Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death
bostonmagazine.com
bostonmagazine.com
They refused to sign-off on any deal that did not involve Jail time. This was THE one point that weighed more on his mind than any else per the recorded statements of his partner.
MIT's pig-headedness in this aspect really destroyed any respect I had for that institution. JSTOR made a much more reasoned statement http://docs.jstor.org/summary.html - Clearly indicating that they had NO INTEREST in any further prosecution (since they were the primary wronged party).
http://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.pd...
II.B.3, last sentence. Read the whole section for a summary of that event.
During the June 21 conversation, the lead prosecutor also told OGC [the MIT Office of General Counsel] that, essentially, his work was done, that the final decision about the prosecution was now in the hands of his supervisors, and that a decision would be made soon. The OGC attorney took the opportunity to suggest that some people at MIT would be likely to view the prosecution negatively. The lead prosecutor replied that he understood the complex dynamics at MIT. He said that he had also been in touch with JSTOR and understood their perspective, and had taken both into account in moving forward with the prosecution and he would let MIT know when the indictment came down. From this, OGC inferred that further presentations of MIT’s opinions were unlikely to have an effect on the prosecution: the views of both potential victims had already been taken into account. JSTOR (at that point) was regarded as the primary victim, and if JSTOR’s view didn’t have an impact, then neither would MIT’s view.
"The heavily redacted documents released today confirm earlier reports that the Secret Service was interested in a “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” that Swartz and others had penned in 2008. In May 2011, a Secret Service agent and a detective from the Cambridge police department interviewed a friend of Swartz and inquired specifically about the political statement."
If you are a hammer, you must smash all nails as hard as possible until they commit suicide? Is that prosecution discretion?
[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/08/swartz-foia-release...
It's not up to the victim how the perp gets prosecuted. It has absolutely nothing to do with them - it is up to the prosecutor alone.
The "absolutely nothing to do with them" is patently false. Prosecutors listens to victims about such things and are influenced by them all the time.
"Apparently a grand jury is meeting to render an indictment on Wednesday and there is really only one more day to provide any input into the process. Since it is a criminal case and the prosecutor needs to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it was unauthorized, I think MIT is in the position to “cast doubt” if it desires."
Aaron was facing a cumulative maximum penalty of 35 years in prison.
The roommates of one of the Boston bombers was only facing 25 years in prison[1] if found guilty of helping Dzhokhar Tsarnaev dispose of a laptop, fireworks, and a backpack in the aftermath of the bombings.
I understand it's not a straight comparison, but no matter how I try to re-arrange those numbers in my head, I can't reconcile the impact to punishment.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_bombings#Dias_K...
That's not true in any reasonable sense. And either way if you're just adding up cumulative values it was 50 years after the charges were amended, not 35.
From Jennifer Granick's post [1] decrying everything that the prosecutors did to Aaron:
> He would be looking at 15 to 21 months of incarceration. That number could get higher quickly. ... True, 35 years wasn't in the cards, despite the fact that's the sentence the government publicly waived over Aaron's head. Neither was a maximum of 50 years, which was what the government arrived at after its perplexing choice to get a superceding indictment. But Aaron could easily have come out to over a year in his guideline calculation.
Either way there were plea options on the table. Do you think there's any chance that Tsarnaev ends up with 6 months in jail for killing 3 people and wounding dozens more?
Don't muddle up the real need for CFAA reform with such shoddy logic and misleading statements, it only makes it easier for legislators to ignore you as a "mere extremist".
[1] http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/01/towards-learning-l... (you'll note she's not a fan of the Federal government on this)
Regardless, have a re-read of the article you linked to. Jennifer Granick writes:
> He could plead guilty to all 13 felony charges and the government would argue for a six-month prison term ... Some have blithely said Aaron should just have taken a deal. This is callous. There was great practical risk to Aaron from pleading to any felony. ... More particularly, the court is not constrained to sentence as the government suggests. ... if he plead guilty to a felony, he could have been sentenced to as many as 5 years, despite the government's agreement not to argue for more. Each additional conviction would increase the cap by 5 years ...
On top of that, Aaron "would have had to swear under oath that he committed a crime, something he did not actually believe".
Due to the obscenely high maximum penalty, it is no longer a sane option to fight to prove one's innocence, even in the case of what would be a minor crime, as the risk in case of failure is disastrous. Even if he pleaded guilty to all the crimes, there was no guarantee of a six month sentence.
