Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz
rememberaaronsw.tumblr.com
rememberaaronsw.tumblr.com
If you are a current member of the student body or faculty you have a lot more power than me. Please read about this matter and learn what your institution chose to do on your behalf and take some action fully in the spirit of MIT to reclaim what it has lost.
My brain can't reconcile why someone would want to donate to something that already takes money from people in return for services. Kinda like the onion half-headline: "Man Has Alarming Level Of Pride In Institution That Left Him $50,000 In Debt."
Thanks for trolling me. I will try and make your contribution positive by reminding readers that if they lack a will with benefactors or executors with real world power, the state generally takes everything often ignoring legal documents you leave behind.
Now that you mention it, I'm not sure where I would leave any form of wealth I had. My first intuition would be needy organizations of some sort (cancer/hiv/troubled youth--and there's always hackerdojo). Intelligence finds a way. I'm not too worried about the world on that front.
Regarding your bad experience it sounds like you weren't able to make the best out of your time and maybe your school failed in some respect. I find universities valuable because they are basically reincarnated every 4 or 5 years. They exist and function as an expression of the values of the students and to a lesser extent the faculty hired in that time. I simply cannot fathom how the Institute in any incarnation that I have been involved with would set out to destroy a productive community member for something so inane. Perhaps handle it internally but to ask for a formal prosecution? Something is really broken and I hope it is brought to light before the institution fails its students further.
Ah ha! That's where we differ.
My university experience made me feel it was a huge cancerously-growing bureaucracy that doesn't really want to change. A huge bureaucracy with draconian rules whose goals were to never inconvenience any employee of the university at the expense of student time and frustration.
[[ At one point, they threatened to suspend my registration privileges because I WWW::Mechanize-automated my registration against their crappy web registration system. They kept telling me I was a horrible person for violating the "honor code" and "computer use policy" and I had no recourse but to write a lengthy letter of apology before they allowed me to register again. fun times. ]]
I bet it would've been fun if you'd automated that, too, using a Markov chain.
If you don't want people to read and comment on something, maybe don't bring it up to them, hm? It's not trolling to continue a conversation about your will that you began.
Also, shaming someone for asking a reasonable question with "I will try and make your contribution positive" seemed deliberately offensive. It's not clear to me why you lashed out at that person as though they were prying into a private matter, when you opened the discussion on it.
The dockets (1) suggest MIT made the poor (perhaps incidental?) decision to involve the Secret Service, at which point the evidence became part of a federal investigation.
I think the paragraph about MIT's "tepid" interest in the investigation is telling.
(1) http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N46/swartz/swartz-suppress1.pdf http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N46/swartz/swartz-suppress2.pdf
People here and in other friends are discussing what they consider a blatant misuse of the law. To my mind, attempting to sue MIT for responsibility in Swartz's death would be a similar misuse.
They will never see another dime or kind word from me, though.
" ... Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge."
So - MIT brings in the Feds, the Government threaten him with 30+ years of Prison, somehow there is no way for him to appeal to the public for support for his lawsuit (which would have been very popular, I'm certain).
Does he try and look to his family to liquidate everything they have to help support his defense? Does he plead out to something that he truly believed was not wrong?
I can't even imagine how horrible this situation must have been for him, and why he couldn't see how he was going to get out of it...
Which makes this whole thing even sadder. It's entirely possible his (great) IP law firm could have gotten him off, or at least ended up with a brief or suspended sentence. Even though worst case he was facing 50 years, it would have almost certainly been far less. But I am sure he was depressed and so involved in it that he wasn't thinking about it rationally.
That is possible. But what life would he have then, with $1.5 million of debt? If not for my kids I'd probably jump off a cliff myself than work a lifetime paying that off.
Killing yourself over $1.5mm in debt is not rational. You can default on it and go bankrupt and be back to normal in 7-10 years. You can get most of it written off. You can do consulting for 5-10 years and live slightly frugally and probably pay enough of it off to have the rest written off. You can start 1/1000th of a kind-of-shitty photo sharing site. You can flee to China, start over, and no one will pursue you.
They basically don't expect you to put 100% of your income toward fines, back taxes, etc. even if it's to the Government (and hence can't be discharged in bankruptcy). In that case, you just live on 25-50k post-tax and either hide a bunch of cash income while making small payments, or find benefactors who cover most of your costs and work on free software or something.
