Disruptions: A Fuzzy and Shifting Line Between Hacker and Criminal

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.

As I sat in the courtroom watching Mr. Spitler, who 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I first started learning how to write software code, I dabbled in things that could have been labeled as such by our outdated justice system: downloading free online scripts that could trace pople’s whereabouts or scraping Web sites in search of music that didn’t belong to me.

A hacker can be a vandal who renders a Web site inoperable or a thief who profits from stolen passwords and credit card numbers. Mr. Spitler was neither kind. But he was being paraded in front of the world, charged with fraud and conspiracy, and likened, by Paul J. Fishman, the United States attorney for New Jersey, to hackers from LulzSec and Anonymous. Mr. Spitler told prosecutors that he tried to notify AT&T about the security hole on its site, but after the company did not respond, the e-mail addresses were given to Gawker and other media outlets. He said he did not sell them, or post them online.

“Forty years ago, a hacker was someone who took great joy in knowing everything about computers,” said Susan P. Crawford, a pr! ofessor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. “The word was really used in admiration. Now it is used to describe and condemn both professional cyberattackers and amateurs who are swept together within the broad description of the word.”

The same label of hacker was also applied by the Justice Department to Aaron Swartz. Mr. Swartz, a 26-year-old entrepreneur and activist, was set to be charged with wire fraud and computer fraud after he downloaded 4.8 million articles and documents from Jstor, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals, because he felt that information should be available to everyone at no cost.

Mr. Swartz could have faced up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines, but before the case went to trial, he hanged himself i his Brooklyn apartment. His family issued a statement, saying that his death “is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.” The United States attorney who was overseeing the case, Carmen Ortiz, said her office’s “conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case.”

Both cases are perfect examples of the justice system’s misunderstanding what a hacker actually is. To many people who understand computers and the law, there is a danger in lumping people who have not sought financial gain with armed robbers. Where people should receive slaps on the wrist, they face decades in jail.

“There’s still uncertainty as to what should be criminal online, and the statutes are pretty vague,” said Orin S. Kerr, a professor of law at George Washington University. “It’s hard because you’ve got conduct that looks bad, and maybe leads to some harm, coupled with vague laws that haven’t properly been clarified by Congress.”

The lack of clarity is something that became all too apparent in Mr. Spitler’s case. When asked by prosecutors why he had hacked the servers, he said he didn’t think he was doing anything illegal. When asked why, he replied, “’cause I didn’t hack anything.”

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

Disruptions: A Fuzzy and Shifting Line Between Hacker and Criminal

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.

As I sat in the courtroom watching Mr. Spitler, who 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 pople’s whereabouts or scraping Web sites in search of music that didn’t belong to me.

A hacker can be a vandal who renders a Web site inoperable or a thief who profits from stolen passwords and credit card numbers. Mr. Spitler was neither kind. But he was being paraded in front of the world, charged with fraud and conspiracy, and likened, by Paul J. Fishman, the United States attorney for New Jersey, to hackers from LulzSec and Anonymous. Mr. Spitler told prosecutors that he tried to notify AT&T about the security hole on its site, but after the company did not respond, the e-mail addresses were given to Gawker and other media outlets. He said he did not sell them, or post them online.

“Forty years ago, a hacker was someone who took great joy in knowing everything about computers,” said Susan P. Crawford, a pr! ofessor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. “The word was really used in admiration. Now it is used to describe and condemn both professional cyberattackers and amateurs who are swept together within the broad description of the word.”

The same label of hacker was also applied by the Justice Department to Aaron Swartz. Mr. Swartz, a 26-year-old entrepreneur and activist, was set to be charged with wire fraud and computer fraud after he downloaded 4.8 million articles and documents from Jstor, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals, because he felt that information should be available to everyone at no cost.

Mr. Swartz could have faced up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines, but before the case went to trial, he hanged himself i his Brooklyn apartment. His family issued a statement, saying that his death “is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.” The United States attorney who was overseeing the case, Carmen Ortiz, said her office’s “conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case.”

