
Still More About The Death Of Aaron Swartz - hudibras
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/aaron-swartz-case-011713
======
cbs
I think this article speaks to why the case is getting so much attention. Lets
presume for the sake of argument the trial didn't contribute to the suicide in
the slightest. But it did cause us to look at the case, and you can't just un-
see the fact that maybe you're not entirely comfortable with the way justice
is being carried out in your name.

We tend to trust in our legal system, one way or another. Even if that way is
by ignoring it and assuming everything will sort itself out. Events like
Aaron's suicide put it on your radar in a way that makes some of the public
sit up and reexamine whether or not the power we have entrusted in others, to
carry out our buisness, is being exercised as we would like it to be.

Something smells like bullshit about the case, and just because a prosecutor
with political ambition can issue a cover-your-ass statement isn't entirely
comforting when faced with the convoluted web that extends beyond her to the
entire nature of justice in the country.

Welcome to being a citizen in a democracy, please stay engaged beyond this
single case.

edited: speeling

~~~
aes256
As much as my personal beliefs align with Aaron's and I am saddened by his
passing, I think people are being more than a little disingenuous in their
references to the charges he was facing.

I'd understand the indignation if we were talking about an actual sentence,
but these were just charges. The maximum possible sentence for those charges
might be dizzying, but realistically, Aaeron was never going to be handed the
maximum.

~~~
aswanson
I experienced "just charges" a few months ago after just getting steady
employment a week prior. A cop in a suburban community was bored to shit and
decided to run tags on the borrowed car which I was driving which wasnt
registered with the state ($38 fee) which he proceed to tow about half a mile
(cost $176) and charge me a days worth of work to appear in court to pay $100
in court costs to have the charges dismissed. Totally innocent. Charges are
not free.

~~~
gw
Cops will often pursue petty things in hopes of discovering something more
serious to charge you with. By impounding your car, they are clear to search
it without your consent.

This happened to me a few years ago in Maryland. As a new resident, I didn't
realize I needed to fill out a form called FR-19. My registration was flagged,
and an Anne Arundel cop pulled me over one evening.

As luck would have it, my insurance paperwork was a few months out of date.
Strike two. I was given several charges adding up to a year in jail, my car
was towed, and I walked home.

After buying new license plates to replace the ones he took, I picked my car
up from the lot ($250+). Everything inside was strewn haphazardly; even the
ash trays were turned up. You know what they were looking for.

The good news? A few months later, the court dropped all charges when they
realized I had insurance the whole time. No harm done!

~~~
aswanson
Right. The whole registration revocation was in their system with the car I
was driving was because of an insurance lapse on the owner's part that was
already taken care of, but either hadn't registered in their bullshit system
yet or had and he just saw fit to fuck with me. Either way, too much power is
entrusted to these people; from the federal to municipal, gov't is rife with
grade A stupidity and abusiveness.

------
hullo
I don't particularly think there's much to be gained by going against the
hivemind on all of this, but I also don't "blame" the prosecutors for Aaron's
death. Aaron killed himself. Suicide and depression are tricky things, and not
one single person currently living knows what the full story is. If that's
enough to get me labeled as "usually reasonable" as well, then so be it.

~~~
gizmo
When you say things like "we don't know the full story" or "suicide is
tricky", you aren't taking a reasonable middle-of-the-road position you're
effectively endorsing the status quo. By refusing to pick a side when there is
a disagreement or struggle between groups of unequal strength you still pick a
side: you side with the stronger group. When people are bullied, be it in the
schoolyard on by the government, the power difference is immense. That means
by default the bully will win. It's just that simple.

We don't have all the information. In life you never have the information you
need to make perfect decisions. But we can ask ourselves if we're OK with the
status quo, and if not, try to change it.

To reduce the whole affair to simply "Aaron killed himself." is crude and far
from reasonable.

~~~
mindcrime
_By refusing to pick a side when there is a disagreement or struggle between
groups of unequal strength you still pick a side: you side with the stronger
group._

"Blame" is an interesting concept though. In almost any complicated scenario,
there is plenty of "blame" to be spread around and you can reasonably argue
that multiple different entities are to "blame" for $WHATEVER.

To use a somewhat tangential example... when Ron Paul talked a lot about
"blowback" vis-a-vis US policy in the Middle East a few years ago, people said
"Ron Paul is blaming America for 9/11". Well, yes... and no. What Ron was
saying, in essence, is that there is culpability in multiple places, which is
a more nuanced position than "America is good, terrorists are bad, Team
America, Fuck Yeah!" OR "We were responsible for 9/11".

So with that in mind... I don't exactly "blame" the prosecutors for Aaron's
suicide either. But that doesn't mean I don't think they hold _some_ degree of
responsibility, and it doesn't mean I support the status quo, or that I don't
want changes made in the law, the sentencing guidelines and the behaviour of
prosecutors.