We essentially ended debtors prisons a long time ago.
35 years in federal prison might actually be a case for killing yourself (although I'd just read a lot of books and be the hacker Mumia Abu-Jamal, and hopefully get out on appeal).
The worse thing is if you're accused of a morally repugnant crime. Say, rape, or child molestation, or maybe some kind of betrayal of trust (like embezzling), or even not a crime but something like snitching on a close friend over an immoral law and sending Anne Frank to the Nazis. Then, there's both all the moral scorn from other people and from yourself -- just the accusation is hurtful, even if you know at some level it's false.
I can't say I've been depressed—I'm not qualified to diagnose that. I can say I've felt so hopeless I've made an attempt on my own life. Thankfully, it was a pretty lame attempt (after a lot of alcohol) that I aborted, leaving only a ring around my neck as evidence. I failed to even send myself to the hospital.
It's more than hopelessness. Life felt like an unbearable burden, a source of pain that would never end… until I ended it.
My life wasn't actually hopeless. My problems weren't as bad as they seemed—literally the day after this began the best two or three years of my adult life.
Had I been more competent, or maybe just more committed, I wouldn't have been around for that to happen. And there's no way you could've talked me into believing I'd appreciate living to see tomorrow—the very problem was I believed my life would be more of the same until I died, and I welcomed death over what I thought life had in store for me.
This story cuts deep for me because I survived and this man who's contributed so much more to society than I have didn't make it. It also cuts deep because I fear going back to that place, and seeing another man fall makes me fear a little for my own life. I've done my research since: if I try again, I'm convinced I'll succeed.
I'm among the most rational people I know. My own family thinks I'm just about incapable of emotion. Yet I've struggled with this.
People aren't rational. Not even the rational ones.
You could be right that $1.5 million in debt is not worth killing oneself, but not everyone will take it that way. It would be a major drag on your life in any case. It would be difficult for all but the strongest people to go on enjoying life.
There are few countries that are not in bed with the US. Usually they don't feel like getting into even more diplomatic difficulties unless there is some gain for them.
Assange, for example, could've made a deal with the Kremlin - in exchange for keeping silent about Russia and friends... But he's a different category.
There's no hope, really, of replacing the US Attorney Ortiz. MIT, however, actually has some indirect accountability to the tech community.
I have done precisely that type of thing dozens of times in the last 10 years, and it would have never occurred to me that I was doing anything wrong. And yes, I always had to login first through a browser, figure out how the hell the cookie was stored, export it into a format that curl liked, figure out the URLs for all the docs, etc, etc...
And yes - when I was younger and more energetic, sticking my laptop in unlocked cabinet with an open ethernet port is exactly the sort of thing I would have done, without for a second believing I was doing anything "criminal".
I have to believe that MIT has hundreds (thousands?) of these types of webscraping events occurring all the time.
What made this one different from their perspective?
If they'd charged him with trespassing, I would have contributed to his legal defense fund and bought him a drink when he finished his ~30 days of community service or whatever. Minimal harm, minimal foul.
I did way worse stuff from my machines at MIT when I was an undergrad. I actually was called to testify in a federal case over it, but told them to eat a bowl of dicks (well, more politely, and through the awesome attorney Jennifer Granick -- I was out of the country and didn't return until the trial was over, because you NEVER win if you set foot in a federal court, even as a witness).
MIT sold out Drink or Die, too, so fuck them in general.
From: http://chronicle.com/article/Rogue-Downloaders-Arrest/128439...
"On January 4, MIT police officers were notified that a member of the university's technical-security staff had discovered a laptop in the wiring closet. That morning, a team including a Secret Service agent and police officers from Cambridge and Boston visited the site and installed a Webcam....JSTOR never contacted any law-enforcement authorities about the matter. The decision to pursue criminal charges, she says, was not JSTOR's."
What did they do?
Course 14 (economics) machines got raided during Operation Buccaneer.
http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N68/68piracy.68n.html
It wasn't handled particularly badly, but the 1994 La Macchia case was worse (which I followed more closely)
He was downloading millions of articles, well more than the rest of the campus all put together. That caught their attention.
And they kept on stopping him, by locking out his MAC addresses. And he kept on working around the ways they were stopping him.
and it would have never occurred to me that I was doing anything wrong
When you are going into a wiring closet wearing a mask over your face to hide your identity, you pretty much know you are "doing something wrong." Probably not something that necessarily warrants Federal prosecution, of course, but he was under no illusion his actions were approved.
