51–60 of 118 posts
The death of Aaron Swartz is a loss to his family, his friends, and to society. The focus on the prosecutors, however, makes me uneasy. I can support a review of the conduct of the prosecutors but I can't call for their firing. From what I have read, the conduct of the prosecutors was close to standard procedure. If it was wrong of the prosecutors to make an example out of Aaron, it is equally wrong to make an exampl…
The death of Aaron Swartz is a loss to his family, his friends, and to society. The focus on the prosecutors, however, makes me uneasy. I can support a review of the conduct of the prosecutors but I can't call for their firing. From what I have read, the conduct of the prosecutors was close to standard procedure. If it was wrong of the prosecutors to make an example out of Aaron, it is equally wrong to make an exampl…
Because legal cases involve tremendous amounts of back and forth, which is slow. After each order, motion, etc, all the parties get time (measured in weeks) to mull over and respond. This is intrinsic to the process--if the prosecution makes a motion, the defense needs to have time to research the law and respond accordingly, and vice versa. So any given case has a ton of latency built in. If courts only handled one case at a time, utilization of the scarce resource would be terrible, so they multitask. You can think of a court as a highly SMT CPU. Each thread (case) is full of high latency operations, so the court handles dozens (or hundreds) at a time and switches between them. This favors throughput at the expense of getting any given case over with as quickly as possible.
> Why is our justice system so dependent on plea bargaining?
Because it doesn't have the resources to handle the actual case load. You can think of this in terms of VM overcommit. Your OS's virtual memory manager will happily hand out much more virtual memory than it can back with physical memory. It's counting on the fact that you won't actually use all that memory (if you do, it'll swap and things will get shitty). The justice system handles far more cases than it can actually take through trial, both criminal and civil. It counts on the fact that most cases will settle (both criminal and civil) before they get very far in the pipeline.
> Why can't we create have a hacker legal defense fund that would keep cases like this from bankrupting defendants?
It was Aaron's choice to hire one of the premier white collar litigation boutiques in the country to defend his case. It's not intrinsic to the system.
> Why should expert legal advice be only available to those who can afford it?
It's not. Truly exceptional and meritorious cases will be taken up pro-bono by non-profit organizations (ACLU, etc). Aside from that, money buys better service the same way money buys everything. Aside from exception people who get a scholarship, truly excellent education is generally limited to children whose parents can afford it. The bar we set as a society in both cases is similar--everyone should have access to competent legal representation, just as everyone should have access to a decent education. But that doesn't mean everyone has access to Andover/Exeter or to Keker & Van Nest.
> What should we tell a friend who is planning to commit a crime on behalf of a cause?
Don't? Civil disobedience should be a last resort. If it is inevitable, work with public interest lawyers to establish a reasonable game plan and set up legal defense ahead of time. Swartz's case, if it was mean to be civil disobedience, was poorly played. If the point was to go after JSTOR, then the whole thing with plugging into MIT's network and evading their attempts to kick him off was just a pointless distraction. It forced him to fight on two fronts, one of which was much less sympathetic than the other (freedom for scientific articles versus the freedom to do whatever you want on MIT's private network despite their attempts to stop you).
> Is any middle ground possible in the conflict between rights holders and advocates of free information?
Does there need to be a middle ground? It's like talking about a "middle ground" between my rights as a property owner and the desires of people who want to camp out in my yard. Tying JSTOR into the larger copyright debate is a losing proposition, and an unnecessary one. It makes far more sense to work the angle that JSTOR articles are the product of substantial public funding, and push for setting up a publicly funded database for accessing them.
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No offense, but you've managed to wrap up a perfectly decent thought with a wording that makes you look like an asshole.
To be fair, he's responding someone who is telling us to not talk about the issue and simply perform the action he favors, in so many words.
In the physical world you are also sometimes confronted by people who stand outside a supermarket with a petition and you're supposed to be able to make a fully informed decision as to whether you should sign literally on the spot. If that's such a good system (it's not obviously) we should extend it to other things. But it's not and it's not even as if the person requesting the action that you have personal knowledge of their reputation or whether they are presenting the info fairly and completely showing both sides of the argument.
