How The U.S. Marshals Are Trying To Break My Hunger Strike | Hacker News Reader

How The U.S. Marshals Are Trying To Break My Hunger Strike

huffingtonpost.com

76 pointselectic55 comments

If anyone wants to read more information about Justina Pelletier, the patient at BCH that the author DoS'ed the hospital donations website over, here are a few articles you might find interesting:

* Parents of Justina Pelletier sue Boston Children’s Hospital: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/02/25/parents-justina...

* The Case of Justina Pelletier Still Requires Nuance: http://www.harpocratesspeaks.com/2016/03/Case-of-Justina-Pel...

* The New Child Abuse Panic: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/opinion/sunday/the-new-chi...

That second one, the blog post, raised a dozen red flags for me. The gist of it is "We don't know what happened, therefore I will speculate about every hypothetical way that the Pelletiers might be bad people, and Justina herself might not know what she's talking about. Because, gosh, we just don't know. BTW my primary concern is her welfare."

So if that blog post can be dismissed as mere speculation because, well it's just a blog post, right? Then on what basis can we give Martin Gottesfeld the benefit of the doubt? As far as I can tell, the Pelletiers did not release the relevant medical records, either into the public domain or through private channels to Mr. Gottesfeld. Nor does Gottesfeld mention having a medicine-related degree, or even having observed Justina in person. It appears that he made his decision based on reading blog posts sympathetic to the family, and not based on any firsthand or otherwise privileged observations of his own.

Much of the discussion in this thread is worryingly callous and dismissive.

This is a first person account of an activist starving themselves to death in the service of a selfless and unviolent cause.

"This is a first person account of a confessed, unrepentant criminal starving themselves to death because they don't feel they should be punished for their crimes."

Amazing how framing makes a difference, isn't it?

Slippery slopes all around.

Hopefully he won't die though, or be tortured with force feeding, because the shit his did is pretty tame, pretty boring, and pretty inconsequential.

It's, like, on the level of shop lifting bubble gum, regardless of whatever intellectual psychobabble anyone wants to heap on top of it.

I've probably endangered more lives with multiple counts of reckless driving, been arrested for it, AND released in under thirty hours with a ~$500 fine, kept my licence and no misdemeanors on my record.

Think about it.

Hopefully he won't die though, or be tortured with force feeding

While I disagree what he did was as minor as you claim, I agree with that, and would agree with that no matter what he did.

It begs an interesting question, though: suppose a confessed murderer went on a hunger strike, refusing to eat until they were acquitted (err, and to be clear, I'm not saying this case is equivalent to murder... just using it as an example). What do you do? I honestly am unsure of the ethics. Forced feeding sounds awful, but anything else is effectively enabling suicide...

The alternative is to bend to their wishes, but that sets a very dangerous precedent that threatening suicide is an effective means of manipulating the criminal justice system.

The Suffragettes did this in the UK to either force their release/transfer to 'political' first-class prison status or martyrdom. The government passed the so-called 'cat and mouse act' with temporary release followed by re-incarceration. Not clear it worked out well, though.

Stand this case next to Dylan Roof's death penalty trial. Ain't no comparison.

Quit gettin' mad at video games.

I find is bizarrely self-serving to describe yourself as the next Aaron Schwartz. Depression and suicide leveraged as political tools feel a little too callous.

What would make more sense is some detail on what the case is about, i.e. a third person report.

Where exactly does the author describe himself as "the next Aaron Swartz?" The only comparison I found was that the article draws parallels between Gottesfeld's and Swartz's cases since both are being prosecuted by Carmen Ortiz and the article is claiming similar to Swartz, the prosecutors are again abusing the CFAA and trying to "make an example of" Gottesfeld.

It was in the originally submitted title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13306320

> “Aaron Swartz Redux -- The Man Carmen Ortiz Is Trying to Kill Next”

Where is the evidence that this title was written by the author of the article rather than just the poster of the article?

I'm not sure what you're asking. Clicking through to the Huffington Post article, the title is "How The U.S. Marshals And Bureau Of Prisons Are Trying To Break My Hunger Strike", and the last portion of the URI is

  how-the-us-marshalls-bureau-of-prisons-are-trying_us_586abd7be4b068764965c3af

This indicates that the Huffington Post article title hasn't changed, as generally URIs don't change even if article titles do.

