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U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz Issues Statement on Aaron Swartz Case

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Re: U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz Issues Statement on Aaron Swartz Case

#131
post #7

> I must, however, make clear that this office’s conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case. That's why you assign investigations to independent entities, and that's why butchers aren't allowed to do their own health inspection. Whether it was appropriate or not is not for Carmen Ortiz to say. "The prosecutors recognized that there was no evidence against Mr. Swartz indicating that he committed his ac…

One. It is a very serious mistake to deny someone the right to believe the correctness of their own opinions. Two. People use leverage. They may or may not use it rightly but they do use it. Anyone who cannot set their opinion of the justice of that to one side, and get on to the business of the contest at hand, is not cut out for politics. Such people enter these contests at a great disadvantage and risk getting hur…

> One. It is a very serious mistake to deny someone the right to believe the correctness of their own opinions.

This becomes very tricky when you have the power to enforce your opinions on other people.

I think that knowing the letter of the law is not enough and people who work as judges or prosecutors should also have profound sense of justice - without it, any law can be twisted and tortured into unjust persecution when there is a will. Even the best humanly possible law is not immune to that. It's always easy to find a stick when you really want to beat the dog.

The way I see it, if Cameron Ortiz were to prosecute herself the same way she apparently prosecuted others, she would be facing death penalty right now. But I'm sure she would be offered some 'acceptable' deal.

Re: U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz Issues Statement on Aaron Swartz Case

#132

"...we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low security setting. ...his defense counsel would have been free to recommend a sentence of probation. Ultimately, any sentence imposed would have been up to the judge" Little known fact here. When you accept a plea bargain you do not accept a sentence as part of that. Often times you agree to plea to lesser chargers which have a lower maximum penalty but you st…

See Jonathan Pollard for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard#Sentencing_and...

For some naive reason I never thought someone would get a life sentence for spying on one of their closest allies.

Re: U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz Issues Statement on Aaron Swartz Case

#134

> and did so reasonably. They still believe that? Sorry but they're unfit for the job. They need to go. There was nothing reasonable about their actions on this case. > a sentence that we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low security setting. Six months in jail for downloading files that were accessible to him? All he did was violate terms of service! Are we going to start arresting under-age Facebook…

http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/news/2011/July/SwartzAaronPR.... Downloading four million files, apparently. And if by breaking terms and services you mean illegally distributing protected content and threatening the business model of JSTOR then yes, I suppose that is true.

Did he actually distribute anything?

Re: U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz Issues Statement on Aaron Swartz Case

#135
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. The point is that you shouldn't submit to 6 months of federal prison without trial or appeal, all the money loss for the two years in the case and your life ruined by the felony counts records for using a script to download files you already have legal access to. At worst all there is to this is trespassing, on an open campus on an open network etc etc.

You're probably right, you shouldn't , but unless you offer up a better suggestion for a law system, it is it what it is.

Yeah, no more crazy law and no bargaining on future lives.

Re: U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz Issues Statement on Aaron Swartz Case

#136

Prosecutors (and lawyers in general) are all about drama and story. Everything is amplified. Reality is distorted. It's worse than cable television. Ortiz framed a brilliant, selfless young man as a criminal who should be locked up behind bars. She and others inflicted mental torture on him until he couldn't bear to live any longer. She is no doubt a wordsmith, but she is not a nice person, no matter what the gullibl…

>Ortiz framed a brilliant, selfless young man as a criminal who should be locked up behind bars. Law is about drama? There's plenty of drama and hyperbole in your post. He broke the law. Which means he is a criminal. If you think the laws are retarded, then how you protest that is your prerogative. If you choose to protest by blatantly and purposely breaking the law, unless you are 99.999% certain that an obvious int…

"He broke the law"

The prosecutor's case was pretty tenuous. Basically, by accessing a network that intentionally has no real access control in an unusual way, and accessing JSTOR in an unusual way through that network -- a network for which a JSTOR subscription is available -- Aaron supposedly committed a crime (or was it 13 crimes? Or 4 crimes?). Unless you want to make the argument that doing strange things is criminal, it is hard to see how exactly any law was broken here.

"If you seriously think that he shouldn't be charged with breaking the law because 'he didn't deserve it', 'he did not have malicious intentions' or 'the law is dumb', then by extension no one should be convicted of any crime, because there will always be some point of view where you could think that of anyone."

