treated Aaron Swartz as a pawn in the political game she is playing
Well, maybe. It's also entirely possible that she was just doing her job, and didn't totally understand the technical aspects of what Swartz was accused of doing.
Well, maybe. It's also entirely possible that she was just doing her job, and didn't totally understand the technical aspects of what Swartz was accused of doing.
> didn't totally understand the technical aspects of what Swartz was accused of doing
These are quite entirely contradictory. How can you charge someone for a so-called crime you do not even understand?
She had the resources to hire the types of experts who are what I call "executive whisperers." She doesn't need to know what a perl script is to understand what happened at JSTOR.
On top of it, when the "victim" JSTOR is saying "what the hell, why are you prosecuting this guy?" Then its pretty obvious we're looking at political motivations here. Sorry, but you have way too much faith in people if you think what just happened was one big 'honest mistake.'
As a tax payer I don't want a prosecutor who doesn't know who to go after or how far to go. From reading the thread(s) here and loosely following the case in the news I am not convinced that the money spent to prosecute this case was the best possible use of my tax dollars.
Much of law is a very technologically backwards field. Up until recently, some law schools (and not backwater ones, but major top-tier ones) only accepted hard-copy, type-written (as in, on a physical typewriter) applications. Harvard's student library had several typewriters specifically for this purpose.
Someone in a position of power is not strong unless they know when to apply the full amount of power entrusted to them and when to practice restraint; when and how to apply less so that the level of punishment is commiserate with the crime being prosecuted. It is bad for our society to give give someone a pass when they over prosecute a crime in both the short term and the long term.