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.

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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. ( 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