If you think every violation of the law should be prosecuted, prepare yourself for some jail time; it is a near certainty that you have committed at least one felony offense in your life, and it is likely that you have committed more. Can you seriously claim not to be a criminal -- have you actually read all laws that you are expected to follow?

This conservative "the law is right and absolute" perspective is truly scary. Laws are passed by people, and are often severely flawed. Laws are often misapplied -- laws meant to protect banks and the government from hackers are applied to people who download too much knowledge, laws meant to protect children from pedophiles are applied to comic book collectors, etc. The far-right law-and-order attitude is the reason America is the world leader in both arresting people and imprisoning them -- not just per-capita, but on raw numbers, we arrest and imprison more people than China, and that even accounts for the recent decline in the prison population.

Re: U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz Issues Statement on Aaron Swartz Case

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He broke the law. Which means he is a criminal. He allegedly broke the law. According to network security expert Alex Stamos, an expert witness in the case, the worst thing you can say about Aaron's actions is that they were "inconsiderate", not criminal. http://io9.com/5975592/aaron-swartz-died-innocent-++-here-is...

Expert witness for Aaron Swartz's defense. If he didn't think he was innocent, he wouldn't have got the paid job or been involved at all.

It doesn't change the fact that Aaron was not convicted of breaking the law. Being charged with a crime does not make you a criminal.

Re: U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz Issues Statement on Aaron Swartz Case

#138
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone here seriously believe that she's going to be fired? And that Carmen Ortiz is such an exceptional case? There are hundreds of prosecutors in the US who routinely - even though against predominantly non-white and non-prominent defendants - seek much harsher sentences for much lesser "crimes", often with much more dubious evidence, and much lower chances for defendants to ever have their personal situation…

2% of American men are currently in jail. Among black men 30 to 34, 7% are currently in jail. We just don't notice the vast injustice of our justice system until we think it might affect us. Attacking a single prosecutor who was doing her job and obeying the law won't change anything. Attacking the laws she enforced will.

"Doing her job and obeying the law" is not an excuse. "Doing her job" would have been to tell MIT (or whoever was responsible for this affair to end up on her desk) to go away. Even though I am aware that's not how becoming a "career prosecutor" in the US justice system works.

Remains the fact that none of the bright minds that congregate under news.ycombinator.com seems to have the slightest idea how "attacking the laws" is supposed to work. Apart from maybe a vague theory of erosion that appears far less convincing than pretty much anything most people here would dare to argue in the context of, say, a business plan.

Re: U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz Issues Statement on Aaron Swartz Case

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One, two, a million, four million, what difference does it actually make? The crime was violating the terms, it isn't relevant where the EOF bit was transmitted. If you made the same files half as big he would have "stolen" twice as many files, or twice as big then he would have done half the crime by your logic. He never distributed anything. No clue where you got that from? Additionally "threatening a business mode…

It makes a big difference. Four million is apparently the majority of JSTOR's database. Keep in mind that JSTOR doesn't own those articles, it just arranges approved access to paying institutions on behalf of the various journals which do own the articles. If Aaron had distributed them he might have damaged around a thousand different institutions involved in an important segment of the knowledge and innovation indus…

Or his actions could have spread the wealth of information to many who lack access to it, facilitating further progress.

The notion that publicly funded research works are behind paywalls is absurd.

In any case, we will never know, because he never got around to actually distributing or doing anything with the downloaded products of public funding.

Re: U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz Issues Statement on Aaron Swartz Case

#140
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone here seriously believe that she's going to be fired? And that Carmen Ortiz is such an exceptional case? There are hundreds of prosecutors in the US who routinely - even though against predominantly non-white and non-prominent defendants - seek much harsher sentences for much lesser "crimes", often with much more dubious evidence, and much lower chances for defendants to ever have their personal situation…

2% of American men are currently in jail. Among black men 30 to 34, 7% are currently in jail. We just don't notice the vast injustice of our justice system until we think it might affect us. Attacking a single prosecutor who was doing her job and obeying the law won't change anything. Attacking the laws she enforced will.

>Attacking a single prosecutor who was doing her job and obeying the law won't change anything.

I disagree, if Ortiz was looking for a future in politics, she's finished. At the very least, she'll have to change her party affiliation. This is a good thing. Otherwise she could've possibly carried on at a higher level.

Although the various public reactions have yet to make any change in law; recent events may discourage similar prosecutions, at least in the near term. Also, a good thing.

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