Thank you for linking to the article though. It's well written and sheds a light on the complexities at play.
Small note: I didn't mention Tsarnaev in my original post, I mentioned his roommates, so your statement about Tsarnaev and a six month jail term is unfounded.
Many people, almost by definition, do not believe that their own criminal acts were actually a "crime". Rationalization is a well-known human psychological phenomenon.
Whatever else Aaron thought about his idealistic mission, being on the MIT subnet without permission was wrong (both morally and legally), as was entering into the MIT server farm to gain that access.
But this wasn't even something that Aaron naïvely didn't recognize... he knew this was wrong to do as he had the same level of JSTOR access at his own campus at Harvard. But he didn't leech JSTOR from his own campus, he traveled across the city to surreptitiously do it from MIT. He even once covered his face with his bicycle helmet when he noticed a security camera so let's know act like "I didn't commit a crime" was his big hang-up. He did know, even if he disagreed personally with the law itself.
> Due to the obscenely high maximum penalty, it is no longer a sane option to fight to prove one's innocence, even in the case of what would be a minor crime, as the risk in case of failure is disastrous.
Well for starters you don't need to prove your innocence, you need only demonstrate that the government was unable to prove your guilt. But either way Dr. Granick covered this point already, and her treatment was comprehensive.
I do apologize for misunderstanding your point to include Tsarnaev, though I think it still applies even for the accomplices. You said you pass by that memorial every week... you think the people of Boston would let anyone involved skate?
We don't know what he intended to do with the JSTOR data.
>being on the MIT subnet without permission was wrong
MIT grants guest access to its network while on the physical premises.
>MIT’s open-network policies at the time allowed anyone visiting campus to access services like JSTOR.
Please not this misinformation again. I have no horse in this race, but he was repeatedly kicked off the network, told not to mass-download again, and yet he chose to find ever-more invasive ways of accessing JSTOR, eventually planting a computer directly on the network access point; and doing so while disguised so as to avoid being caught on camera. It's not like he didn't know what was coming - and if you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
The social norms there don't resemble those of the country at large or even those of other schools, so I would be very careful about extrapolating what's acceptable elsewhere to what's acceptable at MIT. Nothing about what he did struck me as something that would be very far offbase there, I think it would be seen as a really cool hack. I'm sure the admins would feel a bit different if it caused problems for them, but generally this kind of thing was more than socially acceptable.
To answer your question about torrents, file sharing was very common on the network, but people had much better solutions than torrents (cert. authenticated file servers, internet2, etc).
Edit: Also, c'mon - he wasn't wearing his bike helmet to avoid the cams, he didn't think he was doing anything very wrong. He probably just rode is bike to the building and left it on.
The fact is that — much as we may sympathize with him — Aaron killed himself.
And he killed himself in the face of what must have seemed like a hopeless situation, much of that hopelessness created by the massively overzealous prosecution. I think the prosecutors deserve a good amount of that blame.
Your comment is the stupidest I've read in a long long time.
Down voted.
But Aaron was at Harvard. He was not an MIT student or part of their faculty. At what point does MIT get to take charge of their own network against third parties?
Crosstalk or not he should have started it at Harvard if it were so obviously on the up and up.
And in any event once he was kicked off the network to such an extent as to require entering a network closet (note it was never locked, so there was no 'hack' to be had here physically) to regain the subnet he should have taken that as notice that his 'hack' was unwelcome. Well, he should have taken the hint earlier too...
Where does it say he needed to go to the network closet to regain net access? It sounds like the admins didn't have him on their radar until after he had planted his download box. It just seems like a convenient place to leave a computer downloading things for a long time.
You should go study the whole thing again.
Basically he started off leeching off of Wifi only.
At some point JSTOR noticed and complained to MIT so they blocked (get this), his IP address.
So Aaron picked a different IP.
Then they blocked his MAC (this is all on Wifi, still).
So Aaron changed his MAC.
Eventually MIT and JSTOR figured out how to block him off of their wireless completely (or at least, to rate-limit the JSTOR access over Wifi).
It was only at this point that Aaron changed strategies into trying to hookup with a wired connection directly to the MIT switches, by finding and utilizing the network closet.
That is entirely the point. He may well have been willing to do "the time". But "the time" is wildly disproportionate to "the crime". This is bad for the same reason that we don't execute everyone convicted of breaking the law.
