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Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

bostonmagazine.com

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Re: Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

#171

Post by mpyne »

ericd wrote: post #167
roel_v wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MIT grants guest access to its network while on the physical premises. > >MIT’s open-network policies at the time allowed anyone visiting campus to access services like JSTOR. Please not this misinformation again. I have no horse in this race, but he was repeatedly kicked off the network, told not to mass-download again, and yet he chose to find ever-more invasive ways of accessing JSTOR, eventually planting a comp…

I'm sorry, but you clearly don't know what the culture at MIT is like. People at MIT break into places like network closets all the time , including picking the locks (a popular hobby). It's not officially encouraged, but it's endemic, and the administration generally doesn't mind that much. Accessing places you're not supposed to be in and doing neat hacks is a big part of the culture. Lots of people "get kicked off…

> People at MIT

But Aaron was at Harvard. He was not an MIT student or part of their faculty. At what point does MIT get to take charge of their own network against third parties?

Re: Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

#172

Post by mpyne »

gress wrote: post #155
roel_v wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what points you're arguing, or what position you think I'm defending. He knew what 'the time' was, the saying doesn't go 'don't do the crime if you can't do what you feel is a reasonable amount of time for said crime'. I'm also not sure why you think this whole NSA bruha is relevant to this. What 'the law' is for an individual isn't always 'the law' for state actors, otherwise every soldier who ever kill…

How can you possibly assert that Aaron "knew what 'the time' was?" I'm sure he was aware that there could be legal repercussions, but I sincerely doubt that he thought he was risking a felony conviction, bankruptcy, and prison.

Surely Aaron was aware at the time of any of the prior CFAA cases on the books. It's not as if he was the very first "network hacker" in U.S. legal history.

But either way even if he was not aware, that was a failure on his part, not the prosecutors. The law was not amended specifically for Aaron, it was on the books in substantially it's current form for more than enough time for Aaron to have researched it.

Re: Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

#173

Post by roel_v »

ericd wrote: post #167
roel_v wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MIT grants guest access to its network while on the physical premises. > >MIT’s open-network policies at the time allowed anyone visiting campus to access services like JSTOR. Please not this misinformation again. I have no horse in this race, but he was repeatedly kicked off the network, told not to mass-download again, and yet he chose to find ever-more invasive ways of accessing JSTOR, eventually planting a comp…

I'm sorry, but you clearly don't know what the culture at MIT is like. People at MIT break into places like network closets all the time , including picking the locks (a popular hobby). It's not officially encouraged, but it's endemic, and the administration generally doesn't mind that much. Accessing places you're not supposed to be in and doing neat hacks is a big part of the culture. Lots of people "get kicked off…

You're right in that I don't have first-hand experience with the culture at MIT, but I'm highly skeptical of the claim that it's normal that outsiders break into the closets there used for the networking equipment while wearing bicycle helmets so as to not be recognized. Likewise, I'm skeptical of the claim that it's considered 'normal' for people to be repeatedly and explicitly told not do something on the network and not face repercussions eventually. E.g., how many torrent sites are hosted on MIT machines? Or on machines hidden in closets and connected to their network? Maybe there are, I don't know - but the extent of your claim (not the fundamentals of it - what I mean is, the extent of the Wild West-ness on the MIT network you claim) doesn't pass the sniff test for me.

Re: Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

#174

Post by andreasvc »

epipsychidion wrote: post #146
Moocat87 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you just repeating the first few words of the grandparent comment? I hardly think "suicide is a choice" is an appropriate thing to say. Take recent suicide rates in the military. Do all those soldiers decide to become so depressed as to kill themselves, or does environment have something to do with it?

Suicide is a choice. I fully agree that MIT acted abominably and in an ethically, if not legally, questionable manner with regards to giving evidence and support to the prosecution but not defense. But you can't blame them for his decision to take his life. It was an incredibly selfish act given the intense pain it caused his family.

You must have some pretty radical libertarian free will convictions if you don't even grant that mental illness can impair free will--a concept that even in the absence of illness is philosophically highly debatable.

The concept of selfishness is not applicable here, since the individual does not gain anything by suicide, nor does it have anything to do with excessive self love. Suicide is simply an act deemed pathological by society, any other value judgment is bound to be derived from philosophically arbitrary and subjective ethical convictions.

Re: Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

#175

Post by andreasvc »

mentalhealth wrote: post #3
vex wrote: post #2

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…

A desire to kill oneself is a diagnosis of mental instability.

You may want to look up the difference between a symptom and a diagnosis. I am also curious about the argument you want to make, because your comment is just a proposition without motivation.

