A time for silence
lessig.tumblr.com
lessig.tumblr.com
If there is one thing that all this has done it is that it has shocked me like not much has done in the last couple of years and I thought I was pretty tough. Lessig is a giant, imagine how much it would take to hurt a man of such stature that he needs to recover incommunicado and contrast that with the piece written by Mrs. Ortiz.
Worlds apart.
Come on. One was a close, dear and personal friend of Aaron's for many years, the other was someone who saw him as the defendant in a prosecution.
It hardly dehumanizes Ortiz to react and respond differently to Aaron's suicide than Lessig, and is something of a pattern in your posts over this week dehumanizing and demonizing her.
I work in EMS. I see death regularly, including suicide. Though I see (however fleetingly) the pain of those surrounding the deceased, including their loved ones, I don't feel it. The person is, to me, a person and a patient, but I cannot be expected to have the same dark despair as I would, had I lost a long and close friend, and it makes me no less emotional or human to not have that response.
I have not dehumanized Ortiz, she did that to herself, she wrote that piece. It feels insincere and her husbands response seems to confirm that it is insincere.
I fully respect your professional detachment, but if you go so far as to make a public statement about a person you lost, possibly through your own actions then you should really mean it and get out of CYA mode, even if that's a life-long ingrained instinct.
Certainly, though, I'm not disputing that the default mode of many in law (when acting as an attorney) is CYA.
I fully agree with that and noted exactly that earlier in another thread. And because that risk exists it would be a real breath of fresh air if she had accepted the possibility of responsibility. At a minimum she could have asked for an external party to investigate if this was all done properly. Categoric denial was exactly the wrong thing to do.
Even if that zero chance somehow came true, Ms. Ortiz has absolute immunity from personal consequences, as she was acting as an agent for the government in the course of her employment.
She can write whatever she wants with absolutely zero fear of any adverse legal consequences against her, and you should not make excuses for her on that fictitious basis.
Participants in the overzealous legal system, however, disconnect emotionally in order to ruin lives. While there are some violent psychos that need to be put away, and occasionally a low-level criminal straightens their life out as an accidental side effect, a huge number of punishments are cruelly disproportionate to the actual harm to society, all for the benefit of the prosecutor's career. (And indirectly to prison guard unions, police, etc.)
Ortiz only carries a small part of the blame for this. She is only able to do it because it is normalized and systemic, in the legal system and in society at large. I guarantee that if she herself spent "only" six months in concrete cage, after 2+ years of the fear and stress of prosecution, followed by a lifetime of being stigmatized as a felon, she would feel differently.
I like your posts, Jacques, so I vote that you switch into action mode.
I'm thinking of something a bit more substantial than a blog post.
What do you have in mind? Someone needs to mobilize the little guys and get something done.
All in good time.
> Someone needs to mobilize the little guys and get something done.
What's stopping you ;) ?
I think it might be a good time to follow Lessig's lead and give yourself a little time off to reconnect to your own family and life.
The fight for Internet freedom etc is not a sprint but a marathon.
There is a very pervasive and troubling thread of professional "politicking" invading every single aspect of our lives both institutional and private. No one cops to anything, no one apologizes, and no one ever sees the errors in their ways. Admitting otherwise is weak and will undermine ones political future, career etc.
It's sad that honesty is no longer the best policy.
If they refuse and insist that this is business as usual for them then it should be legislated by the government that all previous cases involving heavy handed plea bargaining under the current DOJ staff should be re-opened and re-negotiated under saner conditions.
This is clearly not justice.
Aaron Swartz himself wrote about this kind of situation: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/semmelweis
This is a bit naive. Certainly it would help the DOJ's image if they did this, and certainly firing those involved would be just, but that act alone misses the point: why are prosecutors who behave like this thriving? This isn't an isolated case at all. There's a more sinister factor at work, and doing only as you suggest would cover it up.
I.e., the real problem here is cultural. We live in a culture that creates opportunities for people like these prosecutors, and merely firing these people sweeps that under the rug so it can flourish in the future.
That is never going to happen because it would involve entirely too many cases. You would have a better chance of just having them all freed and put back on the streets, because at least that wouldn't be cost prohibitive, and you can imagine about how likely that is. This is notwithstanding that you are entirely right: this is clearly not justice.
I think we need to look forward rather than back. We need to fix the laws. Cut the criminal penalties drastically for all non-violent non-financial offenses and outright repeal laws against things that don't need to be illegal. Then we can legitimately argue for the release of anyone in prison for violating the laws taken off the books, and the reduction in sentence for anyone previously convicted of anything with a lowered penalty.
