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Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

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Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#81

Post by harryh »

quanticle wrote: post #52
an_account wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The core principle of the US system of government (and of the British system that precedes it) is that no single person should have absolute power in a criminal trial. Power should be subject to checks and balances, even if those checks and balances are cursory in 95% of cases. Put another way, the US criminal justice system is the equivalent of a software development process where the vast majority of changes go in…

That's wrong. The defendant and their lawyer are doing a code review.

Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#82

Post by rubberstamp »

quanticle wrote: post #36
andrepd wrote: post #30

Earlier 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 .

and private arbitration clause included in most TOS agreements now a days. It doesn't work to provide justice as lawyers on company payroll will favor the company.

Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#83

Post by igravious »

gnaritas wrote: post #69
dlandis wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can't say that it was wilful civil disobedience and then say that he went about it the wrong way, you contradict yourself as that's kind of the definition of civil disobedience.

If you're saying that he ought not to been civilly disobedient then that's a different matter but what he did makes him a sort of modern-day hero. That he took his own life makes him a martyr in a weird kind of way. I know that hero and martyr are emotive words but I think I nearly feel that way about all this.

And it's not theft, it's copyright infringement. Repeat after me: you can't steal bits and bytes, only copy them, and copying is infringement, not theft.

Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#84

Post by gnaritas »

wolfgke wrote: post #78
gnaritas wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not unreasonable to choose death over living under an unjust and corrupt regime, whose laws you don't agree with. Who said it was? I said it wasn't murder. Aaron killed himself, that is an indisputable fact of the case. No one agrees with all the laws of the country, anywhere on the planet; that's life everywhere. He didn't choose to die over the corrupt regime; he chose to die to avoid facing jail, he was jus…

> Brave words, but they're just words; people react differently when actually faced with such circumstances. And that is why as a prosecutor you should better be careful than sorry (though I don't know whether Carmen Ortiz is the latter).

That's not a prosecutor's job to worry about the mental state of a defendant. It's their job to prosecute the case if the evidence is there, and it was. The defense can worry about the defendants state of mind, that's part of their job. This prosecutor was overzealous in the charges being made, but there's no doubt they had a strong case against him and he was guilty of a felony.

Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#85

Post by zethraeus »

gnaritas wrote: post #65
wolfgke wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pos…

you're both taking a miserable but ambiguous situation and trying to make it black and white. that's not really useful.

Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#86

Post by gnaritas »

igravious wrote: post #83
gnaritas wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can't say that it was wilful civil disobedience and then say that he went about it the wrong way, you contradict yourself as that's kind of the definition of civil disobedience. If you're saying that he ought not to been civilly disobedient then that's a different matter but what he did makes him a sort of modern-day hero. That he took his own life makes him a martyr in a weird kind of way. I know that hero and m…

> You can't say that it was wilful civil disobedience and then say that he went about it the wrong way, you contradict yourself as that's kind of the definition of civil disobedience.

I didn't mean "morally" wrong, I mean wrong approach. That's not contradictory at all; civil disobedience is not always the correct way to go about change. Sometimes it is, like when its done en-masse; going it alone, wrong approach.

> And it's not theft

Fine, infringing their data, irrelevant to the conversation; a crime no matter what label you want to apply.

The right approach is to lobby to get the law changed, not break it by yourself and hope you don't get hammered.

Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#88

Post by moinnadeem »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #31

I'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".

MIT 2020 admit here: yes, it is still in the hearts and minds of the newest classes. When discussing some of our idols, one student and I both agreed upon Aaron Swartz. He may be gone, but never forgotten and the new students look up to his legacy.

Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#89

Post by id »

andrepd wrote: post #43
songshu wrote: post #37

Earlier 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.

There are literally thousands of cases that:

.) no one ever hears about

.) are never reported by the media

.) aren't "scandals" (to me they are)

.) aren't just, as I (and probably others) see it

I am talking about petty crimes that shouldn't even end up in court (Aaron is a good example), drug offences, more serious crimes with way too harsh sentences, juvenile offenders tried as adults, mental illness treated as a crime, things like the felony murder rule and so on and so forth.

Mind you, I'm not talking about downright wrong verdicts (of which there are enough) here.

Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#90

Post by gnaritas »

zethraeus wrote: post #85
gnaritas wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pos…

you're both taking a miserable but ambiguous situation and trying to make it black and white. that's not really useful.

To whom? It's clearly useful to us or we wouldn't be discussing it. I see nothing ambiguous about the situation, he broke the law willingly, got caught, couldn't handle the consequences, so he committed suicide. What's ambiguous about that?
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