I just watched "The Internets Own Boy" again last night. It amazes me what our justice system can do to people and not be held responsible.
Had I done the same thing to Aaron, I'd have been given lethal injection by now.
Had I done the same thing to Aaron, I'd have been given lethal injection by now.
Just to play devil's advocate here (and I understand this goes against prevailing opinion), but he did break the law. That much isn't in dispute, they had a video of him entering the MIT network closet. And he didn't commit misdemeanors, he committed a half dozen felonies (actually more, but the prosecution dropped a few of them).
The prosecution was offering a meager 6 months in a low-security prison (for multiple felonies, that's peanuts) for his crimes but he rejected the offer (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosec...).
I understand what he was fighting for and agree with him and his ideology. I support Open Access, but let's not kid ourselves or delude ourselves - he wasn't innocent. He did commit crimes. I don't think this is the justice's systems fault. They were going to go extremely light on him but it was he who chose to fight.
He absolutely did break the law. I, personally don't dispute that, nor do I think that that's a controversial fact here. The trouble that I and many other commenters here have with what happened to Aaron Swartz is the gross disproportionality of the punishment he was facing. For downloading academic papers, he was facing a punishment that could have gone to literally millions of dollars in fines and up to 35 years in prison. That is the sort of punishment that I would expect for ending a life (i.e. negligent homicide), not downloading a few thousand academic papers and publishing them on the Internet.
Should Aaron have gone to jail? Should he have been forced to pay some restitution? Probably. But I don't think that holding the spectre of millions of dollars in fines and the rest of his adult life in jail over his head was the right thing for the prosecutor to do. Its very rare for a crime to break just one law. Prosecutors almost always have a choice of laws to prosecute under. In this case, the prosecutor chose the heaviest, most punishing law, when she could have chosen a lesser charge.
He wasn't realistically facing 35 years. He could not get anywhere near that under the federal sentencing guidelines. See this prior discussion for details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7996807
In particular, be sure to read this article linked to in the first comment, which explains exactly how the numbers given in DOJ press releases have very little connection to reality: https://popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence-el...
Also see these two article if you want details specifically on how sentencing works on the specific charges Swartz faced:
http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-agains...
Prosecutors in the Swartz case were actually asking for about 7 years, which was still much higher than they were likely to get. Swartz's own lawyer thought that he'd probably just get probation if convicted.
The DOJ really needs to stop using this stupid method of writing press releases. They wrote the indictment and so they sure as hell better know exactly what they are charging and what facts they are alleging, so they should be able to figure out the guideline sentence that would result if they won on all counts. That's what should be in the press release.
You left out the part where he snuck into a server closet and tampered with the network equipment. Among other things, that's burglary.
This was no, "Oops, I didn't realize you minded!" situation. Aaron was fully aware that MIT didn't approve of what he was doing, and he didn't care, and was actively battling to do what he pleased anyway.
I ask because, though I've never been near MIT, everything I read about it suggests that every one of these steps is seen as part of the game expected to be played by a few curious students now and then.
Typically, when an excessive use case is reported that is determined to originate from within MIT’s network, the Libraries report this to either the MIT Information Services and Technology (IS&T) network security team or MIT’s “Stopit” group, which deals with inappropriate behavior that occurs electronically. The Stopit group’s general response is to send the offender a warning email message. This is almost always all that is needed to get people’s attention and have them stop whatever it was they were doing that caused the problem.
[...]
This time, the requests and downloads stimulated a cascade of failures that brought down multiple JSTOR servers. Half the servers in one data center failed, and JSTOR engineers feared that the entire service might go down worldwide.
[...]
Also on October 12, the Director of the MIT Libraries reported to MIT’s Academic Council that a cyber-attack of the JSTOR database had caused a weekend shutdown of JSTOR to the entire campus.
Now take a look at the "MIT Hacker Ethic", particularly bulletpoint #2: http://hacks.mit.edu/misc/ethics.html
I guess jstor staff doesn't have access to good technical texts on how to run a network.
Breaking into a closet, and connecting your hardware gets you expelled. Regardless of the locked state of the door, entering a closet to which you do not have explicit access is breaking into said closet.
That said, I'm not as familiar as I should be with what MIT tried to do to get Aaron to stop, and whether he knew that they had deployed those because of what he did.
Similar from my days at Caltech. However, there were two important considerations for this kind of thing at Caltech.
1. The "look the other way" attitude of the administration applied to members of the Caltech community, and also depended on how you were connected to Caltech. A student could get away with more than an employee or a friend/relative of a student.
2. The Caltech honor system applied. If you were hacking something without permission and the people in charge of that thing told you to stop, not stopping would have likely been an honor system violation. I'm pretty sure that repeatedly purposefully evading someone's attempt to get you to stop messing with their thing would count as ignoring a request to stop.
Does MIT have similar considerations?
Aaron was offered a plea bargain of six months.
Also, you're still glossing over the part where he tampered with MIT's network infrastructure.
And locking away scientific papers of research that was funded with public money behind paywalls is burglary of the public.
JSTOR has also convinced most of these journals, even ones with restrictive access policies, to let JSTOR make their content available for free to the public at many libraries and schools, including ones that do not have subscriptions to the underlying journals. Because of JSTOR, many second tier colleges, community colleges, and even high schools have free access to vast journal libraries that they would not have otherwise had access to. They also do a lot to bring cheap or free access to vast journal libraries to schools and libraries in developing countries.
JSTOR has probably expanded free public access to scientific research more than any other group or organization.
Sure, it would be nice if everything were open access so you could just legally get it all on the net for free, but many journals aren't willing to do that yet, and in the meantime JSTOR provides a way for most of the public to get that content at the cost of having to visit a library or school that offers public JSTOR.
