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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

I wasn't aware the closet was unlocked. And apparently used by a homeless guy to store his stuff. So, even the bare minimum real crime that I thought he was guilty of (Breaking into a closet) which is a crime serviceable by community service in this context - turns out not to have occurred.

I've been sad all morning. Reading this article just makes me angry.

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Not only that but the actual trespassing charge was dropped. So it wasn't even part of the case!

I didn't even realize that. The most salacious and unsympathetic of the allegations is how Swartz got physical access...othherwise, how different is what he did than what people who go to Starbucks and torrent illegally? Just magnitude?

It's that the U.S. got their asses handed to them in a previous case involving PACER, and were out for blood.

Sadly, that's what they got.

I'm not seeing any reference to PACER in any obit articles and in a lot of the stuff on reddit and elsewhere. This is a very important point. Essentially, Aaron had already defeated the feds for open access and was trying again. I imagine the petty bureaucrats burned by PACER really were out for blood this time.

Apparently, our government's mission is to destroy young people over petty grievances its employees have with American citizens. Christ, there are so many levels of wrong here its unbelievable. I just wish Aaron's case got more attention before he died. There was next to nothing about it, but jerks like Kim Dotcom seem to have articles and public sympathy locked, while real heros like Aaron were margalized because he was working on a level more much complex than "herp derp free moviez" and didn't have the crass marketing and bullshitting skills guys like Dotcom have.

We live in a very unfair world. Whatever American exceptionalism I believed in was steadying chipped away by the horrid Bush years and Obama's bizarre assault on medical marijuana, patent violators, and now 20 somethings downloading lots of PDFs.

I was just thinking how well a young Bill Gates or a young Bill Joy or whoever would fare in 2013 America? These guys have all admitted to doing stuff like stealing mainframe time, ripping off code, causal hacking, pushing around the old guard, violating all manner of rules, etc. Its just back then you didn't go to jail for it. I imagine most of them would have gotten crushed somehow, just like Aaron.

I know I am being dramatic, but this whole thing is very upsetting. The worst is, there is no reform over the horizon. Whatever reformist potential Lessig and the EFF and others had in the late 90s and early 2000s is long dead. If anything, things have somehow gotten worse for those who believe in open information and sensible prosecution of computer crimes since the Bush years. How did we get here? Why is Aaron dead? Why is my side always losing? This is too fucking much.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak would have been persecuted for the Blue Box if they did it today.

The government has been like this for a long time. But it sure feels like they have accelerated on behalf of their corporate paymasters.

The Internet Archive's obituary makes prominent note of Aaron's volunteer work in creating RECAP, which is what Aaron helped create / used in the PACER incident.

http://blog.archive.org/2013/01/12/aaron-swartz-hero-of-the-...

I'm upset as well. It just all seems so absurd and unnecessary, like a cruel game.

>We live in a very unfair world.

I thought I already understood this. Today puts it in even sharper focus.

The difference in this case is that it could reasonably be argued he had an implied license to all the content he downloaded.

The millions of kids downloading music have done more wrong by the letter of the law than Aaron did.

Starbucks torrenters generally don't cause a community of 20,000 scholars to lose access to a major journal archive for days at a time. And they generally don't require university staff to burn hours trying to hunt down hidden machines that are disrupting their network.

Apparently, the MIT and/or JSTOR staff took down the service themselves when they detected the mass downloads. It was not Aaron's "attack" that brought down the access.

That is not correct. He launched what amounted to a DoS against JSTOR:

" the strain it put on JSTOR’s servers was enough to have impaired other research institutions attempting to access the materials."

"Together, Grace and Gary Host downloaded JSTOR articles at such an astounding pace that several of JSTOR’s servers crashed."

http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N30/swartz.html

Every journal database I have done bulk downloads from (sometimes constantly) over a week requires a cookie and sends you a polite message (via http no less) asking you to put in a few seconds pause between each request.

It would not have occurred to me that they haven't configured their servers to handle the load. Once again - Aaron did nothing that I, and tens of thousands of people like me, haven't done many times.

You've downloaded millions of articles from JSTOR? Or how MIT put it: "more than 100 times the number of legitimate JSTOR downloads at MIT during that time period"

So what? Aaron violated MIT's policies and JSTOR's policies and the result was that a large community of scholars lost access. Those scholars would have had access if Aaron hadn't done what he did.

The only harm was manufactured by the "victims". Were it not for the "victims" manufacturing this harm, they would not be called victims at all. They essentially bootstrapped their own victim-hood. If you don't see why that is relevant in an ethical consideration of his actions, then I cannot help you.

This is taking victim blaming to new heights. Is it now the victim's fault they don't acquiesce to a lawbreakers' demands? Doesn't MIT have the right to decide who is allowed to use their network and in what manner?

Can I break into your home and use your internet connection as I see fit without your complaint?

Is it similarly victim blaming when people call shit on the RIAA for claiming thousands of dollars of damages per mp3? Give me a break, and knock it off with the emotionally charged language. MIT isn't the victim of domestic abuse or sexual assault.

> Can I break into your home and use your internet connection as I see fit without your complaint?

They dropped the trespassing charges, the only charges that had merit.

But if I broke into your house and used your internet connection, the only harm would come from you, the "victim", objecting to my behavior. You'd be bootstrapping your own victimhood, right?

If I were choosing to object to you on the grounds that you trespassed, then no.

If I were to drop the trespassing charges and choose to object on the grounds that I had to throw out my router because you used it, then I would indeed be manufacturing victomhood.

I'll repeat myself. They dropped the trespassing charges.

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> "You realize that about 40% of the money that comes into MIT comes from the federal government right?"

Based on this non sequitur, can we infer that you have tacitly accepted jlgreco's point?

He didn't break into anywhere. MIT had an open network. Can I use my neighbor's open wireless network without it being a crime? All signs point to yes.

We do all realize that there's a difference between breaking locks and trespassing, right?

Oh yeah, they would have had a case for trespassing.

BUT THEY DROPPED THOSE CHARGES.

If violation of TOS'en was a crime (thankfully, courts so far have ruled it's not), we'd all pretty much be screwed.

the fact that someone did something dumb does not make it illegal.

If i buy so many lottery tickets that the state thinks it's fraudulent, and shuts down the lottery for a day, that doesn't make me guilty of anything.

(As I said, TOS violations are simply not crimes. No court has ever held otherwise)

Man! What a crime you describe! Do you think any of these scholars--very few of whom probably use JStor on a regular basis (even at a very good liberal arts school, Columbia, did I rarely use it)--would advocate a >$1.5*10^6 or jail time for their lost productivity (which, again, was likely negligible)?

He didn't cause anyone to lose access.

That's besides the point. I'm asking if in which way is the crime, as described in the official charges, different than the Starbucks scenario. The denial-of-service to MIT may have helped spur the case, but wire fraud doesn't seem to depend on whether a DoS happened (or at least from what I can tell)

"...an unlocked closet on an open campus, one which was also used to store personal effects by a homeless man."

MIT is very open. They just put ID card readers on the student center in the last month or so. I used to see homeless people in the computer labs around campus and the student center all the time.

There is something about this case that makes me feel an injustice has been done. Not by Aaron Swartz, but by the apparatus investigating and prosecuting this case.

Sadly, I wonder how frequent these witch hunts are in the USA. The Larsgard story is another, prime example of how misconstrued the narratives of prosecuting attorneys can get - without any risk to their own career.

(Edit:) This is just one out of a few, key reasons that I do not want to visit nor work in the USA. The risk that one may get to pay for some a..hole's political aspirations.

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