"Some of Swartz's advocates believe the prosecution sought excessive punishment to set an example in the age of Wikileaks and Anonymous."
I seriously doubt that setting an example was a significant motivation.
"Ortiz and Heymann refused to offer a deal that didn't include at least six months of prison time and a guilty plea on all 13 charges."
In other words there was no deal being offered that didn't include a guilty plea -- a pelt on Ortiz's belt.
They targeted Aaron Swartz because he was a rung on their ladder, an easy win. One, he was part of an all but not understood minority to the rest of the population, a hacker. Two, it's routine to portray neutral hackers (our sense of the word) as evil hackers (everyone else's sense). Not understanding what we do makes us all potential witches, and no one is sad when an evil witch gets what he deserves, even when we don't understand what he did.
With Swartz ringed in by a large pile of charges, the result would likely have been at least one conviction. It only takes one out of N for Ortiz to put another mark in the "successful prosecutions" column.
Swartz just got in the way of Ortiz's and Heymann's ambitions. Collateral damage.
> One, he was part of an all but not understood minority to the rest of the population, a hacker. Two, it's routine to portray neutral hackers (our sense of the word) as evil hackers (everyone else's sense).
His motives might have neutral but his actions were not, at least in this case.
But either way, I wish we would all take a step back and critically examine why it is that it is so easy for 'hackers' to be portrayed negatively.
Part of it is because "they don't understand", sure.
But there's another large part, which is the feeling of helplessness. Computing controls more and more of everyone's life with each passing day. In the past people could take control of more of what was important to them. They could tweak with their car's engine and chassis, they could put money in the bank and feel reasonably safe it wouldn't have disappeared to some identity thief by the morning, they could go home secure in the knowledge that their work would physically be still sitting on their desk when they went back the next day.
Now computers have taken over everything and there are very, very few people who actually understand what's going on. And when the "average Joe" sees someone taking advantage of that, for whatever reason, it is natural to feel distrustful. You trust Aaron and I trust Aaron (even if I disagree with his methods), but why should everyone trust Aaron?
The past two weeks we've seen a chorus of criticism from hackers regarding a justice system that they don't understand. Much of the criticism is accurate, and much of it wasn't even in the right ballpark. This isn't even the only example, just look at the strictly-technical debates about open source software like Ruby on Rails or systemd where FUD is the rule. So if even the very smartest of us are liable to this type of behavior, why should we expect any better of the general public?
People in general want to think that at least someone understands hacking besides the hackers and is working to keep them safe from those few with the means to destroy those computerized things which are becoming increasingly valuable to them.
> The past two weeks we've seen a chorus of criticism from hackers regarding a justice system that they don't understand. Much of the criticism is accurate, and much of it wasn't even in the right ballpark.
Dead on. The DOJ might have, in a fit of paranoia, jumped to the "evil hacker" stereotype because it didn't understand Swartz's actions, but the "hacker community," in a similar fit of paranoia, jumped to the "big evil government suppressing any threats" stereotype.
I don't think the DOJ understand the "free culture" movement. At the same time, I don't think a lot of hackers understand the public's desire for order, boundaries, and security.
The why of it is really, really obvious. The system attacks those who threaten the system. Successful activists are top of the list. (What makes A.S. stand out is that he was white and middle class. He doesn't fit the pattern-match for an expected target.)
The race point isn't non-sense. The targets of aggressive prosecution are by and large involved in the drug trade or with gangs, and as such are very often black or hispanic. Aggressive prosecution pretty much evolved to target those people. One of the reasons you can get so many years out of what seem like relatively minor convictions is because prosecutors often have to deal reticent minority communities. Everyone knows that the defendant is involved with certain crimes, but nobody is willing to testify to the effect of "yeah, he's the major local drug source here," and the prosecutors end up having to go after the defendant on secondary crimes.
Swartz's case is unusual because of his background (upper middle class, well-connected with the community) but also because of his race.
That's not what I said. I said that Swartz's case is unusual because he's white and rich and well-connected in the community, and he wasn't accused of a financial crime.
> The system attacks those who threaten the system.
Is questionable. There is to date no proof that that is why Aaron was targeted, but there is quite a bit of circumstantial evidence that prosecutors wanted to be seen as tough on cybercrime.
I do consider it an open question, there have been some hints that his activism was part of the reason but for want of proof you can't really contend that it was.
The tin (foil) hat part was the rubbish about "those who threaten the system". That is just some pre-pubescent fantasy about being an outlaw and "sticking it to the man" to revive a 60's saying in the same vein. The reality was that the prosecutors wanted to seem tough and here was a case they couldn't lose.
"The system" is the reactive, situational, instinctual and not consciously volitional shared human underpinnings of the volitional choices of power-having agents in society. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy, because humans across society are running on brains with the same evolutionary history. Thus the commonality can be treated as having intentions as a social unit, because that's how it behaves, when what it really has are closer to reactive mood-influences in discrete humans acting without shared plans, which all point in the same direction.
The concept of "the system" got thrown out of mainstream discourse because the idea that there's a conspiracy is silly. But a conspiracy is just the simplest, crudest explanation for coordinated action.
As I read about the early involvement of the secret service and in light of the later actions of the DoJ, I couldn't help but wonder if there was something to the signature of Swartz's actions that raised the Federal Government's level of interest.
To put it another way, how likely is it that that particular closet had been used for similar activities before? Is it more plausible that Swartz discovered the closet or that someone told him about it?
Hell, it was unlocked. The camera may have already been there and the Secret Service already involved. Swartz may have blundered into a honey hole and screwed up an ongoing investigation. That's the sort of thing which pisses cops off.