Furthermore, how does your logic apply to the NSA? A group of someones very clearly broke the law hundreds of millions of times after being told to stop and being kicked off networks, then finding ever-more invasive ways of stealing our emails to grandma. Remind me, who is threatened with jail for the next billion (!) years under the CFAA?
I'm also not sure why you think this whole NSA bruha is relevant to this. What 'the law' is for an individual isn't always 'the law' for state actors, otherwise every soldier who ever killed someone would have to be jailed. I'm not interested in discussing whether the NSA spying is lawful, the point of my post was to counter the demagogy of 'oh he was just downloading stuff within his rights and then they killed him'. He deliberately broke the law, which is exactly what 'activism' is, but then when the time came to reap what he sewed, well we all know what happened then. Which is a tragedy, and I feel for the family having had two suicides close to me last year, but if you're going to make a point about sentencing practices or penalties of computer fraud laws, make them about actual issues, and don't distort what actually happened for your rhetorical convenience, otherwise you're no better than Fox News. (all 'you' in this not directed at 'you you' but meant as a generic 'you' that refers to everybody acting as described).
But either way even if he was not aware, that was a failure on his part, not the prosecutors. The law was not amended specifically for Aaron, it was on the books in substantially it's current form for more than enough time for Aaron to have researched it.
And this has nothing to do with whether it's the prosecutors fault or not (although their behavior was clearly morally reprehensible).
The point is that he likely did not know to expect 'the time'.
You have committed numerous felonies. Did you consider 'the time' before you committed them? http://www.threefeloniesaday.com/Youtoo/tabid/86/Default.asp...
It is problematic when you accept people's sworn testimony when it is against their true belief. Usually that is what is called a lie and sometimes a form of slavery. Disagreeing with clearly stated laws is one thing, but signing in agreement on what you totally disagree with and only because you were compelled is suppression of expression. I'm NOT trying to convert Aaron's position to one of free speech, but there is a line when you decide that someone has broken the law whether they agree to it or not and making them against their beliefs sign on a paper that becomes public record stating that they knowingly broke the law. The case here is when a law's validity is being challenged, this signed piece of paper removes any doubts about wrong doing and seals the fate of the signer. The law is validated by invalidating the counterargument through coercion.
> Whatever else Aaron thought about his idealistic mission, being on the MIT subnet without permission was wrong (both morally and legally), as was entering into the MIT server farm to gain that access.
But this wasn't even something that Aaron naïvely didn't recognize... he knew this was wrong to do as he had the same level of JSTOR access at his own campus at Harvard. But he didn't leech JSTOR from his own campus, he traveled across the city to surreptitiously do it from MIT. He even once covered his face with his bicycle helmet when he noticed a security camera so let's know act like "I didn't commit a crime" was his big hang-up. He did know, even if he disagreed personally with the law itself.
This I totally agree with and even if he disagreed personally with the law itself he did what he did and it was at least in my opinion somehow not right and obviously illegal.
> Well for starters you don't need to prove your innocence, you need only demonstrate that the government was unable to prove your guilt. But either way Dr. Granick covered this point already, and her treatment was comprehensive.
The problem with this argument is that his life was already nuked. The prosecution and MIT were in cahoots. If you read the article carefully you can see that Aaron's lawyers were upset that the prosecution was getting documents from MIT without warrants and hence violating Aaron's 4th amendment rights.
Tensions at MIT heightened in October after Aaron’s lawyers filed a motion alleging the university was “acting in concert” with the prosecution, violating federal law and Aaron’s Fourth Amendment rights protecting him from unreasonable search and seizure. The motion sought to suppress the indictment and all information gathered during the investigation. MIT was afraid its employees might have to defend themselves on the stand, which Abelson concluded served to further align the university’s interests with the prosecution.
1) You can disagree with a law yet concede that you broke it. I might disagree with the concept of copyright, but I can recognize and admit when my actions, fit the definition of infringement.
2) It was not a violation of Aaron's 4th amendment rights for MIT to hand over documents without a warrant. You cannot invoke 4th amendment protection over someone else's property, only that person can. And that person is free to cooperate without a warrant.
As for your second point it doesn't hold. The kerfuffle around the NSA is partly because it was collecting data from the ISPs without a warrant and 4th amendment rights are being violated. In this case MIT is in the same position as the ISPs while not having immunity over their actions like ISPs did.
