Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rep. Zoe Lofgren Introduces Aaron's Law [pdf]

lofgren.house.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 174 posts

Re: Rep. Zoe Lofgren Introduces Aaron's Law [pdf]

#131

Post by tptacek »

rayiner wrote: post #124
ericd wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MIT has a pretty open unofficial policy when it comes to trespassing, as one would expect from any school with a dominant hacker culture. People used to go into network closets, pick locks, go into maintenance tunnels, etc. There's a very visible/popular student club on campus devoted to this.

That doesn't mean there aren't limits, and MIT clearly thought those limits were violated here.

Which is something that apparently shocked Swartz. In fact, whatever the administration at MIT may have felt at the time, Swartz wasn't violating the community norms as I understood them. Maybe there's something sacred about wiring closets at MIT, but every other place there seems to be a hobbyist lockpicking playground.

This is obviously a situation where the community norms of MIT have collided painfully with the policies of its administration. Swartz thought the norms would be controlling; he miscalculated: it was the policies that mattered.

Re: Rep. Zoe Lofgren Introduces Aaron's Law [pdf]

#132

Post by jmvoodoo »

jacquesm wrote: post #114
jmvoodoo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. The law should be rewritten to prohibit prosecutors from entering into plea deals of less than X% of the maximum sentence they are prosecuting someone for, with the exception of plea/immunity deals that include providing incriminating evidence in another case or against another person. Not sure what X% should really be, but it should be sufficiently high as to prevent prosecutors from using the large delta betw…

You're missing my point. They can offer plea deals as low as they want, but then not ask for more than twice that in a subsequent trial.

I think I got your point. I just approached the problem from the other side. I think limiting a prosecutor's ability to bargain would be easier from a legislative standpoint than getting involved in sentencing, and more effective since the sentence asked by the prosecution is really just a recommendation. Either way, the important part is ratio of sentence to plea bargain, if I understood you correctly.

Re: Rep. Zoe Lofgren Introduces Aaron's Law [pdf]

#133

Post by jacquesm »

jmvoodoo wrote: post #132
jacquesm wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing my point. They can offer plea deals as low as they want, but then not ask for more than twice that in a subsequent trial.

I think I got your point. I just approached the problem from the other side. I think limiting a prosecutor's ability to bargain would be easier from a legislative standpoint than getting involved in sentencing, and more effective since the sentence asked by the prosecution is really just a recommendation. Either way, the important part is ratio of sentence to plea bargain, if I understood you correctly.

Prosecutors will go for very low plea bargains if their case is shaky, with huge penalties for not accepting the plea, so many shaky cases never make it to trial. By reversing the situation you end up with half of the maximum rather than maybe 10% of it, in effect most plea offers would increase rather than stay at their current level and many more cases would have to be tried.

Re: Rep. Zoe Lofgren Introduces Aaron's Law [pdf]

#134

Post by mindslight »

tptacek wrote: post #113
mindslight wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I hadn't. It's your emphasis and attitude that come across as completely different. I kept trying to tell ya, the legal machine looks a lot different when you examine it as if you're the one at odds with it.

By abusing computer fraud laws to needlessly persecute Aaron Swartz, these Boston prosecutors have done grave damage to the entirely legitimate enterprise of having the state help protect individuals and businesses from criminals who can and do hire out superior security talent. Look at HN over the last two days: anyone who's ever been convicted of a computer crime, even if that crime involved the mass theft and subs…

> anyone who's ever been convicted of a computer crime, even if that crime involved the mass theft and subsequent resale of credit cards, is a newly minted hero of the cause of openness

Specifics? I don't recall seeing this, but maybe I'm just unobservant.

> The law cannot hope to capture every possible nuance of all conceivable offenses

On the other hand, the point of having the law instead of The Decider is that acceptability of a particular behavior can be reasonably foreseen. And for the long standing laws most everybody now thinks of as self-evident (murder,rape,robbery,etc), this is basically the case. But the problem with many newer widely-scoped laws, especially federal ones, is that they're highly vague and allow so much leeway, the question becomes quite unanswerable. Are these vague laws primarily used to punish bona fide criminals? Yes. But when we fail to examine the law for what it conceivably could do and instead take comfort in what it usually does, when we fail to stand up for injustices against people who are ultimately not very nice, we set ourselves up for exactly what happened here - a grave injustice against an unlucky blatantly-undeserving target. It's simply the only thing remaining that provides any check on the expedience of the Deciders.

I unfortunately never interacted with Aaron. I identify with a lot of his optimism, even while feeling older than his naivety. I think we've probably had similar principles offended in this case. It just took a tangible incident with high wtf-levels to offend yours, where as mine go off for hypothetical possibilities and run-of-the-mill wtf-levels.

