws most everybody now thinks of as self-evident (murder,rape,robbery,etc), this is basically the case. But the problem with many newer widely-scoped laws, especially federal ones, is that they're highly vague and allow so much leeway, the question becomes quite unanswerable. Are these vague laws primarily used to punish bona fide criminals? Yes. But when we fail to examine the law for what it conceivably could do and instead take comfort in what it usually does, when we fail to stand up for injustices against people who are ultimately not very nice, we set ourselves up for exactly what happened here - a grave injustice against an unlucky blatantly-undeserving target. It's simply the only thing remaining that provides any check on the expedience of the Deciders.

I unfortunately never interacted with Aaron. I identify with a lot of his optimism, even while feeling older than his naivety. I think we've probably had similar principles offended in this case. It just took a tangible incident with high wtf-levels to offend yours, where as mine go off for hypothetical possibilities and run-of-the-mill wtf-levels.

> I'm a little harsh on how I interacted with Aaron online --- not on the prosecution threads, but you know, on threads about "hollywood launches" and stuff like that.

Those prosecution threads should give you pause just the same, and Aaron is absolutely not the only person that you've acted like that with. I respect you tremendously for your technical knowledge, but for someone who reminds people to 'stay classy' and who claims the moral high ground with some regularity a bit of introspection wouldn't hurt. I'd respect you a lot more still. I'm very happy to see you come around in your way of thinking about this particular case though.

You're definitely the same Jacques I remember. I haven't come around on this case; I have the same opinion of it I always had. Like Aaron's own lawyer, I was confident he was at no real risk of serving time --- first time offender, no commercial purpose, no co-conspirators, minimal attempt to hide, no damage. It was hard to fathom that he'd do worse than credit card thieves. Unlike his lawyer, who was privy to all sorts of facts neither you nor I had, I was unaware of the psychological games the prosecution was playing. Have you noticed how shocked everyone is at what happened? That's because what happened was shocking. I think what Aaron did was wrong, but like I said at the time, I was hoping he'd do well at trial.

I definitely don't think of myself as any classier than you; I think we occupy opposite poles of some deranged message board energy sphere. Or you're the heat miser and I'm the cold miser. Either way, I can spot a dumb argument as quickly as you can, and just because I'm imperfect doesn't mean I'm not going to point them out.

> I haven't come around on this case; I have the same opinion of it I always had.

I'll take your word for it but I'm getting a different impression.

Aaron was fairly clearly being made an example out of, and I think that after the expansion of the indictment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4528083, a thread in which you commented, and which came before the thread about Aarons friends setting up a defence fund) that would have been pretty obvious even to those not already of that opinion.

Maybe I'm slightly more sensitive to this stuff because of some of the things that happened in the wake of reocities.com but let's just say that if Aaron had charges worth a few decades thrown at him for TOS violations and unauthorized access I should probably be in jail for at least several decades because of that little gig.

I know everybody is shocked at what happened, but I'm far more shocked at Aarons' suicide than at the travesty of justice perpetrated there, there are lots more examples of such things happening on a daily basis.

I think my mentality about the law is different enough from the one that prevails on HN that I appear much more conservative or authoritarian than I am. I say something anti-authoritarian and I sound like I've done a 180.

We should stop talking about us, or at least, about me. This isn't about me/us.

> I say something anti-authoritarian and I sound like I've done a 180.

That's probably it. I couldn't help but notice.

> This isn't about me/us.

Agreed.

Yes, it does. Things that make you seem like you are being a criminal hurt. The hard thing is that sometimes either option looks bad.

For instance, IIRC, Weev deleted the download script that pulled data from AT&T and the data itself, once publicity had been gotten. That was construed at trial as deleting evidence.

But part of the prosecutors' case was that Weev et. al. planned to exploit the data. In that case, keeping the data would have been used against them as well.

Burglary (entry for the purposes of committing an offense) is broken down into three sub-categories: forcible entry, unlawful entry where no force is used, and attempted forcible entry. It doesn't matter if you use a tank or a paperclip, or even if you're successful.

