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Why Did the Justice System Target Aaron Swartz?

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Re: Why Did the Justice System Target Aaron Swartz?

#31

Post by JulianMorrison »

epo wrote: post #25
alan_cx wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are the low hanging fruit / easy win points "tin hat"? The wrong part was the nonsense race point.

The tin (foil) hat part was the rubbish about "those who threaten the system". That is just some pre-pubescent fantasy about being an outlaw and "sticking it to the man" to revive a 60's saying in the same vein. The reality was that the prosecutors wanted to seem tough and here was a case they couldn't lose.

"The system" is the reactive, situational, instinctual and not consciously volitional shared human underpinnings of the volitional choices of power-having agents in society. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy, because humans across society are running on brains with the same evolutionary history. Thus the commonality can be treated as having intentions as a social unit, because that's how it behaves, when what it really has are closer to reactive mood-influences in discrete humans acting without shared plans, which all point in the same direction.

The concept of "the system" got thrown out of mainstream discourse because the idea that there's a conspiracy is silly. But a conspiracy is just the simplest, crudest explanation for coordinated action.

Re: Why Did the Justice System Target Aaron Swartz?

#32

Post by tzs »

brudgers wrote: post #15

As I read about the early involvement of the secret service and in light of the later actions of the DoJ, I couldn't help but wonder if there was something to the signature of Swartz's actions that raised the Federal Government's level of interest. To put it another way, how likely is it that that particular closet had been used for similar activities before? Is it more plausible that Swartz discovered the closet or…

You need to look at it from MIT's perspective. The laptop in the closet was not an isolated incident. It was clearly connected to the person who had been abusing their open wireless access earlier. This person clearly knew his actions were not welcome.

I don't know anything about MIT culture other than what I've read, but people have told me it is similar to Caltech's culture. At Caltech, the most important rule is the Caltech honor code:

   No member of the Caltech community shall take unfair
   advantage of another member of the Caltech community.
This covers the sort of hacking which is traditional at Caltech (and I presume MIT). It means that you do no intentional harm, and you take responsibility for your actions, and you stop a particular hack if the parties you are asking catch you and tell you to stop.

If the Swartz incident had happened at Caltech then when it reached the laptop in the closet stage the conclusion would be that the intruder was almost certainly an outsider, not a member of the community. At that point it is appropriate to call in the outside authorities.

Re: Why Did the Justice System Target Aaron Swartz?

#33

Post by pyre »

rayiner wrote: post #20
pyre wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... So Federal prosecutors said, "He's white and middle-class... Does... Not... Compute... Must... Prosecute..." ?

That's not what I said. I said that Swartz's case is unusual because he's white and rich and well-connected in the community, and he wasn't accused of a financial crime.

IIRC, one of the charges against Aaron was wire fraud. Bernie Madoff (rich, white, well-connected) plead guilty to wire fraud (amongst other charges).

I'm not sure how the fact that it wasn't a financial crime has much to do with how the Federal prosecutors handled things.

Re: Why Did the Justice System Target Aaron Swartz?

#34

Post by Camillo »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #31
epo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tin (foil) hat part was the rubbish about "those who threaten the system". That is just some pre-pubescent fantasy about being an outlaw and "sticking it to the man" to revive a 60's saying in the same vein. The reality was that the prosecutors wanted to seem tough and here was a case they couldn't lose.

"The system" is the reactive, situational, instinctual and not consciously volitional shared human underpinnings of the volitional choices of power-having agents in society. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy, because humans across society are running on brains with the same evolutionary history. Thus the commonality can be treated as having intentions as a social unit, because that's how it behaves, when what it…

Basically, "the system" is what you call society when you're angry with it.

Re: Why Did the Justice System Target Aaron Swartz?

#35

Post by glesica »

jacquesm wrote: post #18
glesica wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's different in the technical details, but the aim is exactly and completely identical: to deny service to other customers as a way to punish the proprietor of a business. Sitting at a lunch counter is legal, sending an HTTP request to a server is legal. In some cases sitting at a lunch counter for too long becomes illegal, and in some cases sending too many HTTP requests can become illegal (DDoS). The difference h…

You're making the (wrong) assumption that all those participating in a denial of service attack are doing so voluntarily. Typically it's a small number of perps that harness a large number of unwitting drones.

Fine, then the felony should be hacking the bots, not the DDoS.

Re: Why Did the Justice System Target Aaron Swartz?

#36

Post by btown »

Swartz aside, Rolling Stone has possibly the least responsive web design ever. If your window's width is less than the page width, the left side of the text gets cut off on Chrome dev and Safari. There's no way to scroll to make it visible; the only way is to make the window larger. It seems they are using Javascript to change the main container's `margin-left` to keep the content centered on different large monitors, but there's no check to make sure that it's positive on small monitors. So the takeaway is: if you're trying to make a site responsive, do it right, or don't do it at all.

On that note, if you're trying to prosecute crime: do it for justice and society, or don't do it at all.

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