I printed one on zazzle.com on a dark t-shirt but it seems I can't share the design without becoming some kind of t-shirt vendor and take a royalty which I don't care to do. If you want one, you will have to upload the image yourself.
He was a pretty argumentative guy, but he was right about so much. He genuinely put his heart into what he believed in. Without him (and Lessig), SOPA easily could have gone the other way.
He didn't deserve what the justice system did to him. Let's be honest. Almost no one does.
I argued with Aaron a lot. He changed his mind a lot. When he didn't change his mind, it was almost always because I was wrong. In that way, he was the humblest person I have ever met.
"He was a pretty argumentative guy, but he was right about so much."
Not just in person, Aaron argued by email.
When webpy came out I emailed the webpy mailing list asking Aaron a few questions, made a comment on a trivial bug. I got a response and rebuke. Looking back now I see someone constantly underestimated and who probably had to fight to be heard.
That's not even remotely true. Our justice system may be severely fucked in many ways, but it's not completely nonfunctional. But we hear about the problems whenever something goes wrong. The other 99.9 percent of the time when things go smoothly we don't even notice...
There is a huge difference between things going smoothly and things being just. Something like 95% of cases in the US don't even go to trial. They're ended in a plea bargain, which allows the prosecutor to serve as both judge and jury. I do not think that is a sign of a healthy justice system, nor a sign of a justice system that actually pursues justice.
This topic came up with a friend's uncle once, who was an older Sicilian fellow with lots of first hand underworld exposure. He laughed at us as naive and claimed that the main purpose of the US justice system is to prevent vigilanteism.
Generally, however funny or bad this sounds, justice isn't the only objective of a justice system - various kinds of impact on behavior are other reasonable goals (you might believe three strike laws to be just but oppose them because it incentivizes to murder witnesses), as is lowering the cost of the justice system itself (a treatment of every case that is just in isolation might not be a good or even a just deal for society if it costs taxpayers $100M to process each case, even if it's relatively trivial.) (I'm not saying that any specific justice system is good or bad, just that justice shouldn't be its only goal, which I think is an intuitively obvious point for most but a very contentious point for some.)
and private arbitration clause included in most TOS agreements now a days. It doesn't work to provide justice as lawyers on company payroll will favor the company.
Alternatively, it is the sign of a very healthy justice system. When cases are cut and dry there's no reason to go to trial. A basic example: I know I jaywalked, and I got caught, so I pay the already predetermined fine. Why wasted tons of resources taking everything to trial and redifing the system with every case?
Some of these folks are taking plea deals to get out on time served. That time they are serving? It's accrued while they are waiting to go to trial. In a hideously over crowded prison system with overworked public defenders, the right to a speedy trial is a thing of the past. Here is a particularly terrible story of this kind: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law
The core principle of the US system of government (and of the British system that precedes it) is that no single person should have absolute power in a criminal trial. Power should be subject to checks and balances, even if those checks and balances are cursory in 95% of cases.
Put another way, the US criminal justice system is the equivalent of a software development process where the vast majority of changes go in without code review.
That's not true if prosecutors can lie about strength of case with immunity plus have a ton of leverage. Great explanation by this former prosecutor and judge:
> I know I jaywalked, and I got caught, so I pay the already predetermined fine. Why wasted tons of resources taking everything to trial and redifing the system with every case?
It certainly shows the proliferation of ridiculous criminal laws.
How many of these "99.9 percent" of "just" cases are simply just persecuting someone for an invented victimless "crime"?
If the questionable legality of walking across an empty street doesn't perfectly illustrate how our minds have been warped by a draconian sense of "justice", I don't know what could.
No, jaywalking just means you walked across the road where it wasn't allowed. The road can be empty, with a low speed limit, and enough distance to safely cross without any car getting to you. That's pretty much when I run across the road. I also find intersections are more unpredictable in less-dense, areas than crossing about 20-30 yds away from it. Crash data supports my point about intersections.
