Swartz Prosecutors Weighed 'Guerilla' Manifesto, Justice Official Tells Congress
huffingtonpost.com
huffingtonpost.com
There was a hearing, and "some congressional staffers" were left with an "impression".
For all we know, that's entirely true, and those anonymous staffers hit the nail exactly on the head. But how would you know? How much less credible can you get than anonymous staffers sourcing HuffPo, regurgitated by Techdirt?
"Felony" is a whole nother level of escalation.
And honestly, scare quotes?
It sounds very credible to me. I don't doubt that, out of all the staffers involved, two would head to one of the bigger political websites to share their impressions about what's been a bit of a sensational case.
Would you prefer that HuffPo include a New York Timesean "according to two aides with knowledge of the briefing, who spoke under condition of anonyminity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter"? I'd be a lot more skeptical if it were highly-placed sources, but these aren't.
But having said that, you have an adversarial hearing run by the opposition party; it is hard to imagine there not being some staffer for some congressperson leaving such a hearing unprepared to ding the administration. Which is why you'd want something better than "anonymous" and "staffer" and "impression".
I know many news sources exaggerate or mislead to push an agenda or bias. I guess it really bothers me that some of the ideals that TechDirt espouses are the same ideals I agree with, however, I support those ideals on the presumption that they are empirically and logically sounds...or so I'd like to believe. Perhaps I'm being naive, that rhetorical campaign means more than substance, but TechDirt's constant misreading of events and the law, either by mistake or intentional, is really grating.
Note: after typing up this comment, I did go and read the HuffPo piece. My first thoughts are: wasn't it already well known that the prosecutors used Aaron's writings and backgrounds as evidence that he intended to diatribute the downloaded JStore material, as opposed to just doing a personal analysis? I'm nt saying they were right, but to put that revelation in the lede is indicative of a strawman accusation
The original title was "DOJ Admits It Had To Put Aaron Swartz In Jail To Save Face Over The Arrest" and the link was pointing to: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130223/02284022080/doj-a...
In the face of stonewalling, escalating, inflammatory rhetoric (if that's what we have) can serve a useful purpose.
EDIT TO REPLY TO QUESTION IN REPLY COMMENT:
Yes, nothing that was proposed as to sentencing Swartz during negotiations before trial would have prevented his gaining full restoration of civil rights later, and even being able to expunge his record of conviction, if he had been convicted. His lawyers calculated (correctly, it appears to be the opinion of most but not all on-lookers) that the actual facts of what he did could constitute an offense for which he could have been convicted. So the facts, once Swartz made the facts by what he did, were not fully on his side. But what view a jury or a trial judge or a later appellate judge might have taken of the overall circumstances of the case wasn't put to trial before Swartz killed himself. Impulsive, all-or-nothing thinking is dangerous when life-or-death issues are in consideration.
* Expungment: The records are sealed. It's (mostly) as if the conviction never occurred, since there's no way for people to access the proof that a conviction was returned. But this is a legal construct that only applies in the legal world, they can't go back and erase the newspapers. * Pardon: You did it, but we just won't punish you for it.
But the only one we can ask would be Aaron, unfortunately. For what it's worth what "felon" means is entirely up to the state you live in, the people you talk to, etc.
I worked with a "felon" (and I'm using this term very loosely here) who had a clearance higher than mine, actually did the kind of jobs where they can't talk at all about it, was able to vote, use banks, etc. No one thought of him as anything less than a valued shipmate, but of course that's just my personal perspective.
Once any government has seized powers like these (whether rightfully or not), it's very loath to give them up. This is an empirical observation, not a statement about the ideal.
See: http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/317/1/case.html, http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/339/763/case.html
See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/22/obama-br...
There's definitely a discussion to be had about how and where a nation can decide to use military force in the interests of its self-defense, but citizenship has never been a barrier to military action outside of the U.S. in war time. See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_parte_Milligan
Now certainly the Supreme Court did not envision drone strikes and one-sided warfare outside of the United States when they talk about the laws of military government, but it does go to show that even as far back as 1866 that the law showed a distinction between military operations inside of the U.S. and outside of the U.S.
These assassination are occurring in countries that we're not at war with (and in some cases, never have been).
Furthermore, many the citizens being assassinated have never even been accused of a crime (like shooting a rocket), let alone convicted of one.
Sure, but the issue is two-pronged: 1) Whether the target is considered to be "at war" with the attacker and 2) Whether the state he's in allows the military action (or at least, doesn't consider it to be a causus belli).
The issue we were discussing is the first (i.e. whether it is appropriate for the U.S. President to put an American citizen on a "kill list" without trial). Many people claim that this is unusual behavior, but it's really not in the context of the military (even in the media, e.g. Apocalypse Now). Or differently, if an American officer had defected to the Nazis during WWII and was known to be in a certain bunker you can bet he would have been facing a bunch of incoming U.S. ordnance.
However speaking towards the second point for just a bit, the U.S. assassinated a Japanese Admiral (Adm. Yamamoto) during WWII and didn't wait for him to be in Japanese-controlled areas to do so. He was killed in international waters, and not even during a battle as we think of them. He was a militarily valuable officer in a military organization fighting the U.S. and off he went. And, even if he somehow managed to overfly some nation's airspace, he would have been hit as long as the nation involved would tolerate the incursion.
> Furthermore, many the citizens being assassinated have never even been accused of a crime.
Well, they have (insofar as the process as it's been released theoretically requires some form of justification). They haven't been accused in a courtroom, perhaps, but that's a civil law matter, not military/international law.
I want to stress real quick that I'm not even personally decided for/against on this issue myself, but I'm a firm believer in garbage in == garbage out and so I just wish to point out that this issue isn't as crystal-clear as it's sometimes made out to be. If we treat this as a military affair (and AQ certainly does) then there is plenty of reason to treat the U.S. reaction under military terms as well, and those are much muddier waters than civil/criminal law.
The U.S. has never required a judicial verdict when killing fugitives in the course of battle is concerned. There were some American Citizens who served in the army of Nazi Germany. Some of those were killed by allied forces. No judicial determination was necessary. The same thing happened with British Citizens defecting to Germany.
Even in more (relatively) mundane situations, U.S. Citizens can be killed by the government with no judicial authorization. If you're in a building holding hostages at gunpoint, you might very well be taken out with a police sniper's bullet, and there is absolutely nothing unconstitutional about it. The sniper does not have to go get some sort of judicial authorization to take the shot.
You can bring up the "slippery slope" fallacy all you want, but you think it was different at the founding of the republic? Less than a decade into it's existence, the U.S. sent federal troops to suppress an armed insurrection against whiskey taxes. Nobody got a court order to kill the insurgents: http://44363370.nhd.weebly.com/battle-of-bower-hill.html. You think the U.S. government circa 1789 would've done anything different with al-Awlaki?