IOW, it's not necessarily the case that either "side" bears 100% of the
responsibility for what happened.

~~~
jlgreco
Basically my thought is that blame is not zero sum. Assigning some blame from
one party should not in any way be taken to mean another party is not less to
blame. Multiple parties could each be (for lack of better terminology) "100%
to blame".

~~~
benatkin
Mathematics isn't failing here. You're mixing contexts. If you look at it from
the perspective of the victim, it's less than 100% of the blame. If you look
at it from the perspective of a single perpetrator, they're 100% to blame
because the other perpetrator doesn't absolve them of any of the blame. If you
try to add the 100% of each perpetrator in isolation together, you're making
an error.

~~~
jlgreco
My point isn't that mathematics is failing somehow, but rather that blame or
responsibility is something that cannot be summed. Trying to do so is like
trying to add up happiness and sadness. Ethics, and the underlying human
emotion, don't have a system of arithmetic that we are aware of.

~~~
benatkin
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U>

------
dasht
A focus on the prosecutor helps distract attention from the question of
whether and how Swartz was mistreated by being made a (somewhat artificial)
"tech celebrity" at a very young age only to become a kind of semi-outcast in
some tech circles just a few years later.

~~~
sociotech
Bingo. I've been trying not to say petty things out of respect for recently
departed people and his family, with whom I sympathize for this terrible,
terrible thing.

But the radical loss of perspective here is just jarring, and the case is big
enough now that it's hard to refrain from trying to put things into
perspective. I am aware of the full history, having been a programmer with
significant open-source and other contributions through the 90s and early
2000s. Aaron is being totally misremembered.

Of those who knew of him before his death - and he was not a "celebrity" or
"famous" or considered "brilliant" or a "genius" by technologists - most knew
him as a blogger. He was actually a very good writer, even from a young age.
He wrote with clarity and purpose, and he had many interests. His technical
output was not major. To pull a random name out of a hat, his contributions
were less than someone like Craig McClanahan and far less than someone like
Brian Behlendorf. Basically, Aaron got a chance with Y Combinator, which he
parlayed into a merger with Reddit's parent company, mostly through personal
connections. Aaron didn't get end up getting along with Alexis or Steve, who
considered him immature, dramatic, and unreliable. Reddit was shortly
rewritten entirely, and web.py was too buggy to make any further contribution
to Reddit. Aaron was fired from Reddit's acquirer because he didn't bother
doing anything after the payout. He then floated around, wrote a few minor
libraries and some more interesting blog posts, and then became a very good
activist worthy of deeper respect on that front. He wasn't actually a tech
celebrity before his death. He didn't "invent RSS." He didn't singlehandedly
"defeat SOPA." His work on RSS 1.0, a version of RSS that was never
significant itself, was mostly of interest to the semantic-web people, who
have themselves have never made much of an impact, although the work is
interesting to some.

I didn't know Aaron personally, but I do think his volatile relationships with
others and his desire to be famous within this community were a source of
extreme anxiety for him, though probably more so in the past than recently.
But his professional life was, perhaps understandably, extremely frustrating
for reasons that had nothing to do with his criminal case.

That's not an attack. Most people don't make major technical contributions.
But I wish people would see this case for what it is - a volatile activist who
pulled a stunt that spiraled out of control.

~~~
gruseom
I've read many of your comments and am glad you've been posting them. They're
well-written and well-reasoned, and I hope you stick around in the future and
continue to speak your mind with the freedom that your current format seems to
be providing. The combination of legal and technical expertise is valuable and
rare.

That being said, your comments seem to me to pooh-pooh the impact of what the
prosecutors/system did in this case as (a) standard practice and (b) not that
big a deal. Most people here (well, I anyway) did not know much about this
and, having learned it, feel that it _is_ a big deal. This makes me wonder
whether your senses have been dulled by taking too much of that standard
practice for granted. Maybe the people here to whom this is new and disturbing
are not the only ones experiencing "radical loss of perspective".

It's straightforward to explain why Aaron's story has had such an impact on
this and similar communities: he is easy for many of us to identify with, so
the shock has a personal effect. This isn't hypocritical, it's human nature:
one takes in this kind of information through the emotional medium of a story
one can identify with. There's no contradiction between that and learning that
a great many less-advantaged people get treated far more abusively still –
quite the opposite.

Setting aside the obviously dumb comments as a cost of doing business on a
public forum such as this, I am also pretty sure that people here are not
nearly as naive about Aaron's personal history as your critique and the GP's
suggest. Taste enters into this.

~~~
MichaelSalib
Taste cuts both ways though. I'm seriously concerned about how younger people
in the community might respond to the hagiography. I'm afraid that some might
come to believe that the CFAA isn't a real law so there's no problem with
breaking it or that suicide is the best way for activists to enact real
change.

