Earlier quoted context omitted.
I said upfront that this is not a straight up comparison. The main point for me is that I walk past the memorial for the MIT police officer killed in duty about once per week. One of these events had a tremendous impact on MIT and the surrounding community, the other had a negligible one. Regardless, have a re-read of the article you linked to. Jennifer Granick writes: > He could plead guilty to all 13 felony charges…
> On top of that, Aaron "would have had to swear under oath that he committed a crime, something he did not actually believe". Many people, almost by definition, do not believe that their own criminal acts were actually a "crime". Rationalization is a well-known human psychological phenomenon. Whatever else Aaron thought about his idealistic mission, being on the MIT subnet without permission was wrong (both morally…
It is problematic when you accept people's sworn testimony when it is against their true belief. Usually that is what is called a lie and sometimes a form of slavery. Disagreeing with clearly stated laws is one thing, but signing in agreement on what you totally disagree with and only because you were compelled is suppression of expression. I'm NOT trying to convert Aaron's position to one of free speech, but there is a line when you decide that someone has broken the law whether they agree to it or not and making them against their beliefs sign on a paper that becomes public record stating that they knowingly broke the law. The case here is when a law's validity is being challenged, this signed piece of paper removes any doubts about wrong doing and seals the fate of the signer. The law is validated by invalidating the counterargument through coercion.
> Whatever else Aaron thought about his idealistic mission, being on the MIT subnet without permission was wrong (both morally and legally), as was entering into the MIT server farm to gain that access.
But this wasn't even something that Aaron naïvely didn't recognize... he knew this was wrong to do as he had the same level of JSTOR access at his own campus at Harvard. But he didn't leech JSTOR from his own campus, he traveled across the city to surreptitiously do it from MIT. He even once covered his face with his bicycle helmet when he noticed a security camera so let's know act like "I didn't commit a crime" was his big hang-up. He did know, even if he disagreed personally with the law itself.
This I totally agree with and even if he disagreed personally with the law itself he did what he did and it was at least in my opinion somehow not right and obviously illegal.
> Well for starters you don't need to prove your innocence, you need only demonstrate that the government was unable to prove your guilt. But either way Dr. Granick covered this point already, and her treatment was comprehensive.
The problem with this argument is that his life was already nuked. The prosecution and MIT were in cahoots. If you read the article carefully you can see that Aaron's lawyers were upset that the prosecution was getting documents from MIT without warrants and hence violating Aaron's 4th amendment rights.
Tensions at MIT heightened in October after Aaron’s lawyers filed a motion alleging the university was “acting in concert” with the prosecution, violating federal law and Aaron’s Fourth Amendment rights protecting him from unreasonable search and seizure. The motion sought to suppress the indictment and all information gathered during the investigation. MIT was afraid its employees might have to defend themselves on the stand, which Abelson concluded served to further align the university’s interests with the prosecution.