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Petition the Whitehouse to remove Carmen Ortiz from office

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Re: Petition the Whitehouse to remove Carmen Ortiz from office

#111

Post by suchire »

hippee-lee wrote: post #108
monochromatic wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

treated Aaron Swartz as a pawn in the political game she is playing Well, maybe. It's also entirely possible that she was just doing her job, and didn't totally understand the technical aspects of what Swartz was accused of doing.

Very entirely possible. However I have a hard time believing that someone smart enought to make it through law school and pass the bar is not be able to learn enough about technology and motivations behind the actions in this case. As a tax payer I don't want a prosecutor who doesn't know who to go after or how far to go. From reading the thread(s) here and loosely following the case in the news I am not convinced th…

"However I have a hard time believing that someone smart enought to make it through law school and pass the bar is not be able to learn enough about technology and motivations behind the actions in this case."

Much of law is a very technologically backwards field. Up until recently, some law schools (and not backwater ones, but major top-tier ones) only accepted hard-copy, type-written (as in, on a physical typewriter) applications. Harvard's student library had several typewriters specifically for this purpose.

Re: Petition the Whitehouse to remove Carmen Ortiz from office

#112

Post by shiven »

lutze wrote: post #85
jordanb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I don't care if she spends her nights and weekends caring for orphans and war widows. She's a politician who treated Aaron Swartz as a pawn in the political game she is playing. No doubt she intended for her campaign for governor to describe her as a "staunch defender of intellectual property rights" who, as prosecutor, put a "dangerous hacker behind bars" for "breaking into MIT and stealing millions of doll…

I think you're missing the point vis a vis "fix the machine, not the person". The tactics described in the petition are ingrained in the US justice system. Getting rid of a single prosecutor isn't going to change a damn thing because the injustices are systemic, not the product of a vindictive individual. Like Aaron said, shouting at the gears isn't going to fix the machine.

Like Aaron said, shouting at the gears isn't going to fix the machine.

But excising the broken, unfit, insidiously malicious gear from the machine will make said machine one gear short of harming the innocent-until-proven-guilty.

Re: Petition the Whitehouse to remove Carmen Ortiz from office

#115

Post by betterunix »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #35
danso wrote: post #10

Some more context about the prosecutor: She was named "Bostonian of the Year" for her successful cases against mob bosses and drug companies: http://www.mainjustice.com/2012/01/03/massachusetts-u-s-atto... Out of the 94 U.S. DA offices, her office alone collected ~67% of the total criminal and civil fines in 2012, mostly owing to the successful prosecution of drug companies. Her success led to speculation that she wo…

My Grandfather, who was the US Attorney for west Memphis, once explained that prosecuting the law was messy. It was messy because there was rarely a case which hinged on exactly one part of the law or that had circumstances that nicely isolated the principle at stake. He was talking about pornography, and the difficulty of a general consensus that pornography was "bad" and should be outlawed, with the challenge of de…

"These situations seem to arise when there is a fundamental disconnect between what "the people" think and what "the system" thinks"

The system serves the people; the system's thinking should be subordinate to what the people think. Anything less is a sign that the system is broken and is immediate and desperate need of an overhaul (but that is pretty obvious at this point).

Re: Petition the Whitehouse to remove Carmen Ortiz from office

#117

Post by rdtsc »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #93
monochromatic wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

treated Aaron Swartz as a pawn in the political game she is playing Well, maybe. It's also entirely possible that she was just doing her job, and didn't totally understand the technical aspects of what Swartz was accused of doing.

> and didn't totally understand the technical aspects of what Swartz was accused of doing. She had the resources to hire the types of experts who are what I call "executive whisperers." She doesn't need to know what a perl script is to understand what happened at JSTOR. On top of it, when the "victim" JSTOR is saying "what the hell, why are you prosecuting this guy?" Then its pretty obvious we're looking at political…

She is still responsible. There is a chain of command and she is the one getting the pats on the back if a lot of prosecutions go through and crime goes down in the country, but that means she also gets to respond for fuck ups.

Re: Petition the Whitehouse to remove Carmen Ortiz from office

#118

Post by philwelch »

matthewrobertso wrote: post #110
philwelch wrote: post #46

Where's the petition to require free publication and distribution of federally funded academic research? That was the point of that particular exercise in civil disobedience in the first place. What a disappointment--it's like firing a cop for putting Martin Luther King in jail without ever addressing racism.

No, it's like firing a US district attorney for deciding to put Martin Luther King in jail. And you can do more than one action.

It serves no one to make a single prosecutor the scapegoat for a whole system and a whole set of bad laws that need to be changed. There are a thousand prosecutors who are no better just waiting to take that job.

We're going after Ortiz because we think it will satisfy our outrage and grief. That is exactly what I am worried about. I understand wanting to put a face on a tragedy like this, but we should be smarter than this.

Re: Petition the Whitehouse to remove Carmen Ortiz from office

#119

Post by rdtsc »

eurleif wrote: post #21
rdl wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we should be replacing prosecutors who remain technologically ignorant years after these issues come up. If her job responsibilities include prosecuting computer crime, she needs to understand the applicability of computers to crime, otherwise she's not doing her job. Being old and an appointed official is no excuse anymore. It's not as if she's a holdover from the Reagan years. She was an early appointment by…

I'm not disagreeing here, simple asking for information: how has she demonstrated an ignorance of technology?

She has demonstrated either horrible incompetence or maliciousness.

Looking at the way the prosecution built its case, the hyperbole, misdirection, inaccuracies dealing with the technical aspects at least, I cannot but attribute at least one of the above attributes to them.

Re: Petition the Whitehouse to remove Carmen Ortiz from office

#120

Post by jivatmanx »

jzwinck wrote: post #68
jivatmanx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear that the severity of the charges were because the action was a political statement. That is why she wanted to "send a message" Had the same action been done by a non-political individual who simply did he "because he could" there would have been a quiet, minor settlement.

Does that make it better, or worse?

I don't know, but for one, the prosecutor tried to portray the action as solely having a profit motive - which is ludicrous.
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