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>Aaron had the power to choose right until his last choice. Why do some people survive terrible hardships, and others don't?

That's bad reasoning.

That "some people survive terrible hardships, and others don't" can just as well prove the reverse: that NOT all people have the same "power to choose".

Especially a self-professed depressive like Aaron.

Some people are more thick-skinned, either due to temperament, upbringing, genetics, circumstances etc.

>I'm guessing suicidal depression was really to blame for his suicide.

And this "suicidal depression" was unknown to MIT/his prosecutors? Or they found it nice to taunt and threaten someone suffering with such, over a non-issue?

>That won't satisfy everyone, since it doesn't give them a powerful organization to rage against. But reality doesn't always work that way.

I'm finding pop psychology explanations like your serve another plausible rationalization mechanism: it makes those saying them feel superior and more logical compared to the naives that "seek a powerful organization to rage against". (If you allow me the same pop psychology)

In the real world, putting the blame with Aaron and his depression doesn't solve anything (even if it was true).

Blaming MIT and the prosecution will prevent people from being fucked for trying similar benfifical hacks in the future.

> In the real world, putting the blame with Aaron and his depression doesn't solve anything (even if it was true).

> Blaming MIT and the prosecution will prevent people from being fucked for trying similar benfifical hacks in the future.

So MIT and the prosecution unfairly targeted Aaron to serve their personal motives. And now you're suggesting we unfairly pin his death on them to serve your personal motives.

I'm done with this.

Set aside the suicide and imagine that Aaron were still alive today, and you'll find that everything we're saying against MIT still stands. They acted terribly.

The thing is, a guy's dead, and the best thing we can do is use his death to make the world a better place.

Sometimes I wonder if we've forgotten who broke into who's subnet here. :P

Certainly the prosecution should have been in felony mode, but there wasn't no reason to avoid prosecution, except to pander to a highly vocal group.

>So MIT and the prosecution unfairly targeted Aaron to serve their personal motives. And now you're suggesting we unfairly pin his death on them to serve your personal motives.

No, I'm suggesting what you describe as "my personal motives" are actually the greater good.

And that it would not be "unfair" to pin his death on them, since they, as you say, " unfairly targeted Aaron to serve their personal motives".

(Also, you seem to conflate similar behaviour --e.g serving one's motives-- as being of the same moral value regarless of the causes and circumstances.

To give a vibrant example, a bully beating a nerd is serving his personal motives. The nerd fighting back will also be serving his personal motives. But it's clear where the moral superiority lies in this case).

> And that it would not be "unfair" to pin his death on them, since they, as you say, " unfairly targeted Aaron to serve their personal motives".

Surely, you've heard the old aphorism "two wrongs don't make a right"? Besides being a noble thought, it's also pragmatic. If you're acting dishonestly or deceptively to make your case, you're going to lose the support and respect of honest people who are fighting for the same cause. It also just makes your cause look much weaker (why do you need to resort to that in the first place?)

> (Also, you seem to conflate similar behaviour --e.g serving one's motives-- as being of the same moral value regarless of the causes and circumstances.

I don't believe a positive end result excuses immoral behavior, particularly when all other options have not yet been exhausted.

Also, I don't believe your cause (getting law enforcement to look the other way on "beneficial hacks" that break the law) is a universal cause. When one person's "beneficial hack" violates another person's legal rights (even if it's for the perceived greater good), it's obviously not as black and white as you imagine it to be.

>To give a vibrant example, a bully beating a nerd is serving his personal motives. The nerd fighting back will also be serving his personal motives. But it's clear where the moral superiority lies in this case).

What if the nerd stole the bully's lunch money first?

Any morally ambiguous scenario can be reduced down to a simplistic example that ignores the nuances of reality.

>> I'm guessing suicidal depression was really to blame for his suicide.

> And this "suicidal depression" was unknown to MIT/his prosecutors? Or they found it nice to taunt and threaten someone suffering with such, over a non-issue?

Even if you know someone is suicidal, that doesn't make you accountable for them committing suicide.

> Even if you know someone is suicidal, that doesn't make you accountable for them committing suicide.

