Programmer accused of stealing 4 million documents in MIT hack

[Jeffrey Walton <noloader () gmail com>]

http://venturebeat.com/2011/07/19/programmer-accused-of-stealing-4-million-documents-in-mit-hack/

A 24-year-old programmer and online political activist could face up
to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine after being indicted on
charges that he stole more than four million documents from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and JSTOR, a nonprofit
archive of scientific journals and academic papers.

That programmer is Aaron Swartz, a popular expert in Internet academic
circles. He is the founder and former director of Demand Progress, a
nonprofit political action group. Swartz also created the nonprofit
site watchdog.net. His personal website states that he worked with
”Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee at MIT” to help ”develop and popularize
standards for sharing data on the Web.”

...

Swartz was indicted last Thursday by the United States Attorney for
the District of Massachusetts. According to a press release from the
district attorney, Swartz broke into a restricted area of M.I.T. and
entered a computer wiring closet where he accessed the M.I.T. computer
network and took millions of documents from JSTOR. He is charged with
wire fraud, computer fraud, obtaining information from a protected
computer and criminal forfeiture.
_______________________________________________
Dataloss Mailing List (dataloss () datalossdb org)
Archived at http://seclists.org/dataloss/
Unsubscribe at http://datalossdb.org/mailing_list

Learn encryption strategies that manage risk and shore up compliance.
Download Article 1 of CREDANT Technologies' The Essentials Series:
Endpoint Data Encryption That Actually Works
http://credant.com/campaigns/realtime2/gap-LP1/