IBM Exec Husband of Aaron Swartz Prosecutor Takes to Twitter to Defend His Wife
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Does he have any idea what even 6 months in jail would have been like for a 20-something? How would he feel about spending 6 months in jail for, say, that March Madness office pool he might have joined (illegal gambling!) or that time he recorded and re-played an NFL game to his buddies (violation of the disclaimer at the start of the game!). Etc.
I think it's great: So now when Carmen is charged with manslaughter, she can be offered a plea-bargain of six months.
I wonder how Mr Carmen would feel about it being put in that light.
There might be some stipulations for overzealous prosecution, (malicious prosecution?) or something like that.
Justice is not perfect. There are countless people in jail in error (through no malfeasance). People identify the wrong person, someone was somewhere at the wrong time and circumstance is too strong, etc., etc. It can aim for perfection, but it's hardly that. Of course that does not preclude the aggrieved from being angry and disillusioned. Life is full of these weird uncertainties.
It's not as though the girlfriends or boyfriends of people who become distraught and commit suicide because of a breakup would be charged with manslaughter. I've never heard of that being a successful case.
You are missing the point. She can always be charged with manslaughter and take her max of 10 years in prison, or she can plea bargain down to 1 month.
It's not about what you can prove, but what you can extort using trumped up charges to force a plea.
(I'm not being serious, but that was the OP's point i believe)
Yes, you elucidated my point quite well.
It doesn't matter whether or not manslaughter applies: She would have to either defend herself (let's freeze her assets, cuz they're ill-gotten gains, so to pay the victims! (which is what she has done)) or take the plea.
I'm sorry but I'm sure this man, his wife, or any of the prosecution team did not expect Aaron to commit suicide or was their intention. I'm sure they are just as upset as everyone else.
Try and put your emotions aside, and let your logic take control again.
> I'm sure they are just as upset as everyone else.
What makes you sure about those things? Do you have private information that the rest of us don't have? Based on the information in the press it sounds like the prosecution just didn't care, or worse it sounds like this is the way they act as a matter of policy.
Basically we operate in a society (thankfully in my opinion), where actually the onus is on the accuser to prove the accusations, with evidence, beyond reasonable doubt.
The above humans outlined unless have some emotional deficiencies, I believe are like the rest of us, and it's safe to assume when anyone kills themselves it's a sad situation, and can empathise with said person.
So in fact I turn your statement back on to you, please provide solid evidence that would make me to believe they WOULD NOT be upset at the situation.
In both cases, this reflects badly on him and his boss, wouldn't you say?
Accepting 6 months in prison to escape the threat of 35+ years would perhaps have been the pragmatic way out, but still probably disproportionate.
Oh, you think they are just as upset as Swartz's parents?
Really?
Everyone else refers to the average person, or more so if you want to be technical, the average emotional response..
I'd rather believe that they saw him like a target to be scalped, bullied into submission by plea bargain. I don't know why, maybe because US prosecutors have a history of treating the accused like targets to be scalped, and bullied into submission by plea bargain?
Books have actually written on this subject, why don't you have a look? Here are some references:
http://www.amazon.com/Liberty-Eclipse-William-Norman-Grigg/d...
http://www.amazon.com/Liberty-Justice-Some-Equality-Powerful...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Tyranny-Good-Intentions-Constituti...
Finally, don't expect me to re-interpret the idiotic opinions that you post as something really profound, because my mind reading powers are as awful as yours. Express yourself clearly instead.
And don't call me a child - that's ad-hominem, jackass.
"Plausible" means "likely", not "tcuk positing something that can't be proved impossible".
The term you're looking for is "clutching at straws".
I think this is the heart of why people in the tech community can't make sense of what happened, and unfortunately probably why Swartz didn't realize what he was getting himself into.
I don't think it's just prosecutors or husbands of prosecutors who think illegally accessing the network of a key piece of the defense industrial complex (whatever else MIT might be, it is certainly that) is a bigger deal than putting together a March Madness pool.
No, people in the tech community can't make sense of what happened because they viscerally understand what he actually did, just like everybody understands how to record and replay TV. Aaron plugged into an ethernet port to get a faster connection, something people do every day. Aaron continued downloading files after he was told to stop. Should he have faced some penalty for continuing after being told to stop? Sure. Should it have been decades in prison for asserting his right to a jury trial? Of fucking course not.
MIT is a key piece of the defense industrial complex. It might be a hotbed of internet intellectualism, but it's also at various points been one of the top non-profit defense contractors. I can guarantee you that when the police found someone was attached to the network switch, before they figured out the identity of the person, they ran through the scenarios of whether the downloading was a cover for accessing classified information, etc. They wouldn't be doing their jobs otherwise.
