The internet’s own boy: the story of Aaron Swartz [video] | Hacker News Reader

The internet’s own boy: the story of Aaron Swartz [video]

aeon.co

140 pointsLibertatea85 comments

Just the video, embedded from youtube.

Here's the official site of the movie: http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy

Definitively a movie anyone using the internet should watch. I cried.

That link to takepart seems to be asking people to pay.

The film is released under Creative Commons and is available for free to stream or download (MPEG, OGG, Torrent) directly off the Internet Archive.

https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaro...

The part (59mn) where his former girlfriend confesses she's still angry, angry at a system that tries to trap you and turn everything against you and ruin your life... is devastating.

As did I, and that was surprising.

What moved me the most was Lessig. Aaron got right into Larry's soul, and once there, asked a simple, genuine question that could not be denied. There is a quiet power in that I find profound, as if we all operate under limits that really aren't there when we really do question.

"Sweet, sweet boy." Yeah Larry, indeed.

This. I haven't been able to watch this, because even __reading__ about it makes me cry. I didn't know Aaron, never knew anything about him before this, and I still feel profound loss and tragedy whenever I think about him and his experiences. He sounded like an amazing human being.

Me too. I did know about him through his activities. The name popped up on my radar a long time ago.

What I didn't know is he was so young. I also didn't know how many great advocacy efforts he helped to setup or founded. It's amazing! And that, I could feel, like white hot, and to be honest, got me far more politically aware.

When the Jstor event happened, I found out a lot more, and when he killed himself, I just felt loss. Profound, basic loss. And it was a hard loss, because I just began to know, and was interested in following Aaron, feeling like good things were going to happen, and then just like that, he's gone... :(

This work is really good. It communicates that aspect of Aaron to people in a meaningful way. Yes, it will be hard to watch. I found it worth it though.

I question more now. And I think about limits and norms a lot...

"But also, I must admit that I am a little disappointed in Aaron. I understand that depression is a serious disease that can fell any person, however strong. But he chose the path of the activist long ago. And the path of the activist is to fight, for as long and as hard as it takes, to effect change. Aaron had powerful friends, a powerful support network, and a keen sense of moral cause that put him in the right. That's how he got that support network of powerful friends and fellow activists in the first place" -- J. Atwood http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-end-of-ragequitting/

I always felt this Jeff Atwood blog post was a good run down of why everyone was so upset over Aaron's suicide. It was a stupidly tragic mistake and Aaron knew better.

That is how depression sometimes goes.

But stupid? Disappointing? These labels are not fit for fate of a severely depressed mind; logic sense ends and the risk of suicide is a roll of the dice, NOT a matter of commitment to who or what we love.

All I see is the selfpity of those left behind transformed into cynicism. It is unbecoming. In my humble opinion.

Deleted comment

People who don't help don't get to be disappointed.

He wouldn't have been engaging in much political activism sitting in a jail cell for 38 years.

I can't feel disappointed in Aaron at all. I would probably do the same thing in his position.

I'm disappointed in a society and a 'justice' system that pushes for this to happen.

There's actually quite a precedent of engaging in political activism from jail.

absolutely. in fact jail could have been a way to gain more attention, Gandhi?

He would never have been sent to jail for 38 years.

So how many then? 5? 10? 20?

How many less than the figure that was being thrown around as his possible sentence is he supposedly a disappointment to us all for avoiding?

Oh, I forgot, he can be an activist from prison? Nothing to worry about then!

How many on here would honestly do it for even 5 years? I wouldn't. I'd sooner kill myself out of spite.

DOJ strongly suggested they'd be shooting for a 5+ year sentence, which according to the guidelines would have required them to establish losses (stipulating that Swartz had succeeded in his ultimate plan, unimpeded by the countermeasures JSTOR and MIT erected) in the millions of dollars.

Orin Kerr suggests that the likely outcome would have been "anything from probation to a few years", depending on where the judge landed on the financial damages.

Popehat has a really good take (as usual) on the circumstances faced by Aaron Swartz, but it's not as specific as Kerr's, which is the most detailed breakdown I've seen available on what actually happened with the case:

http://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-aa...

I wouldnt kill myself because of 5 years out of the 40 or so that i probably have left.

Or at the least you might wait until you were convicted and sentenced.

