What you're seeing is the community making him into a martyr.
Martyrdom is a concept that is somewhat foreign or unexpected in American culture. Similar to the delusion that the country is somehow immune to totalitarianism, there exists a common assumption that martyrs, like dictators, only happen "in those other, less free countries".
The very nature of what it means for someone to be a martyr basically guarantees that people will react strongly. This is why they can be a unifying force ("we must ${dangerous_but_important_task} for ${martyr}!"). This is also why the more talented oppressors take steps to prevent martyrs such as having them "disappeared".
I see this situation as similar to the question of what to do with the medical data acquired from the Nazi camps. A good argument can be made for both sides, but in the end we should make use of the resources we have.
So if it takes some "deification" or get the larger community to finally wake up and do something about these prosecutors (and other related people), then I would suggest that any "deification" at least served an important purpose. Given that Swartz spent a lot of time and energy trying to get people to do just that (wake up and actually fight the "big" problems in our society), then... I suspect he would have approved for the same reason.
As for waking up the community to do something? Which community? Certainly not this one. This community goes out of their way to elect their own oppressors and justifies the vilifying all those who on the other side prior to any election. Yet they have the gall to turn around and claim they are oppressed? Look, when you willingly, nigh joyfully, watch as they take over your healthcare you cannot then truly expect privacy can you? You cannot suddenly expect that they really care about you do you? Your just one wrong protest away from being in jail.
Hence the term slacktivist, which applies to most of those cheering Aaron on. Never walked a protest line in their life, but ooh they may have downloaded a song they didn't pay for.
I have no idea what you mean by this. Could you elaborate?
He was then mercilessly pursued, pushed to the point of financial ruin, and threatened with several decades of prison - by a prosecutor who seemingly had zero sense of right/wrong, even in the face of the supposed victim (JSTOR) indicating they had no desire to pursue this any further.
It was the sort of activity that when I went to school, would have merited a 3 day suspension, if that.
> He was then mercilessly pursued, pushed to the point of financial ruin, and threatened with several decades of prison
He was not threatened with several decades in prison. Worst case, if he went to trial and lost, would have been something like 7 years. There was a plea bargain on the table that would have let him get off with a few months. His own lawyers say that if he rejected that and did go to trial, they thought the most likely outcome would be probation with no jail time.
It is possible that he thought he faced several decades between the time he found out about the indictment and the time he first talked to anyone who knows how the federal sentencing guidelines work and how the totals in indictments are so exaggerated that they make Hollywood accounting look realistic.
You can find a very detailed examination of the charges and the possible sentences in the two links given as references in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7004640
> (Who hasn't, at one time or another scraped a few gigabytes of Academic Journals, and who hasn't, at University, spent a ton of time trapsing through campus in areas a helluva lot more locked down than where Aaron went)
I traipsed a lot at Caltech. However, (1) I was a student there, and (2) if I was asked to stop because I was causing trouble, I would (to not do so would have violated the Honor System). In Swartz's case, (1) he had no connection to MIT, and (2) he did NOT stop even when it became clear that MIT did not want him to continue, and continued to the point of getting MIT temporarily cut off from JSTOR.
He should have done his downloading from Harvard, where he had JSTOR access due to his position as a research fellow there, instead of sneaking around at MIT and evading their attempts to get him to stop.
"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.justice.gov/usao/ma/news/2011/July/SwartzAaronPR....
Federal crimes are divided into groups, and multiple charges within a group are treated like a single charge for sentencing. So if X carries a 5 year sentence if you are convicted of X in isolation, and Y carries a 5 year sentence if you are convicted of Y in isolation, and they are in the same group, then if you are convicted of both X and Y together as the result of one set of facts, you get 5 years.
The press release for an indictment charging you with both X and Y will say 10 years. It ignores the grouping.
Sentencing also depends on factors like prior convictions. If X carries 5 years for a first time offender, but can get you 10 years if you are a repeat offender, the DOJ press release will say 10 years, even if you are first time offender and so cannot get more than 5 years.
For a detailed analysis of Swartz's indictment and what he was ACTUALLY facing, see these two Orin Kerr articles:
http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges
http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-agains...
They also know who they are charging and what facts they are alleging as the basis of those charges, so should be able to take into account things like prior convictions, how much damage was done, and other things that affect the sentence under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.
Their press releases should be designed to accurately inform the public about the case, not make them look good by making it look like they have indicted someone from the most wanted list.
But, nobody will ever convince me that charging a freedom advocate like Aaron with federal felonies, and driving him to financial ruin for scraping academic journals from a data port in a cabling closet on the MIT campus was anything but "evil."
I'm also not suggesting that everything Aaron did was squeaky clean.