Completely agree, but I feel the need to publicize Orin Kerr's point about the first draft of her proposed "Aaron's Law": It would actually be a regression over what he expects the Supreme Court to do in the upcoming Nosal case, and there are better improvements to the CFAA that he articulates.[1] So let's be sure the changes we advocate are the right ones. (I assume Lofgren will become aware of this information in time, but the way she will is by enough people pointing it out that it gets through her staff, so I encourage anyone inclined to write or call her office to do so.)
[1] http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-agains...
First, prosecutorial overreach is common. Because it's so common, at the most, the DOJ will issue those involved a warning. Don't expect that to change unless people actively fight to prevent it.
Second, plea bargaining is morally wrong, either way you look at it. So is piling on charges to get the defendant to ACCEPT the plea bargain. Many countries have actually outlawed plea bargaining because of the fact. People need to take a stand to outlaw plea bargaining.
And lastly, a very disturbing trend -- have you noticed, has anyone noticed, that all the laws that continue to pass limit the rights of THE PEOPLE while continuing to extend the rights of the government? Now, I don't know how much I slept in 7th grade history, but I'm pretty sure that most amendments to the Constitution, and the laws and guidelines outlined by the Constitution itself were meant to limit the rights of THE GOVERNMENT rather than the people. You can see examples of this government overreach everywhere.
Drones.
The PATRIOT Act.
The NDAA.
Gun control (do you really think the government will stop at assault weapons?).
Congress supporting RIAA and MPAA.
DRM.
Extension of copyrights.
I could go on and on with examples, but I'll stop here. Wasting time on bipartisan politics will not help. The people have been so hypnotized by bipartisan politics that they think the situation is only black or white.
It isn't. There's an infinite number of shades of gray.
The root cause is not liberalism or conservatism. It's the nature of government itself.
An idealistic world would mean that everyone contributed to society equally. Everyone would be paid equally. Everyone would have an equal amount of everything, although . All knowledge would be shared with everyone, and no secrets would be kept between others. There would be no government and the people would rule themselves by direct democracy. Call it communism/anarchism if you wish, but it's idealism. Right now, our government is as far away from that vision as could be.
Maybe it's time we pushed for more freedom and less restriction. Perhaps then prosecution wouldn't be so quick to swing their heavy hand.
Shouldn't someone if they are going to commit an act of civil disobedience be aware just a little bit of the possible consequences?
And this 35 or 50 year sentence has now ossified into the "truth," despite is actually being, as far as I can tell, not true.
Orin Kerr:
"Why are you hearing that Swartz faced 35 or 50 years if it was not true? First, government press releases like to trumpet the maximum theoretical numbers. Authors of the press releases will just count up the crimes and the add up the theoretical maximum punishments while largely or completely ignoring the reality of the likely much lower sentence. The practice is generally justified by its possible general deterrent value: perhaps word of the high punishment faced in theory will get to others who might commit the crime and will scare them away. And unfortunately, uninformed reporters who are new to the crime beat sometimes pick up that number and report it as truth. A lot of people repeat it, as they figure it must be right if it was in the news. And some people who know better but want you to have a particular view of the case repeat it, too. But don’t be fooled. Actual sentences are usually way way off of the cumulative maximum punishments."
(http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-agains...)
Etc.
That's why, before aaronsw killed himself, the highest-rated comment on HN about Aaron being arrested and starting a legal fund was, to paraphrase: You broke it; You bought it.
Nothing about the evidence of what he did has changed significantly since. Substantially the same charges are on the books, pretty much the same evidence, the same political manifesto on display.
The only difference between then and now is that Aaron broke his own neck and a bunch of armchair lawyers and legislators magically popped out of the woodwork of HN (where were they before he killed himself?).
Is that what this has turned into? It's now OK to invade and do what you want on a computer network, as long as the security is feeble enough?
The response of the prosecutors was right in line with the law as it stands. Although it's surprising that MIT refused to buy off on a plea deal with no jail time, it's hardly new for a victim to want someone to "smell concrete" to think over what they did.
There's a lot that can be done in response to this such as Kerr's suggestions about modifying CFAA to make it much more difficult to fall into felony provisions, increased awareness of the crippling effects of depression, and more.