Either way MIT made it actively clear to Aaron that his presence was unwelcome on their subnet. Keep in mind that your logic would excuse essentially any amount of computer crimes and actual vandalism if applied in general to anyone who cared to go to MIT. Note further that MIT 'hacks' are also famous for having the hackers treat the campus with great care to include not interfering with the rest of the students' study and cleaning up after themselves when they were done. And student 'hacks' certainly didn't last over a period of weeks and months.
As for your second point, MIT was the ISP (at least to the point of their network peers and upstreams) and since MIT is not the government the Fourth Amendment never applied between MIT <-> Aaron. Aaron's Fourth Amendment rights (which range Aaron <-> government) could never be violated by MIT unless MIT were working directly at the behest of the government, which is not something that happened here.
Rather MIT voluntarily cooperated with the prosecution after completing their own investigation (which is always the right of the victim of a crime). But ISPs don't get a separate legal immunity; if you are an ISP and act like an ISP (including following the law as an ISP) then you would have the same legal rights as any other "ISP".
Your second rebuttal point is simply a misstatement of the law. Only the government can violate your 4th amendment rights, not private parties like MIT, unless they're acting as agents for the government. But 4th amendment rights are not violated when a private party freely shares it's own documents with the government. The 4th amendment is only implicated when the government accesses your documents and you don't consent.
Obviously Aaron was doing something far more dangerous and destructive to our country than aiding a terrorist.
That is cruel to the hundreds injured. Try harder to not be a jackass.
Deleted comment
Edit: Read his comments, he often is uninformed. I am very sympathetic to Aaron but joking about those injured at the marathon is stupid.
Same thing with computer crimes. It could have been pretty easy to get away with the data if Swartz had been even slightly clever about it (like not physically returning to the scene of the crime...). It's not as easy to get away with as one might think (see Harvard bomb threat guy), but that's the perception of lawmakers.
Many crimes are easy to commit. The reason that there aren't more fatal stabbings isn't because there's a long prison sentence but because most people are not stabbers.
For additional context, David Headley received a 35 year sentence for his active participation in the Mumbai bombings which killed 160 people.[1] The median sentence for murder and non-negligent manslaughter in the US (effective 2000) is 24 years, 3 months.[2]
I can't help but find Aaron's prospective punishment to be far more abhorrent than his crimes. It continues to sadden me that MIT used their influence in such a hurtful manner.
[1]: http://www.propublica.org/article/david-headley-homegrown-te...
If he got more than the one or two years guideline range they would be in danger of being overturned on appeal. That's still excessive of course. The CFAA is a misdemeanor, and the provision allowing it to be enhanced to a felony in conjunction with another crime is misguided.
I don't think this is a fair description; it would be fairer to say that MIT failed to use its influence in a helpful manner. (Even then I'm not sure it would have made a difference; it seems to me that the prosecutors were intent on "getting" Swartz and weren't listening to reasonable arguments for backing off.)
All that is required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.
That still doesn't make doing nothing identical to doing something. You may consider them morally equivalent, but that doesn't make them identical.
My point was about how to correctly describe what MIT did. If we start muddying our language because, oh, well, it's all morally equivalent anyway so it doesn't matter how we describe it, we end up not being able to think clearly. And if we can't think clearly, we can't tell good from evil, so we end up doing even more evil.
Yes. But if you take a man and throw him in the water with chains around his arms and legs so that he drowns, you are guilty of something worse. I'm not saying MIT is blameless; I'm saying that there are degrees of blame, and the prosecutors deserve more than MIT does, because MIT failed to help but the prosecutors actively sought to harm.
In this case they knew what was happening and before issuing an informal warning went for the nuclear option.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. What "informal warning" could MIT have issued? They didn't know who had broken into their network until after Swartz was arrested. As for "the nuclear option", see above.
Saying that MIT didn't do something it should have done, is not the same as saying that MIT did something it should not have done. The fact that you appear to consider them morally equivalent does not make them identical.
It's a natural response to a suicide; we try and search for something to blame. But unless you argue that MIT should have known Aaron was mentally unstable, saying MIT "caused" him to kill himself is illogical. People who commit suicide may desire to because of what they feel about their lives, but the final decision is one's own.
It's sad that it takes a death to bring attention to the IP issues that Aaron's trial had raised.