Both cases are perfect examples of the justice system’s misunderstanding what a hacker actually is. To many people who understand computers and the law, there is a danger in lumping people who have not sought financial gain with armed robbers. Where people should receive slaps on the wrist, they face decades in jail.

“There’s still uncertainty as to what should be criminal online, and the statutes are pretty vague,” said Orin S. Kerr, a professor of law at George Washington University. “It’s hard because you’ve got conduct that looks bad, and maybe leads to some harm, coupled with vague laws that haven’t properly been clarified by Congress.”

The lack of clarity is something that became all too apparent in Mr. Spitler’s case. When asked by prosecutors why he had hacked the servers, he said he didn’t think he was doing anything illegal. When asked why, he replied, “’cause I didn’t hack anything.”

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

Fire at a Nightclub in Southern Brazil

Victims of the fire are attended by medics.

An intense fire ripped through a nightclub crowded with university students in southern Brazil early on Sunday morning, leaving behind a scene of horror with bodies piled in the club’s bathrooms and outside on the street.

At least 245 people were killed, police officials said.

As my colleague, Simon Romero reports, a flare from a live band’s pyrotechnic show ignited the fire in the nightclub, called Kiss, in the southern city of Santa Maria. Throughout the morning on Sunday, rescue workers hauled bodies from the still smoldering building.

One video posted to YouTube showed several bodies of apparently unconscious vicims splayed on concrete outside of the club as medics check them for signs of life.

Shortly before the fire, a club D.J. posted a photo on Facebook from inside the crowded club with the caption: “Kiss is pumping.”

A short time later, another photo purportedly taken inside the club and widely disseminated through social media showed smoke billowing on the crowded dance floor.

BOATE KISS PEGANDO FOGO! http://t.co/tdV2DO4q

â€" Boatos SM ® #LUTO (@BoatoSM) 27 Jan 13

The fire quickly engulfed the building.

Firefighters battle nightclub blaze in Brazil.

Firefighters, apparently joined by volunteers who shielded their faces with T-shirts, struggled to pull people from the burning building.

Firefighters and volunteers tried to pull people from the burning building

Photos from the scene showed frantic friends and family members gathered outside the club and the hospital.

Follow Michael Schwirtz on Twitter @mschwirtz.

Dickens, Austen and Twain, Through a Digital Lens

ANY list of the leading novelists of the 19th century, writing in English, would almost surely include Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain.

But they do not appear at the top of a list of the most influential writers of their time. Instead, a recent study has found, Jane Austen, author of “Pride and Prejudice, “ and Sir Walter Scott, the creator of “Ivanhoe,” had the greatest effect on other authors, in terms of writing style and themes.

These two were “the literary equivalent of Homo erectus, or, if you prefer, Adam and Eve,” Matthew L. Jockers wrote in research published last year. He based his conclusion on an analysis of 3,592 works published from 1780 to 1900. It was a lot of digging, and a computer did it.

The study, which involved statistical parsing and aggregation of thousands of novels, made other striking observations. For example, Austen’s works cluster tightly together in style and theme, while those of George Eliot (a k a Mary Ann Evans) range more broadly, and more closely resemble the patterns of male writers. Using similar criteria, Harriet Beecher Stowe was 20 years ahead of her time, said Mr. Jockers, whose research will soon be published in a book, “Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History” (University of Illinois Press).

These findings are hardly the last word. At this stage, this kind of digital analysis is mostly an intriguing sign that Big Data technology is steadily pushing beyond the Internet industry and scientific research into seemingly foreign fields like the social sciences and the humanities. The new tools of discovery provide a fresh look at culture, much as the microscope gave us a closer look at the subtleties of life and the telescope opened the way to faraway galaxies.

“Traditionally, literary history was done by studying a relative handful of texts,” says Mr. Jockers, an assistant professor of English and a researcher at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska. “What this technology does is let you see the big picture â€" the context in which a writer worked â€" on a scale we’ve never seen before.”