Re: Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

#176

Post by chmike »

Moocat87 wrote: post #134
chmike wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a blunt claim I can't agree with. You totally ignore the context. I know a man who suicide himeself because he was about to lose a trial and it would mean he would have lost his house to pay the huge fine. He was old and to save his wife and child of this misery he commited suicide. From his perspective it was a rational decision because he didn't see any better one. There is absolutely not mental instability…

>My feeling is that most people who commit suicide do it because they decided it on a rational basis. Some people commit suicide because they want to stop a pain they feel and in their view will apparently last forever or will get worse. I.e cancer, someone has to spend the rest of his life in a bed after an accident ... People can also commit suicide as a sacrifice to save others. But I guess you were not talking of…

No. I don't think that and I didn't said that.

Cite? Just found this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide.

From the graphic shown on the page, not all suicide are caused by mental illness. That was my main point.

I have some doubts about the mental illness importance shown in this graph. Anyway, the mental illness could be the source of pain leading to the rational decision to end it by suicide.

Re: Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

#177

Post by nbouscal »

mpyne wrote: post #169
samastur wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't say everyone was responsible. But even if we were it would not follow that no one is since responsibility is not something that depends on others not having any.

> He didn't say everyone was responsible. Didn't say it directly, but follow the logic. If the prosecutors are now responsible for only proferring charges on suspects who won't kill themselves then it obviously follows that we need to ensure that no one appoints prosecutors who would do this (it's life and death after all!). So now the person appointing the prosecutor potentially has blood on their hands. Likewise fo…

Responsibility is not a binary property where any given individual is either responsible or not. There are varying degrees of responsibility. Obviously each step in your absurd slippery slope argument corresponds to a drastic decrease in the degree of responsibility. You aren't following the logic, you're evading logic entirely.

Re: Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

#178

Post by Tloewald »

ericd wrote: post #167
roel_v wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MIT grants guest access to its network while on the physical premises. > >MIT’s open-network policies at the time allowed anyone visiting campus to access services like JSTOR. Please not this misinformation again. I have no horse in this race, but he was repeatedly kicked off the network, told not to mass-download again, and yet he chose to find ever-more invasive ways of accessing JSTOR, eventually planting a comp…

I'm sorry, but you clearly don't know what the culture at MIT is like. People at MIT break into places like network closets all the time , including picking the locks (a popular hobby). It's not officially encouraged, but it's endemic, and the administration generally doesn't mind that much. Accessing places you're not supposed to be in and doing neat hacks is a big part of the culture. Lots of people "get kicked off…

One of the interesting details in this article that I had not previously seen was that JSTOR had blocked MIT's access owing to repeated bulk downloads, which led to an investigation by MIT police. So this presumably went a bit beyond routine high jinks, and it presumably at least inconvenienced other users.

The fact is that — much as we may sympathize with him — Aaron killed himself.

Re: Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

#179

Post by ericd »

roel_v wrote: post #173
ericd wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but you clearly don't know what the culture at MIT is like. People at MIT break into places like network closets all the time , including picking the locks (a popular hobby). It's not officially encouraged, but it's endemic, and the administration generally doesn't mind that much. Accessing places you're not supposed to be in and doing neat hacks is a big part of the culture. Lots of people "get kicked off…

You're right in that I don't have first-hand experience with the culture at MIT, but I'm highly skeptical of the claim that it's normal that outsiders break into the closets there used for the networking equipment while wearing bicycle helmets so as to not be recognized. Likewise, I'm skeptical of the claim that it's considered 'normal' for people to be repeatedly and explicitly told not do something on the network a…

Having gone there for undergrad, I do have first hand experience with the culture. I doubt Aaron was as much of an outsider as you seem to think he was. It's a very open and accepting place. Given that his dad worked for them in some capacity, and given that Harvard and MIT students cross register regularly, and where his interests lay, there's a good chance that he was at least socially involved with people there, and that's generally enough to take part.

The social norms there don't resemble those of the country at large or even those of other schools, so I would be very careful about extrapolating what's acceptable elsewhere to what's acceptable at MIT. Nothing about what he did struck me as something that would be very far offbase there, I think it would be seen as a really cool hack. I'm sure the admins would feel a bit different if it caused problems for them, but generally this kind of thing was more than socially acceptable.

To answer your question about torrents, file sharing was very common on the network, but people had much better solutions than torrents (cert. authenticated file servers, internet2, etc).

Edit: Also, c'mon - he wasn't wearing his bike helmet to avoid the cams, he didn't think he was doing anything very wrong. He probably just rode is bike to the building and left it on.

Re: Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

#180

Post by ericd »

mpyne wrote: post #171
ericd wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but you clearly don't know what the culture at MIT is like. People at MIT break into places like network closets all the time , including picking the locks (a popular hobby). It's not officially encouraged, but it's endemic, and the administration generally doesn't mind that much. Accessing places you're not supposed to be in and doing neat hacks is a big part of the culture. Lots of people "get kicked off…

> People at MIT But Aaron was at Harvard. He was not an MIT student or part of their faculty. At what point does MIT get to take charge of their own network against third parties?

Harvard and MIT have a lot of crosstalk. If he knew people at MIT and was around, which I assume he did and was, it's generally socially acceptable to take part in "hacks" (breaking into locked places is one type).
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