I'm not willing to donate. Aaron's goal may have been noble, but his actions are indefensible.
[0] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/21/aaron-swart...
So much depends on specifics of the situation that I'm not really comfortable making any type of judgement on anyone involved.
Also didn't he make a ton of money selling Reddit?! :/
He knew what he was doing, and hew knew what he was doing was wrong. Doesn't seem terribly smart to make enemies high up.
This is right in the indictment, which is linked from the last 'aaronsw post on HN.
He might have known (and even the extent of this is not clear) that what he was doing was illegal.
But that doesn't mean it is wrong, law and morality are two very different things.
Me and many others would argue that what he did was almost a moral imperative, he tried to free human knowledge (mostly paid by tax dollars!) from the artificial monopoly of some corporate leeches.
And if you need more arguments for this, just read up on what Thomas Jefferson had to say about it: http://harmful.cat-v.org/economics/intellectual_property/
If you believe something shouldn't be illegal, then campaign to get the law changed!
Are people video-camming movies in cinemas "just freeing human knowledge"? Were wikileaks publishing secret sensitive hacked info "just freeing human knowledge"?
I don't need any more arguments, because I absolutely disagree. If you believe a law needs to be changed, the way to get it changed is not to start breaking it. We live in a civilised society here. It's this kind of "political activism" I detest.
Is that because you believe it's not likely to be effective, or because you'd rather see an unjust law than an unruly populace?
Edit: ...or some third opinion that I can't think of
On the contrary, history shows it to be one of the few effective methods.
You're saying that Rosa Parks was wrong when she refused to go to the back of the bus. The underground railroad was wrong for refusing to comply with fugitive slave laws. Ghandi was wrong for breaking the laws imposed by the British.
We live in a civilized society precisely because many people have disobeyed uncivilized laws. It's actually one of the hallmarks of our civilization that we can draw a distinction between what's right and what's legal.
But do you have any data on the downside of that approach?
How many people who disagree with a law will then cause havoc if they broke the law to get what they wanted? Instead of attempting to follow channels?
And I would add: if people didn't ignore dumb laws society would crawl to a halt and collapse.
If what Swartz did was a "moral imperative", why aren't you working on liberating journal articles from Elsevier as we speak? My guess: because it is not really a moral imperative. There is a difference between a moral judgement and an "imperative", and you've lazily blurred that line.
Randal Schwartz was a contractor for Intel, through an IT contracting company. At the conclusion of his contact and, as I remember, his employment with the company that placed him, he backdoored systems at Intel. He later used those backdoors to regain access to Intel systems and got caught.
Randal Schwartz' defense has always been that his activities were innocuous (and, in some cases, necessary to complete work for Intel, which is a claim that is damaged by the fact that some of his actions took place after his business relationship with Intel was severed). There is no "service to the greater good" angle in Randal Schwartz's case. What happened with him was either a spectacular misunderstanding or a galactic-scale instance of bad decisionmaking on his part.
Aaron Swartz set out to liberate information from a private database, because that information had been unjustly locked up.
What you're saying when you draw an equivalence between these cases is that you think most computer fraud/abuse cases are illegitimate. I'm not saying that's a ridiculous perspective to have (though it is not mine), but you should be on guard for the ways that perspective can cloud your reasoning. By all means keep believing that the Internet should be a "wild west" where the strong/gifted rule unchecked so long as they don't steal people's credit card numbers. But also read the case files when you want to argue about them.
I never claimed that the two cases are the same. Just that Aaron's case reminded me of it.
You are right, Randal never had a motive remotely close to Aaron for any greater good of any sort. [In fact I will go on and argue that there is no reason Aaron should be prosecuted since the plaintiff has decided not to pursue the case against him].
What I meant was that (same as the parent) although Aaron's goals may have been good, I do not agree with the manner he went about achieving it.
The DoJ's role in this case isn't simply to right a single wrong done to JSTOR; it's to defend JSTOR and every organization like JSTOR from everybody like Swartz. If Swartz walks from this case because JSTOR --- the victim of a crime --- doesn't put its own reputation on the line to stand up against him, that's a signal that it's OK for other people to liberate documents from other databases.
By prosecuting Swartz criminally and regardless of JSTOR's actions, the DoJ is in effect saying that it doesn't fall to JSTOR to "heroically" defend federal law; that's the DoJ's job.
Again: while I don't like what Swartz did, I hope he wins his case, because I kind of like him. But that means I need to be more clear-eyed about what's happening here, not --- like many commenters on this thread --- less clear-eyed.