These companies were not taking anything away from the public; they made the effort to digitize, process, and catalog documents, which is no small task. And they set up servers to host these documents and make them searchable. If you feel they're asking too much money for these efforts, you're welcome to simply pretend they don't exist, and replicate their work yourself. They did nothing to make that task harder.
Now, if the companies destroyed the original public records or otherwise placed new locks around them that hadn't existed beforehand, then yes, your metaphor, while still hand-wavy, would at least hold water. But of course nothing like that actually happened here.
How is creating network and identity based locks around the papers not placing new locks?
The locks you refer to were around the new, value-added work: the digitized, processed, cataloged version of the papers they had made by adding value to the original public-domain documents. The locks were not applied to the original documents.
It's like the difference between storing a touched-up version you made of an Apollo 11 photo in a vault, and stealing the original photo negative from NASA and putting that in a vault.
JSTOR doesn't claim that its documents are public-domain:
Our licenses from publishers are non-exclusive, meaning that the publishers are free to license their content to others to digitize or make it available in any way they might wish. [0]
We do this with funds provided by thousands of libraries and institutions, all of whom are our partners in disseminating access around the globe. [0]
No, it's not.
http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/burglary-overvi...
This is really not how the court system works.
Also, by killing himself before being sentenced he kind of ruined that argument anyway.
Big, intimidating numbers are definitely one of the tactics used by prosecutors to coerce a plea.
Aaron himself said "There is no justice in following unjust laws."
> https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...
I even go further and say that you can't be good and lawful at the same time - at least not in any currently existing system of laws.
Society functions on a set of laws, but those laws can change for the better.
In the face of this reality, direct action exposing publicly funded papers to the public kind of makes sense.
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
"A proposed policy change with low support among economically elite Americans (one-out-of-five in favour) is adopted only about 18% of the time," they write, "while a proposed change with high support (four-out-of-five in favour) is adopted about 45% of the time." On the other hand: When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it. They conclude: Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organisations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.
I'm on the 'break unjust laws' side of the argument, as have been many of the greatest civil rights figures in history. Break the unjust laws and convince as many people as you can to break them as well.
I personally believe that the way to go is to turn ethics from a humanity into an empirical science, so that any "false" (in a sense that future people will have to define formally) can indeed be falsified. This would at least solve many problems. But at the moment this all is rather science-fiction, since we don't even understand how our brains works (which such theories will probably have to incorporate as special case).
It's so early in the evening to have reached Peak HN already.
> a meager 6 months in a low-security prison
> They were going to go extremely light on him
6 months in any prison and having a criminal record for the rest of your life is extremely harsh and cruel - and unnecessarily so.
Going light on him would have meant dropping all charges.
Those here are well enough in the know to realize that the law is often twisted to serve corrupt ends and thus any question of law breaking should also be met with a consideration of the morality and ethics of the law and of the enforcement of the law.
>The prosecution was offering a meager 6 months in a low-security prison (for multiple felonies, that's peanuts) for his crimes but he rejected the offer (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosec...).
Or isomorphically, they were willing to add decades to his sentence for insisting to his right to a trial.
>They were going to go extremely light on him but it was he who chose to fight.
How dare he exercise his rights!
I used to stand when the national anthem would come on and deeply be thankful for what I had.
You can react two ways: 1) impotent anger or 2) stand up and continue his fight. Which will it be?
Find friends and others and we can all pitch in to create a method of distributing knowledge in a way that can't be controlled. The internet makes it possible, the only thing missing is the will and the effort. Anyone can contact me: my email's in my profile.
False dichotomy and manipulative, there's many ways to react outside of those narrow choices.
Aaron can't do this an anymore since he was driven into suicide by the criminal prosecution of his country, he can't do it anymore.
So: Don't call for action - act instead!
US justice system has so much inconsistencies. Punishment for copyright cases being harsher than the ones for Actual crimes being one of them. Lets not forget that he is being called criminal because he broke a law, a silly thing signed into law probably because someone lobbyed so hard for it. He is no actual criminal. He didn't feel the articles he downloaded from servers should be kept private. At least the research papers funded with public money should be public property. But so much pressure was put on him that he took his own life. If justice system was fair, he could've faced it. But currently the system is broken. He knew that and felt hopeless. Pushing for things like banning him from all things electronic, and thus internet, is not the right way to serve justice. What reforms have taken place since then?
That is a horrible argument. should I just be able to take your tv because I think it shouldn't be locked up in your house?
I'm not saying I agree with the papers being locked up. Not believing in a law does not make you innocent. Many people think they don't have to pay their taxes and they all go to jail.
Such a ridiculous logic.
Aaron has made possible free access to many documents that were being charged for access, but they are actually documents that should be in public domain.
JSTOR is journal store which contains journals published by researchers all over the world. JSTOR access is licensed. There is no open access and the access fees are not cheap for something that is digitalized. Does JSTOR compensate the original article publisher? Aaron Swartz was only trying to make this archive public. He could've used an alternative way to achieve that goal. But does he actually deserve 30 to 50 years in prison and a million in fine for what he did?
I wouldn't have had a problem with it if those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis were given an appropriate punishment, say 500 years in jail time and fined at least a few billions.
Again I'm not saying I agree with the way he was prosecuted but he did commit a lot of crimes. Whether or not you agree with the ends he was aiming for doesn't change the facts.
But they are?
I'd be interested in trying to help someone who lives outside of the US figure out how to come up with something similar but for all the data that is trapped behind the facebooks and the like. I did something like this before, but I got hit with a C&D, but the technical capabilities are still available to leverage to weaken facebooks hold on personality information if one can side step the jurisdiction of such legal tools.
See https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-and-libgen-resurface-after-...