But acting like the prosecutors were on some special kind of witch hunt for Aaron is silly (read Kerr if you haven't already). Why wouldn't a reasonable person have expected that the law applies as equally to the rich white kid from HN as it did to the "computer hackers" who came before him in the decades that CFAA has been on the books?
Why was he being charged with 13 felonies?"
Swartz was being charged for what he did, not for why he did it. Crimes do not, as a rule, become "better" or "worse" based on why someone does them. I'll buy that this was a misguided attempt at civil disobedience, but the point of civil disobedience is to pay the price: that's where the protest truly begins, not when you do the deed.
Yes they do. Intent is usually taken into account during sentencing, for example.
But sometimes crimes are defined by what the perp was thinking or expressing: "Hate Crimes"
And this thesis, hesitant at first, has been demonstrated again and again. By Bush himself - NSA wiretapping, gitmo, the TSA and the most epic 'fuck you' ever spoken to the American people: the attack and occupation of Iraq under false pretenses. Cheney's massive expansion of power of the office of the Vice Presidency was a more subtle but still important expression of this disregard for American oversight. Carmen Ortiz is an Obama appointee, but she is very much a product of the Bush era.
Bush was a wake-up call for all government employees: you have unchecked power. If you want to use it, expand it, abuse it then do it. No-one is going to stop you. Our justice system is so expensive that it's out of reach of most, and really, in the end, you're playing on the same team so go ahead and do what you want. 'Justice' has your back.
But the key to making this power grab work is to follow the Bush playbook: never, ever admit to any wrong doing. Do not, under any circumstances, even acknowledge the concerns of others - except possibly in tones of smirking dismissal and contempt. If you don't follow that playbook, then you give your opponents an opening, and weaken your position. Pretty soon you'll be explaining yourself, and when you're explaining, you're losing. You're losing power.
Stonewall, deny, and fight with every last tool given to you. Do not cooperate or discuss. Force your opponents to find leverage against you: don't just give it to them.
Ortiz is a smart woman, and learned her lessons well.
But... I'm not certain of it. Everyone has always complained about politicians. Are GWB's actions really that different from FDR or LBJ or RMN? In terms of respecting cultural/procedural niceties, not in terms of policy. How could that even be measured?
All that has happened is that it turns out that merely shining a bit of light on these practices didn't make them go away. The constraint now is people's bandwidth rather than raw ability to get them information, but that didn't turn out to be so much larger than the info conduit was in the first place.
Even if you are inclined to call what Bush did a "coup" (which I am not, but I'll take it for a moment), consider the implications of the fact that not only did the word "coup" already exist, it is in fact centuries old, and still far newer than the phenomena is describes.
If you think GWB abused power, then the things FDR did would shock you. Other than trying to pack the Supreme Court, he violated the rights of many of his "enemies" in various ways only a government can get away with.
If the courts had ruled another way when these people were in power, the USA could be a much better place. Heck, Nixon had price controls (voted to him by a Democratic Congress). GWB is vilified far more than he deserves compared to other Presidents.
javajosh's political worldview is simple, comprehensive and wrong. But it does provide an easy, conforting answer whenever something bad happens!
There had been a small group of members of Congress who had been pushing for the merger of the various independent agencies into a single Cabinet-level department since the early 1990s. Partly this was due to a sincere concern over terrorist incidents like the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing), and the belief that merging the agencies would result in greater efficiency and better performance in countering these threats. But it was also partly due to traditional DC power politics -- these congresspeople were on the hawkish, national-security-oriented end of the spectrum, and pulling together all the little agencies that tended to their pet issues into One Big Agency would give that agency more budgetary and bureaucratic clout, making their views more prominent. And making its leader a Cabinet-level officer would create a new seat at the cabinet table that they could all aspire to fill one day.
This faction was bipartisan. You can see this by looking at the makeup of one of its pre-9/11 projects, the Hart-Rudman Commission (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Commission_on_National_Secur...). You had Gary Hart and Lee Hamilton (Democrats) working together with Newt Gingrich and Jim Schlesinger (Republicans). But "bipartisan" doesn't mean that they represented the opinion of the majority of Congress or the country -- these were all people who had been working in and around national security issues since the 1960s and '70s, and they looked at issues with the perspective of people whose idee fixe is that America is not sufficiently organized like an armed camp.
