Aaron Swartz, Asking For Help, 119 Days Ago

Unfortunately, it means that when you jump into a new thread and contravene your other clearly-stated positions, it's a rather transparent attempt to get more attention.

You're not part of Aaron's family, you're not related, and your own words were pretty clear as to what you thought about the guy: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529484.

For the love of all things good, can people who didn't care in the first place about Aaron or his cause stop their fake sympathy now that he is dead? I didn't do anything for him either, but not going to cry any crocodile tears to show everyone how politically aware and smart I am.

While that might have been partially what Aaron was doing, I think the headline leads you to picture a horrifying scenario in which the young man's death might have been avoided, if only the community had been more encouraging or sympathetic. Instead, you find that he was asking for financial support, and there's of course no reason to believe that sending him money could have altered the tortured course that ended with him taking his own life.

It may seem like a trivial point but in my opinion it completely warps this whole conversation. For example, suppose someone shares with you that they have been terribly depressed and contemplating suicide. In this case, I agree, telling them to "man up" is pretty bad form. But that is not exactly what happened here.

One thing that's been bugging me is how, to be blunt, intellectually lazy so many people seem to have been about this whole thing, especially the case against Aaron. Everyone is looking for the easy answer, the soundbite that wraps the whole thing in a bow. I thought that HN was a bit smarter than that, that's a sucker's game, it's a game for tabloids and cable news, not a way for smart people to approach complex problems. And this is a complex problem with no easy answer. The case against Aaron was complex. The law involved was complex. And the application of the law was also complex. It's not as easy as "he was innocent!" or "he was guilty!", because even if either one were easily established in the "court of public opinion" then that's really only the starting point of several much more difficult questions.

I think it's probably fair to say that guilty or not the prosecution was overzealous, as the sorts of punishments he faced was all out of proportion to what one would expect for a white collar crime, even one potentially involving thousands of dollars of losses.

In the same vein people have been reacting to this tragedy by trying to find scapegoats. Whether that's the prosecutor, or edw519, or MIT, or whomever. I don't think I need to spend time addressing why that sort of behavior is a bad idea.

Going back and looking at the comments in the older thread about Aaron's legal troubles I've spotted a few instances of several trouble behaviors that I've noticed have become more and more common. One, the idea that "rich" people are less deserving of sympathy because of their wealth. I've seen this in the rise of the "99%" mentality and other phenomena. Personally I don't think there is any amount of wealth that renders an individual's pain and suffering unworthy of caring about. Two, the idea that punishment is reasonable after being charged but before being sentenced, or infliction of pain and suffering in general as a response to crimes. You see this sort of thing in support for torture, support for poor conditions in jail, sympathetic depictions of police brutality in fiction, public approval of widespread sexual assault in prisons, etc. And you also see it in the idea that there's nothing wrong with a trial being a punishing, life-altering, resource draining experience.

I think these sorts of things are antithetical to the ideals of liberty, equality, justice, rehabilitation, etc. that we should desire our societies rest upon, rather than base instincts like jealousy, revenge, punishment, retribution, schadenfreude, etc.

I don't think this saga bears much, if any, similarity to a fight between absolute heroes and absolute villains. I think that even in as much as the prosecutor was overzealous it's as much a systemic problem of the way that computer and IP related "crimes" are perceived and handled by the criminal justice system as it is to be due to any ill-will or villainy on her part.

I'd much rather we, HN and the tech community in general, were taking the time to talk through the details of the case more carefully, discussing the details of the relevant law (and whether it's well grounded, meaningful, useful, and generally well applied), and bigger issues such as IP issues, computer security issues, problems with our criminal justice system in general, etc. than looked for quick-fix easy answers and tried to fit this story into a simplistic mold. I wonder what sort of discussion Aaron would have preferred take place.