It's not easy to make sense of MIT's actions as naive responses to a one off event - disconnecting the laptop and alarming the closet would be more plausible as responses to a commercial crime. Putting in cameras and letting the crime continue just doesn't make sense in response to the sort of hacking which is traditional on the MIT campus (e.g. lockpicking). MIT went along until JSTOR took radical public action and data collection and observation by the Feds was no longer feasible.
If the proposed plea bargain required Swartz to cooperate with investigations of other hackers, neither side would have an interest in exposing it. The Feds for fear of tipping their hand, Swartz's survivors for remembrance of his legacy. All along I have had the feeling there is more to the tragedy than the press can get from their chairs.
> I couldn't help but wonder if there was something to the signature of Swartz's actions that raised the Federal Government's level of interest.
Of course it was the "signature" of Swartz's actions that raised the federal government's interest.
1) The "target" was MIT;
2) There was physical intrusion into MIT's network;
3) Millions of documents were downloaded;
4) Swartz previously did something similar to PACER.
You can argue about whether walking into an unlocked closest is "physical intrusion" or whether the "actual target" was JSTOR but that's all just a matter of characterization. The Feds are not "shades of gray" people--everything is like the show "24" to them. They will assume the worst.
I'd bet money that the "bullet points" similar to the above landed on someone's desk, and even though I think the prosecution definitely was overzealous, I'm not at all surprised at the way they reacted. I'm really shocked that anyone is surprised.
"You can argue semantics about whether walking into an unlocked closest is "physical intrusion" or whether the "actual target" was JSTOR but that's all just a matter of characterization. The Feds are not "shades of gray" people--everything is like the show "24" to them. They will assume the worst."
To the extent I am arguing anything, it is against the convenience of casting events into the form of a morality play...or of a Fox Television apologetic for torture. Cartoon characterizations don't require much of us and simple causal chains don't require us to deal with messy realities.
They just make for easy journalism and lazy citizenship.
You need to look at it from MIT's perspective. The laptop in the closet was not an isolated incident. It was clearly connected to the person who had been abusing their open wireless access earlier. This person clearly knew his actions were not welcome.
I don't know anything about MIT culture other than what I've read, but people have told me it is similar to Caltech's culture. At Caltech, the most important rule is the Caltech honor code:
No member of the Caltech community shall take unfair
advantage of another member of the Caltech community.
This covers the sort of hacking which is traditional at Caltech (and I presume MIT). It means that you do no intentional harm, and you take responsibility for your actions, and you stop a particular hack if the parties you are asking catch you and tell you to stop.
If the Swartz incident had happened at Caltech then when it reached the laptop in the closet stage the conclusion would be that the intruder was almost certainly an outsider, not a member of the community. At that point it is appropriate to call in the outside authorities.
Its not 1:1, but while its people coordinating its pretty easy to draw the comparison, only when its done by a botnet wrangler or extortionists do things start to diverge.
You just don't see the equivalence because operating on the internet you only see your susceptibility to a ddos, and it's always different when it can happen to you.
It's a nuisance you deal with until the protesting party gets board. In one case you call the cops, in the other case you pay someone with a fat pipe to absorb the hit and forward the legit traffic to you.
I am unaware of any successful DDOS (other than accidental ones) which food not make some use of unsuspecting people's computers, either by ping reflection, botnets or secret iframes. All of these sound less like a sit-in and more like an attack which should be prosecuted to me.
It's different in the technical details, but the aim is exactly and completely identical: to deny service to other customers as a way to punish the proprietor of a business.
Sitting at a lunch counter is legal, sending an HTTP request to a server is legal. In some cases sitting at a lunch counter for too long becomes illegal, and in some cases sending too many HTTP requests can become illegal (DDoS).
The difference here is that sitting at a lunch counter for too long got you a night in jail whereas participating in a DDoS can easily get you many years in prison and a felony conviction.
There is an imbalance here. Both of these things are acts of protest. Both do economic damage to their targets. Both involve collaboration with others. Why, then are the penalties so radically different?
We could debate the relative economic impact, but I think that's a moot point, just because a business is large does not mean that it should be immune from protest. Political freedom cannot be squelched just because we have decided to rely on fragile technology for day-to-day life.
You're making the (wrong) assumption that all those participating in a denial of service attack are doing so voluntarily. Typically it's a small number of perps that harness a large number of unwitting drones.
Swartz aside, Rolling Stone has possibly the least responsive web design ever. If your window's width is less than the page width, the left side of the text gets cut off on Chrome dev and Safari. There's no way to scroll to make it visible; the only way is to make the window larger. It seems they are using Javascript to change the main container's `margin-left` to keep the content centered on different large monitors, but there's no check to make sure that it's positive on small monitors. So the takeaway is: if you're trying to make a site responsive, do it right, or don't do it at all.
On that note, if you're trying to prosecute crime: do it for justice and society, or don't do it at all.
I seriously doubt that setting an example was a significant motivation.
"Ortiz and Heymann refused to offer a deal that didn't include at least six months of prison time and a guilty plea on all 13 charges."
In other words there was no deal being offered that didn't include a guilty plea -- a pelt on Ortiz's belt.
They targeted Aaron Swartz because he was a rung on their ladder, an easy win. One, he was part of an all but not understood minority to the rest of the population, a hacker. Two, it's routine to portray neutral hackers (our sense of the word) as evil hackers (everyone else's sense). Not understanding what we do makes us all potential witches, and no one is sad when an evil witch gets what he deserves, even when we don't understand what he did.
With Swartz ringed in by a large pile of charges, the result would likely have been at least one conviction. It only takes one out of N for Ortiz to put another mark in the "successful prosecutions" column.
Swartz just got in the way of Ortiz's and Heymann's ambitions. Collateral damage.