This Is the MIT Surveillance Video That Undid Aaron Swartz
wired.com
wired.com
A video didn't undo Aaron Swartz.
People undid Aaron Swartz. People with agendas and without compassion using a system of justice stacked in their favor.
I see that all of your HN story submissions are marked [dead] as soon as you submit them. Do you know why that is happening to you? It started happening to me a couple of days ago without any explanation.
Looking back through your history, the last 129 submissions are all [dead] it changed right between #129 and #130.
Your #130 was "Startup - Bill Watterson, a cartoonist's advice" which got 192 karma points, but starting with #129 "Brilliant Resource on Typography (practicaltypography.com)" posted one day later, everything is marked [dead].
Yes injustice is all around. A lot of people have been convicted for murders they have not done, later released because of new DNA evidence. These people have been in jail for decades, falsely imprisoned, and while released, their name probably never clean, but hey ...still alive.. Guess they had some sort of outlook.
Aaron was facing charges for something he knew he did was against the law, but he didn't accept the world where that thing he did was against the law.
So he took his own life.
"His jury trial was looming when Swartz took his own life in January, 2013.
MIT faced a firestorm of criticism in the wake of Swartz’s suicide. Critics, including Swartz’s family and prominent MIT alumni, said the institution betrayed its own principles by not advocating for less harsh treatment of Swartz."
I can't see how "undid" would point to anything other than his "not being here". His presence being undone. His life being undone. If he would have been incarcerated for life, I don't think Kevin would use the word "undid". He would print "Free Aaron" stickers, and getting the word out that this fight should not be over.
I've actually never seen this wording being used ever, so for me it seemed quite similar to "doing someone". Yes that also means "screwing someone over" but for me, when reading "undid" a quote from the movie Trainspotting came to mind.
"Begbie didn't do drugs either. He just did people" and that involved a knife usually.
/edit: Considering the dictionary's definition I will hereby withdraw my suspect of any intent by the author to suggest that another person or entity was responsible for Aaron's death :)
That seems like a preposterous amount of time, money, and stipulations post-release. What was the federal prosecution's motivation for making an example out of him?
ii) US justice system is a machine. Roll over and give up, or they're going to crush you like a bug.
Edit: English
What sort of crimes typically have similar actual and enforced punishments? I'm wondering where on the scale it gets slotted. Is it between assault and shoplifting or grand theft and kidnapping?
For federal crimes, sentencing is generally governed by the federal sentencing guidelines. [1] The application is conceptually simple -- there are guidelines for determining the offense level for each base crime, guidelines for grouping offenses (some of which just keep the most serious, some of which start with the most serious and increase based on other offenses), and guidelines for adjustments to the offense level for various factors such as actual harms inflicted, the defendants criminal history, the defendants acceptance of responsibility, and so forth, and finally guidelines to translate offense level into sentence. But the details are quite involved.
Perhaps the most important thing to note, in the federal guidelines, is that in most cases, where multiple convictions are handed down for offenses involve the same victim and the same act or transaction, or different acts or transaction as part of the same plan or scheme, the offense level is set by the single most serious count alone -- charging multiple counts of the same charge basically just increase the chance of getting a conviction.
For state offenses, sentencing is handled by state-specific rules.
[1] http://www.ussc.gov/Guidelines/2013_Guidelines/index.cfm
So let's not use the "it was just to pressure him" defense.
Restating: people, in the same country as Aaron, have been sentenced to same or worse sentences, even for lighter stuff.
Plus, the Obama administration raised maximum sentences for hacking count to 20 years (up from 10).
As far as I know, only California has a three strikes law that can apply to non-violent felonies, and I don't know of any three strikes law that applies to convictions on multiple counts for the same conduct.
When you see stuff like "man gets life for possessing an unregistered firearm" (at least outside of California), you need to read the fine print and look for the prior murder or armed robbery convictions.
I disagree with three strikes laws even when structured to only apply to violent felonies, but they're totally irrelevant to this discussion.
As I've argued elsewhere [1], "A prosecutor forcing someone to admit guilt by threatening a life-destroying cruel and unusual punishment if they do not admit it - why, that is the very essence of using torture to extract a confession!"
Many of the counts would have been grouped under the guidelines.
Once again: Swartz's own lawyer wrote that he believed it unlikely that Swartz would do any time in prison even if he was convicted after pleading not guilty.
The "35 years" thing is entirely fictional. Popehat has a fantastic blog post on why this fiction exists and how it is misunderstood.
There was no way Swartz was getting 35 years even if he was convicted of everything. And the prosecutor piled on every charge he thought he had a chance at. Knuckling under and serving 6 months quietly isn't too appealing. And the alternative was lots of publicity for the cause, a good chance to change precedent in IP cases, and the possibility of serving some time as a martyr.
I've always wondered if the felony conviction aspect of the punishment wasn't just as unacceptable to him. It would prevent any political ambitions in the US, I believe.
http://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence...
The main thing that confuses people is grouping. Prosecutors charge a large number of counts because they don't want to lose a conviction by being imprecise in characterizing the specific set of acts out of an overall course of conduct that was illegal. If you add up all the counts you get some big number, but the sentencing guidelines (3D1.2) clearly state: "All counts involving substantially the same harm shall be grouped together into a single Group."
I think the sentencing guidelines are ridiculous (look at that big list of meaningless factors in the sushi chef example!), but its much more sensible to calculate a guideline range than to add up the theoretical maximum sentences.
It's too bad that many activists, who want clearly an open, just and more socially enabled world, have a psyche that is so fragile. But apparently the two things are correlated: If you are sensitive, you might very well be fragile.
Now given the fact that tampering 40.000 criminal cases[1] give you 3 to 5 years, I don't see how publishing MIT documents can be so dangerous for the society.
[1] http://filmingcops.com/corrupt-government-chemist-tampered-w...
I don't have the faintest idea on how we could achieve this on our televised democracy, but I'd be interested on reading other's opinion on the matter.
RMS - " Hackers typically had little respect for the silly rules that administrators like to impose, so they looked for ways around. For instance, when computers at MIT started to have "security" (that is, restrictions on what users could do), some hackers found clever ways to bypass the security, partly so they could use the computers freely, and partly just for the sake of cleverness (hacking does not need to be useful). However, only some hackers did this—many were occupied with other kinds of cleverness, such as placing some amusing object on top of MIT's great dome (), finding a way to do a certain computation with only 5 instructions when the shortest known program required 6, writing a program to print numbers in roman numerals, or writing a program to understand questions in English.
Meanwhile, another group of hackers at MIT found a different solution to the problem of computer security: they designed the Incompatible Timesharing System without security "features". In the hacker's paradise, the glory days of the Artificial Intelligence Lab, there was no security breaking, because there was no security to break. It was there, in that environment, that I learned to be a hacker, though I had shown the inclination previously. We had plenty of other domains in which to be playfully clever, without building artificial security obstacles which then had to be overcome. "
note the filename of the pic in the article: swartz-double.jpg
MIT trains hackers for a living, since before this guy was born.
/s