The suicide of famed programmer and free access advocate Aaron Swartz shocked the world. However, the underlying story of the how the Obama Administration prosecuted — and, in the eyes of many, persecuted — Swartz for seeking to publish academic papers which were later released by MIT without charge. Nevertheless, United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz and the Obama Administration relentlessly pursued Swartz and sought an absurd 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines before he took his own life. His family blames the Justice Department and Ortiz for his suicide. Swartz opposed the Administration’s fight against public access and particularly President Obama’s “Kill List.” The Swartz prosecution was widely criticized for months but the Obama Administration and Justice Department remained committed to putting him in jail.
Swartz was one of this country’s most extraordinary individuals. At age 14, he helped create RSS, the tool allowing people to subscribe to online information. He later was a founder of a company that merged with Reddit where we get many of our daily stories.
Swartz, 26, hanged himself and appears to have suffered from depression. Thus, the prosecution cannot be entirely attributed with his death. However, the Obama Administration hammered Swartz for months over his downloading of academic articles. Swartz has long been an advocate for public access to information. Like many of us, Swartz was critical of increasingly stringent laws balkanizing information in our society from works to words to even common images. He however took that crusade to extraordinary lengths.
In 2008, he took on PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, for its charging of 10 cents a page for documents. I agreed with Swartz about this charge as being a barrier to public access to our courts and important cases. He argued correctly that there should be free access. He co-founded Demand Progress to seek online access and fought for social reforms. The federal government, at the behest of industry groups, shutdown his free library program.
In 2011, Swartz took on JSTOR, the academic repository of papers and research. It is a subscription based service. He broke into the computer system at MIT through a utility closet using a laptop and a false identity. He downloaded 4.8 million documents. Notably, however, MIT chose not to pursue charges — to its credit. For many years, academics argued that such material should be free to the public as a matter of principle. Two days before Swartz’s death, MIT releases all documents publicly free of charge.
However, despite MIT’s position that it did not want to bring charges, Carmen M. Ortiz saw her chance. 
Ortiz is the United States Attorney for Massachusetts and a graduate of our law school who spoke recently at our commencement. Industry groups and lobbyists have long gotten what they wanted from Obama on criminalizing trademark and copyright violations. States have shown the same capture by industry groups. Swartz was a prime target as an advocate of public access and the Obama Administration threw everything that they had at him.
There is no question that Swartz crossed the line and broke into the system. However, given MIT’s position against charging Swartz, it would seem a case for prosecutorial discretion or a deal with Swartz. After all, students commit such acts regularly (though certainly not to the size of this download) without charges. Ortiz, however, sought decades in jail and ruinous fines to the great pleasure of the copyright hawks that run throughout the Administration. To the Administration, Swartz was just another felon who needed to be jailed for decades for his crime.
It is doubtful that the Administration will take any action to reduce the stranglehold on creativity and discussion by these laws. The Administration has brought in copyright hawks into the Administration and appointed them to the courts in a windfall for industry.
MIT has started an investigation into any role the school may have played in the prosecution by the Obama Administration. What is notable is that Swartz’s treatment at the hands of the Justice Department has caused outrage. However, thousands of average citizens have been ravaged by the Administration or industry law firms like the U.S. Copyright Group under these laws without attention or concern.
The abuse of Swartz speaks of industry capture of our government that has now claimed the life of one of the brightest of our country. He is the ultimate personification of how our copyright and trademark laws have been flipped on their head. Rather than protect creativity, they now stifle such creativity. We now have prosecutors and lawyers pursuing people like Swartz to prevent public access to information. His tragic image hanging in his apartment speaks to the dismal state of information control in this country. His was truly a beautiful mind and his death should galvanize his cause to empower citizens in their demand to breakdown the rising barriers to information in this country.
