How and why the US Justice Department over-prosecutes

Finally, just because a network is open does not mean you have permission to use it.

He was hit with the hacking equivalent of trespassing. The point is that the fact that the network is unprotected or poorly protected doesn't make it any less "hacking" than the fact that property is unprotected or poorly protected makes it less "trespassing." What matters is whether Schwartz had permission to access the network for the kind of activity he engaged in, and he did not have such permission.

> No one is saying that. If he was hit with trespassing then it would be a different story. He was political target hit with the worst laws they could find that remotely applied to his case.

The aspies here are the techies who can't fathom why someone might characterize Schwartz's actions as "hacking into MIT's network to steal millions of scientific documents" and do so in good faith. It's aspies to not see how most people would see the situation that way, and rage at the prosecutor instead of acknowledging the larger task of changing people's views.

> Just the idea that Ortiz and Heymann had no choice but to hit Schwarz with these specific set of charges is absurd.

I didn't say she had no choice, I said her case was within the scope of the law. This is not a case where a prosecutor stretched obscure statute to railroad an innocent victim. This case was based on laws that proscribed exactly the kinds of activities the defendant undertook.

My point is that there are two very different kinds of "injustice" and people are confusing them.

In some cases, prosecutors charge defendants with completely tangentially-related laws in order to railroad them. But in this case the laws were on point. The real injustice is that the laws regarding "hacking" make no distinction between something like what Schartz did, and Russian mafia hacking into Bank of America's network.

Nietzsche's justifications have no relevance here. Removing Ortiz wouldn't change anything because the next US Prosecutor would simply do the same thing given the same set of facts. Prosecutors overreach. They have to, given the way double jeopardy and the rest of the criminal justice system works.

We get that you and the other technerds are angry about what happened to Swartz, but if you don't redirect your misplaced anger where it properly belongs (i.e., the laws that gave rise to this situation in the first place), you won't accomplish anything, and then Swartz really will have died for nothing.

* The sad part, though, is that the one thing punishment will never achieve is to make Ortiz have a guilty conscience. She and people like you will never realize that she is a bad person and should feel bad.*

Lawyers have feelings, too. Ortiz almost certainly went into the prosecutor's office to do good, to see justice done and to protect the innocent. Do you really believe that Ortiz doesn't feel torn up that a young white collar defendant committed suicide because she pushed him too hard? Because if you really believe that, then you are the sociopath, not her. She will spend the rest of her career second guessing herself with every defendant--both the defendants like Swartz and the murderers and drug dealers that form the rest of her caseload.

Reality does not care about godwin.

"Never forget".

Godwin's Law wants you to. Worse still his "law" encourages the mocking of those who want say if they think something is getting a bit Nazi. Which you have done by implying a disconnect between his comment, thinking persons, seriousness and understanding.

Why?

Perhaps so no one dares point it out if it looks like its happening again? Or something else? Who would want that, and why?

I'd prefer to be wrong, than get caught short. Citing this nonsense "law" is like getting people to shut up on so called "patriotic" grounds. It circumvents logic, reason and debate. Its silences people.

Look at it, it is Nazi in its self. Do and think as you are told.

Have to wonder, if we get more suicides of this type and people cite this case as a parallel too much, will that get a law too? Will people be told to shut up?

Also, "most probably" indicates a bias toward true, where maybe is more like 50-50. I did not say maybe, I said most probably. All degrees of likelihood are not the same for me, so please don't replace my words. If you did want to reword what I was saying, "not certainly" or "not definitely" would have been more appropriate.

Did Swartz have a similar issue? Or was he unable to bear the thought of being called names by that paragon of moral legitimacy known as the US government?

They seemed to have a pretty strong case against him, which means ending up with a felony label was pretty much a foregone conclusion if it went to trial.

A felony on your record is indeed a big deal. However, when you have the connections he did, and the reputation he did, a felony is not necessarily a "destroy your future" type big deal. Plenty of tech companies would have still jumped at the chance to hire him, for instance.

He was going to almost certainly end up with the felony tag regardless of whether or not he took the plea. Taking the plea gets him out and lets him get right to building his life back, and working on getting his record expunged.

Going to jail for, say, 10 years, not only delays all that by 10 years, but also makes it much harder. 10 years is a long time in the world of internet fame. Connections and reputations fade.

I'm afraid I don't see this as a flaw. Scarce prosecutorial resources will always necessitate some kind of discretion in how to spend time.

> criminalize too much

You are widening the scope of the debate far more than I have taste for. You will have to find someone else to argue this point with.

The difference between most democracies and dictatorships is that a dictatorship is despotism by minority and most democracies despotism by majority, not often are democracies systems of fairness.

>>>> Additionally I would propose that in some random subset of accepted plea bargains, a trial is forced

So, let's say the defendant pleads out and the jury can not convict him because of whatever stupid thing. How it makes prosecutor necessarily bad? Remember in the recent case of Blagoyevich outright selling senate seat the jury could not convict him because one of the jurors thought it's just politics as usual and there's nothing criminal was going on? How something like that makes prosecutor bad? Juries are never certain. It would be hugely unfair and would definitely drive good ones from the job, because good people are usually sensitive to unfairness. Bad people would stay and manipulate the system so that their cases either don't get randomly selected somehow or get to a sympathetic judge, or some such.