So, safety risk is low and I'm a criminal anyway. How to not be a criminal? Stop traffic and reduce others' productivity using the crossing lights. What a choice... So, I just kneel down, keep looking back and forth, wait for traffic to be nonexistent, and then sprint across the road far from intersection. Has benefit of conveying to cops watching that I was playing it careful while saving everyone else a stop. Tested it in front of a few cops with success. :)
This is exactly the type of knee-jerk reaction that perpetuates the status quo of immoral laws.
In your scenario, there is a civil case for the accident. There can still be a criminal sanction if a pedestrian fails to avoid vehicles (that are obeying traffic laws). This does not change my example, which is an empty street.
You must also be against drunk driving laws, and just about every law.
Waiting until after dangerous behavior causes damages, injury, or even death to to happen, then hiring a lawyer to sue to damages is terrible to way to organize society.
It benefits the privileged on both sides and monetary payouts do not bring back dead people or cure lingering injures.
So let a jury decide guilt or innocence, based on information such as whether there was a moving car within range of the pedestrian's crossing. The point of plea bargains isn't to save the government money. It's to prevent jury trials.
Jaywalking is a textbook example of a failure of the criminal justice system. The offence was invented by the auto industry to shift liability from drivers to pedestrians. It became law through lobbying. It is highly pertinent to the Swartz case.
I don't think so (and it shows that you really didn't understand my argument).
You claimed:
> Why wasted tons of resources taking everything to trial
With my sentence I wanted to point out that perhaps the problem is perhaps that part of the problem is that there are too many criminal offences - thus the judicial system is much too expense, which leads to the problem that most cases have to be regulated in the dubious way of plea bargaining.
I'm not sure what the original commenter meant, but some of us (a minority I'm sure) believe that no person deserves arrest, prosecution and jail in the forms they exist today even if that person is guilty of a crime. Things can go "smoothly" but still result in people being subjected to intimidation, cruelty and violence.
By smoothly I mean not "nice and quiet" even if unjust, I meant lawfully and justly. I'm sad as everyone should when intimidation, cruelty and violence happen under law enforcement and/or the judicial system. Yet I can still recognised that this is not always the case. And that the silent majority of cases happen with no incident, but we don't hear of those. We do hear about the scandals, though.
I am talking about petty crimes that shouldn't even end up in court (Aaron is a good example), drug offences, more serious crimes with way too harsh sentences, juvenile offenders tried as adults, mental illness treated as a crime, things like the felony murder rule and so on and so forth.
Mind you, I'm not talking about downright wrong verdicts (of which there are enough) here.
Ironically the biggest supporters of the current iteration of the CFAA are those you'd least expect. The currently-extant grey area allows them to target little guys and threaten them with spectacular, life-destroying threats, while also allowing them to abuse and/or ignore the law because they know that it's very unlikely another big entity will care enough to choose to litigate the issue to a conclusion (a process which often takes the better part of the decade).
If the CFAA were not selectively enforced, the internet landscape would look very different. Search engines like Google never would've been able to exist. Who can quantify what we've lost because a big corporate interest threatened a small innovator with jail time and financial ruin if they didn't stop causing a problem for BigCorp's business, which actually turns out being a pretty good summary of Aaron's case.
> It amazes me what our justice system can do to people and not be held responsible.
Just to play devil's advocate here (and I understand this goes against prevailing opinion), but he did break the law. That much isn't in dispute, they had a video of him entering the MIT network closet. And he didn't commit misdemeanors, he committed a half dozen felonies (actually more, but the prosecution dropped a few of them).
I understand what he was fighting for and agree with him and his ideology. I support Open Access, but let's not kid ourselves or delude ourselves - he wasn't innocent. He did commit crimes. I don't think this is the justice's systems fault. They were going to go extremely light on him but it was he who chose to fight.
>Just to play devil's advocate here (and I understand this goes against prevailing opinion), but he did break the law.