Source: NY Times
Once again, arrogant prosecutors set out to destroy a human life, knowing full well that they faced no accountability whatsoever. All they needed to do was “expand the law” a bit to accomplish their horrifying goal: no human being can be expected to withstand such pressure. Those who did nothing to stop this, including academics, the media, and members of the current administration, should be deeply ashamed of what they have done. Their silence in the face of another disproportionate assault on reason, this time focused on academic whistle-blowing and satirical “Gmail confessions” in New York, is equally troubling. For documentation on this latest case, see:
http://raphaelgolbtrial.wordpress.com/about/
•
I’m Rep Zoe Lofgren & I’m introducing “Aaron’s Law” to change the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) (lofgren.house.gov)
submitted 1 hour ago by ZoeLofgren
[–]lessig 51 points 51 minutes ago
Hey, this is a CRITICALLY important change that would do incredible good. The CFAA was the hook for the government’s bullying of @aaronsw. This law would remove that hook. In a single line: no longer would it be a felony to breach a contract. Let’s get this done for Aaron — now.
On Reddit just now. Anyone able to explain what they are talking about?
Aaron Swartz Case ‘Snowballed Out Of MIT’s Hands,’ Source Says
By Gerry Smith
01/15/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/aaron-swartz-mit_n_2480627.html
Excerpt:
Aaron Swartz and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology seemed to hold similar beliefs about open access on the Internet.
Swartz, a well-known Internet activist, believed that copyrighted information should be made freely available online. MIT was one of the first universities to grant access to its course materials and professors’ scholarly articles without charge to anyone with an Internet connection.
But when Swartz was caught using MIT’s network to download academic journals and share them online, the university contacted law enforcement — which led to the involvement of the Secret Service — and helped federal authorities build their case against him.
Privately, several MIT officials expressed concerns that prosecutors were “overreaching” by charging Swartz with federal crimes that carried a sentence of up to 35 years in prison, according to a MIT employee familiar with the investigation.
But by then, it was too late. “By the time this thing snowballed out of MIT’s hands, it was gone,” said the employee, who asked not to be named because he still works at the university. “When the federal government chooses to prosecute, you don’t get to say no.”
On Friday, Swartz, 26, was found dead in his apartment of an apparent suicide. He was facing trial in April for allegedly stealing millions of scholarly journal articles from the digital archive JSTOR using MIT’s network. Before his death, federal prosecutors told Swartz and his attorney that he could spend six months behind bars and plead guilty to 13 federal crimes, but they rejected the offer, believing they could win at trial, his attorney told the Boston Globe.
Swartz suffered from depression, and his reasons for taking his own life remain unclear. But his supporters say that his looming federal trial was a contributing factor in his death and they blame prosecutors and MIT for pursuing the case.
On Tuesday, mourners paid tribute to Swartz during an emotional funeral service in his hometown of Highland Park, Ill. During the service, Swartz’s father was quoted as saying his son “was killed by the government, and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles.”
MIT is planning an investigation of its involvement with the federal case against Swartz. Professor Hal Abelson, who is leading the internal investigation, declined to comment Tuesday about MIT’s role in the case, saying he had not yet begun his inquiry. “Right now, people need time to think about Aaron,” Abelson said.
The university’s decision to contact law enforcement in Swartz’s case appeared to run counter to its history of embracing computer hackers and open access to information on the Internet. In 2009, MIT faculty voted unanimously to make their scholarly articles available for free online. The decision emphasized MIT’s “commitment to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible,” according to a university press release.
“The vote is a signal to the world that we speak in a unified voice; that what we value is the free flow of ideas,” MIT faculty chair Bish Sinyal said at the time.
Abelson said the university had, at times, struggled to create policies that were consistent with those values. “At MIT there’s always been an appreciation of the value of hacking and being more flexible,” he said in an interview. “But there are always hard decisions about how that works out in terms of policy.”
At the time of his alleged offenses, Swartz was a fellow at Harvard University, not a student at MIT, but his lawyers argued that MIT’s Internet policy allowed unfettered use of its network. Unlike other universities, MIT did not require a password or any affiliation with the school to access servers and digital libraries, Swartz’s lawyers said in court filings.
MIT’s network lacked “even basic controls to prevent abuse,” such as preventing users from downloading too many PDFs or utilizing too much bandwidth, said Alex Stamos, a computer security researcher who planned to testify as an expert witness on Swartz’s behalf during his upcoming trial.
lotta’s, not lotts’s
Speaking of which … lotta, where are you? I miss you!
