Disruptions: A Fuzzy and Shifting Line Between Hacker and Criminal.
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| The federal government described Daniel Spitler, left, and Aaron Swartz as hackers |
In January 2011, I was assigned to cover a hearing in Newark, where Daniel Spitler, then 26, stood accused of breaching AT&T’s servers and stealing 114,000 e-mail addresses.
Mr.
Spitler stood nervously next to armed United States marshals while
listening to the judge and prosecutors. I couldn’t help thinking that I
could have been the one in front of that judge, labeled a hacker by the
Justice Department.
Am I a hacker?
No. Not even close. Yet years ago, when I first started learning how to
write software code, I dabbled in things that could have been labeled
as such by our outdated justice system: downloading free online scripts
that could trace people’s whereabouts or scraping Web sites in search of
music that didn’t belong to me.
For the rest of the story: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/disruptions-a-fuzzy-and-shifting-line-between-hacker-and-criminal/
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