Aaron Swartz was 'killed by the government,' father tells mourners | Hacker News Reader

Aaron Swartz was 'killed by the government,' father tells mourners

latimes.com

51 pointsdanso76 comments

It's harsh to say, and I know that there is much reason to think that the prosecutor was over-prosecuting Aaron Swartz's case, but this kind of blame-shifting on the part of parents is not helpful to a young person who is at high risk for suicide. Civil disobedience according to Thoreau, according to Gandhi, and according to Martin Luther King, Jr. is all about being willing to do the time after intentionally breaking a law. All three of those pioneers of civil disobedience spent time locked up in conditions worse than any Swartz would possibly have faced even if convicted. No one in the United States government killed Swartz, just as no one in the United States government forced him to download the JSTOR files through a method that Larry Lessig says he would never have advised Swartz to use. Swartz tested some limits of the system, and found out he miscalculated. He caved in when it came time to stay alive to test the system another day.

> Civil disobedience according to Thoreau, according to Gandhi, and according to Martin Luther King, Jr. is all about being willing to do the time after intentionally breaking a law

The issue I am seeing here is that this take on civil disobedience is only worth it if your incarceration does one or more of the following: threatens to clog the system, infuriates the masses, draws attention to the absurdity of the system, provides an opportunity to set legal precedent, or is just in general noticed and cared about. If it does none of those things, then the only thing getting caught/locked up accomplishes is the silencing of another voice.

Of course you could also say that protesters should accept arrests even if there is nothing to be gained by it just to adhere to some sort of socratic social contract mentality, but not everyone buys into that mentality. I know I certainly do not.

If you are confident that you can secure convictions, and are confident that the system can handle the load, and are confident that the masses don't really give a shit about anything unless a celebrity is involved, then telling activists to go get arrested becomes an effective tool of suppression.

Had Swartz been convicted and served his sentence, would the HN community at large care? We were dismissive when he was alive and it looked like he was hosed, would that have really changed when the jury came back with their verdict?

> Had Swartz been convicted and served his sentence, would the HN community at large care?

I would have. I totally misread the situation. I thought there was basically zero chance he would be punished so vindictively. And I had no idea that he was all this time in Kafka hell.

Had Aaron gone to prison it would have been a wake-up call for a lot of people, much as his suicide was — except that one could have done something about it. Actually, a trial and conviction would likely have become a cause celebre in the tech world.

And yes I know that people don't just kill themselves for one straightforward reason. It's still sickening.

How do you mean punished so vindictively? A 6 month stint in jail (reduced for good behavior) doesn't seem wildly vindictive to me. For the people saying he was facing a lifetime in jail - well yeah, if you add up all the maximum possible sentences and run them consecutively. But that hardly ever happens except in the most egregious of cases.

If he had lost at trial I doubt his sentence would have been much longer than a year or two. The indictment doesn't say 'he committed wire fraud, he must serve 20 years', it just says 'he committed wire fraud' - an offense for which the maximum penalty happens to be 20 years. The court decides what the actual sentence is after conviction.They rarely hand out the maximum and the statute does not assert any mandatory minimum (which provisions are unconstitutional now anyway, but that's beside the point).

Aaron's own lawyer said he didn't believe that Swartz would have received a custodial sentence even if he had been convicted.

What's vindictive isn't the outcome. The outcome never had a chance to happen, so it's hard to discuss it. What was bad about this situation is a prosecution that had taken such a hard line that a 6-7 year prison sentence --- a life-changing calamity --- would have seemed like a real possibility. Swartz was being required to swear before a court that he committed 13 different felonies just to get off with ~half a year's prison time.

We'll continue to disagree about this, but I think the plea deal was fair enough. Sure, being a felon is a burden - but realistically, being a hacker felon is much less of a burden than being an ex-crack dealer or something.

Plugging your machine directly into someone's wiring closet without permission and then running scripts to pull down 100x the traffic requests of everyone else on the campus combined (resulting in a multi-day shutdown that affects all the legitimate users of that campus) is pretty abusive. If I was running a business and someone did that I'd be furious, even if they were just using the bandwidth to download all of wikipedia or something equally freely accessible.