Elaine,
Yes, I did … I thought I’d gotten it on your recommendation but maybe it was lotts’s … anyway … I’ve loaned it to several people who all enjoyed it.
Blouise,
I love Charlie Pierce. Have you read his book “Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free?”
“Good luck running for office, Carmen, with every hacker in the known universe targeting every campaign you ever run for the rest of your life.” (From Elaine’s post)
Consequences
Breaking Someone With The Law
By Charles P. Pierce
1/15/13
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Case_Of_Aaron_Swartz
Excerpt:
COMMON MAN (Comes to the center of the stage, having taken off his mask): I’m breathing . . . Are you breathing too? . . . It’s nice, isn’t it? It isn’t difficult to keep alive, friends. Just don’t make trouble or if you must make trouble, make the sort of trouble that’s expected.
— Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons, Act II.
The Boston Globe went long this morning on the death by suicide of Aaron Swartz — most of which, ironically, is behind the newspaper’s paywall — including a close examination of the relentless breaking-a-butterfly-on-a-wheel pursuit of the young activist by the office of United States Attorney Carmen Ortiz up here in Boston, as well as a deep look into the complicity in that pursuit by the administration at MIT. Kevin Cullen, the best cityside columnist in America now that Breslin’s hung ’em up, weighed in as well.
If it was beyond scandalous that Aaron Swartz was facing prison time for downloading a bunch of obscure academic treatises, it is beyond tragic that he is now dead. Swartz, 26, hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment last Friday, and while we will never know for sure why, many who know him best say that prosecutors bullied him to the grave. At the least, prosecutors lacked proportionality and basic humanity and they tried to imprison an emotionally vulnerable young man who didn’t make a penny from his alleged crimes.
(Ortiz is still considered something of a political comer here in the Commonwealth (God save it!). Good luck running for office, Carmen, with every hacker in the known universe targeting every campaign you ever run for the rest of your life. Local media writer Dan Kennedy detailed how there’s been more than a whiff of the authoritarian surrounding Ortiz’s whole career as a prosecutor, specifically in regards to free speech.)
I spent a long time thinking about this case. I needed to disentangle the personal from the political in the death of someone I did not know. I needed to understand, at least feebly, what it was that Swartz did in his life and his activism. I needed to try to understand, at least feebly, what it was that Swartz did and why so many people decided to break so much rock in his pursuit. I came to only two conclusions.
The first is that every government ever conceived has taken as a kind of internal imperative that the governed out there cannot be trusted with too much information. Of course, the Founders said a lot of brave things about how an informed populace is necessary to the survival of self-government. Jefferson said he’d prefer newspapers without a government rather than the reverse. John Adams talked about the “indisputable, indefeasable, divine” right of the people to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge…of the conduct and characters of their rulers.” Once in high political office, however, even these guys behaved the way that rulers always behave. Too much information dispersed too widely may be essential to self-government, but it also can be a threat to the public order, and we cannot have that, even if later generations will cast us in marble and make HBO miniseries about how great we are.
There is no longer any question that the current administration has decided that the people have an “indisputable, indefeasible, divine right” to only that information which the administration sees fit to release. It has pursued leakers with a vigor that would have impressed the late Egil (Bud) Krogh, except using U.S. Attorneys and not Cuban burglars for hire. It has slapped Bradley Manning into what passes in the 21st Century for a dungeon. It has made a cartoon villain out of the WikiLeaks phenomenon, and out of Julian Assange in particular. I believe that part of the reason that it has adopted the laughable “Look forward and not back” legal strategy as regards to the people guilty of torture, and as regards to the people who wrecked the economy, is that it doesn’t want the detailed information about either of those scandals released to the public, which cannot be trusted to behave itself properly. And this administration pursued Aaron Swartz not because he downloaded information, but because he dispersed it. It was the dissemination of the information that brought down on him the abandoned wrath of Carmen Ortiz and her superiors in Washington. It was because Aaron Swartz told us what he knew…
Which brings me to my second conclusion — Aaron Swartz ran facefirst into a law-enforcement and prosecutorial culture that we have allowed to run amok for far too long. It began with drugs. It intensified with the “war on terror.” Preventive detention — though they don’t call it that — has been mainstreamed, due process sacrificed to efficiency. Investigation without cause has been normalized in our daily lives, through mandatory drug testing and roadblocks and a dozen other ways we barely think about any more. Personal privacy has been rendered less important than official secrecy in the general scheme of things. We want — nay, demand convictions, and all barriers to them be damned.