~~~
gruseom
That there's "no problem with breaking" the CFAA is the last conclusion anyone
will draw from this tragedy.

~~~
MichaelSalib
I see a lot of people writing about how they change their MAC address all the
time so what did Aaron do that was so wrong?

Granick writes in a well-read post about how Swartz didn't really break any
laws -- everyone on MIT's network was legally entitled to download JSTOR as
fast as they wanted to and apparently MIT had no right to keep anyone off its
network.

There's a pervasive social norm that says 'if you can use tech to get
something, then doing so is legal'; lots of people find the CFAA normatively
absurd, in the same way that we might find a law against eating asparagus on
sundays absurd. You see that in all the defenses that start from the premise
that not only is Swartz innocent but that there's no conceivable crime he
could have committed.

~~~
koide
> apparently MIT had no right to keep anyone off its network.

What? How could some institution not have a right to keep somebody else off
its own network? That makes no sense at all. Don't forget both JSTOR and MIT
(after JSTOR contacted them) tried to block Swartz's massive downloads.

------
jjtheblunt
One sad aspect of this event, that I see rarely mentioned, is that Swartz
knowingly taunted the legal system to test its response, which he sadly was
inadquately patient in using to his own advantage. Had he really intended to
make a lasting point, perhaps he'd have more effectively done so by risking
prosecution, refusing to spend any money on legal fees, as he was obviously
eloquent himself. The public awareness of a trial's outcome may have been as
extreme and intense as that of his unfortunate choice. Importantly, the world
wouldn't have lost him so early, and, importantly, he would have been a
wonderful voice in explaining the flaws in the process through its completion.

~~~
jacquesm
Thank you for this very insightful comment. Food for thought.

------
homosaur
I appreciate this article because this is someone outside the tech milieu
bandbox that basically comes to the exact same conclusions as the tech
insiders about prosecutorial blindness and overreach.

------
Cl4rity
I really have no stance on this (in that I don't side with Aaron or the
prosecutors in the case), because I don't have all the facts. Some of you may
say that that is a stance, but I just don't see it that way. I am aware,
however, that what I'm about to say may be considered controversial given the
nature of how this case is being reported--and how it's being responded to.

Whenever we have shootings like the one in Newtown, we talk about gun control
and mental health care. There is always that talk about mental health care.
But when someone commits suicide, regardless of cause, those same mental
health advocates are nowhere to be found. Why?

There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of people who have it worse than
Aaron Swartz did, but they don't go killing themselves. Some people lose their
spouses and children in house fires, along with all of their belongings. They
spiral into depression, lose their jobs, go back to living with friends or
family, see nothing but bleak prospects and they ultimately pull out of it.
Others lose their fortunes and things they've spent their lives working for, a
few of them do commit suicide, like the ones after the 2008 financial
collapse, but some don't. There are people who commit crimes and know they
face stiff prison sentences, like life sentences or death penalties, but they
don't kill themselves.

I could go on and on about how much worse it is for people in third-world
countries, for those who don't know where their food and clean water are going
to come from day in and day out. I could go on about the people who are
brutally bullied, day in and day out.

Many of these people, some in arguably worse condition than Aaron Swartz was
in prior to his death, don't kill themselves. So when we're faced with a case
like Swartz's, why are we so quick to find someone to blame?

Yes, prosecutors were overreaching and giving him hell, but they didn't kill
him. He killed himself. Hell, there are people who are currently serving long
or life sentences in prison who are innocent of the crimes brought against
them, but they're fighting and hoping from within their cells. Many of them
are not committing suicide.

All I'm trying to say is it takes a lot more than a prison sentence, 6 months
or 50 years, to get most people to kill themselves. And yet hardly anyone is
talking about mental health care.

~~~
larrys
Excellent points.

"So when we're faced with a case like Swartz's, why are we so quick to find
someone to blame?"

Let me answer that for you by quoting Rahm Emanuel:

"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an
opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."

~~~
Cl4rity
I've never heard that quote before, and as sad as it is, it's a pretty damn
good one. Honestly, prior to his suicide, I didn't really know much about
Aaron Swartz, and I certainly had no idea that the U.S. prosecuted this
harshly for what seems like a mild/minor crime.

~~~
snowwrestler
Understand that "never let a crisis go to waste" was also the mindset that
allowed the Bush administration to pivot from 9/11 response to invading Iraq--
despite a complete lack of connection between the two.

My point is that while crisis creates opportunity, it does not justify all
responses. It does not exempt us from the need to soberly and (as much as
possible) objectively consider the merits of what people propose to do.

------
hamai
It's relieving to read pieces like this. That last paragraph was spot on. The
top comments got me laughing at "Those poor old bosses need all the help they
can get".

------
gonzo
So what happens next time one of Ortiz's targets decides to die, rather than
face trial?