It would have been around 6 months if he would have taken the plea deal. If he didn't it still would not have been anything close to 38 years.

Considering the federal sentencing guidelines for the specific crimes he was charged with and the parameters of those offenses (non-remunerative, no prior convictions, limited damages) his own lawyer wrote that he believed that even had he been convicted, he would have landed in the sentencing levels where probation would have been allowed.

It was the felony and the limits on his future in politics that drove a lot of it.

Some jail time wouldn't have been enough. I think he would have done that. Maybe while in there, bad things might have happened.

But, it was obvious to me Schwartz understood code, people, how to organize and advocacy. He wanted to build a body of people and power and do some things.

To him, a felony conviction undermines all of that, and he saw it as useless, himself useless.

A felony conviction does not appear to have set Robert Morris too far back in life, or prevented him from changing the world.

Yes. It is not the end of the world. And we can see that. Options, Like having it expunged exist too.

That Aaron let it get into his head and could not or would not seek help, nor really understanding so many people would have his back is tragic.

You're allowed to feel anger and disappointment over suicide. But for the most part, victims of suicide are succumbing to a disease; they aren't failing to live up to a standard.

I might have sympathized with Atwood's comment before watching the doc, but the film goes into the misery Swartz felt even on the first day of working in the Conde Nast office. He literally barred himself in a bathroom stall and wept. For a unique character like Swartz, the disempowerment of the prison system must have literally seemed a living nightmare.

Surely he knew prison would be a likely outcome of his actions? If he was not prepared to do jail time (like hundreds of other hackers and activists had done without a whimper), then perhaps he should have recalculated what he was doing.

For someone so intelligent, it seems he didn't fully understand the implications of his own actions, which is puzzling on several different levels.

While his suicide was a tragedy, it was completely avoidable.

Suicidal depression can be intractable, and we should be careful about assertions of how avoidable any given suicide is. This is a motherfucker of a group of diseases we're talking about.

Easy to say for someone sitting at the sidelines.

Yeah, sure, and Atwood has done what exactly to further our causes and rights?

Seriously, that article is a bunch of self-indulgent bullshit and Atwood cashing in on the suffering and suicide of an otherwise decent person.

EDIT:

Thanks for the downvotes.

Again, from the Atwood article:

"Play other, better moves – and consider your long game."

With the charges he was facing, there wasn't a long-term game. According to wikipedia, was looking at a total of 35 years in prison and $1M in fines. There is no long game there other than trying to invest in cigarettes and bars of soap and pocket radios. There are no better moves.

"I say this not as a person who wishes to judge Aaron Swartz."

Every time I read something like this, there's always an unstated "...but I totally am and will!".

The whole thing is kinda victim-blamey.

I agree, what a terrible and childish thing for Atwood to write. Whenever he's strayed from restating others' programming aphorisms, I've found that I feel less for having read his essays.

The internet's own boy? Where was the internet when he needed them? "He's rich - he made reddit". He never said he was strong. He was an american who naively still believed in its ideals. Fk him right? I wonder how long you guys would last without your internet connection? "He was brilliant and weird, oh it was depression, he made a terrible mistake". Nothing to do with the overbearing jackbooted hypocrites intent on payback charging him with illegal wiretapping whilst all the while doing exactly that to him and other activists! It takes some cynicism to square that. Almost as cynical as that shill Atwood.

Downvote me to Hell you bastards.

Depression clouds one's judgement. "Knowing better" means nothing in that context. The above quote is entirely lacking of empathy, and in understanding of human nature.

That this tone-deaf quote is the top post on an article about such a delicate subject says a lot about HN's community.

The people who could not find their way to some thoughtfulness and restraint and stop an insanely inappropriate and disproportionate legal travesty should lose their jobs and be driven out of their professions.

>an insanely inappropriate and disproportionate legal travesty

That is just about every case ever. Even the really bad people, the ones you and I and everyone else reading this agree deserve to be locked behind bars, have their charges trumped up far beyond what they are actually guilty of in an attempt to coerce them to take a plea bargain for lesser charges. To put another way, they are successfully punishing most people for insisting on their right to a fair trial.

Every case ever has had inappropriate and disproportionate trial/punishment? That's a very outlandish statement. Are you referring to a specific type of crime? A good argument can be made that this is true for many marijuana cases. But you seem to be talking about all crimes...