Elaine,
Thank you for the Charles Pierce link, it made the case for me. Essentially Swartz was being threatened with a long prison term for what? We watch a dysfunctional legal system that is able to harass a young man, while it pays deference to rapacious economic pirates. What I think is often missed by people who uphold our legal system is that our prosecutors and police are out of control except when it comes to deference to our Elite Class. Ms Ortiz and the government’s action in this case was loathsome bullying in the service of nothing that even tangentially relating to protecting society.
Hello, Professor. Long time, no e. Some points of clarification.
1. MIT did NOT drop the charges against Swartz. JSTOR did, but MIT was, in Lessig’s words, “not as clear” in what it wanted done with the Swartz case.
2. JSTOR, as I understand it, is separate from MIT. JSTOR is an academic journal archive that is primarily, but not entirely, subscription-based. MIT subscribed to JSTOR to provide its library of journal articles to MIT students.
3. As I said, JSTOR mostly, but not entirely, subscription-based. The subscribers are academic institutions, whose subscriptions grant unlimited access. But most JSTOR articles can also be purchased a la carte by individuals and members of the general public for usually $10-$20 apiece. I’ve purchased articles from JSTOR myself. But a significant percentage of articles were classified as for academic institutions only and not accessible to the general public for reasons that are unclear.
4. Swartz allegedly used the MIT network and the unlimited access to JSTOR granted by the subscription to try to download all of JSTOR’s library to post them on the internet for free, and was successful in downloading, as i understand it, 2-4 million articles. I won’t get into the right or wrong of Swartz’ actions. But calculating using the a la carte figures, they were potentially worth $20 million-$40 million. Were they realistically worth that? Not likely. But while Swartz apparently did not intend to make money off the articles himself, his actions could have denied that money to JSTOR, a non-profit.
5. Again, JSTOR dropped the charges on Swartz, but MIT did not. As I understand it, it was also MIT and not JSTOR that tried to block Swartz’s access to the network.
6. Whether Swartz violated any law is very questionable here. He may have intended to violate the license for MIT and its students to use JSTOR articles, but that is not a federal crime. Moreover, as I understand it, MIT’s network is open as a matter of school policy, so Swartz did not technically hack into it. The room Swartz accessed was also unlocked and accessible to everyone. The only thing even dishonest about what Swartz did was use a fake name to sign on to the MIT network.
7. Swartz was widely known to suffer from clinical depression. I am a bit saddened by comments on here that suggest at best a lack of understanding of clinical depression, at worst a lack of sympathy and compassion for its victims. Swartz’s clinical depression should not be used against him.
8. And I’m concerned that’s exactly what the Feds did here. A lot of legal observers have criticized the overcharging here, though that is an old and legitimate tactic to get confessions and plea agreements. Far more troubling is the Feds unwillingness to bargain with Swartz. With JSTOR backing off, it’s not clear to me what was to be gained by this prosecution or by the heavy pressure brought down on Swartz. The Feds were not willing to budge on felony convictions and jail time for Swartz for a crime whose status as malum in se was questionable and whose victim wanted dropped.
My major question is, did the Feds try to use Swartz’s depression against him to get him to crack and cop to an unreasonable plea deal?
And, if so, is that ethical? Legally? Morally?
More thoughts here http://www.no-boxes-allowed.blogspot.com/2013/01/aaron-swartz-and-manipulation-of-mental.html?m=1
DonS:
“The seriously depressed mind does not think in such rational terms.”
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I agree with most all of what you said. In fact, the reason I’m taking the position I am is to remind all of us we are all too willing to jump to every conclusion that meets our mindset. i.e, He was driven to suicide, The prosecutor is vindictive, The kid did nothing wrong.
This was our exact criticism of George Bush and his administration as I recall. And all of it without any proof save statements from friends, “yes men,” and paid experts. Does Curveball ring any bells?
Let’s wait to see what happens before we vilify anyone who dares to disagree with us.