He absolutely did break the law. I, personally don't dispute that, nor do I think that that's a controversial fact here. The trouble that I and many other commenters here have with what happened to Aaron Swartz is the gross disproportionality of the punishment he was facing. For downloading academic papers, he was facing a punishment that could have gone to literally millions of dollars in fines and up to 35 years in prison. That is the sort of punishment that I would expect for ending a life (i.e. negligent homicide), not downloading a few thousand academic papers and publishing them on the Internet.
Should Aaron have gone to jail? Should he have been forced to pay some restitution? Probably. But I don't think that holding the spectre of millions of dollars in fines and the rest of his adult life in jail over his head was the right thing for the prosecutor to do. Its very rare for a crime to break just one law. Prosecutors almost always have a choice of laws to prosecute under. In this case, the prosecutor chose the heaviest, most punishing law, when she could have chosen a lesser charge.
> For downloading academic papers, he was facing a punishment that could have gone to literally millions of dollars in fines and up to 35 years in prison
He wasn't realistically facing 35 years. He could not get anywhere near that under the federal sentencing guidelines. See this prior discussion for details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7996807
Prosecutors in the Swartz case were actually asking for about 7 years, which was still much higher than they were likely to get. Swartz's own lawyer thought that he'd probably just get probation if convicted.
The DOJ really needs to stop using this stupid method of writing press releases. They wrote the indictment and so they sure as hell better know exactly what they are charging and what facts they are alleging, so they should be able to figure out the guideline sentence that would result if they won on all counts. That's what should be in the press release.
I've heard stories from my days at MIT of people doing much worse things in server closets. The MIT community's view on these things is vastly different from the federal government's, and there's a large and shocking disconnect when those laws are applied to what's normally fairly accepted (if not explicitly, then implicitly condoned) behavior in the community.
This wasn't implicitly or explicitly condoned. MIT had detected what Aaron was doing, and deployed countermeasures. Aaron defeated those countermeasures; MIT deployed tougher ones, and Aaron escalated again by breaking into the server closet and patching his laptop directly into the network switch, knowing it was the only way to bypass the considerable efforts MIT was making to protect itself.
This was no, "Oops, I didn't realize you minded!" situation. Aaron was fully aware that MIT didn't approve of what he was doing, and he didn't care, and was actively battling to do what he pleased anyway.
Are you basing this on statements from MIT, from the government, from the indictment...?
I ask because, though I've never been near MIT, everything I read about it suggests that every one of these steps is seen as part of the game expected to be played by a few curious students now and then.
Typically, when an excessive use
case is reported that is determined to originate from within MIT’s network, the Libraries
report this to either the MIT Information Services and Technology (IS&T) network
security team or MIT’s “Stopit” group, which deals with inappropriate behavior that
occurs electronically. The Stopit group’s general response is to send the offender a
warning email message. This is almost always all that is needed to get people’s attention
and have them stop whatever it was they were doing that caused the problem.
[...]
This time, the requests and downloads stimulated a cascade of failures that brought down
multiple JSTOR servers. Half the servers in one data center failed, and JSTOR engineers
feared that the entire service might go down worldwide.
[...]
Also on October 12, the Director of the MIT Libraries reported to MIT’s Academic
Council that a cyber-attack of the JSTOR database had caused a weekend shutdown of
JSTOR to the entire campus.
I'm an MIT alum. There is no "game" being played. If a student is violating certain terms of service (e.g. downloading all of JSTOR) he/she would normally be told to stop, and that's the end of it. You do it again, and you might get another warning. Alternatively, you might find yourself in front of a dean or without network privileges.
Breaking into a closet, and connecting your hardware gets you expelled. Regardless of the locked state of the door, entering a closet to which you do not have explicit access is breaking into said closet.
I sincerely doubt it gets you expelled as long as you're not damaging anything, which I wouldn't count connecting a piece of equipment as doing. Breaking into places locked and otherwise is part of the core of MIT's culture. Did you never go roof and tunnel hacking?
That said, I'm not as familiar as I should be with what MIT tried to do to get Aaron to stop, and whether he knew that they had deployed those because of what he did.
> I've heard stories from my days at MIT of people doing much worse things in server closets
Similar from my days at Caltech. However, there were two important considerations for this kind of thing at Caltech.