By itself? No. Merely knowing is not sufficient to make you responsible in some way.

However merely knowing is not what they are accused of.

Okay, let's say someone is suicidal, and you know this, _and_ you do something heartless and stupid to them. They subsequently commit suicide.

Would it be correct to say that whatever circumstances existed where the person was suicidal to such an extent that you _knew_ they were suicidal... were _not_ responsible for the suicide? I mean, doesn't the definition of "suicidal" imply that suicide is a distinct possibility even if no one takes further negative steps?

Or perhaps to put it another way... would this ridiculously shitty conduct be any less so if Aaron were alive today?

Seriously, the notion that things like suicide are controlled by _anyone_ is pretty ridiculous. Sure, sometimes people can make a conscious choice that changes outcomes, and there are no doubt things one can do that improve or reduce the odds... but definitively laying culpability on someone's shoulders is rarely possible.

I think it is enough to say that doing shitty things to people who really don't deserve it is bad, and it is worse when you know those people are already fragile and/or suffering. Engaging in histrionics and scapegoating, if anything undermines the argument.

I think we are confusing 'responsible for his death' with 'the cause of his death'

The mental anguish of being ruthlessly sued by a government, with the cooperation and possible collusion of your school, and facing the potential for many years in prison is inarguably substantial. How well would you have handled the same thing?

Whether a more stable person would have been able to suck it up is inconsequential - they still did the damage that they did. In his case, it was too much. The damage is there either way. They may not be responsible for the ultimate outcome, but they are responsible for the anguish that put him there.

> with the cooperation and possible collusion of your school

Aaron went to Stanford, and was for a time a fellow at Harvard. To my knowledge he was never an MIT student, and chose MIT for the network hack for separate reasons.

I stand corrected.

He wasn't a student, but he was definitely part of the MIT community. He was in a student group, a technical member of the W3C (housed on campus), and his father was an alum and a contractor at the Media Lab. Joi Ito, the head of the lab, sent President Reif a letter asking if this could be dealt with as a "family matter". Reif (or his lawyers) refused.

MIT may not be culpable in his suicide, but they sure don't come out of this looking good. They maintained strict neutrality, when they could have stood up for open access.

Their behavior makes me ashamed to be an alum of my school.

they are party responsible that is true, but he is responsible himself for creating the situation that brought him to their attention.

Do need weigh every prosecution against the ability of the accused to act rationally? Do rational actors break laws or go to extremes to do so?

I am all for levying some culpability on MIT, but it started with him

>Do need weigh every prosecution against the ability of the accused to act rationally?

This is exactly addresses NOT my point.

> If they had called off an overzealous D.A. from throwing the book at him, he might be alive today. Why not blame the D.A.?

False dilemma. I am capable of blaming both.

Sure. Are you blaming them both for the same thing? And what is that, exactly? His anguish, his death, both?

I consider both to be partially responsible for his death. Not legally, but morally.

> According to his close friends' personal accounts, Aaron suffered from suicidal depression for many years. Long before the JSTOR case, and long before MIT ever got involved

One can argue that both MIT and the DOJ needlessly helped exacerbate a problem over a victimless crime of providing free access to publicly funded research.

http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/news/2011/July/SwartzAaronPR.....

"AARON SWARTZ, 24, was charged in an indictment with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. If convicted on these charges, SWARTZ faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million."

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/01/15/humanity-deficit...

"Andy Good, Swartz’s initial lawyer, is alternately sad and furious.

'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.'"

"Marty Weinberg, who took the case over from Good, said he nearly negotiated a plea bargain in which Swartz would not serve any time. He said JSTOR signed off on it, but MIT would not.

'There were subsets of the MIT community who were profoundly in support of Aaron,' Weinberg said. That support did not override institutional interests."

"...victimless crime of providing free access to publicly funded research"

Sorry, I'm just curious, but how do you propose funding the scanning, organizing and hosting of this research? JStor is a non-profit that has spent tons of money going back and doing all of this for millions of articles, and continues to spend money doing it so researchers can access the data without having to flip through thousands of paper research journals in some library.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't allowing researchers to freely post their publicly funded papers on whatever medium they desire whether it's their own website or another freely accessible site solve this problem?