Mespo, your response (“I appreciate a principled iconoclast. I just appreciate somebody who plays by the rules more. That’s harder and less lucrative.”) feels to me like the reasoning I surmised. And, I to, recognize the need for stability and playing by the rule in the vast majority of situations. Pretty much it’s how I’ve lived my life.
But I also recognize extraordinary circumstances — in this case probably prosecutorial overreach, even persecutory intent, and what seems like a backdrop of governmental highhandedness in pursing an anti-democratic agenda — and am not willing to summarily condemn Swartz based on his tactics.
And I have no doubt that he, or anyone in similar circumstances, including his ambient mental state, could be “pushed over the edge” by the combination of circumstances, regardless of the apparent external factors that would seem to classify his life and conditions as good, if not enviable. One could find that the magnitude of his good fortune itself, and the whiplash of being dragged through the legal mire, was an exacerbating factor, not an ameliorating one.
I’ll defer to your analysis of the legal implications, though not even nearly the purity of the prosecution. But as to the psychological outcome, and suicide, if it was suicide, that is not a matter of post hoc rational argument that makes sense. The seriously depressed mind does not think in such rational terms.
anonymously posted 1, January 15, 2013 at 4:17 pm
Aaron Swartz’s Politics
Tuesday, 15 January 2013 14:22 By Matt Stoller,
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13940-aaron-swartzs-politics
Excerpt:
Aaron suffered from depression, but that is not why he died. Aaron is dead because the institutions that govern our society have decided that it is more important to target geniuses like Aaron than nurture them, because the values he sought – openness, justice, curiosity – are values these institutions now oppose. In previous generations, people like Aaron would have been treasured and recognized as the remarkable gifts they are. We do not live in a world like that today. And Aaron would be the first to point out, if he could observe the discussion happening now, that the pressure he felt from the an oppressive government is felt by millions of people, every year. I’m glad his family have not let the justice system off the hook, and have not allowed this suicide to be medicalized, or the fault of one prosecutor. What happened to Aaron is not isolated to Aaron, but is the flip side of the corruption he hated.
As we think about what happened to Aaron, we need to recognize that it was not just prosecutorial overreach that killed him. That’s too easy, because that implies it’s one bad apple. We know that’s not true. What killed him was corruption. Corruption isn’t just people profiting from betraying the public interest. It’s also people being punished for upholding the public interest. In our institutions of power, when you do the right thing and challenge abusive power, you end up destroying a job prospect, an economic opportunity, a political or social connection, or an opportunity for media. Or if you are truly dangerous and brilliantly subversive, as Aaron was, you are bankrupted and destroyed. There’s a reason whistleblowers get fired. There’s a reason Bradley Manning is in jail. There’s a reason the only CIA official who has gone to jail for torture is the person – John Kiriako – who told the world it was going on. There’s a reason those who destroyed the financial system “dine at the White House”, as Lawrence Lessig put it. There’s a reason former Senator Russ Feingold is a college professor whereas former Senator Chris Dodd is now a multi-millionaire. There’s a reason DOJ officials do not go after bankers who illegally foreclose, and then get jobs as partners in white collar criminal defense. There’s a reason no one has been held accountable for decisions leading to the financial crisis, or the war in Iraq. This reason is the modern ethic in American society that defines success as climbing up the ladder, consequences be damned. Corrupt self-interest, when it goes systemwide, demands that it protect rentiers from people like Aaron, that it intimidate, co-opt, humiliate, fire, destroy, and/or bankrupt those who stand for justice.
More prosaically, the person who warned about the downside in a meeting gets cut out of the loop, or the former politician who tries to reform an industry sector finds his or her job opportunities sparse and unappealing next to his soon to be millionaire go along get along colleagues. I’ve seen this happen to high level former officials who have done good, and among students who challenge power as their colleagues go to become junior analysts on Wall Street. And now we’ve seen these same forces kill our friend.