As for the submission title original submission title "Aaron Swartz Redux -- The Man Carmen Ortiz Is Trying to Kill Next", that was submitted by the poster. See this comment from 'sctb when he updated the title:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13306320

Is this what you're asking? If not, can you clarify?

Thank you, this is exactly what I am asking and verifies that the _poster_, not the author, came up with the "Aaron Swartz Redux" title and that the author did not describe himself as "the next Aaron Swartz."

Excuse my pedantry.

The author doesn't, though he does bring Swartz up as part of his story.

"I was tired of explaining this whole travesty over and over again: from the troubled teen industry, to Justina Pelletier, Carmen Ortiz, the CFAA, and Aaron Swartz."

> Aaron Schwartz

Swartz

To sum this up, dude DoS'ed a hospital, got in trouble for it, feels that getting in trouble for breaking the law is something that doesn't apply to him and thus refuses to eat food for a while, and tries to make the lives of everyone else around him difficult (except for his special little African friend).

He also tries to leverage someone else's suicide to his advantage which is always a classy look.

We don't let people kill themselves in prison. The state has a duty to protect the health of people in its custody, even against themselves.

> The state has a duty to protect the health of people in its custody

Few duties are observed as selectively.

"While in custody, you will be subjected to whatever torture is necessary to protect you from yourself."

Frame it however you want. The government should not let people starve themselves to death in prisons. Facing justice is not an easy thing, enough to drive people to psychological extremes. But life goes on even for prisoners.

I'd be interested to know how a starving individual being kept in solitary confinement in a cold cell in standing water, regularly subjected to treatment intended to apply physical and psychological pressure, could be framed as anything other than torture.

I would also argue that if the government focused more on not torturing people and instead treating them with basic human dignity, it wouldn't have to deal with quite so many hunger strikes.

That's a separate issue than keeping people alive. But yes, I agree that torture is a bad thing.

But I also have a healthy skepticism for potentially self-serving claims made by people facing criminal charges.

Hmm, to make a very long story short the guy DoS'ed a hospital.

Probably should read this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-successful-hospital-...

A fundraising campaign was inconvenienced. Probably not as bad as torturing a little girl for months, leaving her unable to walk.

Horrific, inexplicable tragedies happen in hospitals and emergency rooms because in the normal chaos of medical emergencies and communication snafus, surgeons don't properly wash their hands or mark which limb is meant to be amputated [0]. But your experience with such institutions is that while they may fuck up the routine small things and kill patients, they are yet able to pivot like well-oiled military units when their information technology infrastructure is unexpectedly cut?

[0] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist

If we can appreciate inexplicable medical tragedies - can't we appreciate a mans emotional response? If he was wrong was he yet not caught in a tragedy?

>their information technology infrastructure is unexpectedly cut

You are attributing offence of a kind which is far removed from his case - he never attacked the kind of critical systems which you indicate with the Newyorker article.

He pestered and temporarily disabled a medical company website to highlight the maltreatment of a patient, now he is facing many years in prison for the protest.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-i-knocked-boston-chi...

" I also knew from my career experience as a biotech professional that no patients should be harmed if Boston Children’s was knocked offline. There’s no such thing as an outage-proof network, so hospitals have to be able to function without the Internet. It’s required by federal law, and for accreditation. The only effects would be financial and on BCH’s reputation. "

> He pestered and temporarily disabled a medical company website to highlight the maltreatment of a patient, now he is facing many years in prison for the protest.

Uh, OK...

You'll have to pardon my skepticism that you actually read the New Yorker article when it appears you didn't even read the OP whom you defend. Here's one sentence you appear to have skipped over:

> Almost unbelievably, they kept their donation page on the same public network as the rest of their stuff. Rookie mistake. To take it down, I’d have to knock the whole hospital off the Internet.

Edit: clarification. The thing that I quote directly above is not in the OP, but in the link u/strainer provided as rebuttal, i.e. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-i-knocked-boston-chi...

I did only scan the article which I linked to establish that he never attacked the kind of critical systems you indicated by your link. That was established and only somewhat distracted by your reaching caveat -that he knew his attack would take the whole hospitals websites temporarily offline.

You may think about admonishing u/danso for this - the hunger striker never did attack the kind of critical systems indicated by u/danso's comment and link.

