1/13 noon at MIT: Protest wrongful prosecution of Aaron Swartz
maps.google.com
maps.google.com
This was an attack on freedom not carried out by a confused and brainwashed group of people desperate for their lives due to living in an impoverished country or warzone. It was an organised attack, meant to ruin a person's life and deter anyone who wants to fight for information freedom, coordinated by well off, educated people who made conscious choices, had access to all the facts, were reminded repeatedly by the media how ridiculous and immoral their actions were and did it all for the political and financial benefit of special interests and the serfdom of everyone else.
These people were informed, they had to know how malevolent they were acting towards Aaron and those who try to maintain freedom and democracy in the digital world. They were aware and still chose to try to ruin his life even though he was clearly acting entirely in the interest of others and doing it in a manner that was civil and non violent. They did it just because he was smarter than most and thus a greater threat to entrenched powers. The level of evil here is truly off the scale. The fact that it resulted in his death is just... I'm at a loss for words.
And they call themselves department of justice.
I had sympathy yesterday, but this is turning in to hero martyr worship. Its getting ridiculous. Step back and think. Form a proper long term strategy. Think about Kim Dotcom, Bradley, the British bloke you chaps tried to get, copyright stuff, patent stuff, hell, think about damn drone strikes which I assume will begin to happen in the US eventually. Look at the lot of it in this blokes name, not just one tiny insignificant part of it. Most of all think about the relationship between government and ...... YOU. Its supposed to be YOUR government.
I get the grief, but if all you can think of is this one single case, then expect the world to be a better place you are deluding your selves. Those Wall Street protests amounted to nothing what so ever, which means you have to do much better than them. Think about it.
As say this because I want American people, the intelligent, considered, sensitive people I read here to win their country back.
When it costs $1.5m to prove your innocence you no longer have any right to the word "democracy", less right to point fingers at other countries.
Come on America, be the people the rest of us hope you really are.
Aarons death can also be a catalyst for change and I think a cause OWS would be interested in supporting as well.
I'm not saying OWS was useless...I agree with you that the amount of conversation and awareness they raised was far more than I would've suspected walking by their Zucotti Park encampment everyday...they had a decent amount of success despite their wide diversity of goals, and that's admirable. But to the parent commenter's point, their unfocused aims limit their success. The Tea Party, in contrast, is an actual force in Congress.
Isn't that how causes start? I feel like I can think of far more effective, mainstream causes that centered around the cult of a person (or a small group of people) than around agreement on an idea.
Like most of HN, I didn't know Aaron personally, but when I express outrage over these kinds of things I can now say, "Like Aaron Swatrz."
I get your sentiment, but if you start trying to lump too many issues together, your message gets muddled, people get confused or won't be interested.
Using any case to try to enact change is a good thing, and perhaps it will work to help people that would be hurt in similar ways in the future.
One step at a time.
Also, in reference to your final point, and it's well taken: some of us try to be.
"Save kittens" --> no one cares
"Save this kitten" --> everyone cares
You can think of this as hacking the human psyche, if you like.
Today I'm going to exercise our right to peaceably assemble. I'm not going to bring a sign, nor yell, nor point fingers, nor hero worship.
I want to meet other hackers who care enough about what happened to meet, if only for a bit, in person. And, it isn't just enough to meet in person. The gesture can be visible, open in location that has significance to this story.
To simply bear witness to shared grief and concern.
Well there's no common thread that binds those situations so the message is... "things are bad, we are angry"?
No, the focus on this particular case is better than a vague outpouring of frustration.
> Look at the lot of it in this blokes name, not just one tiny insignificant part of it.
Do you believe that everyone here cares only about Aaron Swartz, and not the rest of these issues?
The death of Aaron Swartz is a particularly painful wake-up call, but it doesn't mean that people care only about him. It helps that he was a particularly sympathetic character, and that many people in this community knew him personally or were directly involved in his work and writing. Kim Dotcom is a international millionaire, who was violating copyright for substantial personal profit, and who had a mansion with a built-in bunker for just this sort of problem; and has been able to use his wealth and power to much more successfully defend himself. Bradley Manning is more sympathetic, but he did violate his duty to his country by revealing many secret documents that he had access to, without being particularly selective about anything that really showed abuses.