It’s important for us to recognize that Aaron is just an extreme example of a force that targets all of us. He eschewed the traditional paths to wealth and power, dropping out of college after a year because it wasn’t intellectually stimulating. After co-founding and selling Reddit, and establishing his own financial security, he wandered and acted, calling himself an “applied sociologist.” He helped in small personal ways, offering encouragement to journalists like Mike Elk after Elk had broken a significant story and gotten pushback from colleagues. In my inbox, every birthday, I got a lovely note from Aaron offering me encouragement and telling me how much he admired my voice. He was a profoundly kind man, and I will now never be able to repay him for the love and kindness he showed me. There’s no medal of honor for someone like this, no Oscar, no institutional way of saying “here’s someone who did a lot of good for a lot of people.” This is because our institutions are corrupt, and wanted to quelch the Aaron Swartz’s of the world. Ultimately, they killed him. I hope that we remember Aaron in the way he should be remembered, as a hero and an inspiration.
In six days, on January 18th, it’s the one year anniversary of the blackout of Wikipedia, and some have discussed celebrating it as Internet Freedom Day. Maybe we should call this Aaron Swartz Day, in honor of this heroic figure. While what happened that day was technically about the internet, it should be remembered, and Aaron should be remembered, in the context of social justice. That day was about a call for a different world, not just protecting our ability to access web sites. And we should remember these underlying values. It would help people understand that justice can be extremely costly, and that we risk much when we allow those who do the right thing to be punished. Somehow, we need to rebuild a culture that respects people like Aaron and turns away from the greed and rent-extraction that he hated. There’s a cycle in American history, of religious “Great Awakenings”, where new cultural systems emerge in the form of religion, often sweeping through communities of young people dissatisfied with the society they see around them. Perhaps that is what we see in the Slow Food movement, or gay rights movement, or the spread of walkable communities and decline of vehicle miles, or maker movement, or the increasing acceptance of meditation and therapy, or any number of other cultural changes in our society. I don’t know. I’m sure many of these can be subverted. What I do know is that if we are to honor Aaron’s life, we will recognize him as a broad social justice activist who cared about transforming our society, and acted to do so. And we will take up his fight as our own.
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mespo:
how right you are.
January 14, 2013
How the Legal System Failed Aaron Swartz—And Us
by Tim Wu, Professor, Columbia Law School
Excerpts:
The act was harmless—not in the sense of hypothetical damages or the circular logic of deterrence theory (that’s lawyerly logic), but in John Stuart Mill’s sense, meaning that there was no actual physical harm, nor actual economic harm. The leak was found and plugged; JSTOR suffered no actual economic loss. It did not press charges. Like a pie in the face, Swartz’s act was annoying to its victim, but of no lasting consequence.
In this sense, Swartz must be compared to two other eccentric geniuses, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who, in the nineteen-seventies, committed crimes similar to, but more economically damaging than, Swartz’s. Those two men hacked A.T. & T.’s telephone system to make free long-distance calls, and actually sold the illegal devices (blue boxes) to make cash. Their mentor, John Draper, did go to jail for a few months (where he wrote one of the world’s first word processors), but Jobs and Wozniak were never prosecuted. Instead, they got bored of phreaking and built a computer. The great ones almost always operate at the edge.
…
It’s one thing to stretch the law to stop a criminal syndicate or terrorist organization. It’s quite another when prosecuting a reckless young man. The prosecutors forgot that, as public officials, their job isn’t to try and win at all costs but to use the awesome power of criminal law to protect the public from actual harm. Ortiz has not commented on the case. But, had she been in charge when Jobs and Wozniak were breaking the laws, we might never have had Apple computers. It was at this moment that our legal system and our society utterly failed.
Defenders of the prosecution seem to think that anyone charged with a felony must somehow deserve punishment. That idea can only be sustained without actual exposure to the legal system. Yes, most of the time prosecutors do chase actual wrongdoers, but today our criminal laws are so expansive that most people of any vigor and spirit can be found to violate them in some way. Basically, under American law, anyone interesting is a felon. The prosecutors, not the law, decide who deserves punishment.
Today, prosecutors feel they have license to treat leakers of information like crime lords or terrorists. In an age when our frontiers are digital, the criminal system threatens something intangible but incredibly valuable. It threatens youthful vigor, difference in outlook, the freedom to break some rules and not be condemned or ruined for the rest of your life. Swartz was a passionate eccentric who could have been one of the great innovators and creators of our future. Now we will never know.
Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and the author of “The Master Switch.”
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/01/everyone-interesting-is-a-felon.html#ixzz2I42hjwDq
ap:
Again, you said he “broke into a public building.”
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“Breaking” means traversing the curtilage which defines the boundary between private and public areas, not breaking a lock or security device. Any force to gain entry such as opening the closet door would be enough to satisfy the legal requirement under the common law as long as he did so with the intent to commit a crime. We can debate the nuances of criminal law or semantics but is there really any doubt that he was present where he was not authorized to be with the intention to commit a illegal hack and that he gained access through his own deceptive actions?
DonS:
I have plenty of compassion and sympathy for Swartz’s family, friends, and colleagues, and even some admiration and appreciation or his adventurous spirit as well as sympathy for his “cause.”. However, I do not understand people who claim this criminal charge pushed him over the edge into suicide. Here’s a wealthy, young, genius who had the gumption to knowingly defy the law in service to his own standards. There are plenty of criminal defendants facing more serious charges with less of a financial and social support system in vastly more conservative law and order jurisdictions than Massachusetts who face their charges without taking their own lives in the process.
Swartz appears to have been a good kid who made a serious mistake and who took his own life for reasons known only to himself. In my humble opinion, any other take on the topic appears to be more about the biases or prejudices of the observer and less about the manifest facts.
I appreciate a principled iconoclast. I just appreciate somebody who plays by the rules more. That’s harder and less lucrative.
(p.s., here’s a repost from upthread that’s been held up for moderation (not sure why, but I’ll try again, and attempt to get duplications eliminated)
excerpt from Larry Lessig blog:
“Aaron had literally done nothing in his life “to make money.”. . . Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good. He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.
“For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to “justice” never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled “felons.”
“In that world, the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge. And so as wrong and misguided and f——g sad as this is, I get how the prospect of this fight, defenseless, made it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it.
“Fifty years in jail, charges our government. Somehow, we need to get beyond the “I’m right so I’m right to nuke you” ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: Shame.
http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully
Ah, ‘we’ who have little patience for “technicalities”, as opposed to “it’s either the law or not”. Doesn’t leave much in the way of compassion for Mr. Swartz. Due to the disproportionality of power, I fully concur he was bullied The reasons for suicide are never fully cognizable, nor one sided, nor pleasant for those left behind.
But, given that the “victims” of Swartz’s crime primarily seem to sympathize with the intention — including the many tribute publications by the authors of material “stolen” — I am willing to call the prosecutors vengeance a vendetta hanging on the all the legal niceties and presumptions and inferences she could muster.
Better to talk about the violations cited in the indictment, rather than misrepresenting the situation:
http://web.mit.edu/bitbucket/Swartz,%20Aaron%20Indictment.pdf
Crim. No.
VIOLATIONS:
18 U.S.C. § 1343 (Wire Fraud)
18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(4) (Computer Fraud)
18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(2), (c)(2)(B)(iii)
(Unlawfully Obtaining Information from a
Protected Computer)
18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(5)(B), (c)(4)(A)(i)(I),(VI)
(Recklessly Damaging a Protected Computer)
18 U.S.C. § 2 (Aiding and Abetting)
18 U.S.C. § 981(a)(1)(C), 28 U.S.C. § 2461(c),
and 18 U.S.C. §982(a)(2)(B) (Criminal
Forfeiture)
mespo727272
You said “he broke into a public building.” I don’t see that in the indictment.
As I understand it, the wiring closet was unlocked.
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The building at MIT was open to the public — in certain areas — hence the characterization. And lest you think what he didn’t wasn’t breaking in, the next time you arrive home to find someone rifling through your living room with the excuse that you left the door open please memorialize your reaction for us.
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Again, you said he “broke into a public building.” Under the law, as you know, trespassing is one thing, while breaking and entering, quite another. The trespassing charge was dropped, as I understand it.
You said, “The next time you arrive home to find someone rifling through your living room with the excuse that you left the door open please memorialize your reaction for us.”
That’s truly funny. If you only knew…, but this is about Aaron Swartz, not me. But since you’ve personalized it, I’ll just say that the phrase “high horse” comes to mind.