Re: Rep. Zoe Lofgren Introduces Aaron's Law [pdf]

#135

Post by marshray »

tptacek wrote: post #106
marshray wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if he entered a supply closet at the library to borrow a pen, and then he evaded taxes with that pen, he "broke in" even if the library allowed people to borrow pens from that unlocked closet?

Breaking into a supply closet is not a fact that helps establish any element of tax fraud.

So it's "breaking in" if it helps the prosecution's case, by definition.

What a weird system.

Re: Rep. Zoe Lofgren Introduces Aaron's Law [pdf]

#136

Post by marshray »

ericcumbee wrote: post #117

maybe i am missing the point. But by applying the logic of this bill to other laws. Then trespassing on private property, being asked to leave several times, but not doing so, should not be a crime either.

That's not a crime that will typically get you threatened with 50 years in federal prison, no.

We can't expect our 3000 year old "tresspass" and "stealing" concepts to work well as metaphors for information systems built specifically to copy information at the rate of thousands or millions of times a second.

Re: Rep. Zoe Lofgren Introduces Aaron's Law [pdf]

#137

Post by malandrew »

jacquesm wrote: post #40
tptacek wrote: post #7

Would Aaron's Law have helped Aaron? Both Orin Kerr and Jennifer Granick have said that his actions in evading filtering and shutoffs on MIT's networks would have created a plausible argument for the prosecution that he had been evading specific code-based authorization mechanisms and would have known his access was unauthorized. If you read Reason, you're immediately suspicious of laws with people's names on them; t…

I read the Granick piece. One thing that strikes me as completely absurd is that the plea deal is for a substantially lower sentence and that if the plea deal is rejected the prosecution will go for a much higher punishment, sometimes as much as 10 times as much as offered in the deal. It would seem to me that if you offer a guilty plea that is 10% of what you intend to seek that if such an offer is on the record tha…

I really like your idea of "pricing" using multiples of the prison sentence if plea bargain isn't accepted. This forces market dynamics that the prosecution much consider. I don'w know if 2x, 1.5x or 3x is the right amount, but whatever the multiple, the prosecution knows that the accused is actually weighing the benefits based on the fact that they know they are innocent or guilty instead of treating their awareness of their own guilt as irrelevant, which is something a 10x multiple does.

At 10x, knowing that you are innocent is completely irrelevant to the issue at hand and it simply becomes a choice between the lesser of two evils, because a good is not a realistic option.

Re: Rep. Zoe Lofgren Introduces Aaron's Law [pdf]

#138

Post by marshray »

tptacek wrote: post #131
rayiner wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't mean there aren't limits, and MIT clearly thought those limits were violated here.

Which is something that apparently shocked Swartz. In fact, whatever the administration at MIT may have felt at the time, Swartz wasn't violating the community norms as I understood them. Maybe there's something sacred about wiring closets at MIT, but every other place there seems to be a hobbyist lockpicking playground. This is obviously a situation where the community norms of MIT have collided painfully with the p…

Is there any evidence that MIT's 'policies' were anything other than made up on the spot?

As far as I can tell it looks like "OMG! The attacker has changed his MAC address! We don't know how to stop him! He's stealing all the priceless research papers...call the DHS cyber-espionage defense unit for help! the packets are coming from INSIDE THE WIRING CLOSET!!"

Re: Rep. Zoe Lofgren Introduces Aaron's Law [pdf]

#139

Post by ataggart »

hrabago wrote: post #105
ataggart wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>not to mention the ridiculousness of criminal sentences Perhaps if we didn't use incarceration as punishment for non-violent crimes, things would be a bit more civilized.

The issue is proportionality. I agree that Madoff is in jail, even though his crimes are not violent.

Why? He's not a physical danger to anyone. Surely you can think of more creative and productive forms of punishment.

Re: Rep. Zoe Lofgren Introduces Aaron's Law [pdf]

#140

Post by tarblog »

jacquesm wrote: post #133
jmvoodoo wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I got your point. I just approached the problem from the other side. I think limiting a prosecutor's ability to bargain would be easier from a legislative standpoint than getting involved in sentencing, and more effective since the sentence asked by the prosecution is really just a recommendation. Either way, the important part is ratio of sentence to plea bargain, if I understood you correctly.

Prosecutors will go for very low plea bargains if their case is shaky, with huge penalties for not accepting the plea, so many shaky cases never make it to trial. By reversing the situation you end up with half of the maximum rather than maybe 10% of it, in effect most plea offers would increase rather than stay at their current level and many more cases would have to be tried.

I think that the idea here is to prevent prosecutors from charging people when they only have a really shaky case then using the leverage of a small plea to force people into pleading guilty. If prosecutors don't want to lose cases, and they can't force people to accept really low pleas then they would have to stop trying to get people on really shaky cases.
Post reply on HN