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/05/can-the-...

"I love how surprised people are by the fact that a prosecutor may have overcharged. This is something prosecutors do all the time, as a strategic choice, for various reasons"

(edited to put the 's' back on 'reasons')

Good info, thanks.

You missed my 'just about'. And while it might be a little overstated (I haven't seen anyone do a massive sampling to compare what the charges were compared to what they should've been, which is probably a bit subjective), I would consider it in the majority of cases based on the anecdotes I've seen. Anecdotes are definitely imperfect and worse than peer reviewed science, but lacking the latter, the former is better than nothing.

"Just about" doesn't leave much room for variation. But I get your point, and the link zimpenfish posted actually supports your opinion fairly well. My initial knee-jerk reaction against your original comment seems to have been off base. Which is sad for the state of our justice system...

We should resume who did what:

* Massachusetts US Attorney Carmen Ortiz pushed for the prosecution

* MIT (can we be more specific?) did nothing to stop the prosecution (to say the least)

Please, continue...

Those curious about MIT's role should 1) Read Prof Hal Abelson's report http://swartz-report.mit.edu/ 2) Remember that a prosecutor does not serve the person who reported a crime or prompted an investigation. A prosecutor serves The State http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1423

MIT's neutrality really comes through as a badge of shame there.

That report is a shameful whitewash

You're accusing Hal Abelson of deliberately deceiving the public? Or is there a better way to interpret what you wrote?

If you look at my response below, the report does not have to be an outright lie to be a whitewash. It can deceive by omission, for example. The headline of CNN's coverage of the report was "We did not target Aaron." That's true-ish. There's a lot of room between there and the truth, which is more like "We failed to stand up to stop a bad investigation and prosecution, and now we're dodging responsibility."

Would you place all the responsibility for the report on Abelson? Or do you think Rafael Reif is responsible for setting the parameters of the report to be produced?

That's why I used the word "deceive", as you did right here as well, and so I guess my response is to repeat the question I asked above.

Do you really believe Hal Abelson was deliberately or negligently --- ie, culpably --- deceptive?

later: added clarifying word "really"

"Deceptive" is your word. I said "whitewash."

A whitewash is dissembling and deflecting and, ultimately, deceptive. Abelson, and the other authors of the report should have refused to write it.

But Reif is mostly to blame. He asked for the report, and used it to deflect blame.

Now here is where YOU are being deceptive. You are digging for "Hal Abelson is culpably deceptive." You would even prefer something stronger. That's a weak rhetorical ploy. Write it yourself if you want to read it.

"Deceptive is your word. I said 'whitewash'. A whitewash is [...] ultimately deceptive."

I don't feel like I'm so much trying to use debate tactics against you as to observe how uncomfortable even you seem to be with the idea that Hal Abelson was deliberately deceptive.

So you are completely comfortable defending the Abelson report, and find it completely honest. That's dandy.

Are you still comfortable with your comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529484

Yes. And, yes. Why? What does that have to do with Abelson's report?

Do you have sources to contradict it?

Contradict what? The report amounts to "It wasn't our fault because, except for the people we won't name, and won't say what they told law enforcement, nobody here told Aaron to kill himself."

That doesn't need to be contradicted to call it weak sauce and whitewash.

Michael Pickett of the secret service who aided MIT's IT staff and security in strong arming Aaron and escalating the case and the relevant charges. His presence and influence was the main factor in pumping up the charges and gathering evidence to support them when this could and should have been a matter between the school and its student.

Aaron Swartz was not a MIT student. From the MIT report:

"Aaron Swartz was neither a member of the MIT staff, nor an enrolled student nor alumnus, nor a member of the faculty. He was a regular visitor to the MIT campus and interacted with MIT people and groups both on campus and off."

I didn't realize that. He was accessing student services allocated to him under his enrollment with the university. I won't try to litigate the case here. I see why it might be complicated by that fact.

I want to know who called in the secret service/electronic crimes division here? MIT (who's only concern was trespass) or JSTOR who might be able to enforce contract terms on MIT or a EULA on Aaron at best?

Another (rhetorical) question: did they call the secret service before or after they identified who and what was happening?