You & I don't disagree that Swartz's actions should have been subject to criminal charges. We depart at the need for time served in prison. In its context: an act clearly intended as civil disobedience (though perhaps intended anonymously) by a first time offender with no commercial purpose, minimal damage, minimal attempt to evade detection and thus obstruct investigation, no co-conspirators, and involving no critical information systems or protected information of any sort should have been acknowledged by the prosecution as one not meriting prison time. The offer should have been "take a felony conviction and we'll argue for a suspended sentence; go to court and you risk doing time in prison".

You know what I bet happened here? Aaron hatched this plot assuming that the worst thing that might happen is that JSTOR might have sued him. After all, what was he really doing? The same set of actions from his own network would have been mere copyright infringement. He wanted to make it less likely that he'd get sued, so he did it from someone else's network. That was dumb, but does it really transmute a tort into a felony?

The same set of actions from his own network would have been mere copyright infringement. He wanted to make it less likely that he'd get sued, so he did it from someone else's network.

I'm probably misunderstanding you: How could he have done the same from his home network? The articles he was downloading were only accessible from MIT intranet, not from the public Internet, no?

He was a fellow at Harvard, with an office there, and had legitimate access to JSTOR.

An offense worthy of a year or more in prison? Indeed we'll have to agree to disagree. Moreover, there's a distinction between principled activism and garden-variety crime, the ability to observe which is surely one of the criteria for a civilized society.

Anonymously downloading the entire contents of JSTOR so that you can publish it on a file sharing network and thereby destroy its commercial value is not principled activism; it's ends-justifies-the-means activism.

> downloading the entire contents of JSTOR so that you can publish it on a file sharing network and thereby destroy its commercial value

It seems implausible to me that publishing the contents of JSTOR in such a way would actually destroy any substantial amount of JSTOR's value. What university would actually drop their JSTOR subscription in favour of a bunch of unlicensed PDFs they torrented? JSTOR, in addition to keeping you on the right side of copyright law, gives you all their systems for querying their data, and keeps itself up to date.

Maybe a university in a developing country would drop their subscription, but any in the US? I find it unlikely.

Such a torrent would be far more useful to an individual who didn't have access to an organization that subscribed. However it seems these pay-per-download fees only account for a fraction of a percent of JSTOR's operating budget (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064408).

So it looks like there is some feasible harm there, but by no means destroyed commercial value.

Do we know for sure what his intent was?

Anyway, yes we can argue about the distinctions here, but I suspect we agree that for prosecutors rigidly to refuse to consider any of them at all ("theft is theft") was abusive.

We have some evidence, because he wrote a manifesto.

Interestingly, Lessig explicitly dismisses the theory that Swartz was trying to "liberate" the JSTOR archive:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/13/01/aarons-law...

Isn't it a little odd that Lessig doesn't mention the manifesto? It wasn't obscure, and was introduced by the prosecution as evidence.

You're right. It is odd.

Maybe so. I am not confident that his conviction would cause waves large enough to really cause any sort of change though. I can't help but feel many people here would be less inclined to change their position (or even care enough to read articles about it) were the revelations not accompanied by such a tragic shock. Maybe I'm just being cynical because I found the dismissal from prominent community members so shocking and offensive at the time.

However I am certain that were he someone with even less celebrity who was interested in something more marginal than freeing academic works, getting convicted really really would do fuck-all for his cause.

He didn't "test some limits". He did what most people interested in computers have done at one point. Connect to a network you aren't supposed to connect to and download something you aren't supposed to download.

That's outside the limit of legal behavior. He's not saying it was the worst thing ever, just that Swartz's actions crossed the threshold between legal and illegal.

> blame-shifting on the part of parents

That is too harsh. They just lost their son. What can they be but blind with pain?

The parents are now responsible for at-risk youth and Aaron was supposed to carry the mantle of Thoreau and Gandhi, who's blame-shifting now? You allow an arrogance on the part of prosecutors not to be held to the same standard you assign these people, for why couldn't they see they were battling such a force as you ascribe to the Swartz family, including Aaron, and relent under the threat of acting on the wrong side of history? After all, by your estimation, they themselves left an at-risk youth and the possibly-next Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the lurch. Perhaps without this wisdom of proportionality they are not competent to be Federal prosecutors, especially if by your terms they are acting in the tradition of evil that the aforementioned precursors fought to transcend.