You're not the first person to think up the "but it wasn't locked (very well)!" defense. :)

Of course, but then we ought to apply reasonable standards of trespass before we can talk of federal-level "breaking and entering". He was present as a guest on MIT campus and the trespassing charges had even been dropped.

Show me a university campus where the students don't poke around in unlocked basements and closets and I'll show you a worthless university.

Entering a wiring closet with a lawful excuse is permitted. You genuinely thought it was the door to the bathroom, or smelled smoke.

Entering a wiring closet with lawful intent but not a lawful excuse is trespass. For example someone left a light on and you wanted to turn it off. The property owner can generally have you removed and file a civil case.

Entering a wiring closet with unlawful intent is a crime. For example your MAC address has been blocked from the wireless network and you intend to plug in to avoid that block.

So hopefully it makes sense now. They can't just charge him for breaking into the closet (unless he did property damage), but they can charge him in addition to another crime (and you can argue till your blue in the face if THAT was a crime, I don't have an opinion). Its like the magical "with intent to distribute" if you cut up your drugs into lots of little baggies.

(IANAL, but I did have one explain this stuff to me years ago in relation to an employee termination)

So if he entered a supply closet at the library to borrow a pen, and then he evaded taxes with that pen, he "broke in" even if the library allowed people to borrow pens from that unlocked closet?

Breaking into a supply closet is not a fact that helps establish any element of tax fraud.

So it's "breaking in" if it helps the prosecution's case, by definition.

What a weird system.

"What a weird system."

A little yeah. But check this out. If you steal something, you won't automatically go to jail. Someone has to sue you because of that first. Same thing, I think.

He wasn't charged with breaking & entering. The fact of his "breaking in" to the wiring closet was used to establish his intent and understanding that his actions were unauthorized. It's part of a pattern of facts that established the elements required to charge him with fraud.

Well somehow the press and everyone started reporting that Aaron "broke in" to the closet where the wires were gathered and I figured they were using a legal term of art.

If we can s/broke in/entered/ without changing the meaning, then this "breaking" use sounds like pure spin.

It's spin (the closet was quite unmaintained given its dual use as a homeless shelter), but it's also legally meaningful when talking about the network access he obtained in there.

Lots of places are unlocked that you're still not supposed to go into. How hard it is to get into somewhere you're not supposed to go is completely irrelevant, as is how hard you have to work to evade someone trying to get you off their network.

MIT has a pretty open unofficial policy when it comes to trespassing, as one would expect from any school with a dominant hacker culture. People used to go into network closets, pick locks, go into maintenance tunnels, etc. There's a very visible/popular student club on campus devoted to this.

That doesn't mean there aren't limits, and MIT clearly thought those limits were violated here.

Which is something that apparently shocked Swartz. In fact, whatever the administration at MIT may have felt at the time, Swartz wasn't violating the community norms as I understood them. Maybe there's something sacred about wiring closets at MIT, but every other place there seems to be a hobbyist lockpicking playground.

This is obviously a situation where the community norms of MIT have collided painfully with the policies of its administration. Swartz thought the norms would be controlling; he miscalculated: it was the policies that mattered.

Is there any evidence that MIT's 'policies' were anything other than made up on the spot?

As far as I can tell it looks like "OMG! The attacker has changed his MAC address! We don't know how to stop him! He's stealing all the priceless research papers...call the DHS cyber-espionage defense unit for help! the packets are coming from INSIDE THE WIRING CLOSET!!"

"Let's stop the guy who keeps on breaking into our network" is not "made up on the spot."

MIT gives you wide power on the Internet. You aren't firewalled at all. I'm not even sure if they filter port 25.

But you also have the responsibility that comes with that power. The fact that they don't wrap you in bubble-wrap doesn't mean you can't hurt yourself or others.

> MIT gives you wide power on the Internet. You aren't firewalled at all.

So since Swartz was considered a guest on the MIT campus, he could hardly have been "breaking in" to this wide-open non-firewalled network.

You should really just read the account in the indictment, it's quite accessible: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/217115-20110719-schw.... I think many of us would take issue with how the indictment derives appropriate charges, but the factual account seems relatively straightforward and thorough.