1. The "look the other way" attitude of the administration applied to members of the Caltech community, and also depended on how you were connected to Caltech. A student could get away with more than an employee or a friend/relative of a student.
2. The Caltech honor system applied. If you were hacking something without permission and the people in charge of that thing told you to stop, not stopping would have likely been an honor system violation. I'm pretty sure that repeatedly purposefully evading someone's attempt to get you to stop messing with their thing would count as ignoring a request to stop.
Which just proves my point. The penalty he would have faced for burglary would have been less, by far, than the penalty he faced for violating the CFAA.
JSTOR doesn't lock content away. They make deals with existing journals to take content that is not available online and make it available online. Any access restrictions JSTOR imposes come from the content owners, not JSTOR.
JSTOR has also convinced most of these journals, even ones with restrictive access policies, to let JSTOR make their content available for free to the public at many libraries and schools, including ones that do not have subscriptions to the underlying journals. Because of JSTOR, many second tier colleges, community colleges, and even high schools have free access to vast journal libraries that they would not have otherwise had access to. They also do a lot to bring cheap or free access to vast journal libraries to schools and libraries in developing countries.
JSTOR has probably expanded free public access to scientific research more than any other group or organization.
Sure, it would be nice if everything were open access so you could just legally get it all on the net for free, but many journals aren't willing to do that yet, and in the meantime JSTOR provides a way for most of the public to get that content at the cost of having to visit a library or school that offers public JSTOR.
I can't imagine a way that's even figuratively true. The crime of burglary is about being somewhere that you're not supposed to; perhaps you meant to say it's like larceny of the public. But even then, it's a very tenuous connection you're trying to draw.
These companies were not taking anything away from the public; they made the effort to digitize, process, and catalog documents, which is no small task. And they set up servers to host these documents and make them searchable. If you feel they're asking too much money for these efforts, you're welcome to simply pretend they don't exist, and replicate their work yourself. They did nothing to make that task harder.
Now, if the companies destroyed the original public records or otherwise placed new locks around them that hadn't existed beforehand, then yes, your metaphor, while still hand-wavy, would at least hold water. But of course nothing like that actually happened here.
The "them" in the sentence you quoted refers to "the original public records".
The locks you refer to were around the new, value-added work: the digitized, processed, cataloged version of the papers they had made by adding value to the original public-domain documents. The locks were not applied to the original documents.
It's like the difference between storing a touched-up version you made of an Apollo 11 photo in a vault, and stealing the original photo negative from NASA and putting that in a vault.
JSTOR doesn't claim that its documents are public-domain:
Our licenses from publishers are non-exclusive, meaning that the publishers are free to license their content to others to digitize or make it available in any way they might wish. [0]
Not only were many of the papers in JSTOR funded by the public, but JSTOR itself claims to be funded through by the public through universities:
We do this with funds provided by thousands of libraries and institutions, all of whom are our partners in disseminating access around the globe. [0]
JSTOR cannot magically put documents in the public domain. It needs the permission of the original publishers. JSTOR is responsible for scanning a whole ton of old journals which would otherwise only be available as physical copies in libraries. Nothing JSTOR has ever done has ever made anything less accessible than it was before.
"Burglary is typically defined as the unlawful entry into almost any structure (not just a home or business) with the intent to commit any crime inside (not just theft/larceny). No physical breaking and entering is required; the offender may simply trespass through an open door."
Is the right course of action to break "unjust" laws, or to just fight to change them? This is an opinion, but I argue that every person has a different definition of what is "just", and if everyone followed their definition of "just", than our legal system would break down.
Society functions on a set of laws, but those laws can change for the better.
"A proposed policy change with low support among economically elite Americans (one-out-of-five in favour) is adopted only about 18% of the time," they write, "while a proposed change with high support (four-out-of-five in favour) is adopted about 45% of the time."
On the other hand:
When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it.
They conclude:
Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organisations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.