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Whether the "mob" is right or wrong is of relatively little real consequence; lives are not at stake, a career is (and even that is wishful thinking) . You attempt to artificially raise the stakes in order to shut down action and dialog through unsanctioned channels by comparing this to lynching, but your intent is too transparent. Your 'pet theory' about those who complain about oppression is a very convenient one f…
Okay. First of all, I am not afraid of effective collective action. It's right there in what I wrote: I gave what I consider a shining example of powerful, positive effective collective action: the American Civil Rights Movement. (This documentary is excellent: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/ - I use it as point of reference to reflect on modern political activism.) Secondly, I am actually n…
If that is really the case, then maybe think next time before you start off by making comparisons to lynching.
Yeah yeah, I know. "Why not LOIC him?" doesn't carry the same juicy emotional punch...
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I actually think the Whitehouse petitions are harmful to causes, precisely because they give those who participate a false sense of accomplishment.
I agree. They facilitate evaporation cooling of causes and movements. Let the less dedicated participants feel that they have done their part, and numbers will dwindle. As numbers dwindle only the extreme remain, and in few enough numbers that the entire cause is then written off as fringe. It is a phenomena usually seen when cults start ejecting their more moderate members, but in this case it is harnessed by a sepa…
Exactly if you give people a "complaint department" and a method to file a complaint you put distance between their anger and the thing they are angry about and they will many times cool down and not explore other more viable options (not sure if that is what you meant but it's one of my thoughts about a process like this).
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I signed it, not because I expect Heymann to get fired or even care whether he gets fired, but because there needs to be some public pressure to counterbalance the existing pressures on prosecutors to send as many people as possible to prison for as long as possible.
I'm willing to bet he would care if he got fired.
But let's suppose you're right. I don't actually think firing would be an disproportioniate rebuke under the circumstances. To use language that Heymann might have used of Swartz, I think it would be great to make an example of him.
All that said, I don't expect it to happen.
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I agree. They facilitate evaporation cooling of causes and movements. Let the less dedicated participants feel that they have done their part, and numbers will dwindle. As numbers dwindle only the extreme remain, and in few enough numbers that the entire cause is then written off as fringe. It is a phenomena usually seen when cults start ejecting their more moderate members, but in this case it is harnessed by a sepa…
"evaporation cooling" Exactly if you give people a "complaint department" and a method to file a complaint you put distance between their anger and the thing they are angry about and they will many times cool down and not explore other more viable options (not sure if that is what you meant but it's one of my thoughts about a process like this).
My (probably unnecessary) expansion on this is that when you deflate the sentiment, all those who remain angry will become more extreme (just by nature of not being surrounded by less extreme people) and will become easily to marginalize/fire.
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Actually, I'll think about it and discuss as much as I'd like. Then I'll make a decision to sign or not sign the petition.
No offense, but you've managed to wrap up a perfectly decent thought with a wording that makes you look like an asshole.
Heymann saw Aaron as a scalp he could take. He thought he could lock Aaron up, get high-profile press coverage, and win high-fives from his fellow prosecutors in the lunchroom. Aaron was a way of reviving Heymann’s fading career. Heymann had no interest in an honest assessment of whether Aaron deserved any of the hell he was being put through. Is there any evidence for any of this seeming mind reading?
Aaron and his lawyers also interacted with him on a regular basis. Although you can never be absolutely certain of things, it's certainly possible in general to infer people's mental state through their actions. In this particular case, if you think Aaron and his lawyers were disingenuously misrepresenting what was happening, or Taren is lying in a deeply emotional state about what he related to her, just say so. Not…
Heymann saw Aaron as a scalp he could take. He thought he could lock Aaron up, get high-profile press coverage, and win high-fives from his fellow prosecutors in the lunchroom. Aaron was a way of reviving Heymann’s fading career. Heymann had no interest in an honest assessment of whether Aaron deserved any of the hell he was being put through. Is there any evidence for any of this seeming mind reading?
Oh come on. That's like asking "is there any evidence this particular bear shat in these particular woods?" The path to success for prosecutors is successful high-profile prosecutions. Everybody knows that. I don't actually know that Heymann's career had been fading, but the rest of this quote seems pretty reasonable based on what we know.