If you punch a stranger in the face, you probably don't expect him to fall, crack his head on the corner of a table, and die; but you don't get to claim you're blameless if that happens, either.
* This is the bit where someone says that Heymann didn't really want to lock Aaron up 'til 2045, he just said that to scare him. Where I come from, "but I was lying" isn't considered much of a defense either.
I hardly think "suicide is a choice" is an appropriate thing to say. Take recent suicide rates in the military. Do all those soldiers decide to become so depressed as to kill themselves, or does environment have something to do with it?
Seriously? I'm not blaming MIT. What did I say that indicated this? I'm arguing about "suicide is a choice." It's not. Choice has something to do with it, but to say it is choice is asinine. To say that is to never have been depressed or truly known another person who was depressed or suffering from another mental illness.
Also, is it not selfish of a family to expect a person with mental illness (or other serious problems) to suffer for the rest of his/her life just so they can delay the loss?
The concept of selfishness is not applicable here, since the individual does not gain anything by suicide, nor does it have anything to do with excessive self love. Suicide is simply an act deemed pathological by society, any other value judgment is bound to be derived from philosophically arbitrary and subjective ethical convictions.
The mistake you're making is that responsibility isn't zero-sum. Is Swartz responsible for killing himself? Sure. But if prosecutors are unjustly harsh with a lot of people in a way that causes the suicide rate in that group to jump, are they responsible too? Yes indeed.
If multiple factors cause something, multiple people can be responsible, and the responsibility of one does not diminish the responsibility of the other.
Didn't say it directly, but follow the logic.
If the prosecutors are now responsible for only proferring charges on suspects who won't kill themselves then it obviously follows that we need to ensure that no one appoints prosecutors who would do this (it's life and death after all!).
So now the person appointing the prosecutor potentially has blood on their hands. Likewise for the person appointing the person appointing the prosecutor. And God only forbid the population as a whole votes for someone in this chain, could you live with yourself if you had voted for the person who appointed Ortiz or Heymann?
That is insanity and I refuse to go down that path.
Instead point your finger at the person (or even persons) responsible, but don't act like simply being a big mean jerk is by itself tantamount to putting a noose around a man's neck. If that were really the case the vast majority of humanity would at some point be liable for manslaughter or attempted manslaughter.
In 2007 Schwartz posted what was believed to be a suicide note after being fired from reddit: http://digitaljournal.com/article/341150
Being fired is also high on the depression list.
You're pointing out two dark moments in someones life. I've had far more than two and I don't by any means consider myself depressed.
That's actually the point... it is depression that kills, not merely subjecting someone to a "dark moment" in their life. We wouldn't have blamed Alexis and the rest of Team Reddit if Aaron had killed himself after being fired, we would have blamed his depression.
Seriously, please educate yourself before offering embarrassing opinions. Clinical depression does not mean automatic suicide, it just makes you more prone to considering suicide when things are bad.
But why are the rates of attempted or completed suicide so high?
If you also consider the differential susceptibility thesis (which seems to apply to Aaron rather well) then it's easy to argue that the government's conduct most likely did significantly contribute: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_susceptibility_hyp...
P.S. it was actually 50 years, but thanks for paying attention...
MIT's IS&T office had a knee jerk security-oriented reaction, and was over impressed with interacting with Steven Heymann, who is a fixture at the sort of conferences where Swartz's "crime" is inflated out of proportion.
It's not OK that Heymann, Ortiz, and MIT's personnel who overcooked this case contributed to the death of Aaron Swartz. And it's not OK they got away with it so far.
They didn't know the guy was Aaron Swartz and that they ought to have been privileged to have him on their network, invited or not.
Suicide is not completely a personal choice. Part of it is a problem with mental wiring, yes, but a significant part of it is also environmental. Suicide is far more prevalent among people who view themselves to be in hopeless situations, whether financial or otherwise.
I hate to resort to analogy, since everyone always then argues the analogy instead of the subject it's trying to describe, but if you have an engine that redlines at 5,000 rpm and you redline it for a while and it self-destructs, you don't turn around then and say, "well, that wasn't the driver's fault, that was completely the engine's fault."
Aaron made the sad decision to take his own life. Ultimately, yes, he made that decision and nobody else did. But that doesn't mean that there isn't some responsibility to go 'round. He made that decision because of the future he believed he was facing, because of the situation he believed he was in.