Aaron, on the other hand, was merely trying to preserve access to a large body of academic and scientific work. Nothing he did ever indicated that he intended to profit from his downloading. Heck, he never even distributed any of it. And while he used some techniques that were further into the grey-zone than many of us would try, the prosecution was so clearly out of proportion with the "crime" as to make the absurdity apparent to almost anyone (and the fact that it's treated as a crime rather than a civil matter is patently absurd as well).
It has always been the case that martyrs, or particular example of people persecuted by a system, are far more effective than general complaints about entire populations. There were millions of black people who had been treated unfairly, made to use separate bathrooms, drinking fountains, sit in the back of the bus, before Rosa Parks decided one day that she wouldn't take it any more and refused to move, leading to her arrest, and subsequently leading to bus boycotts and the case that eventually worked its way to the Supreme Court ruling that segregation on the bus system was illegal.
Putting a face on injustice is so much more effective than simply talking about it in the abstract. And when that face is a brilliant and well loved young man, who had many influential connections in the tech industry, who was working in the interests of knowledge and social justice, rather than some kid downloading the latest Hollywood blockbuster or an international millionaire trying to make a buck, it will be much more effective.
The stakes have been raised. We cannot sacrifice our future, and our freedom, in the interests of failing business models.
That being said It's a great idea and I wish I could be there.
So STFU.
He is just saying that it would have probably been far more useful to do it while he was still alive, which is sadly true.
Being said, I agree that's it's a nice move.
Edit : I should add that I believe there would have been a meaningful backlash had he for some reason lost his criminal case and been sentenced to (n > 3) years in federal prison.
In hindsight, there was a great deal of empathy to be shown to an individual who was being financially and emotionally drained by the legal system. However, that's the sort of stuff that doesn't readily occur to most people (myself included).
A Redditor started the campaign to raise $700K for the bullied bus driver. How easily that could've been raised for Aaron http://www.columbiatribune.com/wire/bullied-bus-driver-fund-...
> affiliation with MIT right now, even as a student,
looks to me like affiliation with the Nazi youth
Those retaining voluntary affiliation with MIT after these events are vile. I choose, as a matter of personal morality, going forward to have nothing but disgust towards them and will not cooperate or affiliate with them anymore than I would with Neo-Nazi Skinheads. Those who had affiliation with MIT in the past, such as graduated students, provided they disavow all connection or affiliation with this organization might be redeemed, just as Nazi youth who have since disavowed their affiliation have become tolerable. The affiliation though will always be a black mark on someone's record regardless of whether they knew the details of the evil committed by their organization.
> I choose, as a matter of personal morality, going forward to have nothing but disgust towards them and will not cooperate or affiliate with them anymore than I would with Neo-Nazi Skinheads.
That's revisionist history. Those people who voluntarily affiliated with Nazis were generally forgiven unless they benefited from the affiliation in ways beyond mere survival. The Nazis had a nasty tendecy to kill those who opposed them, so "affiliating" and even "accomodating" with Nazis was a valid survival technique so long as affiliation or accomodation did not turn into mutual cooperation. Many people in the French Resistance were officially "affiliated" with the Nazis in some way; this is part of what made them so effective. The same is true of those who helped Jews flee from Nazi-controlled areas.
This is the proverbial straw that's getting people to realize and understand just how fucked up the law is when it comes to digital "crimes".
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-stat...
Already about a fifth of the way there.
To say that this is a catastrophe at many levels is an understatement. This should not have happened.
While I did not personally know Aaron I have lost at least one good friend to the pressures and stresses of running a business and colliding with the legal system. I've seen it happen right in front of my eyes.
These things are not worth a person's life.