My argument with you is that I don't think we should trust Mr. Gottesfeld's self-serving claim, at face value, that he knew that his attack wouldn't have unintended consequences. He was not an employee at BCH, he did not have inside knowledge about how their systems work, nor does he even appear to have read their incident plan. No one is arguing that a hospital folds over and dies when the Internet goes out; the argument is that a hospital operates suboptimally when under attack. I think it's a bit pretentious for an outsider to argue that crippling "non-critical" systems like appointment and prescription management is no big deal.

But the main reason why I think we should be skeptical of Gottesfeld's professed expertise is...well, the fact that we are discussing him at all. How was Mr. Gottesfeld caught so quickly? If you take Mr. Gottesfeld at his word, it's because the FBI poured thousands/millions into investigating the breach. According to the affidavit, though [0], the reasons for Mr. Gottesfeld capture were:

1. He allegedly posted a video calling for Anonymous to take action against BHC, and this video was posted on a YouTube account attached to Mr. Gottesfeld's identity.

2. He used a Twitter account attached to his name to DM other people about hacking the BHC.

3. He created a separate anonymous Twitter account to tweet about the attack, using an email address connected to his computer.

4. He bragged about the DDOS attack to his friend, who then told the FBI about it.

Since Mr. Gottesfeld, according to the FBI, initially denied his involvement -- and then was caught after he and his wife attempted to flee the country by boat but ended up being rescued, we can't make the argument that Mr. Gottesfeld was sloppy about his personal opsec because he wanted to get caught.

So Mr. Gottesfeld appears to be ignorant of how the Internet can inadvertently be linked to personal computer systems, even when such knowledge and awareness is critical to his immediate, personal well-being. But we're supposed to take his word that he can execute a hack with ninja-like precision on BCH because he happens to be an expert in BCH's systems and IT dependencies?

[0] https://www.scribd.com/doc/299575089/Gottesfeld-Martin-Affid...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbnJyK_54Jo

You argument with me was that I don't adequately read sources and that I made an untrue statement, which was in fact not untrue, and was merely open to adjustment - which all summaries are.

My argument with you, was that you linked critical medical equipment to the accuseds website attack, which you should really be aware cannot be vulnerable to a website attack. Yet I am the one criticised for "not a lie" but "a major mistake ... made in rush to judgement"

I found neither your relevant or over-extended response to my criticism tenable. You appear to be in a rush to prosecute beyond fair assessment. Which is what years of hard prison for a temporary website protest attack that cannot threaten critical equipment presents.

> You argument with me was that I don't adequately read sources and that I made an untrue statement, which was in fact not untrue, and was merely open to adjustment - which all summaries are.

The statement in question:

> He pestered and temporarily disabled a medical company website to highlight the maltreatment of a patient, now he is facing many years in prison for the protest.

Mr. Gottesfeld's own statement:

> Almost unbelievably, they kept their donation page on the same public network as the rest of their stuff. Rookie mistake. To take it down, I’d have to knock the whole hospital off the Internet.

Christ, if that's "not untrue" in your judgment, then I won't hold out hope that you care enough about basic facts to see that even in the many words I've spent in this thread bickering about the topic, I've never stated that I support the prosecution or alleged mistreatment of Mr. Gottesfeld. My opinion has been: I am more ambivalent about this case than I was about what happened to Aaron Swartz [0]. Given how angry Swartz's case made me, me not feeling strongly about Mr. Gottesfeld by comparison does not equate to me supporting his prosecution.

But I'm not surprised you aren't able to see the distinction, if you don't see the difference between a website and the Internet.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13306401

Either you are a master troll, or you need to draw a network diagram. You invoked "horrific, inexplicable tragedies" because "surgeons don't properly wash their hands or mark which limb is meant to be amputated". (Frankly I'm not sure the latter qualifies as "inexplicable".) Hand-washing and limb-marking don't require internet access. If hospitals require non-internet-enabled signs to inform surgeons of these risk factors, those are available at restaurant suppliers. (Well maybe not the limb-marking...)

Life support devices also don't require constant internet access. Diagnostic equipment also doesn't require constant internet access. Local medical procedures do not require internet access. Hospital medical records do not require constant internet access. In fact no life supporting activity requires constant internet access, because designing the system to rely on something that is unreliable would be stupid. Physicians are not stupid.