Once you've created that kind of suspicion in people, they're not as eager to give you the benefit of the doubt as people on Hacker News who see the story in full hindsight and with sympathy towards his motivations.
Not if you're already using the network at Lockheed-Martin, and the "network closet" is the only quiet place that has an ethernet port and a chair because it doubles as sleeping quarters for the local homeless population. But presumably at Lockheed-Martin, they bother to maintain some physical campus security, including the locks on their doors, and don't have an environment primarily based on openness and exploration.
MIT is also a key piece of Cambridge, which is a key piece of Massachusetts, which is a key piece of the US, which is a key piece of the world. OMFG Aaron was hacking the planet!! And yeah I've no doubt the police thought that, partially because it's good investigation, but largely because they gain funding and importance by overblowing every possible threat. See also: small town cops getting helacopturs in case terrists try to blow up their water tower. But this is mostly irrelevant anyway, as it should have been sorted out by the legal system.
Now I know that over the past few days, you've been seeing a lot of tenuous reasoning based on blind emotional outrage. But buried in there, there's also been plenty of well reasoned analysis as to the actual causes of this outrage, that you have been ignoring (overly broad law which criminalizes every online activity, ridiculously harsh penalties for digital trespassing, denied right of due process due to immediate $1.5MM fine, denied right of jury trial under threat of multiplying his sentence by one and a half orders of magnitude).
If you honestly cannot understand that these things are major systematic problems facing all hackers, I question why you're even on HN. Wouldn't you be happier over at some lawyer forum where you can pretend that your system works, its errors are just "people doing their jobs", hacking (the breaking of abstractions) is a mortal crime against the state , etc ? I know that the world hackers have built currently looks an awful lot like your comfortable feudalism, but please just take our 'gifts' of phpbb and facebook and resume leaving us alone so that we may progress our world in peace.
It's incredibly frustrating to see people like you claim to speak for techies everywhere. I learned to program in C++ when I was 12 and have stared at more hex dumps than I care to remember. But guess what, I also believe in a world with fences and boundaries and rules. I think it's reckless to mess with the network of a $10 billion institution that does almost a billion dollars of defense contracts each year, just as it's reckless to jump the fence at a nuclear power plant. People get sensitive around sensitive things and I think they are right to do so.
I guarantee you I'm not the only one that feels this way, even within the techie community, so please don't act like you speak for me.
From the perspective of a prosecutor, what do you do in that situation? Can you not see how the nature of MIT as a major defense contractor would color an outsider's view of the situation? Do you honestly think the prosecutor would have acted similarly if Swartz had plugged into the network of a sports bar?
I shouldn't have to point this out, but again, I'm not saying that 50+ years or whatever would've been an appropriate punishment for what happened. I'm in fact quite sympathetic to the problem of overly aggressive laws re: network security. But I think it's willful blindness to paint this situation as someone doing something totally harmless and every day and being totally unable to comprehend why anyone would react differently.
Further, if the cost of MIT's status as a defense contractor has indirectly been the death of one of the bright individuals in the very field that MIT holds the most prestige, then I think the cost is too great.
Now, that does not mean that MIT does not or cannot foster a culture that encourages challenging boundaries. It just means that there are firmer boundaries further out from the playground in which the undergraduates play.
MIT says: "MITnet is an open network. There are no network firewalls, or network filter restrictions, and computers connected to MITnet are given network addresses that are accessible by the public Internet." (http://ist.mit.edu/security/authentication). This is the soft boundary. They're not going to prevent you from running bittorrent. But that doesn't mean it's unregulated. It has terms of use: http://ist.mit.edu/network/rules. Of the six central tenants, one is: "Don't misuse the intellectual property of others." It gets higher billing than: "Don't use MITnet to harass anyone in any way." That's the hard boundary. Better not use bittorrent to download copyrighted materials!
I think that explains MIT's reaction in this situation. Going into the closet to plug into the network came too close to breaching that hard outer boundary for the University's taste.
And to circle back to my other point: MIT's status as massive defense contractor colors how other people perceive what happens there. When the prosecutors in the DOJ think of MIT, they don't think of a place where students are encouraged to "challenge boundaries." They think of it as a place that does critical research often on very sensitive subjects--a vital part of the national infrastructure. Please tell me you understand why someone would be more sensitive to a network intrusion at MIT while operating under the latter premise than under the former.
What you're saying about MIT's network policies doesn't even help your point, it helps mine, unless you actually believe that e.g. running BitTorrent on MIT's network should justify really stiff penalties just because of some DoD involvement in other parts of MIT's network.