Of course, we have a natural "who done it?" attitude and now want to find someone to blame for his untimely death. At some level you do have to blame him. No, not for downloading files but rather for making the decision to end his life. Nobody but him made that decision. I have suffered enough in business to actually understand how a person can get there, how, before you know it, mental stress and anguish walks you right up to the edge of that precipice. And, once there, only an external force can keep you from jumping off. In my case this "non-mascable interrupt" were my kids. I know they saved my life, even though they had no clue they were doing so. I can't even guess as to why this young and brilliant man did not have someone to pull him away from the edge.
And so, as much as one can blame Aaron for taking his own life, it also took external forces to cause him to walk to the edge of the precipice. Sadly, it seems, these forces originated with actions taken by MIT and were amplified by the DOJ. I find myself strangely contemplating the idea that, perhaps, just perhaps, pro-gun extremists who believe the government is out to get us might know something that we don't. But I digress.
Who done it? Well, MIT and DOJ. At least that's how I read it. I also think JSTOR is at fault, even though they seem to be washing their hands. Negligence through inaction.
Can anything make this right? Well, not really. You can't replace a life. Yet, the part of me that always wants both sides of an equation to balance has been searching for something that might at least make this horrible event make some sense.
I love MIT, but I get the horrible feeling that they fucked up in a big way. Admittedly I have formed this opinion without direct access to the facts. I have to concede at least that to be fair. Still, one idea keeps circling around in my head and I just had to come here and put it out there:
JSTOR can no-longer exist. MIT, needs to acquire JSTOR, release all content to the public domain and disband the organization. MIT, shouldn't even have direct control of this data. perhaps it should be handed over to Wikipedia for dissemination (along with the requisite financial support).
If it is true that MIT initiated this and they, along with JSTOR, could have made tons of noise to pull back the DOJ, they really need to engage in deep introspection in order to make sure this never happens again. And they need to make JSTOR ancient history. If, despite their substantial financials, this acquisition is beyond their capabilities industry giants such as Apple and Google need to intervene. One of the best ways I can think of honoring Aaron's memory is for this data to be free for anyone, anywhere, to access.
RIP
At the risk of being branded insensitive, I do have to agree with this sentiment. My view on Aaron's suicide is much the same as that of the nurse Jacintha Saldanha last month [1].
In both cases, these people were subjected to incredible stress and anguish by external forces, but crucially, the reasonable person could not have predicted their response to these pressures would have been to take their own lives.
Aaron wasn't on suicide watch. Nobody foresaw this.
> Thus Master Wayne is left without solutions. Out of options, it’s no wonder the series ends with his staged suicide.
> But Movie Joe somehow is able to foresee this future and concludes the only way to prevent it is to kill himself.
They have been wrote a few months ago but ... well. It's a weird coincidence.
A person suspected of breaking federal law will be prosecuted by the Federal government at its own discretion. The alleged victims get no say in that. Their forgiveness may be taken into account by a judge at sentencing, but it has nothing at all to do with the pursuit of prosecution. In fact, a federal prosecutor would be behaving in an impeachable way to fail to pursue a violation of federal law.
Citation needed.
Particularly considering the fact that prosecutors do not have the resources to pursue all violations of federal law. Doubly so given that multiple states currently have extremely uneven enforcement of federal law around the sale of marijuana.
Selective enforcement is a reality.
State and local prosecutors do not have the resources to pursue violations of federal law; they also do not have the jurisdiction to do so.
Federal prosecutors have several billions in resources to pursue violations of federal law, and are effectively not capped in their pursuit of "justice".
Doubly so given that multiple states currently have extremely uneven enforcement of federal law around the sale of marijuana.
Federal prosecution of drug laws regarding marijuana are fairly even. The difference is that states which have legalized marijuana make it far easier for federal prosecutors to find defendants than states where it is illegal (because defendants in those states do not distribute their marijuana in the public eye).
Being aware of a situation where it is probable to win a conviction under the letter of the law in no way obligates a prosecutor to seek that conviction.
[0] http://www.americanbar.org/publications/criminal_justice_sec...