It is conceivable that telemedicine sessions might have been interrupted, but telemedicine is inappropriate when life is in jeopardy. We could imagine the future invention of remote robotic surgeries that would qualify, but if that were going on it would have been mentioned in the indictment, and also a dedicated and isolated network would have been created. In fact since every federal indictment written includes everything but the kitchen sink, and this indictment mentioned only the customary ridiculous inflated monetary damages, we know that this DDoS attack did not hurt anyone physically.

I don't think that we normal easygoing HN folks would really mind your conceptual mistakes, but the combination of those with the withering scorn you've exhibited here is probably what inspired us to keep this thread going long past the point of interest and utility. So, nice trolling!

Please don't imply that a commenter has not read an article, no matter how apparent it is to you or how obtuse you believe them to be. It does nothing to further the discussion constructively, but rather only increases animosity between participants. Simply pointing out what the article does say in contradiction is strong enough, and any ignorance or otherwise on behalf of the commenter should be apparent in and of itself.

I agree that we should err on the side of civility. But in this case, I think it's important to call out u/strainer for his mistake. Note that I said "mistake" and not "lie", because I do think it was an honest mistake, but a major one that was made in a rush to judgment.

No big deal. Me and u/strainer are just two people opining about things we read on the Internet on a late Monday night. But that's kind of the bigger picture, isn't it? If the allegations against Mr. Gottesfeld are materially true, but we assign the best of motives to him, then he himself is also just another guy who read something on the Internet. Except, instead of just opining about it, he allegedly tried to shut down an entire hospital's IT.

u/strainer wants to believe in the narrative that Mr. Gottesfeld is competent and knowledgeable enough to know how a hospital's IT is configured. I'm of the belief that maybe Mr. Gottesfeld is overconfident of what he knows about hospital IT. And perhaps he was overconfident of the issues regarding the plight of the girl and her family. Because it's easy to miss even the big details when reading things on the Internet.

Dude if anyone here "wants to believe in a narrative" it's got to be you. Gottesfeld's "narrative" is simple. He wanted to interrupt fundraising, so he interrupted fundraising. It's BCH and DoJ that have the complicated yarn to spin, about how torturing little girls is OK and all of their life support equipment relies on constant access to Instagram and the best response to your connection coming under DDoS is to just unhook the damn thing.

You aren't actually being civil, when you pretend that anyone whose argument you have misunderstood is some sort of moron.

I don't believe I ever used the word "moron" to describe someone who purportedly believes that the FBI, Boston Children's Hospital, and the state of Massachusetts conspired to torture a girl in public view. I'm still struggling with how Mr. Gottesfeld both denies that he was behind the attack while describing in extensive detail to the Huffington Post how he did in fact launch the alleged attack.

I guess I'll have to count myself among the simpletons who fail to comprehend Mr. Gottesfeld's simple narrative. I honestly don't feel too bad about that, though. Apparently the two people who care most about Justina, i.e. her parents, don't seem to understand his narrative, either.

Not true.

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2016/10/24/anonymous-hacker...

Huffington post is the internet at it's worst. Pretends to be factual but isn't even close.

"Imprisoned human rights activist, journalist, and author Martin Gottesfeld "

I see no external evidence of this other than people can now just call themselves these and it's true?

There's a story here but the mess that's HP destroys that.

Did you see something at that link that contradicted anything at my link? Everyone seems to agree that BCH got DDoSed. Sophos adds a juvenile "hacks're bad, mm-kay?" gloss to it, apparently because all their readers are in elementary school, but that's all they have to offer. They don't mention any reasons why this hack was as bad as any other hack. If one recognizes, as all thinking people do, that some hacks as justified even though some other hacks are not, Sophos has no retort. This is a basic rhetorical failure; Sophos ought to be embarrassed.

One more thing: this was just a DDoS, yet, "The indictment states that BCH had to shut down its access to the internet and email servers to protect patient medical records." Come again? How on earth would a simple DDoS have that effect? Does the DB "fail open"? This is pure bullshit, yet DoJ and Sophos are happy to parrot it, because this is the sort of bullshit that pays their bills. Pathetic.

[EDIT:] He writes and he's in prison, so he mostly fits that description; do you have a particular reason to deny that he's concerned about "human rights"?

>> Did you see something at that link that contradicted anything at my link?

Didn't say it would, but that HP link was a total disgrace, in no way shape or form productive or balanced.

And my link directly contradicts your comment which was totally untrue -

> A fundraising campaign was inconvenienced.