By the way, one of our clients has been on-and-off-again funded by the DoD, and we are directly responsible for their network, and we were audited by representatives of the army not too long ago. So, I do have some notion of the expectations for network security in such an environment, and I can tell you that everyone that matters there -- including the Army -- would think I was insane if I suggested that the unauthorized use of the network there to download paywall'd scientific journals should be a felony offense, or one that should result in any jail time at all.
Whether or not MIT's status as a defense contractor "colors" other people's decisions or not is irrelevant. What has been under discussion is whether or not those decisions were reasonable and proportionate to the crime committed, and you are doing absolutely nothing to argue that point.
Your profile claims that you are both a lawyer and an engineer, but bewilderingly, you don't seem to be accounting at all for what Swartz was actually doing. You seem to be making an argument that, because there were sensitive portions of MIT's network, even though it was established that Swartz was not accessing or attempting to access those portions, it's somehow justifiable to punish him as though he were. If that is your argument, I think you ought to reconsider that condescending tone on your last line.
If your point is that any unauthorized access, either of facilities or network closets, at MIT should be prosecuted more heavily merely because of MIT's DoD involvement, then let me again circle back to my point, which is that such policies are completely at odds with the ideals that made MIT an attractive talent pool for the DoD in the first place.
However, it's one thing to think this intrusion is a "digital misdemeanor" and another thing to act like you can't fathom why anyone would see it otherwise. You have your perspective, but the police and the prosecutor and evidently at least some people at MIT: 1) had no idea who Swartz was or what his agenda was; 2) didn't share his politics; 3) weren't familiar with the "hacker culture"; and 4) were rattled by the target being an institution like MIT. You seem to completely ignore that aspects of Swartz's activities seem similar, to an outsider, to someone with much more nefarious intentions, and you seem completely unwilling to explore how outsiders to the situation might have, in good faith, a different perception of it than yourself.
Also, I presume the "hacker" in Hacker News is used in the same sense as in Paul Graham's essays--hacking on code. I fail to see what that has to do with one's politics re: information security.
I actually do fully understand why what happened to Aaron did, on both fundamental and systemic levels. All hacking unnerves the people who were unquestioningly taking those abstractions for granted. It shakes their faith in their own reasoning process, making them wonder what else they could possibly be missing. The hacker appears to have special powers, and sets off a deep-rooted fear of the unknown.
Which is why we presently have life changing criminal sentences for any kind of computer hacking. The kind of people that desire to punish others for pointing out their non-clothedness inherently don't understand the varying ways their abstractions can be broken. So we get a vague open-ended law applicable to basically every situation (legitimate or not), but it's only enforced when someone who feels they've been wronged manages to get the ear of someone powerful.
But all of this certainly does not imply that this state of affairs is morally right. And it certainly doesn't help to repeat the nonsense scare tactics and justifications of the machinery that punished him as if they're fact, because the whole goddamn point is that these completely open-ended laws are not true laws at all, but avenues for exercising arbitrary punishment justified by appeals to not-illegal but bad-feeling "context". No doubt had this prosecutor's son done the exact same thing, the "context" would be different and they'd have ended up with a continuance or probation in the worst case.
It's not that some people here are "unwilling to explore the situation in good faith", it's that we have done so, and still cannot justify the actions of the prosecution in a reasonable way.
Sure, but first impressions can never be erased. Remember, at first the investigators had no idea who was accessing the network. They had to place a camera to find out. Moreover, as a general rule, prosecutors don't go to lengths to really explore the character of defendants, because people are punished or not for their actions, not their character.
> sharing his politics is not necessary for a just outcome
No, but it totally shapes your perception of justice. Entertain the notion of someone who believes that copyrighted articles are really property, and that network boundaries are like real life fences. To such a person, what Swartz did seems like hopping a fence at a public art gallery to steal the paintings. But, most people on HN seem to subscribe to the politics that say a network boundary is like a "keep off the grass" sign at a public park, and that research articles aren't anyone's property at all. They are outraged that anyone would get in serious trouble for merely trampling on the grass and taking the fallen leaves on the ground.
> given this occurred at MIT, an institution whose primary notable achievement is the celebration of hacker culture
I think very few people would consider MIT's primary notable achievement to be the celebration of hacker culture. That's not what ordinary people think about MIT. They think it's like the show Fringe. Even within technologically-minded people, I think celebration of MIT's hacker culture is limited mostly to the CS set. I went to nerd high school, and what we knew about MIT was robotics, aerospace, etc, not hackers.
> and the target was not MIT, it was JSTOR. MIT was merely the vessel.
If you're familiar with Swartz's agenda, you know that. If you're the prosecutor presented with evidence of someone video taped accessing a restricted closet at MIT, you don't know that.