I don't know about you, but I always call the FBI when I leave my facebook open at the public library: http://www.avclub.com/article/updated-fbi-arrests-man-suspec...

What was happening at MIT was hardly equivalent to someone leaving their Facebook page open at the library.

They had some unknown person massively exceeding the limits of what they intended to offer to the public. When they used blocking methods that would stop most people, he evaded them. When they continued trying to stop him, he continued evading.

Then he entered an equipment room off limits to the public, wired equipment into the network, and hid it.

He repeatedly trespassed to check his equipment and was grabbing so much data that to stop him JSTOR cut all of MIT off from JSTOR access for a couple days while they tried to figure out what to do next. So at that point he has disrupted research at MIT and possibly put them in violation of their contract with JSTOR.

MIT is a major research center, and that research includes quite a bit of research funded by and for the Department of Defense and other government agencies. Poking that kind of thing tends to get agencies like the Secret Service called in.

The Secret Service is routinely called in for complicated computer crime cases; they are historically the federal government's computer crimes expertise center.

The fact that the case was prosecuted federally is notable, but the USSS's involvement isn't.

What's the alternative?

The supposed victim, JSTOR, dropped their civil case. If it had affected them materially, they would have been wrong to do so.

Well FUCK jstor. I want a payday.

That's a debate worth having.

My opening salvo: The point at which individuals and corporations use of cryptography can be denigrated as, "Making it hard to detect terrorist activity" is the exact point at which it becomes impossible for the individual or the corporation to meaningfully engage with law enforcement. The escalation of the rhetoric surrounding e-crimes blurs and negates our ability not only to judge appropriate penalties, general severity, but also when, how, and to whom to report these crimes.

Its very hard to even tell when and if a crime has been committed.

In such a chaotic environment it is inevitable that money and connections and influence supplant the law.

> Its very hard to even tell when and if a crime has been committed.

So what's your suggestion? Ignore the intrusion until it goes away?

If I had the ear of middle management in America's security service I'd suggest a different approach to evangelizing at a grassroots level. Let's stop pretending startups can ignore the law and make knowledge of the law a distinguishing mark in the pedigree of a startup hacker.

Are you a Markov bot?

most lawyers I know, know how to party rock.

Totally relevant.

As someone working on an project for DARPA & the FBI, having a dump of all of the court documents from PACER would be awfully useful.

(https://github.com/memex-explorer if you are curious)

Not a fan of unnecessary reposts, but this guy's death was a huge tragedy for our generation so I don't mind more people seeing this. He could've been one of the first congressmen actually in touch with our generation, and willing to take a stance on issues he believes in rather than pander to lobbyists.

I saw it and recommend it. It gives some insight into Aaron's life and legal situation.

I watched it a while ago and I believe the movie talks about Aaron possibly investigating on the correlation of results found in JSTOR's academic papers database in order to conclude on the influence of financing on their results (hopefully what I'm saying makes sense... I may also very well be wrong about this claim). I am myself very interested in this topic, regardless of whether that's what Aaron was trying to do when downloading these papers. Does anyone know if such an analysis has been performed since/before/ever ?

Aeon's Deputy Editor has also (just?) published a 2600 word detailed article on Aaron Swartz asking "Persecuted little guy, or powerful revolutionary – what sort of wunderkind was Aaron Swartz?"

Posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9505156

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=internet%27s%20own%20boy&sort=...

What's crazy is that the accomplices in the Boston Marathon bombings faced less jail time than Aaron. That's right people, copying documents is a worse crime than being an accomplice to terrorism.

"tragic story"

For those catching up, I made a timeline of the events of Swartz life and arrest: http://newslines.org/aaron-swartz/

They were doing exactly the same thing as him (and worse) but they killed him.

People should really be upset at the first girlfriend who tipped the Feds about the manifesto for immunity.

You really have to keep most people on a need-to-know basis.

I think the movie conveys pretty clearly that she shows a lot of remorse and anger about how she was treated and the information she gave up under duress.

It doesn't matter. Her cooperating for immunity led to a ripple effect of him committing suicide.

> anger about how she was treated

There's the problem.

This time can we please skip the obligatory mega-thread about if Aaron was or wasn't a True Founder of Reddit?

It appears that we have skipped it. So, good job?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com