Even in crappy HP the hacker directly says

"Almost unbelievably, they kept their donation page on the same public network as the rest of their stuff. Rookie mistake. To take it down, I’d have to knock the whole hospital off the Internet." [1]

If you think during DoSS companies (rightly or wrongly) don't shut down services, you need to look at more real world examples- This for instance also happened during the Australian census ddos [2] and has specifically caused data to leak during people trying to fix the issue which was maybe Sony?

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-i-knocked-boston-chi...

[2] http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/hacking/census-hack...

OK, if you insist, let's stipulate that the fundraiser wasn't actually inconvenienced.

Please reconsider the sentence from your own link that I helpfully repeated back to you. In a DoS context, "shutting down access to the internet and email servers" does nothing "to protect patient medical records". (In fairness, it might be the right response to a more targeted attack, which this was not.) DoSing doesn't give one access to protected DBs or delicate medical equipment. At any rate, if too much traffic is causing difficulties connecting outside the hospital, who on earth would "solve" that problem by severing the connection completely? Oh, right, this was in Boston, the official home of nose-cuttingly ill-considered overreactions like the Great Boston Mooninite Panic of '07. (I think they're coming out with a movie about a different yet similar episode...) One supposes that all the patients on ventilators were lucky they didn't just decide to cut all the power in the building. Note also that most of the alleged damages stem not from the DoS, but from the moronic shutdown. If one were cynical, one might suspect that the first step in the incident response handbook is "make the incident worse so it rises to indictable level and also we can get on the news".

I wish I was as optimistic about the modern workplace as you are, in which every single employee has the training and capacity to calmly and precisely diagnose why their computer programs aren't working. But in my experience, when the Internet goes down, the average non-IT person sees it as "the computer is broken". And instead of doing something rational -- like running `ping` -- they'll do things like restart the program, or even the computer, until an IT professional tells them that the fault is with their Internet connection.

Not too long ago I was at a very modern Palo Alto clinic getting some routine x-rays. My doctor warned me that things might be a bit slow because their office had just made the transition from XP to Windows 7 (because of XP's end-of-life, not because Windows 7 was new), and the clinic was having problems all week. I ended up waiting an extra half hour because they couldn't figure out how to get digital x-ray images taken from just a few rooms over onto my doctor's computer. And it wasn't some high school summer intern who was stumped, but the doctor, the radiologist, and a couple of nurses.

Sure, I'll admit, as an engineer, I can't help but think that this was an unnecessary shitfest. But, as an engineer, I also know that the "common sense" git-er-done solution -- such as just putting the files on a USB stick and moving them over -- might not apply in this situation. Sometimes, software is just hamstrung and shitty. Luckily, this was a routine checkup at a small, very-well equipped clinic in Silicon Valley, and not an entire fucking hospital in Boston, that, besides tending to children, also has to operate an emergency room and trauma center, in which a 10-minute tangle in IT can easily mean the difference between life and death.

I don't have a strong opinion on whether the perceived cruelty justifies criminal action by the OP. But I strongly disagree with his smug assertion ("I also knew from my career experience as a biotech professional that no patients should be harmed if Boston Children’s was knocked offline. ") that a hospital that he's never worked at can safely pivot when their entire Internet shuts down.

If no one was seriously afflicted by the outage -- and how the fuck would we even know that when modern healthcare can't even consistently diagnose causes of death on an average day? -- then that would have been pure luck, and not because the OP performed his attack with deliberate consideration of its possible effects.

I'm not sure you've modeled my thought process all that well; it's certainly a novel experience to be labeled "optimistic".

If a patient had actually died because her physician couldn't access WebMD for an hour during the fundraiser, that fact wouldn't have been omitted from the indictment. Actually it would have been a typical-bullshit element of a typical-bullshit homicide charge. Internet interruptions occur regularly, and they very rarely have fatal consequences even in hospitals. If they did, hospitals would have more redundancy. Lots of people seem eager to criticize Gottesfeld for not somehow foreseeing this unlikely thing that didn't actually happen except in their own imagination.