OK, now I think I understand you, and unfortunately that means we're at an impasse, because you've imagined that we're making the most ridiculous argument possible despite all of the ample and articulate statements to the contrary. There is simply no way to have a sensible conversation with you if you're going to ignore all discussion of concepts like "reasonable" and "proportional" and instead conjure up some absurd caricature of the people you're talking to.
> I went to nerd high school, and what we knew about MIT was robotics, aerospace, etc, not hackers.
That's what hackers are -- robotics and aerospace and technology and knowledge and other "really cool shit!" enthusiasts.
> If you're the prosecutor presented with evidence of someone video taped accessing a restricted closet at MIT, you don't know that.
I'm not sure what I can say about a prosecutor that litigates a case without bothering to investigate the facts of the case, without sounding like a complete jerk. I will say that although Ortiz and Heymann might be described in many unflattering ways, I doubt either one of them could be said to be that incompetent.
Hacker culture is a mindset, not just diddling with computers, as I would have thought everyone on this site was aware. But perhaps not.
Perhaps not an everyday thing, but far from being something programmers don't do often, i.e. automate something.
Yes, the community is going to do as good of a job curating as the New England Journal of Medicine, etc. Please.
Classified information? Do you know anyone that can get physical access to a computer network with classified information on it? If it is easy to get access to it, it better only have access to sensitive but unclassified data (SBU).
Still a huge difference between 30 years and 6 months (which was probably 3 months in reality).
OTOH, a felony conviction on your record is a lot more damaging than 6 months in jail.
Incidentally, this also affects the idea that they should have gone easy on Swartz because of his history of depression and suicidal ideation, because then that becomes a tool for negotiating leverage as well.
But when the root cause is the systemic effect of plea bargaining on the justice system as a whole, it becomes difficult to find good solutions, and obvious that whatever the solution is, it will be very hard to implement. But our outrage compels us to demand something to be done right now, so let's just designate a scapegoat.
If he had a start-up idea, would it stop his funding?>
* MIT network was open * Everyone on this open network had access to the JSTOR articles * No EULA or any other agreement or license was presented to the user that would define what constitutes abusing the above mentioned privileges
Nobody is discussing whether he did the things he did. What we are discussing is whether anyone in their right mind would consider this a crime.
So there.
(edited to expand on my point)
Conrad Black managed 37 months whilst in his sixties.
As someone who's been reading Aaron's writings for years, it's clear he was a student of civil disobedience. It seems like the JSTOR act was a deliberate act intended as a statement of civil disobedience, given the little I've read here. My facts may be wrong here.
But if that's the case, going to jail seems like a common component of civil disobedience as a way to demonstrate how unjust a law is. The men I'm certain Aaron admired -- MLK Jr, Gandhi, etc. -- all served time in jail as a mechanism of galvanizing society around the injustice of the laws they were fighting.
I ask this as a legitimate question: Did Aaron not expect to go to jail for an act of civil disobedience?
What he found out was that the people in the legal system do not take kindly to being "hacked". Rather than give a wry smile and say "You got us this time, Aaron Swartz!", the prosecutor grabbed on to the part that she thought she could make stick and went for it. The rest is, as they say, history. There are a lot of lessons in what happened, but one that I haven't seen get much mention here on HN is that the US legal system is comprised of people, with all the advantages and disadvantages that that entails. It's not something that should be "hacked" lightly or by the unprepared, because the consequences are not always as deterministic as you might think they should be.
On a side note, I think your comment about HN being "abusive" lately is spot-on. Some of the discussion has bordered on "internet lynch mob", and I can't say I'm very comfortable with that regardless of the circumstances.
Frankly, you can't break the law even with just cause, kill yourself for being prosecuted, and blame the government for prosecuting you.
Although imperfect, we have a pretty good justice system that is based on an adversary model whereby the prosecutors will try their best to prove you are guilty; the defense will do their best to prove you are not; and a jury of peers guided by the judge will decide.
Everyone in the right mind will see that there is no way Aaron would get 35 years. Now, in fact, he was offered 6 months.
I have no idea what is the basis of that statement. I think that if he didn't agree to a plea bargain, if found guilty he could have gotten more than 35 years if the prosecution got their way. In fact, the prosecution just upped their accusation count to 13 a short while before Aaron's suicide.
His message and his timing are terribly misguided, but he is at least trying. No doubt she appreciates the support and, I hesitate to say, he does have a point: the 6 month offer hasn't been widely discussed by the mob.
(Just for the record I think it's a scandal that these charges were ever bought. Proportionality utterly failed here, and I hope the government and the nation learns something from this tragedy.)
It's been discussed. It's just that it's been dismissed as irrelevant. What is relevant is that the process itself has bankrupted a brilliant man, distracted and stressed him for two years of his life, and required that he declare himself a felon, abdicating his right to vote, among many other rights, for a fucking TOS violation, that the "victim" did not even want to pursue. Additionally, it's quite likely the bargain would have included some degree of probation during which a man whose passions run deep in computing, would be banned from touching a computing device of any kind.