But lets not battle hyperboles. Maybe we can simply agree that while the actions of Obama's Department of Justice and Secret Service were not entirely to blame for killing Aaron, they certainly knowingly helped supply the weapons, and at any rate that ultimately the interests of justice absolutely were not served by their efforts. Maybe we can also agree that the Department of Justice has schools of bigger fish to fry these days.

I really feel for his family, but I just can't blame his death on the Government. Did they handle this poorly and overreach greatly? Yes. Did they kill him? No. He was offered a plea deal for 6 months in prison. Nobody in their right mind kills themselves over 6 months in jail or the prospect of being a felon.

Obviously being labeled a felon and 6 months in jail sucks, but it's not like he couldn't get a job because of it. Based on the front page of HN for the last several days it's clear he was a well respected and loved individual in our community. He would have been just fine.

I can't either, and that was before I had read anything about a six month plea deal, but searched for it thanks to your comment.

According to Aaron's own lead defense attorney, they both wanted to reject it so that they could fight the charges in court [1].

This article reads weirdly though, in one quote the attorney says they 'both' rejected the plea deal, and in the next, he says he "didn't want to expose Aaron to the risk" of a jury trial.

[1] http://boston.com/metrodesk/2013/01/14/mit-hacking-case-lawy...

Agreed 100%, your reasoning is sound. I think this is a fair assessment of the situation, and that if more people could hold this opinion, more reform against the laws that so many disagree with would actually happen.

Should you always plead guilty to crimes the Government accuses you of?

I think the answer is obviously 'no'.

But I also believe that your question is exactly what is bad about the situation. It is a total red herring to the issue at hand. Let me expand:

He should have pleaded guilty to the crimes, because it is in my opinion, that he did infact break current laws, and that 6 months + felony, is not life ending sentence, far from it.

Consider this:

I also believe the laws in which he broke shouldn't exist in the capacity as they do.

You can hold both the above beliefs, and when you do, it gives you power to make reform in an appropriate capacity.

When you say "because it is in my opinion that in fact X," what you've said is simply that "in your opinion X". I point that out because Aaron apparently had a different opinion that led him to make a different choice. I find it strange that posing a question which you and Aaron answer differently in order to probe your rational is "a total red herring".

I respect that you don't believe these laws are just. One such power that helps society push back against such laws is jury nullification - the right to for a jury to say "not guilty" regardless of what the law claims.

It doesn't matter what aaronsw's opinion was; it's still illegal to break intoa w riing closet and attach our computer to someone else's network without permission. If you found someone doing that in a typical workplace, you'd call the cops too. I think my local library should be open 24/7 but that doesn't give me the right to remove the door by the hinges.

politician, with respect I think you need to be more concise with your questions, I would hope Aaron would also say 'no' to the vague:

'Should you always plead guilty to crimes the Government accuses you of?'

Did you perhaps mean to ask:

'Should you always plead guilty to crimes the Government accuses you of, even when you believe you are right?'

Which is still a red herring because it doesn't address the issue:

Did Aaron truly believe he broke no current laws, or did he believe so strongly the laws were bullshit, so he shouldn't be prosecuted at all? (which means he still actually broke them)

trespassing maybe. Not any serious bulling plus 13 counts. Are you not the troll from early today ? How many accounts is that ?

No, but if there's prima facie evidence of criminal activity (such as the surveillance video, being caught red-handed with the laptop), then maybe you should consider it. Effectively the government was asking him to face up to the fact that whatever his views about the ethics of JSTOR were, the way he acted upon them (breaking into a wiring closet etc.) was illegal. It's not like anybody contests the facts of what he did.

It seems to me that there is a fine difference between admitting you did the act, and admitting you did the act and conceding the act indeed violated the laws the prosecutors assert.

