
Federal law enforcement documents about Aaron Swartz, released under FOIA - pje
https://swartzfiles.com
======
sethbannon
Seeing Aaron made to stand shoeless, handcuffed to a metal bar for over 23
minutes as armed men rifled through his belongings and occasionally asked him
questions, I can't help but think this process is designed to be demeaning.
This is no way to treat someone who's not been found guilty of committing any
crime. And I'm sure this wasn't the worst of it.

If our criminal justice system had more concern for the dignity of the people
that went through it, perhaps we'd see less tragedies like Aaron's.

~~~
bane
I think if there's a lesson to be learned, one-size-fits all treatment of
people is the dehumanizing factor.

If the person in the video was a 270 pound guy on his 3rd arrest for B&E and
had an arrest history that included violent assault, you'd want him to be
chained to a bar without shoes while he was booked.

Aaron was a slightly built kid, with no priors, on a non-violent arrest. But
those kinds of details don't filter down to the booking officer, and most
police stations are equipped to handle difficult "customers", that's why
there's 3 inches of protective glass between the officer and Aaron. There's no
special "well he looks like a nice kid" booking room.

The police in the video appeared courteous and non-aggressive. Nobody was
tased, beaten or abused. Aaron was arrested and was cuffed and detained, the
same as for any other person. As they went through their processing of him,
they asked him politely, thanked him for compliance, assured him things would
go smooth and he'd be out pretty quick. They asked him about his medication,
verified what it was, asked when he needed his next dose. In terms of police
treatment of a person under arrest, this is pretty nice. Of course he's going
to be handcuffed, he _is_ in police custody after all.

They're not going to just find a comfortable chair for him and ask him if he
wants to share in the squadroom's latest pizza delivery while the booking
officer runs out for lattes?

This is what being under arrest actually looks like.

Standing for 23 minutes is hardly cruel or unusual. He wasn't being badgered,
they weren't using coercive tactics on him, they didn't even ask him any
questions about his case. It was Aaron after all who admits to walking onto
MIT's property without a question being asked of him!

As tragic as what happened to Aaron is, and the feelings about it that I'm
sure you and I both share on the subject. Messing around with other people's
property and consequently the law enforcement the might come from that is not
something you want to be doing ill prepared.

Was MIT's handling poor? Was JSTORs? There's a healthy debate to be had about
that. But w/r to the police and the circumstances of his arrest he _was_
treated about as humanly as the system allows for now.

In the end, Aaron took his own life. The same naïveté that caused him to look
at a closed service door and think "that's a place I'm going to set a computer
up and harvest hundreds of thousands of research papers, nobody will know" is
also what caused him to buckle under the immense pressure of legal
entanglement. He wasn't put to death, executed, beaten to death, tortured or
any other horrible thing. He did something against the law and ended up in the
grind of the system. The system, instead of treating him like a sensitive
special snowflake like we'd like them to have, treated him like any of the
other thousands of people it handles every day.

It's a shitty way to be treated, but if you want to be in a public fight for
your principles, it's something you have to be mentally prepared for. If what
you are doing might get you arrested, this is how the legal system works. Be
prepared.

~~~
coldtea
> _Aaron was a slightly built kid, with no priors, on a non-violent arrest.
> But those kinds of details don 't filter down to the booking officer, and
> most police stations are equipped to handle difficult "customers", that's
> why there's 3 inches of protective glass between the officer and Aaron.
> There's no special "well he looks like a nice kid" booking room._

You make it sound like something unavoidable. Most western countries in Europe
have managed to offer a much better experience.

> _The police in the video appeared courteous and non-aggressive. Nobody was
> tased, beaten or abused._

That's a pretty low bar.

~~~
bane
Have you been arrested and booked in most Western Countries in Europe?

I've _actually_ been in police stations in a few countries (not under arrest)
and they all look about the same.

What exactly, in your imagination, do you think police stations look like? A
comfortable memory foam massage chair and complimentary espresso bar while a
soft voice introduced them to their customized "arrest experience"?

> That's a pretty low bar.

Well, comments here seem to think that his treatment was somehow unusual or
egregious when it's pretty normal and pretty nice and the things that could
have turned it into a black eye for the police didn't happen. It's just nit-
pickery, people looking to blame somebody other than Aaron for taking his own
life.

It sucks, it's shitty, I feel bad about what happened with him, I'm pretty
upset about it also, but I'm not going to get ridiculous and start pointing
fingers at places where there's no pointing to be done.

~~~
coldtea
> _Have you been arrested and booked in most Western Countries in Europe? I
> 've actually been in police stations in a few countries (not under arrest)
> and they all look about the same._

No, I've actually seen people being arrested in several Western Countries in
Europe (and in the US). And have been in a couple of police stations (and many
more in my home country, were we also go for bureacratic reasons, like getting
some permits, passports, etc).