How you government sycophants sleep at night is beyond me. Is there nothing the agents of the Almighty State can do that would make you stop defending them?
Wait, OK wow. I'm pretty sure I said it was a scandal, and a tragedy, and they needed to learn from it. I stopped short of calling for her to be fired because there are enough people pouring fuel on that fire. The changes that need to happen are far bigger than one person's job.
I'm also fairly sure that my comment simply explained why a husband of an embattled wife might choose to come to her defense in public. How you get from that to "government sycophants" is as beyond me as my ability to sleep is beyond your comprehension.
Finally, the irony involved in your baseless attribution of bad motive to my post when we're discussing a prosecutor's attribution of evil intent to what you call a 'TOS violation' is profound. It's a pity, because the first paragraph of your post contains a reasonable point, less the swearing.
I'm mainly looking at you, philwelch. Your defense of law & order has been incomparable since the beginning of this story. May your jackboots be forever bloody, good sir!
I agree with what you said with respect to the state of mind he must be in but you'd think an IBM exec would realize that there's nothing he could say that could possibly help.
He's making public ass out of himself exactly when his wife's career is vulnerable. That won't help her and in the long run I can't see it doing anything good to their marriage.
WRT the six month "offer," Lessig pointed out that Aaron wasn't willing to accept a felony conviction. The "punishment" for being a felon lasts for years and years beyond the prison sentence so it's easy to see that a felony + six months is way more than just six months. But it's easy to see why Ortiz was sticking to the felony charge. If Aaron had gotten a misdemeanor then she couldn't have boasted about "convicting" a "dangerous hacker".
"The thing that galls me is that I told Heymann the kid was a suicide risk," Good told me. "His reaction was a standard reaction in that office, not unique to Steve. He said, 'Fine, we’ll lock him up.' I'm not saying they made Aaron kill himself. Aaron might have done this anyway. I’m saying they were aware of the risk, and they were heedless."
If there is ANY truth to this at all, then firing the prosecutors is not enough. They had a prosecutor who was dealing with a suicide risk, who had triggered a previous suicide due to being overly aggressive, and the standard response was to offer to lock the person up??
That's manslaughter in my books. And if the system had justice (it does not) it would be so prosecuted.
unfortunate for the people that really are at risk.
Also a rethink of how much punishment is warranted.
Let's suppose that last Thursday the prosecutor (or whoever had the power) decided that there was a big suicide chance and Aaron Swartz were locked in a psychiatric hospital under suicide watch for his own safety.
I'm sure that it would have been a very big outrage, and most of the people would have say that it was an exaggeration and just an excuse to punish him, and claimed for his immediate liberation.
However the call to actually lock him up in the hospital CANNOT come from someone involved in the legal process against him. Allowing THAT would just lead to further abuses of power.
I expect that at some point Abelson will get to the bottom of that one and name names. I don't expect a pretty response.
If the parents knew he was suicidal, why in god's name didn't they seek medical attention?
I am surprised however that the husband thinks anyone cares what was offered. That suggests he really missed the root of the anger completely (which is as far as I can ascertain egregious prosecution by copyright interests and their lapdogs regardless of human cost or mandate) The only thing that would make people sit back and go "Huh?" was if we found out the Justice Department had dropped the charges weeks before Aaron's suicide.
Especially non USA-natives who have no idea how the juridical system there works, for the first few days, I actually believed the above, that if found guilty he would face that sentence, I had no idea how plea bargains works there, it's been a frustrating experience to say the least.
Being a convicted felon is no walk in the park either. That shows up on every job application you submit, and makes it much harder to find jobs for the rest of your life. (Which is something Aaron would have faced, because he'd exhausted his financial resources.)
Understand that Aaron's story is a classic Greek Tragedy, I'm sure that at this very moment some playwright/screenwriter is putting together a treatment of the form:
Act I: The boundless potential of unlimited talent in youth
Act II: The conflict of passion and righteousness over the injustice of broken copyright law. Climaxing in the arrest.
Act III: The pain of our hero being buried under a system too inured to the reality of the situation to distract it from its mission, and Aaron's death.
It has Oscar/Pulitzer written all over it. And if it can move the nation to change, like the novel To Kill a Mockingbird did, then Aaron's death won't be in vain.
The Justice Department is in the role of bad guy/antagonist in this play. They were the unwilling heroes in the antitrust action against Microsoft, and the before that the enforcement of civil rights laws. So they are equally capable of being 'put' in either role.
So this is not about "The Justice Department", it's about a person in a position of power, who abused that power.
