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Aaron Swartz was 'killed by the government,' father tells mourners

latimes.com

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Re: Aaron Swartz was 'killed by the government,' father tells mourners

#71

Post by gruseom »

anigbrowl wrote: post #69
tptacek wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aaron's own lawyer said he didn't believe that Swartz would have received a custodial sentence even if he had been convicted. What's vindictive isn't the outcome. The outcome never had a chance to happen, so it's hard to discuss it. What was bad about this situation is a prosecution that had taken such a hard line that a 6-7 year prison sentence --- a life-changing calamity --- would have seemed like a real possibili…

We'll continue to disagree about this, but I think the plea deal was fair enough. Sure, being a felon is a burden - but realistically, being a hacker felon is much less of a burden than being an ex-crack dealer or something. Plugging your machine directly into someone's wiring closet without permission and then running scripts to pull down 100x the traffic requests of everyone else on the campus combined (resulting i…

An offense worthy of a year or more in prison? Indeed we'll have to agree to disagree. Moreover, there's a distinction between principled activism and garden-variety crime, the ability to observe which is surely one of the criteria for a civilized society.

Re: Aaron Swartz was 'killed by the government,' father tells mourners

#72

Post by tptacek »

gruseom wrote: post #71
anigbrowl wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll continue to disagree about this, but I think the plea deal was fair enough. Sure, being a felon is a burden - but realistically, being a hacker felon is much less of a burden than being an ex-crack dealer or something. Plugging your machine directly into someone's wiring closet without permission and then running scripts to pull down 100x the traffic requests of everyone else on the campus combined (resulting i…

An offense worthy of a year or more in prison? Indeed we'll have to agree to disagree. Moreover, there's a distinction between principled activism and garden-variety crime, the ability to observe which is surely one of the criteria for a civilized society.

Anonymously downloading the entire contents of JSTOR so that you can publish it on a file sharing network and thereby destroy its commercial value is not principled activism; it's ends-justifies-the-means activism.

Re: Aaron Swartz was 'killed by the government,' father tells mourners

#73

Post by gruseom »

tptacek wrote: post #72
gruseom wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An offense worthy of a year or more in prison? Indeed we'll have to agree to disagree. Moreover, there's a distinction between principled activism and garden-variety crime, the ability to observe which is surely one of the criteria for a civilized society.

Anonymously downloading the entire contents of JSTOR so that you can publish it on a file sharing network and thereby destroy its commercial value is not principled activism; it's ends-justifies-the-means activism.

Do we know for sure what his intent was?

Anyway, yes we can argue about the distinctions here, but I suspect we agree that for prosecutors rigidly to refuse to consider any of them at all ("theft is theft") was abusive.

Re: Aaron Swartz was 'killed by the government,' father tells mourners

#74

Post by tptacek »

gruseom wrote: post #73
tptacek wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anonymously downloading the entire contents of JSTOR so that you can publish it on a file sharing network and thereby destroy its commercial value is not principled activism; it's ends-justifies-the-means activism.

Do we know for sure what his intent was? Anyway, yes we can argue about the distinctions here, but I suspect we agree that for prosecutors rigidly to refuse to consider any of them at all ("theft is theft") was abusive.

We have some evidence, because he wrote a manifesto.

Re: Aaron Swartz was 'killed by the government,' father tells mourners

#75

Post by jlgreco »

tptacek wrote: post #72
gruseom wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An offense worthy of a year or more in prison? Indeed we'll have to agree to disagree. Moreover, there's a distinction between principled activism and garden-variety crime, the ability to observe which is surely one of the criteria for a civilized society.

Anonymously downloading the entire contents of JSTOR so that you can publish it on a file sharing network and thereby destroy its commercial value is not principled activism; it's ends-justifies-the-means activism.

> downloading the entire contents of JSTOR so that you can publish it on a file sharing network and thereby destroy its commercial value

It seems implausible to me that publishing the contents of JSTOR in such a way would actually destroy any substantial amount of JSTOR's value. What university would actually drop their JSTOR subscription in favour of a bunch of unlicensed PDFs they torrented? JSTOR, in addition to keeping you on the right side of copyright law, gives you all their systems for querying their data, and keeps itself up to date.

Maybe a university in a developing country would drop their subscription, but any in the US? I find it unlikely.

Such a torrent would be far more useful to an individual who didn't have access to an organization that subscribed. However it seems these pay-per-download fees only account for a fraction of a percent of JSTOR's operating budget (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064408).

