When Is Journalism Hacking? ⇥ theverge.com

When I linked to Tim Burke’s indictment yesterday, I compared the ridiculousness of the case to Josh Renaud’s near-indictment for viewing the source of a webpage. I missed an obviously more analogous and equally outrageous case: that of Aaron Swartz.

Sarah Jeong, of the Verge,

[…] Swartz was prosecuted for scraping JSTOR, a paywalled academic database that could be freely accessed on MIT’s campus network. Theoretically, his access began to “exceed authorization” when he signed into the network as Gary Host (G. Host, or Ghost), and then when, after campus IT attempted to block his computer for excessive server requests, he spoofed his DNS.

These are disproportionate consequences for actions which are, at worst, mischievous, not criminal. And we need a little mischief.