81–90 of 211 posts
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It was Aaron's choice to kill himself. He wasn't a victim of anything but his own mind.
I can guarantee by your quip; you have never dealt with our legal system.
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So the US should stop prosecuting crimes if there is a worry that person might be mentally unstable?
No, but the US absolutely should stop using plea-bargaining as a way to bully people into not going to trial, and then retaliating against people who dare to exercise their right to a trial by adding additional charges against them after plea bargaining. While we are at it, we should reign in the cost of actually exercising the right to a trial -- Aaron lost his fortune defending himself from the government, which is…
What makes me absolutely, terribly sick is the extent to which the USG waves its hands to dismiss the seriousness of the extent and reach of the NSA's domestic data gathering activities and at the same time deciding that Swartz's data gathering was worth going to the mat over.
The USG also claims it's wrong for people to shoot each other all while maintaining an army of hundreds of thousands of people empowered to do exactly that, and worse , in the right situations.
Suicide is completely a personal choice. MIT had no reason to try and defend an outsider who hijacked part of their network, and trying to make them seem like they caused him to hang himself smacks of tunnel vision. It's a natural response to a suicide; we try and search for something to blame. But unless you argue that MIT should have known Aaron was mentally unstable, saying MIT "caused" him to kill himself is illo…
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The CFAA charges were dubious at best, and were only pursued because the copyright charges were looking pretty shaky. The prosecutor also tacked additional charges on when Aaron decided to exercise his civil rights. I do not know many libertarians who support that kind of abuse of prosecutor power.
The premise of the CFAA charge is entirely consistent with libertarian thinking: owners of private property, like computer networks, are entitled to exclude people from their use, or revoke a previously granted license of use, for any reason at all. This charge makes sense even if you don't believe in intellectual property: it doesn't matter what he was doing on the network, only that he had reasonable notice that hi…
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Oh, poor MIT, all they did was actively help the guy who wanted Aaron thrown in prison for three and half decades* while pretending to be neutral. Any of us might have done the same, right? Totally innocent! Like "a rape victim," to use Heymann's own words. If you punch a stranger in the face, you probably don't expect him to fall, crack his head on the corner of a table, and die; but you don't get to claim you're bl…
It was Aaron's choice to kill himself. He wasn't a victim of anything but his own mind.
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I can guarantee by your quip; you have never dealt with our legal system.
You couldn't use that argument against the thousands of people who have dealt with our legal system in as bad or worse scenarios and did not commit suicide.
The mistake you're making is that responsibility isn't zero-sum. Is Swartz responsible for killing himself? Sure. But if prosecutors are unjustly harsh with a lot of people in a way that causes the suicide rate in that group to jump, are they responsible too? Yes indeed.
If multiple factors cause something, multiple people can be responsible, and the responsibility of one does not diminish the responsibility of the other.
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The USG also claims it's wrong for people to shoot each other all while maintaining an army of hundreds of thousands of people empowered to do exactly that, and worse , in the right situations.
When "we" decided to grant the government a monopoly on violence, there was nothing in the contract about letting them hack and sabotage American computer systems or commit other crimes at will.
But either way, "we" also didn't put anything in our "contract" that let them make nuclear weapons, air forces, computer inter-networks, or social security/welfare programs.
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So is it your position that trespassing on other's property is now OK if they forget to lock the door?
Trespassing is the whole substantial crime in this case, and it should have ended with an arrest by the Cambridge PD and a fine.