This Is the MIT Surveillance Video That Undid Aaron Swartz
The door to the network closet pops open and a slender figure enters, a bicycle helmet hanging at his side. He sheds his backpack and pulls out a cardboard box containing a small hard drive, then kneels out of frame. After about five minutes, he stands, turns off the lights and furtively exits the closet.
This scene, captured by a video camera hidden in a wiring closet at MIT, was the beginning of a probe that led to federal charges against the late coder and activist Aaron Swartz. The video, along with dozens of other documents related to the case, has been released to the public for the first time through my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the U.S. Secret Service.
The video was made in January 2011, near the end of a months-long cat-and-mouse game between MIT personnel and a then-unknown user who’d been downloading millions of articles from a service called JSTOR, which provides searchable copies of academic journals online. MIT has a subscription that allows free access to students from MIT’s public network. Someone had been sporadically using that access to automatically download one article after another, at times so aggressively that JSTOR’s website was slowed.
