I often remember his essay 'Lean into the pain' : http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dalio
+1. His series on Raw Nerve is still one of the best things that I've found on the internet - http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve
Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
61–70 of 213 posts
Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
#62I'm still disgusted by the behavior of the MIT officials in all of this. Whenever I see or hear 'MIT' the first thing that comes to mind is: "that's the school that was responsible for the death of Aaron".
Whenever I visit MIT to work with some researchers there I always manage to sneak in an Aaron reference and love watching their faces. People can justify what happened by citing that he broke the Law™, but this is still a sore thing for many on the campus, that I think those who want to, shouldn't miss the beat to rub salt in MIT's wounds, especially because of the history around hacking at MIT.
People won't think twice about things they don't like unless you make it unavoidable.
Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
#63I'm still disgusted by the behavior of the MIT officials in all of this. Whenever I see or hear 'MIT' the first thing that comes to mind is: "that's the school that was responsible for the death of Aaron".
And why would that come to mind when none of it is true? Firstly, Aaron is responsible for his own death, it was suicide. Secondly, it's the zealous prosecutor you should be mad at, MIT is not to blame here; Aaron broke many laws and they were well within their rights to have him arrested. Good intentions aside, what Aaron did was illegal and he deserved to be arrested for it; what he didn't deserve was more than pro…
Well oftentimes colleges can and will exercise discretion when it comes to having a student arrested and they will perform their own internal inquiry to determine whether an offense warrants arrest and prosecution. That's just the way it goes. Colleges should do the right thing for their students and protect them when appropriate because all kids do stupid things. MIT would have known pretty well what type of prosecution he would face. Do you think all students who do something illegal on campus get arrested for it?
Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Just to play devil's advocate here (and I understand this goes against prevailing opinion), but he did break the law. Aaron himself said "There is no justice in following unjust laws." > https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj... I even go further and say that you can't be good and lawful at the same time - at least not in any currently existing system of laws.
Is the right course of action to break "unjust" laws, or to just fight to change them? This is an opinion, but I argue that every person has a different definition of what is "just", and if everyone followed their definition of "just", than our legal system would break down. Society functions on a set of laws, but those laws can change for the better.
I mean "good" in the sense of the values that you honor - and here indeed you can't be good and lawful at the same time (except "being lawful" is your exact definition of good).
I personally believe that the way to go is to turn ethics from a humanity into an empirical science, so that any "false" (in a sense that future people will have to define formally) can indeed be falsified. This would at least solve many problems. But at the moment this all is rather science-fiction, since we don't even understand how our brains works (which such theories will probably have to incorporate as special case).
Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
He didn't have to commit suicide, that was his choice , you cannot blame his choice on those prosecuting him. People get prosecuted every day and serve time and don't go and kill themselves. He was not murdered. Murder means an unlawful killing; prosecutors did not unlawfully kill Aaron, he did that himself.
> He was not murdered. Murder means an unlawful killing; prosecutors did not unlawfully kill Aaron, he did that himself. Carmen Ortiz as the prosecutor was the law at that moment, so it is a circular reasoning and sophistry to say that killing Aaron Swartz was not unlawful. > He didn't have to commit suicide, that was his choice And it was Carmen Ortiz' choice to bring Aaron into a position where he didn't see any ot…
> Carmen Ortiz as the prosecutor was the law at that moment
No, she was a prosecutor attempting to apply the law; rather than have his day in court, Aaron chose suicide. It is the judge and jury that are the law and Aaron never saw them.
> so it is a circular reasoning and sophistry to say that killing Aaron Swartz was not unlawful
It is nothing of the sort.
> And it was Carmen Ortiz' choice to bring Aaron into a position where he didn't see any other escape than suicide.
That's still Aaron's fault, not hers, he could have chosen to have his day in court and she could have lost. We'll never know because his will was too weak to even face the possibility of a trial. Committing suicide to avoid a trial is never the prosecutors faults.
Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what the original commenter meant, but some of us (a minority I'm sure) believe that no person deserves arrest, prosecution and jail in the forms they exist today even if that person is guilty of a crime. Things can go "smoothly" but still result in people being subjected to intimidation, cruelty and violence.
