July 11, 2020 RIP my darling boy
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http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/handwritingwall
It played a significant role in shaping my understanding of humanity, charity and what impact as a single human being can have. It was a big factor in why I joined the Effective Altruism movement and donate 10+% of my income yearly. I highly recommend reading it.
It saddens me greatly that person who was so forward thinking and was only looking out for the future of humanity was taken away so young.
* Spoilers *
It is not defnitely the same to say "Kill 10 people so I can keep my earnings" than "I will kill 10 people so I can steal theirs". It is definitely not. I am not saying capitalism is fair, but in the first case I (or whoever is that person) earn their stuff working, while in the second case the outcome may be the same but the path isn't.
Ultimately, it started feeling like I'm paying to become mentally weaker so now I opt to live a life with nothing to lose.
After I no longer care about my income, I can now fearlessly call people out on their bullshit at work and challenge their decisions. It helped me focus more at work and make the right decisions instead of the easy ones.
Imo, if you are truly happy, you can find happiness no matter how bad your situation is. So I don't care about the distant future. I optimize for the impact I can make today.
(Tim Berners-Lee)
Top voted post at the time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5046845
Five years later - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16141013
I'm appalled at Disney, Comcast, and any other media giant that has successfully lobbied for the expansion of the monstrous copyright regime in the USA.
Did you know the FBI wastes time looking into this kind of stuff? Shameful.
Or did they just not speak out publicly against the prosecutor?
Compounding this, I also got into a dispute with two former federal prosecutors, both of whom did wildly unethical things. One represents the Police Chief and the Sheriff of a major city. I can't even believe that former US Attorneys would act this way, but then I'm reminded by Alexander Acosta who protected Epstein.
That's how I see most lawyers.
It's bad for prosecutors, though...
I understand people get upset when they help a very likely guilty person get off (OJ Simpson anyone? see the point about being rich above.)
But defence lawyers have an important job, irrespective of who they're representing or what they're alleged to have done.
This only shows that using lawyers is a classic game theory problem. Both people using lawyers prolly makes the system worse off overall, but neither side can defect in isolation.
Think of divorce lawyers for example so that you don't feel this is about criminals on one side and innocent people on the other. In a divorce settlement, neither side is usually the criminal, and yet they spent thousands of dollars lawyering up in a bizarre game of mutually assured destruction. cf. The Marriage Story.
And that's a high profile white hacker. Wait till you hear the experiences with them of poor/black/latino folk...
I think at the end of the day when it comes to stories such as Aaron's the buck stops with everyone of us, because we're responsible for keeping these people employed and the rules in place.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/ha9mjv/off_...
Its a network that is surrounding the fool teaching, reinforcing and promoting the behavior. You will notice they have a high level of confidence no matter what outcomes are produced. That's because the network behind is patting them on the back and saying you got what it takes.
The only counter balance is developing your own network. When I was younger it was just about people I got along with. People who had the same personality, interests, needs etc. But thats a network with only certain strengths. It took a while and lot of blundering about to realize there are lot of people very different from me, who share the same values. And putting in the effort of connecting/nurturing connections over those values, pays off big time in dealing with douchebags esp above you in the food chain.
Interesting, I have reached essentially the same conclusion. Read the link on my profile and contact me if needed.
I just think about all the influence a life can have.
Thank you Aaron
Sorely missed.
The prosecution against him was unwarranted from an ethical perspective, but that doesn't mean it alone drove him to suicide. Laying the blame solely on external factors for a suicide does an extreme disservice to the understanding of depression and mental illness.
Also suicide is never a "reasonably foreseeable outcome" when someone is faced with a 6 month jail sentence. There are literally millions of people in jail in this country for longer sentences that never consider suicide. Anyone who thinks throwing away the 50 years post jail sentence is worth not having to endure a rough few months is not in a good mental state. This country does a horrible job helping people with mental health issues. That is generally what kills people who die by suicide. It isn't whatever event is ultimately the impetus for the action.
Most people don't have such inescapable power underlying their threats. The government is a good deal more fearsome than most individuals who aren't directly threatening murder in the traditional sense.
> Also suicide is never a "reasonably foreseeable outcome" when someone is faced with a 6 month jail sentence.
It's a bit disingenuous to call it a threat of 6 months in jail. That was a plea bargain offer with other strings attached, that came after Swartz was threatened with up to 35 years and then more charges were added bringing the potential up to 50 years. By the time the 6 month offer was made, Swartz had already been subject to more abuse and harassment than his actions could have ever justified. He was deep into a Kafkaesque nightmare before the prosecution offered the first shreds of mercy.
This never happened.
The prosecutors did eventually state that they would not seek maximum penalties, but that's not a guarantee, and it's not something that was communicated at the time the charges were initially brought against him.