They used the commission's final report, which it issued in February 2001 (http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/nssg/PhaseIIIFR.pdf -- warning, PDF) -- seven months before 9/11 -- to push explicitly for "an independent National Homeland Security Agency (NHSA) with responsibility for planning, coordinating, and integrating various U.S. government activities involved in homeland security." But this proposal went nowhere, because nobody outside the national-security world thought the enormous costs and bureaucratic turmoil that unification would involve would be worth it. So this proposal looked like it was going to do what most blue-chip commission proposals do: collect dust on a bookshelf somewhere in Washington.
Then came 9/11, of course, and suddenly everybody in DC was running around shouting the same thing: Something Has To Be Done. The national-security faction, seeing this, was happy to dust off its report and say "We have Something That Can Be Done!" Which was a powerful thing to be able to say, at that moment -- while everyone else was running around trying to figure out how to respond, these guys had a plan all ready to go. When everyone else had nothing, they had Something.
And on top of that, suddenly the things that had looked so negative about their big idea -- the huge expense, the bureaucratic turmoil -- began to look positive; these things would mean everyone would see that not only was Something Being Done, but that this Something was Something Big. Which must mean it's also Something Important.
So Congress glommed onto the proposal, and the "National Homeland Security Agency," which had seemed like the ridiculous pipe dream of a bunch of defense obsessives, became the Department of Homeland Security that we all know and love today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/12/national/12SECU.html
The Bush administration had earlier indicated that it could support the bill despite preferring legislation that would limit the government's new role at airports to oversight rather than hands-on screening.
I would emphasize in your statement the term "budgetary" and follow the money.
The meeting I was in at a "front company" in the D.C. area ended a day of brainstorming with a guy I had just met that day slapping me on the knee, saying "We're gonna make a lot of money off this!". Several at the meeting claimed to have spent the prior evening swilling whiskey with the then Governor of Pennsylvania, saying he was to be the head of this yet to be announced DHS and its our job to cook up multi-billion dollar projects for private gain. And cook up they did. Every idea discussed that day eventually became a reality and Tom Ridge did become the first head of DHS.
I would say more, but these guys spook me. I had zero experience with D.C. prior to that day. I was the accidental tech guy that should have never been in the room. I left and never went back.
This. Many people don't realize that "promises" that many presidents and presidential candidates make are very, VERY unlikely to pass with an uncooperative Congress. Likewise, anything coming out of Congress is hard for the presiding to veto without Congress coming after him like a pack of rabid dogs.
A quick run through American history would show that the executive branch has pulled off some crazy stuff in the past. Executive order 9066 comes to mind. This did not start with Bush, it continued through his administration and, yes, to the current administration.
When Oprah started defending fabulist James Frey, she was savaged by the press. So she invited her critics on the show and apologized, saying “You were right, I was wrong.” It didn’t destroy her reputation; it rescued it. When the space shuttle Columbia exploded, launch manager Wayne Hale took full responsibility: “The bottom line is that I failed to understand what I was being told…I am guilty of allowing Columbia to crash.” He was promoted. When JFK admitted the responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco was “mine, and mine alone,” his poll numbers soared.
People, for good reason, like it when other people own their mistakes. But we've built bureaucracies that don't. They have far too rigid accountability rules. Everything you do gets put in your file, and the file is what it takes you get you fired when someone wants to get rid of you for internal political reasons, so everyone has to be sure they never admit they've done anything wrong. "For crying out loud, man, don't improve our ability to detect mistakes, those mistakes go in or records!"
The criminal justice system works the same way. If you admit what you did, you get punished. If you deny it successfully you go free. But we can't have criminals going free, so we make it impractical for "normal criminals" to deny anything successfully. Then your choice becomes to confess and face punishment or assert your innocence and face an even larger punishment -- a choice that doesn't depend on whether you were actually guilty or innocent, or whether you should have been guilty or innocent under a more just set of laws.
So we get where we are: If you get accused of something the penalties are absurd, so if you're a big Wall St. guy with a billion dollars, you spend a fortune on the Big Lie and get out of any real punishment whatsoever, and if you're not a millionaire then you plead guilty regardless of your guilt so that you "only" go to prison for six months instead of six years.
And then we wonder where prosecutors and politicians possibly got the idea that the Big Lie is the way to go.
Not that I think it will make any difference though.
I think that's too strong. If Carmen Ortiz were to admit she made a mistake, does that mean she should be promoted? Become a candidate for Attorney General? I don't think so. Admitting that you made a mistake is great; but if it's a big enough mistake, admitting it might just be the first step towards resigning so someone with better judgment can take your place.