> _What exactly, in your imagination, do you think police stations look like?
> A comfortable memory foam massage chair and complimentary espresso bar while
> a soft voice introduced them to their customized "arrest experience"?_

About that memory foam massage chair. Here is a prison in Norway compared to a
US prison:

[http://theday.co.uk/politics/lessons-in-law-from-world-s-
mos...](http://theday.co.uk/politics/lessons-in-law-from-world-s-most-humane-
prison)

Check out images from Swedish, Danish, Swiss, German etc prisons. The worst
are perhaps the French ones, and even them can be better than US conditions.

Oh, and yes, some arrests involve coffee with the interoggator and soft
voices. Especially for high profile persons, which would include someone like
Aaron.

------
couchand
I'm very curious why they feel the need to redact the location of MIT's Office
of General Counsel (see MIT Communications with US Attorney(1) [0]). That
information is freely available on the OGC's website [1].

[0]: [https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1355271-mit-
communic...](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1355271-mit-
communications-with-us-attorney-1.html) [1]:
[http://ogc.mit.edu/](http://ogc.mit.edu/)

~~~
vonmoltke
It may be some blanket Personally Identifiable Information policy wherein they
have to redact anything remotely related to PII, even if that information is
easily obtainable from other sources.

~~~
bane
I think this is the correct answer. They also kill the sound when they're
asking him his address and phone number in the arrest video.

------
Elrac
Pardon my laziness: is there anything to be seen from these documents/media
that we didn't know before? Anything surprising/interesting? If so, a quick
summary and/or a link would be appreciated.

~~~
bane
Not really, the JSTOR document gives you some behind the scenes emails on the
service degradation Aaron was causing and their interactions with MIT.

If you were running a service scaled to handle a few hundred requests per
minute and somebody starting downloading hundreds of thousands of things as
quickly as possible, resulting servers crashing, etc....well it's the kind of
email conversations you'd expect as they tried to deal with it, IP address
locating, log file dumps, statistics, questions if it's like another previous
case they dealt with, cutting off service to MIT, MIT asking why they did
that, discussions back and forth over the license and service agreement,
making the usage agreement more present for users, etc.

There's surveillance photos of the setup Aaron was using, the room it was all
in and him entering and leaving the room.

There's a copy of the Swartz-JSTOR settlement agreement.

Lawyer's emails back and forth, etc.

To be honest, if you've ever been part of any kind of contractual or legal
proceeding it's pretty banal stuff and appears pretty cut and dry: Aaron went
where he wasn't supposed to go and did something he wasn't supposed to do, it
involved 2 aggrieved parties and the local criminal code.

There's not really anything terribly unusual about any of it. If Aaron hadn't
taken his own life and hadn't been as well known, it wouldn't be notable in
any particular way whatsoever.

~~~
spacemanmatt
So the felony network intrusion charges and overzealous prosecution are
entirely lost on you? Suicide is the only thing that made the case notable?

~~~
bane
Felony network intrusion happens probably multiple times per day. There's
absolutely _nothing_ interesting about it. To be perfectly honest, I'd
probably have tried to bulk download JSTOR if I had access to a network port
somewhere on a campus that allowed for unfettered access. Why not?

Would I have hidden a computer in a campus telecom room to do it for me?
Probably not. Were the aggrieved parties over-the-top in the actions they
took? Probably.

Suicide also doesn't make this particularly notable. People in custody and
under criminal charges are going to have a bad time. Unfortunately some of
them do kill themselves as a response to that stress.

In the end, Aaron, and the community around him is what makes this notable.

------
alimoeeny
Can I do this for myself? I mean can I submit a FOIA to see documents that fed
gov has on me? Not that I am an important person, but I mean in general, what
does it take?

~~~
themagician
If you submit a FOIA request on yourself you will probably be denied.

FOIA Requests are only for organizations, businesses, investigations,
historical events, incidents, groups, or deceased persons.

Privacy Act Requests are for yourself. You must include Form DOJ-361 or
equivalent when submitting.

~~~
tsaoutourpants
No. Just no. Please don't take the comment above as valid legal advice.

~~~
codewiz
Did you spot a specific issue, or are you just opposed to any form of legal
advice given on HN?

~~~
smackfu
Well, it would be nice if they cited something, rather than just making
general statements that may or may not be true.

------
tdooner
In case it's not loading for you, it looks like there's a mirror in the
CoralCDN: [http://swartzfiles.com.nyud.net/](http://swartzfiles.com.nyud.net/)

------
sparkzilla
For those wishing to catch up on the story, I made an archive of Swartz news:
[http://newslines.org/aaron-swartz/](http://newslines.org/aaron-swartz/)

------
sp332
Did this just go up? It seems to be going down intermittently. Edit: The "zip
file" link doesn't work now, although it seemed to before. Maybe they took it
down to save bandwidth?