As you've also pointed out, JStor is a non-profit. Donations and soliciting volunteers would probably help fund this stuff; it seems to work fine for Wikipedia. Regardless, publicly funded research shouldn't be kept behind pay walls.

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't allowing researchers to freely post their publicly funded papers on whatever medium they desire whether it's their own website or another freely accessible site solve this problem?

So who's going to go back and digitize the 50+ year old articles from a journal that has long since ceased publishing? Also, a decentralized system would make research much more difficult. A lot of academic journals have their own websites where they publish articles; they aren't used because it's much easier to just use JStor.

>As you've also pointed out, JStor is a non-profit. Donations and soliciting volunteers would probably help fund this stuff; it seems to work fine for Wikipedia.

JStor is a relatively large non-profit, I'm sure they've looked at different methods of funding and have determined which methods are feasible and which aren't. Wikipedia is not comparable at all to JStor; one is targeted to the general public, the other is to researchers. There is a huge difference in the userbase.

>Regardless, publicly funded research shouldn't be kept behind pay walls.

Until a centralized distribution method is publicly funded as well, this is the way it has to work.

> So who's going to go back and digitize the 50+ year old articles

Volunteers. I did this type of volunteer work for hospitals and a museum when I was in high school. I didn't get paid for it but I still enjoyed it.

> Wikipedia is not comparable at all to JStor; one is targeted to the general public, the other is to researchers. There is a huge difference in the userbase.

Does it really matter who the target audiences are? They're both just publishing documents over a network. It's not like classified information or financial transactions, so there's not a huge difference. The only big difference between the two organizations is that one is open and more efficient while the other is not.

> Until a centralized distribution method is publicly funded as well, this is the way it has to work.

No it doesn't. All you need to do is free the publicly funded data. Who do you think Aaron was downloading the documents for? He was downloading them for another non-profit organization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public.resource.org) that was willing to publish and host these documents themselves. JSTOR wouldn't have to pay for them to host it and people would have at the very least a backup for accessing this data. JSTOR isn't the only non-profit that has the capability of serving documents online.

I still haven't seen a good argument for keeping publicly funded research paper under a central paywall. It kills innovation, access, and it's inefficient.

imo a major reason Aaron was prosecuted, was because certain parties wanted to keep their paywall racket going without competition.

Since you seem to have all the solutions to JStor's woes, maybe you should apply for a spot on the board of directors. I'm sure they've never even thought of using volunteers, or accepting donations. With you on board, they'd never have to charge another cent!

Sorry, but you're being completely unrealistic. Do you honestly think JStor would be able to rake in nearly as many donations as Wikipedia does with a userbase that is no where near as big as them? The people behind JStor aren't some cabal that just loves charging people a ton of money for access to journal articles (key word being access). If it were feasible to use donations and volunteers alone to provide their service to the general public for free, they would've done that.

> No it doesn't. All you need to do is free the publicly funded data.

I'm getting tired of this pointless philosophical debate. Hosting the articles is a small portion of what JStor actually does. When this Public.Resource.Org group goes to the library and digitizes all these journals, including tagging and sorting them, let me know if they'll still be able to provide them for free. Hint: they won't. Unless they keep getting people to unlawfully access them from an organization that does, that is.

If JStor were some big corporation that was raking in millions of dollars each year, then you'd have a point, but they're not. They are a non-profit that is doing excellent work.

I am realistic:

1) I would think that most researchers use computers and not typewriters to write their papers. It's been this way for a few decades now.

2) While Wikipedia has more donations, since they also have more users and way more data; they have much bigger hosting operations related costs than JSTOR. Even then, they've been able to run below $5 million dollars a year. Correction: JSTOR generates $65 million per year. They have a lot more resources, nicer offices, and much bigger salaries than Wikipedia; even though they have a much smaller audience and less data.

3) Other organizations are scanning books and they aren't charging for access to that data. Also once it's scanned, the ongoing costs are minimal. Storage is cheap and it continues to get cheaper.

I'm sorry but it would not cost $250 million dollars to make this available to everyone. Maybe a huge portion of these costs are due to their expensive Park Avenue office in Manhattan?