I wouldn't blame him for ending his life. I would say there is responsibility however on his part, to have found and kept enough support around him to counter-balance whatever he was diving into; There's also responsibility on society's part to provide and facilitate that support - and to make sure powers/controls are kept in check and balance (proportional to the alleged offense, and based on society's evolving values). Perhaps he thought he was though and underestimated the pressures and how it would affect him. Sometimes when I have eureka moments, on the positive side, they initiate a very powerful chain reaction in my thinking and focus. I could see the same thing happening if you've created lots of justifications as to why "pending doom" may not hit you, may not be real - and something could happen that makes it very real and all of that pending doom could flood in and cascade as doom.
Is there anything further planned that you're aware of?
It's sad that people started to protest after his death, hey, where you'we been before?
Had anyone imaged that Aaron decided to suicede just to wake people up, he did so many great things and was so altruistic for to internet freedom that this could be a real scenario...
RIP
Maybe I'm missing something here. Was he made an example? Is this the fundamental nature of the protest and the outrage, that we perceive that he was made an example of, that we are aware, and that it is unfair, in some essential way, for them to target leaders who are no less perpetrators than the rest of us?
Because we do that to them when BoingBoing or Anons cry to bring down or apply heat to CNN or pundits. I'm not playing devil's advocate, but I'm trying to understand the nature of the protest. I believe these questions can be fairly asked about [the protest] without counting as some sort of insincerity toward Mr. Schwartz.
But "Marshall Law", as I understand it, is _more or less_ in effect, and a lot of people are talking about Obama's UAVs and whatever it is they do. (I know it was repealed. But you get what I mean. We're all consuming roughly the same information; so can we just bootstrap past the facts, please? I don't want to play semantics, pedantics, or any kind of fact-checking game.)
So I must ask: Is this a civil war? When do we call it that? 100 years ago, it meant having a militia or something of that order. Now we all play slapstick at our keyboards and write "modules" and pentests. Is it possible to call a spade a spade?
I'm asking seriously here. Every week I have to stop and ask myself, "Should I read the news? Will there be another episode or thread of death that I'll have to keep track of on account of something our government did?"
I really do appreciate Mr. Schwartz efforts and work. But this country is taking heavy demoralizing blows every week.
Beating someone down who isn't trained or prepared to fight is a different matter from beating down leaders, ideologues, activitists, and fighters. It seems like this country, our communities, are being served heavy blows, in much the same way the U.S. demoralizes the "Middle East" with its extended arm of Social/Big Media.
It's almost like the internal struggle we all face in our own lives. Doing the right thing is hard, doing the wrong thing is convenient. So the people we have running our government are human, they pick the wrong thing sometimes. Most of the time they probably don't even realize they're acting like the bad guys. People can rationalize anything.
What we have to do is to stop them when they do wrong. The check on the common criminal is law enforcement. The check on law enforcement is Congress. The check on Congress is the people.
We the people need to do our job.
And honestly. I'm sure a majority of us here are prepared to print a gun and build a quadcopter at the drop of a pizza slice.
[Ugh. Of course that doesn't mean "let's go out and get crazy!" I just want to make it clear that something is emerging socially in this country, and it is due to the fact that weaponry is so widely available. (And even further, by the Bureau for Justice Assistance, my Terminal is technically considered a weapon.) Many of us defend the idea of printing a gun, and this in itself is problematic for something like a "Congress" that cannot even begin to understand, in any practical sense, what 3D printing amounts to economically and socially.]
It could just be that Aaron was a "kindred spirit" but what I think at last is that it comes down to the fact that someone who was so valuable to us was taken from us by the actions of someone who offered us so very little with their own life, for nothing more than a small amount of personal gain for themseleves.
Its the same feeling I get when I learn an NFL star or a merit scholar was killed in a mugging over a few hundred bucks by some worthless thug.
And so I'm outraged.
Aaron actually had the chops to pull these things off and make them stick.
Witness the PACER affair for example, if this wasn't a direct retaliation you have to wonder if there wasn't a link between that and this.
In the aggregate your dropbox and everybody else's probably contain at least as many articles as Aaron downloaded, but JSTOR isn't scared of that because it isn't centralized for easy access. That's when their little gravy train becomes endangered. Don't be misled by them being a 'non profit', there is plenty of money made around non-profits.