For example, presumably Aaron's lawyers would argue that while Aaron did in fact use a fake name on a captive portal, but that doing so was not wire fraud.

Why should you abstain from arguing if your actions violated the law just because they have hard proof that you did in fact perform those actions?

This is the definition of wire fraud: (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1343)

Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

JSTOR was in a different state. Swartz caused signals to be transmitted by wire for the purpose of an artifice to defraud. The indictment is specific and cites to statutory definitions of what constitutes criminal behavior.

As I've said over and over again in relation to copyright issues, maybe things like copyright infringement should not be considered crimes at all, but right now, they are. If the elements of a crime are defined as X, Y, and Z, and there's proof that someone engaged in X, Y, and Z, then that person has committed the crime n question. Now if you want to argue that the law in question is unconstitutional for some reason, that's fine, but that's something you do at appeal. the purpose of a trial Court is simply to establish whether a certain set of facts is true or not.

Further evidence that we all commit numerous felonies a day I suppose.

You would be remiss to not even attempt a defence of such a 'crime'.

What "everybody doesn't contest" is different from the 13 felony charges, including wire fraud (!), the government indicted him on.

For instance, the trespassing charges, supported by the surveillance video of him opening an unlocked closet used by the homeless to store their personal effects, were dropped. [1]

[1] http://boingboing.net/2013/01/13/expert-witness-describes-aa...

That article strikes me as absurdly biased. To take just one example, the argument is made that Swartz did nothing to cover his tracks, but if this is the case why buy a new laptop for this purpose instead of using his everyday one? What is so wrong about the comparison between spoofing one's MAC address and changing the VIN on a car, when the purpose of both is to identify a specific piece of hardware? Why cover one's face with a cycling helmet if one does not care about being identified? Why place one's computer in a wiring closet if one could have just downloaded freely from anywhere on campus?

Look, I don't want to bash the poor guy for his idea that such material should be free. But plugging into other peoples' networks without permission and so on are criminal offences, and Swartz was educated enough to know this. If you look through the indictment (http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/09/swartz...) it's very clear about which statutes were being broken. Boingboing is presenting it as if Swartz was some wide-eyed ingenue that didn't realize that anyone would consider his downloading a problem.

No, but suicide is not the only alternative (you could try to flee the country or otherwise go into hiding). It is just horrible that somebody already battling with depression for so long got caught up in the twisted game that is the prosecution of federal crimes.

Good read, related to the cat-and-mouse game: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/12/14/jailhou...

Aaron Swartz was not a very big guy at all. Aaron Swartz would have been raped within moments of walking in a Federal Prison. Aaron Swartz prison stay would have been 6 months of non-stop prison rape.

Impending prison rape is exactly the sort of thing reasonable people commit suicide about. All the time.

Highly unlikely http://www.nij.gov/journals/259/prison-rape.htm

They have protective custody for this and he would absolutely have gotten it.

His father is justifiably enraged at the US Govt. Ms Ortiz and Steve Heymann are certainly the primary culprits here - However MIT is equally if not more responsible for this mess that ended in a horrible and needless tragedy.

MIT has a higher duty than the Govt. It is in their charter to foster open access - and not only did they NOT stand up for Aaron, they actually made the prosecution malicious by refusing to ask for anything less than JAIL TIME http://gothamist.com/2013/01/15/aaron_swartzs_lawyer_mit_ref...

So MIT as good as killed Aaron along with the Govt.. for shame!

MIT didn't kill Aaron. But their decision to be the roadblock to a plea deal because it didn't include time in prison is shameful, and there is definitely some heavy responsibility on the heads of those at MIT who rejected that deal.

Everyone involved in the case had been made aware of Aaron's depression http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/he_ll_be_safe_in_jail_fed...

They knew that this (suicide) was a risk if they kept hounding the guy - yet the Prosecutors and MIT both kept going at it - for the sake of political gain (prosecutors).

Devil's advocate: if we felt the punishment was fair then would we think the prosecutors should have been leniant because the accused person was depressed? For example if we were having this conversation about a murderer or a rapist.

> yet the Prosecutors and MIT both kept going at it - for the sake of political gain (prosecutors).