I'm just saying, as is pretty much every other person who I've ever spoken to about this event, is that this was not a "13 felony count" type of activity - particularly after JSTOR said they no longer wished to pursue it. The whole "Felon" element really weighed down on Aaron, possibly more so than the financial ruin that he underwent when the government decided to keep pursuing this. I've often wondered whether he worried about bringing his family down as well - as the cost of defending just kept going on and on...
He wasn't threatened with several decades of prison. The numbers in DOJ press releases when multiple related charges are involved are way off, because they do not take into account how related charges interact at sentencing. They also do not take into account the actual defendant, and use the maximum for each individual crime that it is possible for someone to theoretically get, even if to get that maximum requires that the defendant be a repeat offender.
The following two links, from Orin Kerr, explain how this actually works, and also go into details on whether or not the charges the prosecutors picked were appropriate.
http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-agains...
"I think the proper level of punishment in this case would be based primarily on the principle of what lawyers call “special deterrence.” In plain English, here’s the key question: What punishment was the minimum necessary to deter Swartz from continuing to try to use unlawful means to achieve his reform goals?"
The problem with this is, what happens if (as I think was probably true in Swartz' case), the answer is "none"? I.e, what if there is no level of punishment that will deter the person, because he believes that achieving his reform goals is important enough to outweigh any level of punishment?
In other words, the whole theory of punishment that Kerr is describing here can't really be applied as he applies it to a case of civil disobedience. The whole point of civil disobedience is that, to the person doing it, any punishment is unjust, because the law itself is unjust. Given that, trying to figure out what is an "appropriate" level of punishment is pointless.
Taking arguendo the question you highlight:
By cruel empirical evidence, we know that a six-month jail sentence was sufficiently effective enough that it made Swartz end his life, to say nothing of merely stopping his attempts to liberate the JSTOR archives.
Given that, a few days in jail would have likely taken the shine off of his activism and made him realize he wasn't cut out for this kind of thing.
Of course this can't be mathematically proven, but nothing involving humans is. It's one reason for increasing sentences for repeat offenders: the justice system is experimentally trying to find out how much punishment you need to get the message to stop doing that.
Well, if we're taking this point of view, what stopped his attempts to liberate the JSTOR archives was the private settlement he reached with JSTOR, before he knew he was facing any jail time at all. The jail time was completely superfluous in that respect.
That said, Kerr's article makes a comment in a somewhat similar vein to yours:
"[T]his is one of the puzzles about Swartz. On one hand, he was deeply committed to civil disobedience and to the moral imperative of breaking unjust laws. On the other hand, he seems to have had his soul crushed by the prospect that he would spend time in jail. This is an unusual combination."
However, I still think the "deterrence" theory of punishment doesn't quite fit a case of civil disobedience. Increased punishment for repeat offenders assumes that the offenders have no reason other than narrow self-interest for violating the law--in other words, they commit crimes because they think it benefits them, so making it not benefit them should, at some point, get them to stop committing crimes. But someone who breaks the law for the greater good is not doing it for their own benefit to begin with.
Is there any way we can avoid rehashing this discussion every time anything related to Aaron Swartz is posted to HN?
The problem seems to be that the conduct of the prosecutors was just on the cusp of being reasonable to describe them as comic book super-villains. So you get one contingent of posters demanding they be locked in Arkham Asylum and the other contingent insisting that is an exaggeration and they're only regular ordinary villains, and it just goes back and forth like that indefinitely and derails any hope of a productive discussion about what can be done about it.
The problem isn't pedantry. It's that the sentencing parameters of Swartz's case have become an urban legend.
It all seems like talking past each other. Is there anyone who sincerely believes that sentencing and plea bargaining are not broken? Is there any legitimate reason why statutory maximum sentences should be an order of magnitude or more longer than typical actual sentences, rather than more clearly delineating what conduct constitutes a serious felony as distinct from a misdemeanor? What are the practical ways of reducing the coerciveness of plea bargaining so that there isn't so much pressure for a defendant not to demand his day in court, or to make it so that doing so does not induce bankruptcy for ordinary people? These questions are more interesting than discussing whether a particular prosecutor said a particular thing on a particular day for the seventeenth time.
Aaron didn't know the difference between right and wrong either. He snuck into a closet and copied proprietary data.
If I was working for a startup, copied all of their customer data, and released it to the public (because I thought it should be free)..should I be prosecuted?
No, he copied data that we, the public, already paid for once, but are being forced to pay again for access to because the government has not forced organizations like JSTOR (and Elsevier and other journal publishers) to retire their outdated business model. The data itself is not "proprietary"; it doesn't contain trade secrets or personal information or anything like that. It's scientific papers that were paid for by the public. The fact that every single paper is not on a public website like arxiv.org where anyone can read it is an outrage.
That said, I think Swartz knew perfectly well that he was breaking the law; but he thought it was worth doing so to fix the outrage I just described.