Yes, and those reports fail to accurately communicate the possible range of punishments that Swartz could’ve received.
At the time the prosecutors claimed that Swartz could’ve faced at most 7 years. A very harsh, but unlikely sentence.
From what I can find, "at the time" here means at the time of the plea bargain offer, not at the time he was charged, or at the time they added more charges.
Suggesting that Swartz was threatened with a 35-year sentence requires some extraordinary mental gymnastics.
A defendant with competent legal counsel (as Aaron Swartz had) would have been informed by them of the likely actual range of the sentence if found guilty.
The government isn't a singular person. A prosecutor does not have "inescapable power underlying their threats". They are a single person in a system. There are numerous other people involved in the system that have roles that serve to rein in prosecutors if Aaron allowed the process to fully play out.
>It's a bit disingenuous to call it a threat of 6 months in jail. That was a plea bargain offer with other strings attached, that came after Swartz was threatened with up to 35 years and then more charges were added bringing the potential up to 50 years. By the time the 6 month offer was made, Swartz had already been subject to more abuse and harassment than his actions could have ever justified. He was deep into a Kafkaesque nightmare before the prosecution offered the first shreds of mercy.
No one reasonably expected him to spend 35-50 years in jail so citing that as a potential outcome is much more disingenuous than saying he might serve 6 months. Sure, there are strings attached to plea deals, but it is a simple fact that he had the option to serve that 6 months and end any further threat of jail. He instead chose death. That decision was caused by his mental illness and not any person who might have wronged him.
That "fully playing out" you refer to is a process that would have most likely involved appeals carried out while Swartz served prison time—probably longer than 6 months.
I think you're following the prosecutor's playbook in trying to make 6 months and assorted other harassment sound more reasonable by comparison to decades of prison time, when it's still an unreasonable proposition. The consequences of a guilty plea were certainly not going to disappear from Swartz's life after six months.
The first sentence of my first comment said the prosecutor was too aggressive. I'm not trying to make 6 months of jail sound reasonable for his crime. I am trying to point out that suicide is not a reasonable response to the situation Aaron was in.
No, you're not. Nobody is claiming that suicide was a reasonable response to the situation he was in; that's not what you're trying to rebut. What you're arguing against is the suggestion that the overzealous prosecution should bear some degree of culpability for his suicide. Whether his suicide was a reasonable decision doesn't really matter to that question. People do "unreasonable" things all the time, and it is quite ordinary in many circumstances to expect other people to account for that possibility.
They claimed suicide was a "reasonably foreseeable outcome". My point is that the decision was not reasonable and therefore the outcome isn't to be expected.
>People do "unreasonable" things all the time, and it is quite ordinary in many circumstances to expect other people to account for that possibility.
Ok, if we are going to hold people legally liable for the most extreme response to their actions, let's build a similar hypothetical. Imagine a similar situation in which a prosecutor is unjustly but legally railroading a person (reminder Aaron was guilty of a crime and no one argues against that, we just argue that the law he broke is unjust). If the person being prosecuted murders the person who pressed charges, does the prosecutor have culpability?
Suicide is almost never a "reasonable" response to the situation a person is in, yet it's a very common cause of death.
People who work in suicide prevention talk about "rapid onset despair". They also talk about help seeking behaviour, especially of people who are men; young; autistic; and a few other characteristics.
Rapid onset despair is very important when talking about the criminal justice system. People feel overwhelmed by CJS, and death by suicide is very common in people who've been arrested for serious crime or who have been imprisoned.
Deaths by suicide of people who've been accused of, or convicted of, offences is not hidden information. It's a well known phenomena.
That almost always massively overstates the sentence for a couple reasons.
1. Federal crimes are divided into groups. If you are convicted of more than one crime in the same group, you are effectively only sentenced for one of them.
When you see an indictment with a lot of charges there usually is a lot of grouping going on and so it looks a lot more scary than it actually is.
2. Most federal crimes have a range of possible sentences, ranging up to 10 or 20 years. Most of the time the judge will determine where your sentence falls in that range by following the federal sentencing guidelines. Those basically start at the low end and then various modifiers can push it up.
The modifiers include things like how much monetary loss you caused, whether you used a weapon, whether you recruited or directed other people to help in your crime, whether you involved minors in your crime, and the seriousness of recent past crimes of yours. That's just some, there are more, and there are some that can lower the sentence.
In Swartz's case, first offense, no weapon, not part of a criminal enterprise, etc., it would really come down to the monetary loss. According to Swartz's lawyers, the prosecutors thought a sentence of up to 7 years was possible which suggests they were going to try to prove millions of dollars in damages. Swartz's lawyers thought there was a good chance he'd just get probation which suggests that they thought they could show that damages were under $10k.
