Harvard researcher charged with online theft

A 24-year-old researcher at Harvard University's Center for Ethics in Massachusetts in the United States was arrested on computer crime charges - including stealing massive amounts of data. Aaron Swartz was charged for stealing 4.8 million articles from an academic archive, including 1.7 million articles that were not free, computer security firm Sophos reported Wednesday. If convicted, he may face a maximum sentence of: 35 years in prison, restitution and forfeiture, and a fine of $1 million, Sophos Asia Pacific head of technology Paul Ducklin said. Ducklin said Swartz has an "interesting history" - as co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification, which was published just one month after his 14th birthday; and as part of the W3C's Resource Description Framework (RDF) working group just five months after that. "Since that, he's done lots of other things. He describes himself as the cofounder of social networking site Reddit (perhaps a bit of a stretch, since Swartz joined Reddit at 19 when the original founders acquired his company); as the founder of online political activist site Demand Progress; and as the founder of the the librarian's Wikipedia, the anyone-can-edit library catalog Open Library," Ducklin added. Charges The charges claim Swartz used Massachusetts Institute of Technology's network (not Harvard's) to download academic articles from non-for-profit academic journal archive JSTOR, allegedly with the aim of republishing them without restriction. According to the charges, MIT blocked his laptop and banned him from the network, but Swartz repeatedly took steps to circumvent the ban. He allegedly then "hard-wired" into the network. "Swartz's colleagues at Demand Progress are, unsurprisingly, aghast at the charges, with executive director David Segal suggesting that this is 'like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library,'" Ducklin said. — TJD, GMA News