I don't defend her actions, but neither do I presume to know her intentions. I do not imagine her cackling with glee at this outcome. Vilifying her, as an individual doing her job, is not warranted. That leaves the organization which gave her that job and ordered her to do it.
It is by that reasoning that I do believe it is about the "Justice Department" and not a particular prosecuting attorney within the department.
And, "no less"? On the contrary, all prosecutors do substantially less. They don't actually apply the law most of the time, if they did, we'd probably all be in prison. See this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/...
Even within this submission, the comments here still talk and insinuate Aaron was facing life imprisonment, danger to being raped daily, and suicide was his only option.
The more I sift through the crap most of the community is posting, and actually find more objective facts (why is Orin Kerr's objective analysis of the law no where to be found after a day?! Does this not speak volumes of the community?).
I actually feel sorry the Tom Dolan, and his wife and everyone else involved (isn't it weird how you can empathise with multiple polarizing parties??).
I don't actually think from the facts I've observed that 6 months (his lawyer actually suspected a suspended sentence), is actually a bad deal in this case, given all the facts, but this is my personal objective opinion.
I would like to see people be more objective, and communicate with less emotion and more reason, but it's something I've observed happening over the past few years, and I think this just highlights what type of community it's mutated into.
I also find it interesting that your account is 27 minutes old, and was created specifically for this discussion. Your concerns about "how un-objective this community is" seem self-serving...it seems pretty clear you aren't of this community, and exhibit few signs of understanding what makes this community tick. Also, as a nerd who values clear, concise, and accurate language, your misunderstanding of the word "objective" really bugs me. And that's my "personal objective opinion".
I agree the law is perhaps wrong, but who could have known he was being bullied past breaking point and would lead to suicide but himself? Do you believe that if someone disagrees with a law they can break it to cause reform, and if so which laws do you draw the line at? Is this the best way to act? Do you not think regardless of whether we agree with it or not, if we break it we should be punished? He clearly broke the current law, is 6 months imprisonment, a felon, and a highly likely suspended sentence really such a grave punishment? Do you honestly believe Aaron if convicted felon would struggle for work? Do you think he was emotionally sound and compos mentis at the time of taking his life? Do you believe this man did not show traits that he could possibly go on to further break other laws he didn't agree with in the name of his version of liberation?
I don't think Aaron went about his goal in an amicable way, and I don't think he believed he was either, he knew what he was doing, and unfortunately if you break laws, whether or not you agree with them, you ought to be punished. If you don't like the laws, cause reform without breaking them,there are other ways.
Whats the minimum requirements to be considered part of this community?
Civil disobedience is not the only, or often even the best, way to change oppressive laws...but, it has been a necessary component of most major cultural shifts. Civil rights, LGBTQ equality, etc. They all happened because a few people were brave enough to break the law, even in cases where the law was popular. However, it is very much worth pointing out that most prosecutors, when pursuing charges against participants in non-violent civil disobedience exercise restraint. They rarely pursue felony charges (though this has been changing; activists in Texas are alarmed by the new use of bizarre old laws to charge participants in the Tarsands Blockade with felonies; but this is the exception rather than the rule), and it is usually possible to continue your life without major impediment, perhaps after a short stint (a few days or weeks) in jail, and without the weight of a felony conviction following them around for life. A political act with no profit motive should be treated very differently by prosecutors, and judges, and the law, than an act committed for personal gain.
So, I disagree with your assessment that breaking the law is not a valid part of changing the law. Often, it is the only way change happens, and I have great admiration for the people willing to lay their own well-being on the line for something they believe in. In this case, an unjust law was broken, and I consider that an ethically sound decision.
Aaron Swartz was known to be a suicide risk. Prosecutors responded to this knowledge with, "We'll lock him up." Evil rarely looks like a James Bond villain...it's usually somebody just following orders. Evil was committed in this case, and it's part of a systemic problem in our culture and in our state. "Well, he broke the law!" is no justification for hounding a kid into bankruptcy and deep depression. It simply isn't. There is no justification for the behavior of the prosecutors in this case, and there is no justification for the way the law treats non-violent offenders in politicized cases like this.
Had Aaron hurt someone with his actions, I would have little sympathy. But, he didn't; he sought only to help people, to free the poorest people from an oppressive lack of access to information. When someone spends their entire life trying to help those least able to defend themselves, and the state responds with threats of decades in prison, the state is committing a great evil. I'm not even going to discuss the distraction of a six month sentence in a plea deal; this case damned near bankrupted him and that was used to back him into a corner where he had no options, and that's deeply unjust.