Fighting to change the system from within that system is much, much less effective than massie civil disobedience of that system. In fact it seems completely ineffectual to me most of the time.
I'm on the 'break unjust laws' side of the argument, as have been many of the greatest civil rights figures in history. Break the unjust laws and convince as many people as you can to break them as well.
The US was founded after war. That is going far above and beyond merely breaking unjust laws. Working within the system is preferable as long as it remains an option, but for many it has closed off. So they switch to breaking unjust laws instead. Be wary of what follows if that option is removed.
I mean "good" in the sense of the values that you honor - and here indeed you can't be good and lawful at the same time (except "being lawful" is your exact definition of good).
I personally believe that the way to go is to turn ethics from a humanity into an empirical science, so that any "false" (in a sense that future people will have to define formally) can indeed be falsified. This would at least solve many problems. But at the moment this all is rather science-fiction, since we don't even understand how our brains works (which such theories will probably have to incorporate as special case).
Those here are well enough in the know to realize that the law is often twisted to serve corrupt ends and thus any question of law breaking should also be met with a consideration of the morality and ethics of the law and of the enforcement of the law.
First, Aaron was as much our country as the people who persecuted him. He cared about it; you should too.
You can react two ways: 1) impotent anger or 2) stand up and continue his fight. Which will it be?
Find friends and others and we can all pitch in to create a method of distributing knowledge in a way that can't be controlled. The internet makes it possible, the only thing missing is the will and the effort. Anyone can contact me: my email's in my profile.
US justice system has so much inconsistencies. Punishment for copyright cases being harsher than the ones for Actual crimes being one of them. Lets not forget that he is being called criminal because he broke a law, a silly thing signed into law probably because someone lobbyed so hard for it. He is no actual criminal. He didn't feel the articles he downloaded from servers should be kept private. At least the research papers funded with public money should be public property. But so much pressure was put on him that he took his own life. If justice system was fair, he could've faced it. But currently the system is broken. He knew that and felt hopeless. Pushing for things like banning him from all things electronic, and thus internet, is not the right way to serve justice. What reforms have taken place since then?
> He is no actual criminal. He didn't feel the articles he downloaded from servers should be kept private.
That is a horrible argument. should I just be able to take your tv because I think it shouldn't be locked up in your house?
I'm not saying I agree with the papers being locked up. Not believing in a law does not make you innocent. Many people think they don't have to pay their taxes and they all go to jail.
I realize the ridiculousness of comment I made, but I wasn't originally talking about tv.
Aaron has made possible free access to many documents that were being charged for access, but they are actually documents that should be in public domain.
JSTOR is journal store which contains journals published by researchers all over the world. JSTOR access is licensed. There is no open access and the access fees are not cheap for something that is digitalized. Does JSTOR compensate the original article publisher? Aaron Swartz was only trying to make this archive public. He could've used an alternative way to achieve that goal. But does he actually deserve 30 to 50 years in prison and a million in fine for what he did?
I wouldn't have had a problem with it if those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis were given an appropriate punishment, say 500 years in jail time and fined at least a few billions.
Again I'm not saying I agree with the way he was prosecuted but he did commit a lot of crimes. Whether or not you agree with the ends he was aiming for doesn't change the facts.
I think projects like sci-hub are definitely a step in that direction, and the more projects that leverage the legal arbitrage and technical capabilities that exist today the better.
I'd be interested in trying to help someone who lives outside of the US figure out how to come up with something similar but for all the data that is trapped behind the facebooks and the like. I did something like this before, but I got hit with a C&D, but the technical capabilities are still available to leverage to weaken facebooks hold on personality information if one can side step the jurisdiction of such legal tools.
Seems like an apt time to reupload the markdown dump of his blog that was made by a HN'er 3 years ago. (we were concerned that his blog would cease to be a going concern)
Someone actually made a perfectly indexed epub back then but I think HN frowns upon the reformatting of someone's public blog, which I guess is why more people don't upload an epub of pg's blog.
MIT Failed him - spectacularly so. If they had declared that they had no wish to see him in prison and used their (considerable) influence he would be alive.