There were actually two plea bargain offers. One was plead guilty to the felonies and they all agree on a 4 month sentence. The other was plead guilty and the government will argue for 6 months with the judge, and Swartz can argue for less (or probabtion).
Here's a good entertaining article on how federal sentencing works and how the numbers are greatly exaggerated in press releases [1].
Here's a two part article on the Swartz charges [2] [3]. The first looks at whether the charges individually fit the alleged facts. The second looks at, among other things, potential sentencing (and was my source for what Swartz's lawyers thought might happen).
[1] https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
[2] http://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
[3] http://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-aa...
Not "anyone"; a public official who (I assume) willing swore a oath not to abuse the authority they were unwisely trusted with.
read this thread:
https://threader.app/thread/1214173689111031808
Aaron had been helping Assange and Wikileaks very early on. In 2009, Wikileaks released files from the Congressional Research Service, apparently obtained by scraping their website using a trivial by-pass to access non-public files.
Aaron had worked on the staff of Congressman Grayson during the same time period.
What if it was Aaron poking around the CRS website as part of his job duties who found that bug and then gave it to Assange?
That would make Aaron the "source" for that 2009 leak--one of the first things published by then young Wikileaks.
what if the reason DOJ so harshly persecuted Aaron was because of his involvement with Wikileaks? This is speculation, as there is no explicit evidence supporting this. Aaron's connection to Wikileaks seems like an important enough coincidence that I cannot rule it out.
But I have always wondered: just how far does the US govt go to suppress and permanently silence people who are Enemies of the State? Especially talented programmers who are digitial natives well equipped to challenge systems of power which are more and more based on technical and information supremacy?
No comment on this, although I posted to show what the farthest extent postulated is for the question you asked. But Corecivic.com is not a good company certainly and likes to pretend it is the Bureau of Prisons (which has real authority from a legal sovereign state), and lol has previous hosted on Huawei Cloud of all places.
Prosecutors have the option of pressing charges on behalf of their jurisdiction for criminal cases and can sometimes do so even if the violated party declines to press charges themselves.
More detail: https://conncriminaldefense.com/blog/how-do-you-not-press-ch...
When cops ask “do you want to press charges” what they really mean is “are you willing to follow through with everything if charges are pressed”.
Colloquially, the phrase usually means that the victim will not participate or cooperate willingly. It makes a case harder to prosecute in many cases, and is a big issue for domestic violence cases in particular.
> After his arrest, JSTOR released a statement saying that though it considered Swartz's access to be a "significant misuse" committed in an "unauthorized fashion," it would not pursue civil litigation against him;[16][38] MIT did not comment on the proceedings.[39]
> Marty Weinberg, who took the case over from Good, said he nearly negotiated a plea bargain in which Swartz would not serve any time. "JSTOR signed off on it," he said, "but MIT would not."[50]
A reminder that even with the wave of media attention, approximately zero of the cops involved in the recent unambiguous murder of black people have been brought to justice.
Is that true though? At least in the recent George Floyd case the 4 cops involved were all fired the next day from their jobs and have all been charged and are awaiting trial.
When a person drinks too much at a Christmas party it is an incident. When someone has a nervous breakdown in public, it is an incident. When someone kneels on a person's neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, as they beg for mercy, say they can't breath, and then cry out for their mother it is a murder.
They were fired after murdering a man. Can you imagine that standard being applied to literally any single other field than police officers?
"After Floyd got out [of his car], he physically resisted officers. Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress."
Being fired and charged is not being "brought to justice". It's just the first step, and there's a history of the system failing to follow through with trial, conviction, and fair sentencing.
Also never forget that we're having this discussion on a site that is hostile to us.
HN is hostile to people like Swartz who actively work to tear down information silos, shine light on government and corporate secrets, and advocate for intellectual property reform.
It's not an accident that shit_hn_says, n-gate, /r/SneerClub, and other critics of HN, can make most of their commentary simply by quoting HN discussion and juxtaposing it next to basic paraphrases of what was said; so much of what's said here is rude towards the rest of the world that merely quoting the discussion is sufficient to highlight its farcical and close-minded nature.
As for "shit hn says", we are all not even from the same part of the world and have very diverse cultures and divergent viewpoints as well. There's no single "hn" that you allude to.
I'm not trying to paint some picture of folks unsympathetic or uncaring. I'm saying that no amount of thoughts nor prayers are going to be equivalent to doing the hard work of changing the world to be less horrible. If we are going to spend a thread remembering the sacrifice of such a person, martyred for not just their beliefs but their works, then we ought to at least acknowledge the mismatch between what Swartz did with his life, and what commenters here are doing with their life while they're sending in thoughts and prayers.
>Also never forget that we're having this discussion on a site that is hostile to us.
Poignant words, I say. I see that people have downvoted you. The enemy is not an external entity it's internal.