That's revealing. We expect private individuals to act with perfection, so that no unintended consequence, however unlikely, could ever be imagined. Yet giant wealthy firms with lots of lawyers can run roughshod over innocent children, being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process, and they must simply be endured. How could the hospital know this handicapped girl wasn't simply imagining her symptoms? Actually lots of people at the hospital knew what was happening; nurses were quitting over it. Actually providing appropriate care for sick people is basically the reason that hospitals exist. Yet at every turn we give the giant abusive bureaucracy the benefit of the doubt.

In this case as in every case, DoJ stood ever ready to serve the interests of the wealthy, powerful, and well-connected. With gag orders, even complaining about abuse was grounds for more abuse! Policing a big urban hospital is not a good DoJ career move. Crushing little people who speak truth to power, even if only for an hour during a fundraiser: that's what really gets a federal prosecutor's juices flowing. We've seen enough from DoJ to expect this behavior, but don't imagine for a second it's justified by anything but their own craven self-interest.

[EDIT:] Rather pointless googling I'm afraid. It's not as though the interests of the wealthy and powerful are never found in opposition. By all means, though, keep trying to change the subject from your silly spurious movie-plot medical-procedures-dependent-on-constant-Facebook-access theory. I'm not sure that something as braindead as "CVS is just like this tortured handicapped girl" is any better though...

It's not terribly hard to find cases, even within just the Obama administration, of DOJ going after big hospitals.

A few months ago, the federal prosecutor in Georgia announced a $513 million settlement against the Tenet hospital chain for charges of bribery and fraud: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/hospital-chain-will-pay-over-...

The fed prosecutor in DC managed to extract $12.9M in settlements from the D.C. Children's Hospital based on a whistleblower complaint last year: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/childrens-hospital-pay-129-mi...

I admit, in casual Google searches, I didn't find any case in which Ortiz's office took on an area hospital. But I did find quite a few cases where her office hit pharmaceutical companies quite hard:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/cvs-pay-35-million-resolv...

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/pharmaceutical-executives...

https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/boston/press-releases/2012...

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/wyeth-and-pfizer-agree-pa...

https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/boston/news/pre...

Strange world in which Pfizer and CVS are "the little people who speak truth to power" only to be crushed by the DOJ.

Ah, so I see we're all for vigilantism now.

Good to know!

Now where did I put my pitchfork...

Aaron Swartz's suicide coincided with one of the worst downtimes of my own life so the tragedy of his death has always had special poignance for me. Even seeing his name now makes me blink back tears at what a goddamned unnecessary tragedy it all was, and I was as disappointed as anyone that the campaign to pressure Ortiz to resign eventually petered out.

But it didn't surprise me that the outcry didn't cause her termination. She was just doing her job, and for most of the time for most people, that's just fine. Just 3 weeks ago there was a highly upvoted thread on HN praising the labor of her office: the prosecution of pharma execs accused of racketeering [0]. A few users called her out by name, but I don't think anyone argued that that invalidate what most people agreed was a worthy case.

So I have a strong reluctance to assign to her office a vendetta against Swartz-like offenders. I do think the indifferent incompetence that led to the decision to drop the hammer on Swartz justified her resignation, but not because she's malicious. I think framing the machinations of politics as simple good vs evil is not only inaccurate, but harmful in the long run.

So seeing the headline of the OP (as originally submitted) -- "Aaron Swartz Redux, The man Carmen Ortiz is trying to kill next" -- reflexively raised red flags for me. Actually reading the content of the OP did not help, as it is an incoherent mess. I'll give the author the benefit of the doubt, as being coherent is probably a difficult task given his circumstances.

But when reading an earlier statement by the OP, in which described his actions and motivations in more specific detail, I'm left with even more apprehension:

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_57df4995e4b08cb140966cd3

If I'm reading his statement correctly, the OP learned on the news that a hospital was accused of mistreating a young patient. So the OP unilaterally decided the hospital must be punished by shutting off the hospital's internet during a fundraising drive.

Here are his own words:

> I also knew from my career experience as a biotech professional that no patients should be harmed if Boston Children’s was knocked offline. There’s no such thing as an outage-proof network, so hospitals have to be able to function without the Internet. It’s required by federal law, and for accreditation. The only effects would be financial and on BCH’s reputation.

> The network was strong, well funded, but especially vulnerable to a specific attack. Apparently BCH was unwilling to architect around the problem. I see such laziness often in my work, and it leaves our nation vulnerable.

> I had spent my career building cyber-defenses. For the first time, I was on the offensive. I coded around the clock for two weeks to perfect the attack. Small test runs were made. BCH bragged to the media that they were withstanding the onslaught and hadn’t been taken down. They had no idea what was to come.