Mr. Jockers, 48, personifies the digital advance in the humanities. He received a Ph.D. in English literature from Southern Illinois University, but was also fascinated by computing and became a self-taught programmer. Before he moved to the University of Nebraska last year, he spent more than a decade at Stanford, where he was a founder of the Stanford Literary Lab, which is dedicated to the digital exploration of books.

Today, Mr. Jockers describes the tools of his trade in terms familiar to an Internet software engineer â€" algorithms that use machine learning and network analysis techniques. His mathematical models are tailored to identify word patterns and thematic elements in written text. The number and strength of links among novels determine influence, much the way Google ranks Web sites.

It is this ability to collect, measure and analyze data for meaningful insights that is the promise of Big Data technology. In the humanities and social sciences, the flood of new data comes from many sources including books scanned into digital form, Web sites, blog posts and social network communications.

Data-centric specialties are growing fast, giving rise to a new vocabulary. In political science, this quantitative analysis is called political methodology. In history, there is cliometrics, which applies econometrics to history. In literature, stylometry is the study of an author’s writing style, and these days it leans heavily on computing and statistical analysis. Culturomics is the umbrella term used to describe rigorous quantitative inquiries in the social sciences and humanities.

“Some call it computer science and some call it statistics, but the essence is that these algorithmic methods are increasingly part of every discipline now,” says Gary King, director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard.

Cultural data analysts often adapt biological analogies to describe their work. Mr. Jockers, for example, called his research presentation “Computing and Visualizing the 19th-Century Literary Genome.”

Such biological metaphors seem apt, because much of the research is a quantitative examination of words. Just as genes are the fundamental building blocks of biology, words are the raw material of ideas.

“What is critical and distinctive to human evolution is ideas, and how they evolve,” says Jean-Baptiste Michel, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard.

Mr. Michel and another researcher, Erez Lieberman Aiden, led a project to mine the virtual book depository known as Google Books and to track the use of words over time, compare related words and even graph them.

Google cooperated and built the software for making graphs open to the public. The initial version of Google’s cultural exploration site began at the end of 2010, based on more than five million books, dating from 1500. By now, Google has scanned 20 million books, and the site is used 50 times a minute. For example, type in “women” in comparison to “men,” and you see that for centuries the number of references to men dwarfed those for women. The crossover came in 1985, with women ahead ever since.

In work published in Science magazine in 2011, Mr. Michel and the research team tapped the Google Books data to find how quickly the past fades from books. For instance, references to “1880,” which peaked in that year, fell to half by 1912, a lag of 32 years. By contrast, “1973” declined to half its peak by 1983, only 10 years later. “We are forgetting our past faster with each passing year,” the authors wrote.

JON KLEINBERG, a computer scientist at Cornell, and a group of researchers approached collective memory from a very different perspective.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 27, 2013, on page BU3 of the New York edition with the headline: Dickens, Austen and Twain, Viewed in a Digital Lens.

Mixing, Matching and Charging Less for a Phone Plan

AN Android smartphone with unlimited calls, unlimited texting, unlimited data and no contract, all for $19 a month Really

When I first saw this offer from Republic Wireless, I rubbed my eyes and looked for an asterisk leading to fine print that detailed a huge catch. But Republic, a division of a telecom company called Bandwidth.com, delivers exactly what it advertises. It can do so because the handset technology is a curious hybrid: it uses Wi-Fi when the customer is in a Wi-Fi area and Sprint Nextel’s 3G network when it is not.

The concept brings together the best of two worlds: the low cost of voice calls carried over the Internet and the convenience of making calls to any phone number using a major carrier’s cellular network when Wi-Fi isn’t available.

In my own case, on a typical day, I use my mobile phone mostly when I’m not actually mobile: I’m either at home or at work, perfectly positioned to use Wi-Fi at both locations. And I don’t even use the phone as a phone all that much. I use it mainly for e-mail and texts, neither of which requires enough bandwidth to benefit from the power of the fastest data networks.

If you walk into a Verizon Wireless store and buy an iPhone 5, you’ll pay $60 or more a month for an unlimited talk and texting plan, depending on the data allocation for Internet use that you select to go with it. Some of that monthly charge goes toward repaying the carrier for the discounted price that makes a $649 iPhone seem as if it costs only $200. But most of the charge is for gaining access to the carrier’s wireless network.

