I wouldn't even be 1% surprised if they forced Swartz into committing suicide, by threatening to harm his loved ones if he didn't.
DOJ Elevated Its Charges Against Swartz Because Internet Rallied on His Behalf
31–40 of 96 posts
Re: DOJ Elevated Its Charges Against Swartz Because Internet Rallied on His Behalf
#32The actor I'm most disappointed in is MIT. Right now, the DOJ is one of the targets of a massive scared-straight campaign by Beltway technologists. One of the worst kept secrets in the world is that US cybersecurity, outside of the military and the IC, is incredibly bad. If most civilian agencies were private corporations, they would have been sued dozens of times by users for negligence in data handling. For those t…
One of the worst kept secrets in the world is that US cybersecurity, outside of the military and the IC, is incredibly bad. Not sure why you're excluding Mil/IC here, in light of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, did you mean to restrict your point to Internet-connected devices?
Yes. The comment was restricted to internet-connected devices and in particular network and endpoint security safeguards.
Both Snowden and Manning got their information from systems to which they had been granted access. .Mil and IC targets are among the most hardened in the world, even if they were a bit lax about implementing fine-grained access control amongst their cleared personnel.
Re: DOJ Elevated Its Charges Against Swartz Because Internet Rallied on His Behalf
#33I wouldn't even be 1% surprised if they forced Swartz into committing suicide, by threatening to harm his loved ones if he didn't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_suicide
can you share some of your reasoning behind this (quite extreme) belief?
Re: DOJ Elevated Its Charges Against Swartz Because Internet Rallied on His Behalf
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the worst kept secrets in the world is that US cybersecurity, outside of the military and the IC, is incredibly bad. Not sure why you're excluding Mil/IC here, in light of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, did you mean to restrict your point to Internet-connected devices?
Yes. The comment was restricted to internet-connected devices and in particular network and endpoint security safeguards. Both Snowden and Manning got their information from systems to which they had been granted access. .Mil and IC targets are among the most hardened in the world, even if they were a bit lax about implementing fine-grained access control amongst their cleared personnel.
When 1% of the nation has similar levels of access as these two, I don't know that it's reasonable to exclude the sneakernet vuln.
Re: DOJ Elevated Its Charges Against Swartz Because Internet Rallied on His Behalf
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
>All Ford's pardon did was to prevent vengeful Democrats, some holding grudges going as far back as 1950, from criminally prosecuting him. So while we're in agreement that Nixon was a criminal, you're saying he should not have been prosecuted...because people had other reasons to dislike him beyond his criminal acts? I fail to see how allowing Nixon to escape justice allowed the country to Move On. It demonstrated to…
Because in no way would justice have been served. The stringing up of one gang leader by another gang would not have provided the country safety, security, recompense, or even resolution - It would have started an all out war, the one we're now seeing in politics.
I'm all for gang leaders being strung up, especially when it's in accordance with the law as would've been the case with Nixon. If the democrats were similarly guilty of felonies, they should've been brought to justice as well. Remind me again, what felonies did the democrats commit?
Re: DOJ Elevated Its Charges Against Swartz Because Internet Rallied on His Behalf
#36This story makes me wonder what would have happened if the Watergate scandal would have happened in the age of the Internet. Would the Internet rally in favour of Richard Nixon's impeachment and against his subsequent pardon? Would impeachment proceedings still take place irrespective of the pardon because of massive public support?
The NSA spying on all of us is a bigger crime and a bigger scandal than Watergate. I don't see any groundswell for impeachment.
> a bigger scandal than Watergate.
Depends on how you qualify its big-ness. Go out and talk to regular, non-techie folks about NSA spying. In the unlikely event that you even find someone who knows what you are talking about, they won't care. They will look at you like you're crazy and they'll say, "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about."
If it's just a small, quickly forgotten blurb on Fox news between TERRORISM and Honey Boo-Boo then does it even qualify as scandal?
Re: DOJ Elevated Its Charges Against Swartz Because Internet Rallied on His Behalf
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
A stalker can demand to face their accuser, just to harrass that person more. This is exactly the example given in the article: if you're trying to make trouble for someone, dragging them through a lawsuit is effective.
What, so you think stalkers should not have a right to a fair trial? They are using their right, not abusing it. They don't lose that right just because the accuser is not interested in seeing them.
I never said that. But the prosecution (and the judge) have to take into account the effect the trial might be having on the victim, and reduce the defendant's ability to cause more damage. Prosecutorial discretion is all about minimizing the damage done in the course of the defense itself.
Re: DOJ Elevated Its Charges Against Swartz Because Internet Rallied on His Behalf
#38This article makes the prosecution sound much more reasonable than other articles I've seen before. "The prosecutor’s response was that it disturbed him whenever a defendant ‘systematically re-victimized’ the victim, and that was what Swartz was doing by dragging MIT through hearings and a trial." The trial must have seemed like a deliberate waste of everyone's resources, when (from the prosecutor's view) Aaron would…
>defendant ‘systematically re-victimized’ the victim, and that was what Swartz was doing by dragging MIT through hearings and a trial.
Just surreal. Like Swartz was a sadist and MIT was a traumatized victim of violence, not like a young prodigy whose life were being crushed for the modern "Prometheus" action and a bunch of PC-sensitive executive bureaucrats augmented by a lawyer department.
Re: DOJ Elevated Its Charges Against Swartz Because Internet Rallied on His Behalf
#39 ‘from a human one-on-one level to an institutional level.’
Re: DOJ Elevated Its Charges Against Swartz Because Internet Rallied on His Behalf
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
nope, it doesn't at all - it makes the prosecutor seem like a petulant child - they didn't get what they wanted (Swartz to quietly, meekly give in), so the pulled out the big guns and bullied him until he committed suicide.
I dunno. When I'm going 65 in a 45 and I know I'm dead wrong, when the cop only gives me a ticket for my broken tail light I don't give them a hard time. I would fully expect that if I gave the officer the finger he'd give me both tickets. The prosecutor probably felt he was doing the kid a favor and got snubbed. I'm not saying it's right, just saying there's more than one side to the story.
> Prosecutors eventually offered Swartz a deal to avoid trial in which he’d have to plead guilty to all 13 charges and spend six months behind bars. Two days later, on Jan. 11, 2013, Swartz hung himself.
Somehow I missed it before that they had come all the way down to 6 months in prison, and just 2 days before he killed himself. I thought he died still thinking he was facing 35 years in prison... not 6 months.