Life Inside the Aaron Swartz Investigation

I felt sick reading her account and couldn't finish. She is not the person I would want by my side going through something like that. In spite of being a "reporter on hackers" she was extremely naive of the system. How can anyone in the right mind recommend that the prosecution reads a document called the "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto"?

"Federal agents have the right to lie to you-and to put you in prison if you lie to them. Any citizen who makes even a single-word false utterance (”no,” “yes”) to a federal agent faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine." : http://jimbovard.com/blog/2010/08/18/the-crime-of-lying-to-t...

They try to make witnesses contradict themselves, so that they can invoke this law and scare them into testifying what they need to hear.

There may be some damn good reasons to cooperate, but you need an attorney to estimate the impact of any statement you make, even if you did nothing wrong.

Talking to the police/feds/prosecution under other circumstances, or accepting a proffer when you're not under investigation or without advice of counsel, is where the problem lies.

Once you're given immunity, you can be compelled to testify, since the only restriction is on self-incrimination; self-incrimination is impossible once you have immunity. (Essentially, it's also only protection against self incrimination; you can be forced to incriminate others. There are limited exceptions for doctor/patient, priest/victim, spouses, attorney/client.) If you refuse at that point, it's potentially contempt of court.

Grand Jury rules are also somewhat different from trials.

IMO, she made some seriously bad life decisions in both retaining logs (making them is bad enough, but retaining them indefinitely is horrible), and in testifying. But not out of malice, just ignorance or something. The party to blame here is the prosecution and government for creating a world where random girlfriends and journalists need to be combatants.

At least a few seasoned federal criminal defense attorneys suggest never accepting a proffer unless you're at serious risk of being prosecuted, which she wasn't.[1]

Suppose she didn't accept the proffer offer. Her laptop data still gets subpoenaed. She's still subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury. She takes the stand and takes the fifth. Either Steve doesn't give her immunity and she doesn't testify, or Steve gives her immunity blind (without having the opportunity to know what she's going to say first), in which case she's in exactly the same situation she ended up in.

Her lawyers probably decided that getting her to cooperate and accept the proffer might keep Steve from yelling at them so much, and it didn't violate their duty to her, since cooperating or not didn't affect her so much as it affected Aaron, so they advised her to cooperate. Since she wasn't a suspect and Steve was being hostile anyway, her laywers could have told her to do just about anything short of perjuring herself or disobeying subpoenas, and they would have adequately served their duty to their client; the outcome for her would probably have been similar, too: after the grand jury appearance, she never heard from Steve again.

[1] http://www.wisenberglaw.com/Articles/Queen-For-A-Day-The-Dan...

2) Her lawyers didn't care at all about protecting Aaron, they cared about protecting her -- because that's 'officially' what lawyers are supposed to do, throw everybody but their client under the bus. (If you WANT to do this too, and you're being offered immunity, well, that's different).

3) Non-political laywers will often not have good advice in political cases, in part but not entirely because of #2 above. And probably related to her deciding #1 above in the end.

YES, being involved in things you don't understand, being threatened by peopel with power, etc., YES, that is enough to convince most normal people to speak. I am NOT blaming those who are duped into speaking, again, the cops are EXPERTS at duping you. Which is why I'm saying, when you hear about this happening to someone else, the more people that learn from it the better: don't talk to the cops.

Now, if you actually _want_ to accept an immunity deal to 'snitch' on someone else (say, because you think they ought to go to jail), then okay. But, other than that, if you think you can actually make things better for you or someone else by talking to the police -- well, like I said, we can't say in 100% of cases that won't work, never say never: We can say that you are unqualified to have any idea if it will work or not, and that usually it won't. Don't talk to the cops.

i.e. another big East Coast university (primarily MIT, now Harvard) fucking over people actually doing something useful, more in keeping with their purported mission than anything the institution currently does.

I hope MOOCs, online collaboration, one on one communication, self-directed projects, etc. destroy these outdated medieval legacies.

This reminds me of the dystopia in 1984.