> Hint: they won't. Unless they keep getting people to unlawfully access them from an organization that does, that is.

This isn't privately funded research that JSTOR and academic journals are hoarding. It's publicly funded and it should be easily accessed by the public.

If this were JStor's raison d'être, then the pay wall would be limited in time. Will the need to scan old articles exist in two years? In five? In ten, or twenty?

There is no sunset plan for the pay wall, so your premise is false.

yep, blame the victim.

People on HN like to remind others about need to take responsibility for one's own actions. They did it to Aaron before his death and do this after. Being a passive observer while something awful is being done to another human being is a bit uncomfortable, it is much easy and self-comforting to our consciousness to think about the victim as being the one who is solely responsible for and is causing the awful things being done to him.

> it is much easy and self-comforting to our consciousness to think about the victim as being the one who is solely responsible for and is causing the awful things being done to him.

Just as it's much easier to heap the blame on a villain, rather than consider that Aaron had other options and a life still full of potential.

My point is that both perspectives are one-dimensional and both rely heavily on speculation about things that you and I don't really know about.

And more to the point, both downplay the reality that Aaron suffered from severe depression for years preceding the trial. If MIT was the tipping point, so be it. But often the tipping point is just the proverbial straw, and shouldn't be held responsible for Aaron's actions.

>Just as it's much easier to heap the blame on a villain, rather than consider that Aaron had other options and a life still full of potential.

1.redirect the blame from actual villain to the victim.

"easier to heap the blame on a villain" - an especially great line, i immediately felt sorry for doing it.

>My point is that both perspectives are one-dimensional and both rely heavily on speculation about things that you and I don't really know about.

2.sow the doubt.

>And more to the point, both downplay the reality that Aaron suffered from severe depression for years preceding the trial. If MIT was the tipping point, so be it. But often the tipping point is just the proverbial straw, and shouldn't be held responsible for Aaron's actions.

3.downplay the villain's actions severity through showing a perceived weakness of the victim.

Nice, man!

> Aaron suffered from severe depression for years preceding the trial.

Depression is a fatal illness. Treatment for mental illness is sub-optimal. People are always responsible for their actions - Aaron was responsible for killing himself.

Having said all of that, a legal system that is so brutal that people kill themselves is fucking barbaric and is something that Americans should be deeply ashamed of.

Putting a person who you know to be vulnerable into solitary confinement, naked, is evil. It is baffling how anyone thinks that could be a suitable option.

Prison should be reserved for severe crimes - people who kill, who rape, who show themselves unable to live in society.

(In case it matters I've done some voluntary work around "secure mental health units" in the UK, including medium secure units. These are 'forensic', ie, part of the criminal justice system and they're where prisoners with severe mental illness go if prison is unsuitable. I'm not against locking people up, even if those people have mental illness.)

> Why do some people survive terrible hardships, and others don't?

> Aaron suffered from [...] depression for many years.

This answers the question, although I would prefer not to use the term 'suicidal depression', which is not a medical term.

As someone who's attempted suicide, I also believe your choice of quote is both wrong and unfair. Surviving the holocaust is in no way comparable to surviving the things your mind can convince you to do when you suffer from anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder or any other such condition.

You're right, the fact that Frankl was a holocaust survivor was not relevant, and I didn't mean to draw a comparison between the two experiences.

My impression of depression is that it's pervasive and crippling, and often the events surrounding it can be incidental. Not to say that one event couldn't be a tipping point, but neither is it fair to put all blame on one event or one organization or one person, as it downplays the effect of the underlying condition.

And also by the same token, pinning it squarely on the condition can equally downplay the situation such a person might find themselves in.

It's an incredibly difficult topic to discuss.

Throughout this thread, you purport that Taren wants to blame and hold responsible MIT for Aaron's death. When, instead, from start to finish, she is calling out their actions that lead up to Aaron's "decision." Their "whitewashing" and possibly lying about the facts and continued ignorance that they had alternatives that might have taken Aaron -- others in future, similar cases -- down a different path.

You don't rebuke the text you quote of her's.