Aaron had been talking about suicide years before this, maybe we should just blame reddit?
Edit: Why the downvotes? Fact is that we don't know why Aaron killed himself, but we do know that he had a prior history of depression and in 2007 posted what seemed very much like a suicide note.
Frankly, making claims like "If x had (not) done y he'd still be alive" and presenting them as facts is straight up disgusting.
We really don't know how much of an effect MIT declaring that they don't want Swartz in prison would've had on his prosecution, speculating on that is rather pointless anyway since we never got to hear his sentence.
I never made such a claim. I specifically brought up the previous depression to make clear that we really don't know what was going on his life and what ended up driving him over the edge.
But they didn't lock the door. Or take the computer that he left there (and it seems they knew it). They didn't stop guests from having unfettered access to JSTOR. They decided the best course of action was to send police after Swartz.
Eh...this wasn't a private residence but a building where the public had free access. And it's hard to argue that they "forgot to lock" the doors when they didn't bother locking them even after they realized Swartz was going in there.
> Yes, for breaking and entering. Fuck MIT.
For going in to an unlocked room in a public building.
>Eh...this wasn't a private residence but a building where the public had free access. And it's hard to argue that they "forgot to lock" the doors when they didn't bother locking them even after they realized Swartz was going in there.
At that point they kind of needed to know WHY Swartz was going there.
>For going in to an unlocked room in a public building.
Have a friend in a Federal investigation. No evidence besides people who did something wrong willing to turn State's Evidence. Heck he was under surveillance for 2 years and NOTHING. He is threatened with 25 years to life.
Has cost them over $200,000 in lawyer fees and to go to trial is over $1,500,000 at least. Doesn't sound very justice. Government has spent over a millions already with an empty war chest for trial.
The response to his death is creepy to me, like "His name is Robert Paulson". There's so much misinformation, and misuse of his death for ideological and social purposes unrelated to the actual person. The fact that someone made something called "Internet's Own Boy" only compounds this. If it were me, I'd want to come back to life just to tell you all that I'm not your puppet, and you have no clue why I died; you didn't know me, and I am not "your boy". Since I couldn't come back to life, I'd hope there'd be people who would speak against this groupthink on my behalf.
Did you actually watch the documentary? (It's available for free) They talk with people who were very close with him, including his father, his ex-girlfriend, and Lawrence Lessig. It also includes excerpted footage of him speaking at various events. (Not to mention his blog is still present) If these people (like the author) and excerpts don't actually know Aaron Swartz, then I don't know who could. (I'm also of the personal opinion that documentaries are not meant to tell the truth, but rather solidify a living memory of the person)
One can't deny that Aaron was opposed to institutional corruption (such as his work with PACER) and wanted to see the freedom of information (see his "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto" for a precursor to that). Of course as in Fight Club, the original intent of a movement or a person's identity can get twisted and morphed, but it would help if you actually bought up these inaccuracies. The most insulting thing we could do is forget what Aaron fought for and let all that he stood for go for nought out of some misguided respect for his memory.
This historical event is what tipped me into the direction of being much, much more concerned about government overreach and find some sympathy with my libertarian-leaning friends for the first time. Swartz's story will be part of The Fire Next Time that James Baldwin wrote about 40 years ago. Swartz is part of the same story that includes Eric Gardner, Sandra Bland, et al.
A Swartz is more closely related to general government overreach like Snowden or Katherine Mitchell; people who saw a system that needed fixing. Comparing A Swartz with Gardner is a somewhat unfair comparison for Swartz.
While Swartz was surely a lot more of a hero then Eric Garner, both were each in their own way murdered (or left for dead) by the same system of criminal prosecution.
One of the first movies I watched on Netflix (we just got it) was "The Internet's own boy".
He was the typical overachiever, successful in almost anything he touched but finally he decided to hack justice. And broke a bunch of laws and went against a few institutions. JSTOR wasn't responsible, MIT might've been but he broke through enough barriers set up by them that Aaron did deserve a slight tap on his knuckles (the plea deal). And rather than take it he decided to end his life cause it meant the end of his political career. If he had been so volatile I wonder how he would've reacted had his earlier efforts elsewhere had failed.
