[eldr]

I wonder how he would be treated if he had picked up a stack of paper printouts an AT&T employee had left on a park bench and taken it to a news outlet in order to showcase AT&T's recklessness with customer information? Would Aaron Swartz's case have been handled the same way if he'd gone into a library and photocopied a whole heap of journal articles? The powers that be seem terrified that someone might use technology in a way which they can't control. Apart from the disgusting human rights abuse that these cases illustrate, I worry about the future when people like judges and prosecutors think it's at all fair or reasonable to put people in jail for freely accessing information.