For an entirely different case, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._LaMacchia
I disagree. You know you're doing something that isn't allowed and will get you into trouble, but you might feel that it's morally right to do so.
I realize that sneaking into Wiring Closets and plugging in a laptop to get onto a privileged vlan isn't something sanctioned by the school. If I was caught, I probably would expect to get my hand slapped if I'm a student, and if I'm not a member of the community maybe even charged with trespass (though, I understand at MIT they dropped those charges)
But if I was a student, I wouldn't (and didn't) consider that behavior to be "criminal."
But what I find astonishing about the MIT case is that they pulled the secret service into the case (A) Just because someone was webscraping from a laptop and (B) Before they knew that the person doing the webscraping wasn't a student.
If it were me in charge of IT - I would have probably just asked campus security to lock the closet moving forward, make sure there are locks on all the wiring closets, and replace the laptop with a sign explaining campus-security had confiscated the laptop, and please go have a conversation with them to pick it up - return of Laptop being subject to (A) Apology for slamming JSTOR, and (B) Return of all the JSTOR IP.
But someone at MIT wanted to call in the feds. Make case hard and tough and send someone to prison for causing them inconvenience. This was a decision someone there made.
Yes, because someone -- they did not know who, but someone -- kept on breaking into their network. Over and over and over and over.
handled internally
He wasn't a student.
the result would have been effective from their viewpoint
They kept on telling him "no" and he kept on going in anyway. It seems you think the 13th time they told him "no" he would have stopped, when he ignored the first 12 times.
By the time you get to the police chasing someone through the halls, you have passed the point where you can expect to get away with "a stern talking to." (I shouldn't have to say it, but I will anyway: that doesn't mean that a Federal prosecution for decades in prison is the proper response, either.)
And yes, I do believe that being taken in by campus law enforcement and read the riot act, so to speak, would have been effective. That's much more serious than the previous attempts to tell him no.
It's just that everything that was described was the type of thing that my university had to deal with all of the time. People were always spoofing MAC addresses, trying to get onto privileged VLANs, and the Campus IT was always playing Cat and Mouse with them, and, in a very, very few rare circumstances where the student did something really stupid, brought Campus Police into the conversation.
But Campus police was the absolute escalation - I don't ever recall my university calling in the RCMP (Canadian Federal Police, and municipal as well) to investigate someone doing the equivalent of what Aaron had done.
I absolutely agree with Aaron's parents. MIT and the Prosecutor over-reacted, and, when the truth of the matter surfaced, failed to course correct.
The prospect of ruining your own family in a protracted legal battle with the DOJ is nothing short of a nightmare.
There but for the grace of God, as they say. This country can be a terrifying place, although I myself occasionally forget it.
This might not occur in this case, but I see lobbyists wanting money for all those movies your children watched for free.
Was this a court limitation? Why couldn't he appeal openly for his own defense?
I can understand a US Attorney being reckless, but I cannot believe MIT would act so cowardly. If not even hacker-friendly institutions like MIT will side with people like Aaron, it's a sad state of affairs.
MIT hasn't been a hacker-friendly institution since the early 1980s which is why Richard Stallman left MIT to found the free software movement.
That said, they could have handled it with a lot more finesse, especially when it is such horrible publicity for them. I suspect this has more to do with eager lawyers than it does MIT's culture.
Keep in mind that MIT is an academic organization and is committed to, well, academics, not politics; e.g. Stallman did not belong there anyway.
Politics is too important to be left to politicians. If you refuse to take control over your environment, you cannot expect it to remain friendly to you, for you are no longer a force shaping it. Academics is politics.
You misunderstand me. Of course, you are correct, but it's not the role of the school to be political, but instead to inform their students on how to be political. When people choose a school to go to, it should be about their academics and should not be swayed by politics. (Of course, politics always creeps in, which is why I'm never going to give one of my alma maters and money.)
Are you sure about that?
Read this, and then think long and hard about it: http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N46/swartz/swartz-suppress2.pdf
This was a product of a greater "in loco parentis" and services available for students, as well as bigger government grants (requiring more admins on that side)
It correlated with the downfall of MIT as an amazing place, outside bio/biotech. It would not be my first choice of CS school today (Stanford by a mile, then CMU, then maybe a few others including Waterloo), or science (Caltech). For computer security, I'd probably say Cambridge (UK), maybe Stanford, maybe Technion, and a few others.
http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N40/simpson.html
At least some faculty got it:
That fellow Pare seems awfully proud of himself for not accidentally murdering an innocent citizen.