Do you have proof of this, or is it just what you believe of the situation?

Well yeah, it's also in article here on HN. They wanted him to have jail time

Articles aren't proof. Victims don't have veto authority over plea bargain negotiations in any US jurisdiction that I know of.

Veto is non necessary, pressure and willingness to pursue and unwillingness to have any plaid without jail time is what the MIT is _rightly_ accused of.

He may feel differently in time. My little brother committed suicide 5 years ago when he was like 22. His wife was cheating on him and despite having three sons, he still did it.

I know for years I hated her and blamed her fiercely. In time though, I looked at it differently. While I still don't have much love for her, I really can't place the blame for my brother's actions solely at her feet.

The thing is, it isn't natural or normal to kill yourself when your wife cheats on you, if it's ever normal, especially when you have three sons to watch out for. My brother had problems. He wasn't right in the head and I don't think he ever really was.

If it wasn't his wife, I think he just would have found another reason, because I think he wanted to go.

Aaron Swartz may have hated what the government was doing to him and he may have even stated that was the reason for his suicide, I really don't know. But that wasn't the reason, in my opinion.

If the threat of a prison sentence was reason enough to hang yourself, it would only make sense to at least see if you're convicted first.

My heart goes out to the family, I know firsthand how much it hurts when a family member commits suicide. And I really can't blame the father for reacting that way, I would've (and did) react the same way. Just thought it would be useful to offer some perspective.

Going from being rich to poor (due to legal costs), facing years in prison, and becoming a convicted felon for life? For running what amounted to "wget -r http://jstor.mit.edu/ " to download publicly funded academic papers?

I think even someone who had never suffered from depression might contemplate suicide. His father's words may be a little too strong, but they're not entirely off-base either.

His father's words may be a little too strong, but they're not entirely off-base either.

Yes, they are off base. He deserves leeway due to the untold grief he is enduring, but a statement like that is ridiculous. Thousands of people a day go to jail a day, many of them for breaking unjust laws, and very few of them kill themselves. He was killed by depression/mental illness not by the government. The charges likely exasperated his condition, but without that underlining fragile mental state, he would almost assuredly still be alive today.

a: In a drive-by shooting, the driver is often charged along with the shooter; even when the driver insists that he didn't know what was going to happen.

b: The defense attorney claimed that he made Stephen Heymann aware of the suicide risk early in the case.

If Heymann was aware of the risk and pushed ahead anyway, is he a contributor in the same sense that the driver of the car is a contributor? Why or why not?

Regarding your second point, are you suggesting the legal system should go easy on criminals who may be suicidal?

I just think it is foolish to start blaming every entity that could have contributed to his mental state. Hypothetically speaking, if he had recently broken up with someone or was fired from a job would we claim that they killed him? No, they would simply be catalysts that might have contributed to his ultimate decision.

Are you saying one should not sue, or at least weigh heavily, people's mental state prior to launching a lawsuit?

Is that current procedure, run mental evaluations before suing? Lots of people have mental breakdowns before and during trials. The trials proceed so long as people are 'mentally competent' to stand trial.

If something like this were allowed, people would pretty much abuse the system and claim mental anguish, etc. to avoid facing a trial.

Aren't you aware that we already do take into account the mental states of defendants - the mentally challenged, the insane?

Yes, and one of the ways we do so is by the defense filing a motion to argue that the defendant is unfit to stand trial for the time being. I haven't followed the motion work in the case, so I don't know if his defense team made any such claim. But it seems to be that quite a few people are trying to have it both ways - on the one hand he was too mentally fragile to be put on trial, on the other he wanted his day in court to argue for the right to download freely and so the plea bargain with the mild sentence (which would have been served in some sort of minimum security facility) was an unconscionable deal with the devil.

That is a good argument for why Heymann would not be a contributor. That is, Heymann has clean hands because the defense failed to make the court aware that Swartz was possibly unfit to stand trial. Thank you.

In extreme cases, yes. People are put on suicide watches, but the trials proceed. The bar for being considered 'insane' and 'mentally unfit' is very high. You have people who would colloquially be considered 'crazy' go to trial, represent themselves, etc.