“We were looking at a mobile industry that had begun to charge extraordinary amounts of money, and we saw an industry opportunity that everybody else was missing: Wi-Fi is the new mobile,” says David Morken, co-founder and chief executive of Bandwidth, based in Raleigh, N.C.

Smartphone apps that offer voice calls using data plans, not minutes allocated for calls, are plentiful. Just last month, Facebook quietly added an option that lets users of the iPhone version of Facebook Messenger place free voice calls to other Messenger users. But using those apps to make a call means the recipient has to run the same app, an irksome requirement that never comes up when using phones alone.

Republic buys access to Sprint’s network on a wholesale basis for calls made outside of Wi-Fi areas. Its business model assumes, however, that Wi-Fi carries the load a majority of the time its phones are used. The company says that its service, even at $19 a month, is a profitable operation on a per-customer basis.

“We don’t have to force people, or even ask people, how to behave,” Mr. Morken says. “Over 60 percent of the time that the phone is being used, on average, our users are using Wi-Fi and that number is only going up.”

Last month, I tested a Republic handset, a Motorola Defy XT. It’s a light smartphone with a small screen, acceptable sound quality and great battery life.

Republic’s Web site gently warns against acting like a “data hog” and encourages its customers to “play nice and try to use Wi-Fi as much as you can.” But scolding isn’t needed: Wi-Fi is faster than 3G, so users have an incentive to opt for Wi-Fi wherever it is available.

The Motorola handset is the only one now offered by Republic, and it costs $259. The phone runs an older version of Android, and it has some first-generation glitches, like losing a connection when a caller starts out on a Wi-Fi network and then leaves the coverage area. (With a click, the call is resumed using Sprint’s cellular network.)

Today most Wi-Fi access requires a logon. But that shouldn’t prove a great inconvenience: you can simply set up the phone once with Wi-Fi at home, then once more at the office. At other locations, users can ignore Wi-Fi availability and use 3G instead.

Mr. Morken says a solution to the Wi-Fi-to-cellular handoff problem has been worked out in the company’s lab, and should be available midyear. Later this year, he also expects to offer more handset models, including one at the high end; he says they will run the latest version of Android.

Matt Carter, president of the Global Wholesale and Emerging Solutions division at Sprint, asserted that the company was happy to serve as Republic’s supplier. When I asked whether Republic’s Wi-Fi-centric model, with its drastically lower price to the consumer, would pose a serious threat to the incumbent carriers, including Sprint, he said, “If the world operated based on just economic decisions, people wouldn’t go buy the most expensive cars on the planet, right”

Mr. Carter listed reasons that most consumers would prefer the wireless service obtained directly from a major carrier: a wider range of devices and the convenience of placing a call without having to tinker with Wi-Fi setup.

Republic “will resonate with a sliver of the marketplace,” Mr. Carter said. He compared wireless carriers to the major airline carriers, which still control a majority of the market despite low-priced upstarts like JetBlue or Southwest, which he described as appealing only to “a certain segment of the population.”

Philip Cusick, a J.P. Morgan analyst who covers telecommunications, says he doesn’t expect a major shift of customers to Republic Wireless. The price difference isn’t as great as it first appears, he says, when one considers that 80 percent of customers of AT&T and Verizon are on family or employer-related discount plans.

MR. MORKEN of Bandwidth.com says he knows that his company must lower the price of its handset â€" the industry rule-of-thumb for no-contract wireless services is that a simple handset cannot cost more than $99 and a smartphone, $149. But if Republic can offer me an Android phone with a generously sized screen for a reasonable price, I don’t see why, with Wi-Fi available at work and home, I should continue to pay an expensive-sports-car price for my wireless service.

“There’s a reason why the carriers around the world don’t want you using Wi-Fi for voice and text,” Mr. Morken says. “You will soon realize you shouldn’t have to pay what you’re paying today.”

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 27, 2013, on page BU3 of the New York edition with the headline: Mixing, Matching and Charging Less.