Heck, she's a prosecutor, why doesn't she prosecute some of the jackholes who actually deserve it? Who made the system work this way? Go take on the prison industrial complex. Catch prison companies breaking election laws in order to push bills for the express purpose of increasing the prison population and put that on the front page. Work with whatever the federal equivalent of internal affairs is and investigate the propriety of her own Department of Justice being stacked with former RIAA attorneys[1] and prosecute anyone involved who she can prove committed misconduct. Wage a campaign against policy laundering as a mechanism to over-criminalize nonviolent actions and prosecute some international corporations for bribery or treason or whatever you can get to stick to them. Then even if they fired her it would be as the hero instead of the villain, and she can go to work filing civil suits of the sort that criminal justice reform advocates are always wanting to, but with a head full of insider information.
That is how you redeem yourself after you make a mistake, not by denying everything and going back to business as usual.
[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/04/obama-taps-fift/
I agree, but as you note, that takes a lot more than just admitting to it.
Your stance about government has merit, but it is severely weakened by a lack of understanding of American political history.
Yes, let's pretend neither the Spanish-American or Mexican-American wars ever happened. (recognizing you're not the OP.)
A grab-bag of events that brought us to the contemporary period:
US's role in post-WW2 reconstruction of West Germany & anti-soviet programs. Taft-Hartley Act. WW2 internment camps. OSS. US's complicity in doing nothing about the German work/death camps, despite knowing about them by 1942. Banana republics. The Gilded Age. America's excessively and government-sponsored anti-labor business history. The Pinkertons. Jim Crow. Plessy v. Ferguson. Dred Scott v. Sanford. Compromise of 1877. Reconstruction. The Civil War. The Missouri Compromise. Property clauses in the Constitution. Pre-revolutionary colonial America.
A similar grab-bag of landmark cases one should understand if anyone is going to even speak about power of the private sector (because that power is a recent invention (in history, recent doesn't mean last decade)):
U.S. v. Martin Linen.
Buckley v. Valeo.
Ross v. Bernhard.
Wheeling Steel v. Glander.
Hague v. CIO.
Grosjean v. American Press Co
Ligget v. Lee.
Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon.
Dodge v. Ford Motor
Armour Packing v. US.
Hale v. Henkel.
Lochner v. New York.
Noble v. Union River Logging.
Minneapolis & St. Lous Railroad v. Beckwith.
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad
Railroad Tax Cases.
Munn v. Illinois.
Slaughterhouse Cases.
Paul v. Virginia.
McCulloch v. Maryland.
Dartmouth College v. Woodward.
Fletcher v. Peck.
Marbury v. Madison.
The OP has an inaccurate and myopic view of how we arrived at our present state.
For example, his comments on the private sector--President Bush isn't a drop in the bucket on that. He's over a century after the damage was done (two, depending on when you start counting). Even Citizens United is but a great-grandchild of earlier 'power grabs' (see Buckley v. Valeo).
Case in point--After passing the 14th Amendment, would you care to guess at who brought the most cases to SCOTUS to have their legal rights as persons recognized under the Amendment? Corporations. At a ratio over 15:1. There were 19 cases that dealt with African Americans' legal rights as citizens. There were 288 cases brought by corporations asking to be recognized as persons intended by the language of the Amendment between 1890-1920. A 30-year program by American business to be recognized as having the rights of natural citizens using the most important Amendment in the fight against holding people as property at the cost of ~600K lives--all to pervert the national mind into holding property as people.
It's been a long and winding road.
The standard line is: "we had nothing to do with this or that event", until of course documents are leaked to the contrary. And of course we must prosecute those who leak these documents (sound familiar?) because they are helping the enemy (by revealing the truth) which breaks the impervious façade we day after day try to maintain.
1,000 more votes on either side, and the controversy would have disappeared.
What I think everyone fails to remember, however, is that independent analysis of recounts that could have happened may have led to either Bush winning or Gore winning, depending on the type of recount, which gives you an even better idea of just how much Florida fucked up in 2000.
I still think Fox screwed the country by calling Florida an hour before the polls on the panhandle closed. The voting margin in panhandle probably would have erased the dispute and allowed for an easier transition. That lack of a proper transition cost us in Asian politics (NK) and probably didn't help our readiness for 9/11.
* It would have been nice to count all of the votes. The decision of who won Florida was in the hands of Bush's Florida campaign manager Katherine Harris, who ordered a halt to the counting of votes and declared the state for Bush as soon as he was ahead of the votes and it was legally permissible for her to do so (some amount of time needed to have passed).
