Published at LXer:

Years before the JSTOR scraping project that led to Aaron Swartz's indictment on federal hacking charges—and perhaps to his suicide—the open-data activist scraped documents from PACER, the federal judiciary's paywalled website for public access to court records. (The acronym PACER stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, which may sound like it's straight out of 1988 because it is.) Swartz got 2.7 million documents before the courts detected his downloads and blocked access. The case was referred to the FBI, which investigated Swartz's actions but declined to prosecute him.

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