By smoothly I mean not "nice and quiet" even if unjust, I meant lawfully and justly. I'm sad as everyone should when intimidation, cruelty and violence happen under law enforcement and/or the judicial system. Yet I can still recognised that this is not always the case. And that the silent majority of cases happen with no incident, but we don't hear of those. We do hear about the scandals, though.
It is very effective at locking up a huge number of people.
Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Almost no one does. That's not even remotely true. Our justice system may be severely fucked in many ways, but it's not completely nonfunctional. But we hear about the problems whenever something goes wrong. The other 99.9 percent of the time when things go smoothly we don't even notice...
There is a huge difference between things going smoothly and things being just . Something like 95% of cases in the US don't even go to trial. They're ended in a plea bargain, which allows the prosecutor to serve as both judge and jury. I do not think that is a sign of a healthy justice system, nor a sign of a justice system that actually pursues justice .
This topic came up with a friend's uncle once, who was an older Sicilian fellow with lots of first hand underworld exposure. He laughed at us as naive and claimed that the main purpose of the US justice system is to prevent vigilanteism.
Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It amazes me what our justice system can do to people and not be held responsible. Just to play devil's advocate here (and I understand this goes against prevailing opinion), but he did break the law. That much isn't in dispute, they had a video of him entering the MIT network closet. And he didn't commit misdemeanors, he committed a half dozen felonies (actually more, but the prosecution dropped a few of them). Th…
>Just to play devil's advocate here (and I understand this goes against prevailing opinion), but he did break the law. He absolutely did break the law. I, personally don't dispute that, nor do I think that that's a controversial fact here. The trouble that I and many other commenters here have with what happened to Aaron Swartz is the gross disproportionality of the punishment he was facing. For downloading academic…
> For downloading academic papers, he was facing [...]
You left out the part where he snuck into a server closet and tampered with the network equipment. Among other things, that's burglary.
Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
And why would that come to mind when none of it is true? Firstly, Aaron is responsible for his own death, it was suicide. Secondly, it's the zealous prosecutor you should be mad at, MIT is not to blame here; Aaron broke many laws and they were well within their rights to have him arrested. Good intentions aside, what Aaron did was illegal and he deserved to be arrested for it; what he didn't deserve was more than pro…
Well oftentimes colleges can and will exercise discretion when it comes to having a student arrested and they will perform their own internal inquiry to determine whether an offense warrants arrest and prosecution. That's just the way it goes. Colleges should do the right thing for their students and protect them when appropriate because all kids do stupid things. MIT would have known pretty well what type of prosecu…
He didn't just do some silly illegal thing; he illegally hacked a network from a closet he should not have been in and hit it with so much traffic that he caused legitimate users of the network to suffer loss of access for multiple days and he did this multiple times after being kicked out. Legitimate users were harmed, regardless of what what anyone feels, Aaron committed a felony and was rightfully arrested.
Beyond that, you seem to be overlooking the fact that it wasn't MIT that was after Aaron, but JSTOR, who constantly pushed MIT to help them locate the hacker who was taking their data from the MIT network. MIT didn't have the option to just handle the matter internally, a third party was involved who was being hacked through the MIT network.
You know what happens when you're a hacktivist; you go to jail. Aaron knew he was guilty, he knew he was breaking the law when he did it, it was willful civil disobedience by his own admission. His suicide was likely the result of his knowing jail was coming even if the prosecutor hadn't been overzealous because he committed a felony and knew it and he couldn't deal with facing the consequences of his actions.
He wanted to change the system, he went about it the wrong way and figured that out too late.
Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a huge difference between things going smoothly and things being just . Something like 95% of cases in the US don't even go to trial. They're ended in a plea bargain, which allows the prosecutor to serve as both judge and jury. I do not think that is a sign of a healthy justice system, nor a sign of a justice system that actually pursues justice .
Alternatively, it is the sign of a very healthy justice system. When cases are cut and dry there's no reason to go to trial. A basic example: I know I jaywalked, and I got caught, so I pay the already predetermined fine. Why wasted tons of resources taking everything to trial and redifing the system with every case?
Some of these folks are taking plea deals to get out on time served. That time they are serving? It's accrued while they are waiting to go to trial. In a hideously over crowded prison system with overworked public defenders, the right to a speedy trial is a thing of the past. Here is a particularly terrible story of this kind: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law
Tragically, the young man from the story committed suicide last year: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/kalief-browder-1993-...