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.