When exactly did MIT first jump the shark? It wasn't like this 15 years ago.
Most of the time I feel that it is like a high tech soap opera but this events brings it home to me that alarmingly the stakes can be very high and that the weight of the collective system can crush any one individual. Is this naive of me but would it be possible to set up some kind of fund or foundation that could provide real monetary support to help those that are a braver than the rest of us when they confront the system and as a result get overwhelmed.
Apologies if this is inappropriate in any way.
I think the EFF would be pretty close to this already.
In that sense he was "one of us"... the HackerNews community
Beware would be activists of the forces you put to your axe.
Like the tip of an iceberg, their great heft can remain unseen.
These machinations have no appreciation for hacks.
Even lawful men have much to fear from their vision keen.
The unlucky must contend with a 13 stringed marionette.
Whose deadly snare targets all free men.
Probing at the six lines in every hearts quartet.
The song it plays is fell indeed.
Moments of silence won't bring this man back.
But we can rally as our thoughts are often not thought alone. [0]
We can repel the forces who's wishes for the public domain is to sack.
We can refuse to reap for us what others have sewn.
Don't falter at the sight of a martyers fall.
There is always work to be done with one less hand at the helm.
Stand up and shout, silence strangles us all!
Strangled, by this intellectual miasma that seeks to consume our world with hell.
And though this life has been bought,
full speed ahead! Eight knots!
Damning
Interested to hear what reminded you, but Turing committed suicide based on an unjust persecution of a minority by society as a whole. While Aaron's situation also involved injustice, I hadn't (and probably wouldn't) link the two.
How sad it all is.
Here's hoping his memory inspires more folk both here and elsewhere in the world to do the same.
Domain name: rememberaaronsw.com
Registrant Contact:
Brian Guthrie ()
179 Stockwell Dr
Mountain View, CA 94043
US
Here is one of the stories linked to it that doesn't verify the source:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2013/01/online-activi...
> I've registered rememberaaronsw.com on behalf of Aaron's family, with whom we're in touch. Please do not be alarmed.
We're in close contact with Aaron's family and partner Taren. You can take my word for it or not, I guess, but the site and the statement are official.
Take it for what it is or prove that it isn't until you have proof that it is not have the good grace to be quiet and let these people grieve without adding insult to injury.
Enough damage has been done I would say.
You're being a bully.
Sorry but I stand behind what I said which brings up a realistic question given the way the information was presented and that lack of contact info (at the time I viewed the page). You can choose to be trusting and you could very well be correct. I'm just asking a question.
No, you are casting doubt. Re-read what you wrote. There is a question in there but a lot more besides.
A hero is someone admired for courage and/or other noble qualities.
It's also a word greatly overused in culture today.
Swartz was accomplished, certainly. Though to me "co-founded the website reddit.com, co-wrote one of many specifications for syndicating content and repeatedly hacked and trespassed to download content to which he was not authorized" does not a hero make.
In a way it hits home even more, because it shows how any poor sap not unlike myself can be steamrolled by the justice system. I've probably done "worse", or at least comparable things.
Weev is about to go to jail for something equally preposterous.
I read that article and see some very worthwhile beliefs and endeavors, though beyond contributions to fighting SOPA, I'm not sure what I didn't "know about".
So yes, I'll stand by my belief that I don't see anything particularly 'heroic' there. Which isn't to say he didn't make many valuable contributions to things.
A week ago I posted something to a subreddit I've founded and it got banned. This spam filter isn't even allowing moderators to post these links. But I was allowed to unban it.
So, I wrote to the moderators of /r/technology a few minutes ago and instead of unbanning it they said that tumblr.com is banned reddit wide. No, he hasn't unbanned the link. :-(
Image captioning is, in our opinion, a bit worthless, but this is what we actually find objectionable not just one site of many which provides this.
Blogging itself is not what is objectionable just the general quality of the content from Tumblr, so comparing quickmeme to tumblr is unfair.
Cut flowers just die in a week.
It's nothing personal, just business. They use these cases to run for higher office by "being tough on crime" and other nauseating BS.