Also, the entire point of this article was that MIT did have at least one good reason to defend Aaron: self-interest. He was as much a symbol of what people believed was a hacker ethos at MIT as anyone else of his generation. The message now is clear: hackers are not safe at MIT.
"Just following the rules" has never been a socially acceptable defense for bad behavior. Sometimes the rules are wrong, and the wonderful thing about humans -- when they choose to be human -- is that we have the ability to judge a situation and decide when to bend or even break the rules.
Because they didn't know what was going on and needed help to figure it out. It's all laid out in the Abelson report.
If you're looking for a key juncture at which MIT made a mistake, I would ask why they didn't make a statement similar to the one JSTOR made after the civil settlement: basically saying "we're satisfied that this is resolved and don't have any interest in further legal actions being taken". (I'm not sure this would actually have stopped the prosecutors, since they seemed bound and determined to "get" Swartz no matter what, but at least it would have been something.)
This is common knowledge about the case, also found in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#JSTOR
http://www.mass.gov/courts/courtsandjudges/courts/districtco...
See, the problem here is that we are talking about giving aid to overly aggressive prosecutors, whose entire careers are devoted to undermining civil rights and destroying their targets. If that is the sort of prosecution you are aiding, yes, you should share in the blame for what happens to the prosecutor's victims.
If the punishment vastly outweighs the crime, to the extent that one's mental health is impacted, can he be completely to blame for that?
There's no such thing as a "completely personal choice".
In fact the whole notion of a "completely personal choice" is ludicrous, bordering on the metaphysical.
There is an outside world, a reality, and things that happen there influce our actions, including any decision to commit suicide.
Basically, this case embodied almost everything that is wrong with the criminal justice system in America.
E.g. there's no reason that this should have been a felony, but the option of pleading to something that was a misdemeanor wasn't even available to Aaron here because of the way the law is constructed.
However given the law and the way the legal system works the prosecutor was certainly treating this just like any other CFAA case.
A lifetime in prison is not worse than death. At least you can still talk to your family. You can acquire new skills. There is the chance you get paroled early. Etc, etc.
Yet when the tables are turned suddenly suicide is viewed with such disdain?
I'm not advocating suicide or anything, I'm just arguing that when faced with an immensely harsh sentence, it's not a surprising decision to reach.
The fuck it isn't. Or, more civilly, that is definitely a statement on which reasonable people may disagree.
I'm not particularly depressed, but if I were actually sentenced to life in prison, I would check out in a hot second. There's no point. My opportunities to create joy in the world and to experience unalloyed happiness are done. The rest of my life would be nothing but marking the days and the years until death. It's a waste of good consciousness. I'm opposed to capital punishment because it's irreversible, but I do believe that death is more merciful than life in prison.
From his perspective it was a rational decision because he didn't see any better one. There is absolutely not mental instability in play here.
My feeling is that most people who commit suicide do it because they decided it on a rational basis. Some people commit suicide because they want to stop a pain they feel and in their view will apparently last forever or will get worse. I.e cancer, someone has to spend the rest of his life in a bed after an accident ... People can also commit suicide as a sacrifice to save others. But I guess you were not talking of these types of suicide.
Suicide due to mental instability is probably just a small fraction of all suicide.
Your claim is typical from someone who didn't took the time and made the effort to understand what can lead someone fully rational to suicide. A rational thinking compares the cost and benefit of dying or living. According to some context a perfectly sain person may rationnaly conclude that commiting suicide is the best choice.
The rational thinking they had from their perspective and knowledge may have been wrong, but this is not to be confused with mental instability.
You think that more people commit suicide for others than for themselves? Care to explain why or cite anything?
>Suicide due to mental instability is probably just a small fraction of all suicide.
Cite?
Cite? Just found this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide.
From the graphic shown on the page, not all suicide are caused by mental illness. That was my main point.
I have some doubts about the mental illness importance shown in this graph. Anyway, the mental illness could be the source of pain leading to the rational decision to end it by suicide.
I think we should only invoke "mental instability" when someone's projection of their future level of suffering is clearly mistaken.
Regardless, the vast majority of suicides are the result of a combination of depression and loss of inhibition, both of which are psychiatric symptoms that can be brought on or exacerbated by severe stress. The assumption can and should be that this is the case, not that an individual who was self-admittedly under huge amounts of personal stress performed a rational evaluation of their own future prospects in life and determined that it wasn't worth living.