The requirement to be a part of this community is to respectfully discuss topics. Your approach has been to insult the intelligence, objectivity, and knowledge of anyone you engage with. In a community like this, which contains some extremely bright (famously so, in many cases) and curious people, dismissing anyone who disagrees with you as not being objective, or being too emotional, or being biased, while staking out your own claim of being unfailingly objective, unemotional, and unbiased, is insulting. Shutting down conversations by way of insult is unproductive, and unwelcome here.
Many people here disagree with you; if you can't convince them by way of reason, you're going to have to deal with being in the minority. To suggest that disagreement with you is uninformed or unobjective, on issues that many of us have taken very seriously for decades (and have seen the force of the state used to oppress friends or acquaintances on a number of occasions in similarly unjust fashion), is not productive.
You are perfectly free to do that, however, know that as a well off IBM executive he is the last person in the world in need of sympathy right now.
In contrast given the facts of the case, I honestly believe this is a fair deal. From what I've read of Aaron, and the case, I would assume this wouldn't of been his last fight of freeing information, if prosecuting I would also have wanted to try and deter Aaron from taking steps further on his next conquest, which I think the above deal does without ruining his life.
How many people here would not employ Aaron once out of jail? It was no where near the end of the road, or his only option, it was far from it. The man was quite clearly mentally ill, that's the main thing being clouded here by trying to scapegoat everyone.
Regardless of your 30 mins old account, if you are not a troll I want to do business with you, I'm a prince and I need to transfer a large amount of money out of the country and would be happy to compensate you for your help a whopping 25% commission!
I'm from Europe and, honestly, I can something deeply rotten in the american legal system (not that the ones in Europe are perfect, far from it).
The person committed an act of civil disobedience. OK, fair enough. But was the law fair to qualify such an act as civil disobedience in the first place?
35 years or "recognize you're guilty and get 'only' 6-months" for a victimless crime?
And crazy high lawyers fee bringing you and potentially your family to bankruptcy.
Add to that a prosecutor obviously having long teeth and wanting to advance in her "career" and you have something which looks ugly.
There's one word in the dictionary to describe what this whole issue feels like.
UNJUST.
It's unjust because the whole point of the legal system should be to bring justice and, in this case, it brought death.
Death in the name of insane lawyer fees. Death in the name of careerism. Death in the name of unjust laws, created under pressure of powerful lobbies abusing the golden law (the one who has the gold makes the law) over and over again.
That's why this "community" --and many other communities-- are very very upset.
That's why the white house shall have to respond to tens of thousands of people who wants one thing: a legal system that is just.
Considering the gross disproportionality of filed charges and the fact that there was no real incentive for the US Attorney office to "keep Swartz happy" (i.e. no chance he'd turn any co-conspirator or recover any loot, this basically being a mostly-symbolic solo operation), obviously you wouldn't trust their word.
P.S. Please, don't argue whether the analogy is imperfect: the point is that argument is logically fallacious.
He put even more fuel into the fire and he gave up his anonymity.
My reply to him is and stays:
The qualities of a good prosecutor are as elusive and as impossible to define as those which mark a gentleman. And those who need to be told would not understand it anyway. A sensitiveness to fair play and sportsmanship is perhaps the best protection against the abuse of power, and the citizen’s safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who approaches his task with humility.
Source: http://www.roberthjackson.org/the-man/speeches-articles/spee...
I feel like this case feels strangely reminiscent of the extortion of patent trolls, where they levy exorbitant risk over a company in exchange for a payout. Except, of course, this time the price was a significant portion of a talented young man's life. I have no grace for sympathy here.
So, here was a trade: 6-months in a jail for breaking Swartz's own sense of what is good and what is not, something he believed in the most, free knowledge. Obviously, this was out of question for Swartz. He simply couldn't agree for it!
I admire Swartz even more for doing what he did. He did not have any other options left, as he symbolically writes in his last post about Dark Knight.
He claims everyone is on the 35 years federal prison maximum sentence train and that he sees no mention of the 6 months plea offer. Besides the fact that if you are not guilty (I'm not american) I would simply not plea guilty I think that the persecutor scare tactics is enough to be asking for her resignation as it is the very definition of bullying which too often heads people into suicide, by leaving them a worst alternative (i.e. costing family and friends lots of money). Offer or no offer.
Bullying: Use superior strength or influence to intimidate (someone), typically to force him or her to do what one wants.
Basically going to federal prison 6 months, ruining you financially and having a criminal record for breaking some TOS/EULA for freeing _state_funded_ research which should have been free in first place is the fabulous offer ? How about thank you but no thank you ?
If he is guilty, i.e. trespassing, I would say the sentence should maybe be something like a month worth of social works. Or just see the context and give him a medal, he has done more _social_ work than most people already.