A consortium of newspapers did count all of the votes and prepared to announce the results on September 12, 2001. Due to unforeseen circumstances, they delayed the report for a few weeks and then declared it official that Bush won and was our legitimate President even though their numbers showed that Gore won by a negligible amount, fewer than 400 votes.
* Harris should have recused herself from her Secretary of State duties regarding the election for the obvious reason that she was the campaign manager for one of the candidates, but she did not.
* Harris had Republican-tied companies aggressively scrub the voting rolls of somewhere between 20,000 to 150,000 "felons" and people whose names resembled those of felons if they lived in a heavily Democratic area. Voters removed from the rolls were not notified of their removal and were simply turned away when they went to vote. This is why there are now "provisional ballots" for people who want to challenge their ineligibility. Also, about two-thirds of the people whose voting rights were taken away were black. The best source for this is Greg Palast's book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy".
* Blacks were turned away from voting in some districts. This may be related to the scrub lists, with individuals being turned away from the polls, but there were also rumours of police blockades around polling places in Jacksonville and Orlando turning black people away while letting white people through. One of the alleged police blockades was later attributed to a traffic accident.
* The US Supreme Court decision forbidding the full count ordered by the Florida Supreme Court was so ridiculous that the majority wrote in their own opinion that it should not be used as precedent in the future.
* One Republican county clerk took a list of 2,000 people who had not voted into his private office and came out with 2,000 absentee ballots voting for Bush.
* A group of Republican Congressional staffers from DC raided a polling place where votes were being counted in an attempt to show that public opinion was against counting the votes. They also tried to steal a ballot box from a county official carrying it.
* Punch machines in some areas were broken, producing the notorious pinhole, dimple, and hanging chad votes. These mostly occurred in areas where the Democrats were running the election system and can be blamed on their incompetence.
* The first picture of a "butterfly ballot" that I saw in the media had the left page misprinted at a slight angle so that the arrow or line by Gore's name pointed directly to the box for Buchanan. Every subsequent press report used a picture of a correctly-printed ballot with straight lines. Buchanan got the same amount of votes in that district as he did in the 1996 election, so it did not really matter.
* One Democratic lawyer attempted to challenge the legitimacy of a few thousand military absentee ballots that were technically invalid. The rest of the Democratic party convinced him to pull the suit.
The African woman whise four children were tied to her limbs before she was thrown in a river? That's an example of justice being out of reach.
The government of George W. Bush was, in comparison, a gift from the gods that many people would consider unimaginable luxury. (Including the natives in Afghanistan and Mesopotamia, whose previous claim to military fame was vying for the title of 'graveyard of empires'.)
Ortiz is a generic prosecutor who is wholly unremarkable. You could blow her up by bombing the building where she works and they would fly out interchangeable replacements in standard federal suits to finish grinding out her cases exactly like she would.
Time for us to carry the ball.
Personally, I have no hope in Congress. But I still do, perhaps, have some hope in the people. Who have the power to change Congress, and to reform the judicial system.
For decades, people clamored for "tough on crime". Many of those voices may not change; however, many other voices may arise to insist that we... well, in the nature of things here, "look at the data" and "make some sense".
P.S. I meant to add, that we currently -- as we did last year with SOPA/PIPA, have momentum and national attention. We should not miss the opportunity to take it and use it to (metaphorically) burn away at least some of the corruption before our eyes.
And this should give at least some pause, hopefully, to those seeking to foist ever more corruption upon us. They are relentless; such respite would serve us well while continuing to construct an effective response.
Thank you for doing what you do.
I'm not saying Lessig will regret writing this, but I wonder.
Perhaps in his profession? I don't know.
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/1/14/an_incredible_soul_law...
Aaron Swartz picked a huge fight with the feds over, well, pretty much nothing. He then proceeded to run a spectacular PR campaign where he rubbed their noses in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the copyright laws.
They did what the feds always do: calmly, carefully beat you to death with a billion dollar prosecuting machine. What happened to him was a foregone conclusion. He basically threw himself off a cliff a year ago.
I am flabbergasted that folks like Lessig, people who appear knowledgable and together, were egging him on. Swartz may have been an overenthusiastic young man, but his elders and advisers knew about Steve Jackson Games. They knew about Mitnick and the hundreds of other crackers, hackers, and phreaks that have been crushed by the Feds. They as good as wrote his eulogy a year ago, and now they cry crocodile tears.
Count me in the ranks of the unimpressed.