You say that there are some situations where suicide is a rational choice. But even in these cases it's not that clear.
While I respect the right to chose death, and support changing of law to allow people to seek medically assisted suicide, I am worried that people with undiagnosed depression who would respond to treatment are allowed to die.
user: mentalhealth
created: 17 minutes ago
Then don't comment if you're so afraid of your rep. I mean, what's the point of this site? To me, it's to exchange various thoughts/ideas related to tech and otherwise.
Creating a new account to comment cause your afraid of being down-voted is cowardly. And insulting, frankly.
Regarding the "unsubstantiated claim", I don't feel the need to substantiate every assertion I make on HN. People here are generally smart and motivated enough to do their own research (when they're not busily dismissing everything they can with "citation needed"), and suicidal ideation as mental illness is universally accepted by the professional community qualified to discuss the phenomenon.
Those big numbers come from simply taking the maximum possible sentence that can ever be given out for each charge, and adding them all up.
There are two things that make that unrealistic in most cases. First, the defendant is almost always charged with several similar or related crimes that have mostly the same elements. If convicted on more than one charge from such a group, they are only sentenced for one of the convictions.
Second, the sentence takes into account the severity of the particular acts that constitute the crime, and the prior criminal record of the defendant. To get the maximum possible sentence you'd need to have gone way beyond what ordinary violators of that particular law usually do, and you'd have to have a serious criminal history.
What Swartz was actually facing if he want to trial and was convicted was something ranging from probation to a few years, depending on just how much damage the court decided he caused.
If he took the plea the prosecutor was offering, he was facing up to 6 months.
Details with citations on the above are available at [1] and [2].
In the dozens of discussions of the Swartz case we've had in the last year here, the 35 year or 50 year myth has been repeatedly busted. Yet it keeps coming up in each new discussion--often from people who were in some of the previous discussions! Why is it so persistent?
[1] http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
[2] http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-agains...
Aaron was charged with wire fraud, computer fraud, and “unlawfully obtaining information from” and “recklessly damaging” a “protected computer.” There would be 13 felony counts in all. At the time of the indictment, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said he could face 35 years in prison.
For a given charge, the law specifies a range of possible sentences. The particular sentence is determined largely algorithmically, with one of the inputs being the defendant's prior convictions. Another input in how much damage was done.
With no prior convictions in this area, even if the court found that Swartz had caused the maximum alleged damage he would not have been able to get anything remotely near the maximum. If the judge had for some reason ignored the rules from the Federal Sentencing Guidelines and imposed a longer sentence, it would have been easily overturned on appeal.
Second, there is a kind of redundancy in the charges. Congress sometimes passes several laws that all cover essentially the same kind of wrongful act. A defendant can be charged under all of them, but is only sentenced under one of them even if convicted for all.
The 35 year number comes from a press release. The press release authors just take the highest number in the range for each charge, and add them all up. They do not take into account the grouping of similar charges for sentencing, nor do they take into account any factors (such as lack of prior criminal record) that lower the maximum for the particular defendant whose indictment they are writing about.
Read Orin Kerr's analysis. It is thorough, and fully documented.
So claiming that he killed himself over a number that wasn't even a possibility is damaging to his image. To me it seems like a bright man got caught doing something illegal and couldn't face the music.
Besides, I still think that such a possible outcome can be a hard burden, even with the knowledge that it is unlikely.
> To me it seems like a bright man got caught doing something illegal and couldn't face the music.
"Face the music"? we are not talking about a game here, but about jail and a real life. Besides, that comment totally ignores how far the prosecution stretched the law to define the illegality of his actions.
edit: I never claimed he killed himself over the number.
If anything, I'd think screwed up laws and an overzealous prosecution are the real issue here, and I'm not sure what pointing fingers at MIT accomplishes.
The Abelson report's take on this (with which I basically agree) is that, while MIT perhaps had no "obligation", it certainly missed an opportunity to use its position to educate the US government about a technical area in which the government is, to put it bluntly, clueless.
Now consider that someone using your open network in order to access a corpus of public-funded scientific literature with the intent to analyze and publish findings about any fraud that lexical analysis revealed.
Does that fit the mission statement or not?
I am deeply saddened by the whole affair and the extent it reveals about how much the institute has changed from a place of learning, innovation, and challenging yourself and others into basically a government-funded R&D lab run by administrators and lawyers. Determining whether this is the kind of place the faculty, staff and students of MIT actually wants it to be is what "pointing fingers" accomplishes.
