No, the Pacer thing was previous. He was accessing JSTOR’s archive of
   (often publicly funded) scholastic research with a crawler of sorts.
   His main mistake seems to have been not rate limiting his requests,
   which caused so much traffic that he impinged server functionality and
   got noticed by the sysadmins for JSTOR, who then blocked access. He
   kept circumventing the blocks, drawing more attention, until they
   finally figured out who he was, where he’d put his laptop on their
   network, and arrested him.

   --
   Al Billings
   http://www.openbuddha.com
   http://makehacklearn.org

   On Tuesday, December 31, 2013 at 3:20 PM, Jim Bell wrote:

     My understanding (from reading the Wikipedia article on Swartz an
     hour ago) was that he accessed "PACER" information.
     ( [1]http://www.pacer.gov/   )    The information in PACER (which I
     have used a few times before, for example to access the docket for
     fake, forged, fraudulent "appeal" case 99-30210) is simply Federal
     court case files.  (Dockets; filings).  This material is legally in
     the public domain:  It is not even copyrighted.  I don't know if
     Swartz did anything 'illegal' to get into the computer that had the
     information, but I doubt that.
        Incidentally, the charge for PACER documents is now $0.10 per
     page, but if you run up a charge of less than $15.00 in a calendar
     quarter, there is no charge.  (In other words, less than 150 pages
     downloaded are free)
           Jim Bell

References

   1. file:///var/lib/mailman/archives/private/cypherpunks/attachments/20131231/654f4ad5/attachment-0001-tmp.html