But frankly, I'm disappointed the coverage has stopped being about suicide prevention. Nobody should ever take their own life, and if you are feeling like life is not worth living please immediately call 1-800-273-8255. Thanks.
p.s.: I'd appreciate responses for downvotes, as I know this isn't popular, but would enjoy a real discussion.
I guess I personally disagree with this, at least for my own personal utility function. I would prefer suicide over a lengthy prison term, and I think that's the rational choice, at least with the inhumane conditions in American prisons. And you have to make that decision before sentencing, unfortunately, because courts often order suicide watches around the time of sentencing, precisely because many people share that preference.
I agree with you in cases where you have an option of continuing to live as a free man, however. In those cases seeming dead ends are usually irrational, borne of depressive pessimism. And treatment can make the situation improve and make it clear that there are ways out. But a lengthy prison term is an actual dead end, and treatment can't produce ways out of it. When someone kills themselves to avoid torture, it's the fault of the torturer.
Should we, as people who are not currently in prison, not try to make prison living conditions better instead? Some things that come to mind are:
1. Nobody should gain monetarily from someone being sentenced to prison.
2. Nobody should gain monetarily from someone being sentenced to prison for a longer time.
3. We should ensure full physical security for prisoners. I am willing to entertain the idea of making common lunch / shower areas optional. A prisoner ought to have the option to not be in physical proximity of other prisoners if necessary.
4. There should be a way to report bad behavior / torture by other prisoners or by guards.
I think the question to ask here is not whether death is better than prison... What can we do to make our prisons better?
I agree with your sentiment, but... are you aware of the fact that a large part of the US prison system is run by private corporations that have clear profit motives, and even seek contractually guaranteed occupancy levels?
Edit, link: http://annarbor.com/news/opinion/passing-house-bill-will-wor...
Money quote: "In 2012, [the Corrections Corporations of America] sent a letter to 'prison officials in 48 states offering to buy prisons from these states in exchange for a 20-year management contract and a guaranteed occupancy rate of 90%.'"
With all due respect, sir, this is simply not true. Oftentimes, choosing nonexistence to loss of freedom, prison rape, and in general the hollow, empty existence of a caged animal is NOT an irrational choice.
Probably not necessary for the threat of 6 months at Club Fed. Martha Stewart managed five months.
I'm not defending anyone here and I believe there was prosecutorial overreach in this case, but I disagreed with the family's use of their son's obituary to make a political statement.
He was obviously a troubled man if he believed suicide was his only option. He needed assistance (and reading through his posts, it seems obvious in retrospect) and I think a better statement would have pushed for improved mental health awareness and assistance in the US.
Easy: they hired a "Social Business Development" executive who doesn't understand social media in the first place (i.e. when an internet mob is out, you ain't gonna stop it with one puny twitter account).
Also, we now know that they hired the husband of a well-connected US Attorney prosecutor with political ambitions. Of course they did it because of his qualifications, nobody is saying otherwise, but y'know, people talk and stuff.
Face 35 years in prison or plead guilty and get only six months - how many innocent people would confess guilt just out of fear? And those confessions are as valuable as those that inquisition got... and that's sickening.
System that creates strong incentive for innocent people to plead guilty belongs to middle ages and not to a supposedly civilized country. How many Americans had to go through something like this and now have to live the rest of their lives with this horrible injustice, labelled as criminals just because they were afraid to take their chances and risk spending years or even decades in prison?
Relevant discussion from earlier today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5058703
I reckon that if Aaron would have gone to trial, he would have most probably not done 35 years, more probably from one to four years - that is taking into account most high profile hacker convictions in the past ten years, with one exception of five years and change plus a screwed up supervised release which I can't remember the timespan of. Six years would have been even better than that.
Look at Kevin Mitnick (the exception to the rule mentioned above), Adrian Lamo, Mark Abene, Kevin Poulsen, etc, etc... They've all had successful careers either as Security Consultants, Technologists/Speakers, Journalists, et al. And you could easily argue that having served time has made them all notable figures in the technology and security scenes. Aaron Swartz could have pleaded guilty (he did steal the documents and trespass) and do his 6 months or go to trial and end up doing a couple of years - and come out a hero with a strengthened cause and higher profile. A Reddit cofounder and high profile activist doing some jail time for his cause is something that would not have been forgotten.
Don't get me wrong, I'm on Aaron's side. The charges where preposterous and the way he was treated was barbaric. I can definitely sympathize. That been said I would have taken the charges and 6 months of jail time as a badge of honor. I mean he did break the law and caused monetary damages to JSTOR. At the end of the day this man would probably have entered that elite group of "convicted computer criminals" who have been able to turn their convictions around to become successful entrepreneurs, public figures, and hell maybe even a Movie/TV personality. Hell Mark Abene even had his debut as an actor in some movie I can't remember.