Comment by greyface-

11 days ago

> trespassed into a room

A room with an unlocked and unmarked door, off of a hallway that was open to the general public. An INCREDIBLY tame act compared to other unprosecuted trespasses normalized and celebrated at https://hacks.mit.edu/.

> rotated his MAC address

Not a crime; in fact now a widespread and default practice for consumer Wi-Fi/Bluetooth devices.

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greyface-

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sillysaurusx  10 days ago

I'm not sure if this is meant as some kind of "gotcha," but the legal system doesn't work that way. He wasn't rotating his MAC address as a default practice. He changed the last byte of his MAC only when he noticed he was banned from the network.

Intent matters. Plugging your laptop into a router you normally don't have access to, with intent to download a large number of private articles, means something. And it means more than "I downloaded a lot of public files off the public internet," which is what Meta did.

All of this is in the indictment, which is worth reading: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/217117-united-states...

Personally I think it's a shame that digital crimes can result in prison time at all, except for e.g. crypto theft. But under US law, Aaron committed a crime back then, and it would still classify as a crime today.

  • thomasjeff1  10 days ago

    From your sourced link.

    > JSTOR,founded in 1995, was and continued to be a United States-based, not-for-profit organization that provides an online system for archiving and providing access to academic journal.

    If it was online, could any one have access to it? So why him downloading them was breaking the law?

tzs  10 days ago

You are greatly underestimating what was going on.

Over the course of months they tried all kinds of blocking methods that would stop most people, but he kept evading them. It is impossible that he did not know his use of the free access was no longer authorized.

Then he put his equipment on their wired network, which he had no permission to do so and had to trespass to do that. It is irrelevant that the door was unlocked and in a hallway the public could get to. It being unmarked just makes it worse, since doors the public is supposed to use generally are marked.

He also repeatedly came back to that room to check his equipment.

He was now grabbing data at such a high rate that JSTOR cut off all MIT JSTOR access for a few days while they tried to figure out what do next.

At that point MIT research is being disrupted. MIT does a lot of government research and what was going on was indistinguishable at that point from a hostile attack, and police were called.