> I finished the code just in time. It ran. BCH’s donation page went down. As they were down, I was nervous. I left it running for a few hours.

> Then, with some donation time still let, I issued the command to stop the attacks—the point had been made. Justina wasn’t defenseless. Under the banner of Anonymous, she and other institutionalized children could and would be protected. There have been no such egregious parentectomies published at BCH since.

That is a seriously fucked up rationalization, based on my experience of the massive dissonance between IT and non-IT people about technical issues and downtime and what constitutes a disruption. It's like a small-scale Mr. Robot in real life, except lacking the calm rationality of f-society.

This doesn't invalidate the OP's claims of mistreatment. I'm just expressing the roots of my ambivalence on this, even as a huge sympathizer of Mr: Swartz.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13164826

edit: added more excerpts from his statement about the why and how of his alleged DDOS attack.

Considering that one of the top stories on the site is "Fitness Star Proves There's Nothing Wrong With Stomach Rolls", I have a hard time taking this article seriously. Are we not better than HuffPo?

The Huffington Post not only has a Pulitzer [0] -- which is rare for an online-only outlet -- it regularly does serious journalism [1], even if it runs clickbait to help pay the bills. As I explained in another comment downthread, I'm not strongly convinced by the OP's claims, but I didn't dismiss the OP simply because of where it was originally published.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/apr/22/huffington-pos...

[1] http://data.huffingtonpost.com/2016/jail-deaths

> The Huffington Post not only has a Pulitzer [0]

That's a bit misleading. David Wood was awarded the Pulitzer prize for a story that was published by the Huffington Post.

Just because the merit of David Wood's work was recognized by Pulitzer's board members it doesn't automatically mean everything posted by the Huffington Post is a Pulitzer contender.

> it regularly does serious journalism [1]

I believe you meant that some authors who host their work in Huffington Post do serious journalism. That's not exactly the same thing at all.

> it doesn't automatically mean everything posted by the Huffington Post is a Pulitzer contender.

That's a straw man argument I never made.

You argued that the Huffington Post won a Pulitzer to try to refute the fact that their top content is clickbait trash such as "Fitness Star Proves There's Nothing Wrong With Stomach Rolls". Stating that the Huffington Post won a Pulitzer to refute that its content is mostly clickbait trash and suggest that the amount of Pulitzer-worthy material is the norm is disingenuous at best.

The comment I responded to suggested that the OP was not credible because it appears on a website in which the top story is "Fitness Star Proves There's Nothing Wrong With Stomach Rolls".

I brought up the Pulitzer example because, under the commenter's reasoning, that story too should be dismissed because of the clickbait links that are published along side of it.

In fact, you can check this for yourself. Here's the direct link to the lead story in the Pulitzer series:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/10/beyond-the-battlefi...

I've taken a screenshot to preserve what it looks like for me at the moment:

http://imgur.com/a/GQw5Z

As you can see, the top trending story is "Baby And Beagle Pose For Adorable Monthly Photos Over Course Of 2 Years". So here's a remix of u/boona's argument:

> Considering that one of the top stories on the site is "Baby And Beagle Pose For Adorable Monthly Photos Over Course Of 2 Years", I have a hard time taking this anti-American-military article seriously. Are we not better than HuffPo?

I read over my comment. Still don't see where I said claimed that the Huffington Post's Pulitzer Prize meant that Pulitzer-level (or even just "serious") journalism was the "norm". My argument was that an article being on Huffington Post was not itself a decisive reason for dismissing the article. You are the one who interpreted that as a glowing endorsement of all of Huffington Post's editorial content. Somehow you missed the part where I said, "even if it runs clickbait to help pay the bills." (though to be fair, I could have said, "even though clickbait probably pays most of the bills"...but I honestly don't have access to their analytics to make that an assertion)

We've updated the title from “Aaron Swartz Redux -- The Man Carmen Ortiz Is Trying to Kill Next”, which breaks the guidelines by editorializing.

Thank you. I appreciate you de-sensationalizing posts. Your constant work as well as dang's enables me to read these comments, which show a wide range of opinions, and enjoy and learn from the conversations. No insults, no rancor, no superficial arguments -- but rather a useful exchange of POVs. Thanks for making this possible!

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