But that did not happen here, did it? Does that make Heymann a contributor?

I don't think so. It's a really tenous connection. It's like saying me getting on the freeway contributed to an accident which happens 10 minutes behind me. Sure, maybe if I had not gotten on the freeway that would have caused a different pattern of traffic on the freeway so that the accident would not have happened, but in no way would I be a direct contributor.

Would you change your mind if you were warned that by getting on the freeway there stood a serious above average risk of causing a accident?

In those cases isn't it due to the fact that the defendant is unable to mentally process their crime, trial, or potential punishment?

The fact that the boy is dead is grim proof that he was "unable to mentally process his potential punishment".

No it isn't. If anything it shows that he didn't want to endure his potential punishment. If he didn't understand the potential punishment there would be no need to commit suicide.

Your statement could be misinterpreted to mean that any rational competent defendant would consider the potential punishment worse than death.

I'm positive that you meant that he understood what 35 years in jail and a felony charge meant and was thus not unfit to stand trial under an insanity claim. That's fair.

He never had to go from being rich to poor or face years in prison if he had just plead guilty to the crime that he plainly committed.

The choices and the risk that he faced were entirely of his own volition. It's very sad, but it's not the government's fault.

You forgot Swartz being threatened with months of non-stop prison rape.

[citation needed]

Once again, Steve Heymann appears to be the bad guy here. Here's the wh.gov petition to have him fired, too:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/fire-assistant-us-...

I don't know that firing people is necessarily the best way to approach the problem. It might make us feel better but it won't solve the actual problem, which is the overly prosecutorial society we have.

I don't know if it's the best solution either, but the fact that the petition calling for Carmen Ortiz's sacking reached 25k signatures in three days, alone, suggests that distaste for our "overly prosecutorial society" isn't exactly "rare".

Having multiple hops in the chain of command behind Aaron's prosecution publicly called out like that can't hurt, and makes it seem less of a "backlash" and more of a "this isn't right."

I think the consensus here right now is that because people believe the laws he broke shouldn't exist in the capacity they do, he shouldn't have been punished, and that his case is a cause for reform in things that perhaps don't deserve to be reformed on this merit alone.

It may very well be that there is need for reform in these laws, but does that give Aaron the right to break them? And if so, does this lead precedence for others to behave similarly without consequence? If so, where do we draw the line in what constitutes which laws are allowed to be bypassed? How does this not lead to massive abuse?

I do not believe that no matter how wrong we think the laws are, in a democratic society, we must act in appropriate ways to cause reform. This is because edge cases like this where laws are broken that perhaps shouldn't exist, are never real reasons to change how we prosecute people.

There is so much confusion within this whole situation:

1) Reform on the laws 2) Reform on how we prosecute people 3) Termination of prosecutors involved

Each of the above needs to be clearly defined, and a case made against each one. I don't believe this case by itself causes for reform in prosecution, or termination of prosecutors.

I only believe this case should cause reform in specific laws, and that it's said a man felt his only option to cause reform was to break the law, which ultimately ended in him taking his whole life.

I see similarities between this and the Anders Breveik case in equal but opposite ways, where 20 years life sentence was said by many to be absurd for his crime, and many called for reform, when in fact the Norwegian system is extremely effective, and this was just an edge case.

This idea that "the law" is a fixed and unambiguous thing that can only be objectively enforced, however lamentable a given case may be, is totally at odds with how the legal system really works. There's a good reason why we've been hearing the phrase "prosecutorial discretion" over and over again in the last few days — that is what was driving this case. Not some dispassionate sorry-but-our-hands-are-tied legal code.

p.s. Invoking Breivik in this context is really inappropriate.

If I proposed that perhaps in an age where cyber crime is not only misunderstood but increasingly high (see anon et al), that perhaps the prosecution wanted to deter Aaron who by all accounts was an activist, from committing further more serious crimes.

What would you think of the above? Is it a plausible reality to the alternative one where the prosecutors are merely evil?

Anonymous is planning a protest at the DoJ in Washington:

https://twitter.com/youranonnews/status/291315488477282304

Reply on news.ycombinator.com