So it looks like there is some feasible harm there, but by no means destroyed commercial value.

Re: Aaron Swartz was 'killed by the government,' father tells mourners

#76

Post by rhizome »

tokenadult wrote: post #31

It's harsh to say, and I know that there is much reason to think that the prosecutor was over-prosecuting Aaron Swartz's case, but this kind of blame-shifting on the part of parents is not helpful to a young person who is at high risk for suicide. Civil disobedience according to Thoreau, according to Gandhi, and according to Martin Luther King, Jr. is all about being willing to do the time after intentionally breakin…

The parents are now responsible for at-risk youth and Aaron was supposed to carry the mantle of Thoreau and Gandhi, who's blame-shifting now? You allow an arrogance on the part of prosecutors not to be held to the same standard you assign these people, for why couldn't they see they were battling such a force as you ascribe to the Swartz family, including Aaron, and relent under the threat of acting on the wrong side of history? After all, by your estimation, they themselves left an at-risk youth and the possibly-next Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the lurch. Perhaps without this wisdom of proportionality they are not competent to be Federal prosecutors, especially if by your terms they are acting in the tradition of evil that the aforementioned precursors fought to transcend.

But lets not battle hyperboles. Maybe we can simply agree that while the actions of Obama's Department of Justice and Secret Service were not entirely to blame for killing Aaron, they certainly knowingly helped supply the weapons, and at any rate that ultimately the interests of justice absolutely were not served by their efforts. Maybe we can also agree that the Department of Justice has schools of bigger fish to fry these days.

Re: Aaron Swartz was 'killed by the government,' father tells mourners

#77

Post by BrokenPipe »

anigbrowl wrote: post #66
BrokenPipe wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yeah, it's also in article here on HN. They wanted him to have jail time

Articles aren't proof. Victims don't have veto authority over plea bargain negotiations in any US jurisdiction that I know of.

Veto is non necessary, pressure and willingness to pursue and unwillingness to have any plaid without jail time is what the MIT is _rightly_ accused of.

Re: Aaron Swartz was 'killed by the government,' father tells mourners

#78

Post by pfedor »

tptacek wrote: post #70
anigbrowl wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll continue to disagree about this, but I think the plea deal was fair enough. Sure, being a felon is a burden - but realistically, being a hacker felon is much less of a burden than being an ex-crack dealer or something. Plugging your machine directly into someone's wiring closet without permission and then running scripts to pull down 100x the traffic requests of everyone else on the campus combined (resulting i…

You & I don't disagree that Swartz's actions should have been subject to criminal charges. We depart at the need for time served in prison. In its context: an act clearly intended as civil disobedience (though perhaps intended anonymously) by a first time offender with no commercial purpose, minimal damage, minimal attempt to evade detection and thus obstruct investigation, no co-conspirators, and involving no critic…

The same set of actions from his own network would have been mere copyright infringement. He wanted to make it less likely that he'd get sued, so he did it from someone else's network.

I'm probably misunderstanding you: How could he have done the same from his home network? The articles he was downloading were only accessible from MIT intranet, not from the public Internet, no?

Re: Aaron Swartz was 'killed by the government,' father tells mourners

#79

Post by tptacek »

pfedor wrote: post #78
tptacek wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You & I don't disagree that Swartz's actions should have been subject to criminal charges. We depart at the need for time served in prison. In its context: an act clearly intended as civil disobedience (though perhaps intended anonymously) by a first time offender with no commercial purpose, minimal damage, minimal attempt to evade detection and thus obstruct investigation, no co-conspirators, and involving no critic…

The same set of actions from his own network would have been mere copyright infringement. He wanted to make it less likely that he'd get sued, so he did it from someone else's network. I'm probably misunderstanding you: How could he have done the same from his home network? The articles he was downloading were only accessible from MIT intranet, not from the public Internet, no?

He was a fellow at Harvard, with an office there, and had legitimate access to JSTOR.

Re: Aaron Swartz was 'killed by the government,' father tells mourners

#80

Post by gruseom »

tptacek wrote: post #74
gruseom wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we know for sure what his intent was? Anyway, yes we can argue about the distinctions here, but I suspect we agree that for prosecutors rigidly to refuse to consider any of them at all ("theft is theft") was abusive.

We have some evidence, because he wrote a manifesto.

Interestingly, Lessig explicitly dismisses the theory that Swartz was trying to "liberate" the JSTOR archive:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/13/01/aarons-law...

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