It seems to me after reading the report that it was seen as a potential attack on the government's interest in the IP on MIT's network and that was the cause of the ham-fisted response.
"United States Attorney Carmen Ortiz, in the midst of a prosecutorial tear that would lead the Globe to name her 2011’s Bostonian of the Year, held up Aaron’s indictment as a warning to hackers everywhere."
https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleII/Cha...
The article hinted at the fact MIT ran an "Open network" which ran counter to the charge of "unauthorised access". MIT should have commented on that in their report.
MIT worked with the prosecution to help build there case, that's fine, but talk about "neutrality" as that clearly isn't.
Anyone arguing that MIT didn't do anything wrong, I would say, just isn't rational.
But we still haven't gotten causation (Are they to blame for Aaron's death?).
There is always some people who say that suicide is only the victims fault, no one else. But do you apply that to people being tortured? Or people with no hope to live out their life as they thought they would. Was it the jews fault for committing suicide rather than face the camps?
Now applying that extreme analogy to the US legal system, and in particular, the plea bargain system... isn't it the same dynamic? They want to make the proposed outcome so bad that you take an easy way out. In the process they destroyed parts of your life (in Aaron's case it was his friendships, girlfriend, family, wealth).
Thus, aiding this system (the prosecutor) (as MIT did) certainly deserves some of the blame, no?
Do you mean the Abelson report? That was published after the fact. (And it does address the issue you mention.)
But either way, "we" also didn't put anything in our "contract" that let them make nuclear weapons, air forces, computer inter-networks, or social security/welfare programs.
You're missing the word "presently."
That back door is there. Others not having figured out how to interact with it yet is a matter of security through obscurity[0], and the system is still weaker for it, even though it's not yet fully cracked.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity
I never realized Norton agreed to talk with the prosecution against Aaron's wishes.
I am on the end of a civil suit. It's nothing big, but I have never felt so helpless. I can't imagine what Aaron was feeling.
I don't know if MIT was complicit, but a few things suprised me--50k charge to public libraries.
Swartz's death was the result of institutional failure. The criminal justice system and more broadly the US government are very sick institutions if their standard operating procedures can result in a tragedy like this.
In libertopia... Aaron would only face life in prison if he entered into a contract with MIT agreeing to life in prison for accessing the systems in the way he did.
In libertopia... you cannot consent to terms you cannot negotiate (IE accessing a website does not magically enter you into some agreement).
Second, the root of the CFAA charge wasn't intellectual property, but physical property: MIT's network. Libertarians certainly do recognize non-contractual violations of property rights, i.e. various incarnations of trespass.
Arguing that violation of property rights is justified by some greater social purpose is distinctly unlibertarian.
As for "abuse" of the process, that's orthogonal to libertarianism. Classic libertarians believe in limited government, but once the legitimate object of government is implicated, in this case protecting property rights, they do not have any tendency towards favoring more forgiving or lenient prosecution.
Under a Libertarian regime, the whole thing would've been simpler, as no theory of justice or societal good would've been involved. It would've simply been JSTOR and MIT extracting whatever revenge they'd considered.
Let me illustrate. Say you belong to a private club. The contract of membership allows you to use the clubhouse, as long as you don't bring any Hindu guests. Say one day you do. That's a breach of contract. Say you come back the next day. Since you've breached the contract, your license to use the house is revoked, and now its an infringement of property: trespass. Finally, lets say you punch the owner for being racist. Any classic libertarian will support prosecuting you under three legal theories: breach of contract, trespass, and battery (a tort). Classic libertarians don't reject any of these.
> On the day Aaron was indicted, the analyst emailed Heymann: “Nicely done Steve and kudos! …it’s just a true relief and very refreshing to see your accuracy and precision.”
MIT is supposed to be the model of an environment where people who want to break the rules and hack the system can function. Students breaking into buildings, for example, has a long tradition there.
The article sort of hinted at the way what happened was not just a problem for Swartz, but for MIT itself. It is not clear what MIT actually is with the current status quo.
Aaron Swartz did not attempt to obscure his face. The DOJ just chose a screenshot of when the helmet happened to pass over his face, making it falsely appear as though he was. That's malicious on the part of the DOJ, and that's slanderous and sloppy journalism on the part of Janelle Nanos and Boston magazine.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/life-i...