He is such a inspiring legend, shining beside Edward and the other fighting friends, for freedom and a better world.
I love Aaron for his spirit and the mission he lived.
For anyone, who hasn't seen the documentary [1], I can recommend it!
Good to be remembered to some of his goals:
„We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks.“ [2]
I independently came up with the same thing about journals but instinctively knew better. I looked at the financial reports for a major one to confirm or reject the instinct. All I can say is "Holy shit. We're not buying that any time soon."
Thanks for the documentary link, though. I'll check it out.
I encourage everyone to take time today to reflect on Aaron's legacy, and on how we can use technology to make the world more just, more open, and more fair.
Related: I'd run across an article some time back that discussed what it was that Aaron might have been up to by doing massive data collection of JSTOR data. Unfortunately I cannot find the article and don't recall just what it suggested.
The upshot though was that there may have been some quantitative / bulk analysis that such a corpus would have allowed or enabled, potentially turning up interesting or unusual elements of large-scale academic research.
Can anyone give a clear and concise summary of what he did to bring on the wrath of the criminal justice system? Every article I have read jumps back and fourth through his timeline and inter-splices useless information.
I know it involves breaking into a room, writing a bot to scrape a website, and MIT. I'm not sure on the details though.
He downloaded a large amount of articles from JSTOR. This involved setting up a laptop in a storage room in MIT, where he was not a student. MIT had to investigate it because the laptop was making a large amount of requests to JSTOR's servers and JSTOR had to block access to MIT. The rest of the story involves an overzealous federal prosecutor wanting to charge him under the CFAA to make an example of him because of Aaron's "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto". JSTOR also claimed that Aaron cost them an overinflated sum of damages, but was not interested in prosecution after Aaron agreed to delete the acquired documents. MIT adopted a policy of neutrality in the matter, contrary to its spirit of hacking, and did not speak up for Aaron's case. Hope that helps. If you want a more objective look at the case, see Wikipedia [0][1] and MIT's Report to the President [2] (which is long, but very comprehensive).
an idealist to the core who has left a mark on world or anyone who got to know about him directly or indirectly. May be governments and people like us have failed him. Its like few or majority hold too much of power to make a decision rather than what is right.
I think he should've just taken a plea deal and gone to prison for a few months. It wouldn't have been that bad - maybe he could've taken the time to write a book.
Could you have picked a better thread to make some irrelevant rant?
To address your only relevant question; I think he may have enjoyed interacting with the very smart people here. He also joined (merged?) the reddit team through ycom.
It's pretty gross the way you've made this memorial thread all about you. This seems like the exact wrong place to air your personal grievances against HN.
"2. Anyways email me again Hacker News. It's going into a file. Why on earth would you think it's legally permissible to email me. It's considered spam--right?"
Wow. So many misconceptions... Is there even _any part_ of the above that is correct?!?
Your e-mail is just like your physical mail-box: Anyone can mail you something any time. That's what it's FOR.
Hacker News is far too eager to make martyrs out of suicides in the tech community. It was done with Aaron Swartz, and it was done with Ian Murdock, with ruthless efficiency. The only thing it accomplishes is fomenting impotent rage, and it certainly doesn't honor anyone's memory, or lead to practical solutions or discussion.
No he was not murdered; he committed suicide rather than face jail and fight. Using hyperbolic language and calling a suicide murder doesn't do anything useful.
He didn't have to commit suicide, that was his choice, you cannot blame his choice on those prosecuting him. People get prosecuted every day and serve time and don't go and kill themselves. He was not murdered. Murder means an unlawful killing; prosecutors did not unlawfully kill Aaron, he did that himself.
He was suffering from depression and suicidal ideation. He wasn't in a sound state of mind necessary to make a choice about killing himself. He died from depression. The circumstances merely contributed to that.
The reasoning behind the "murder" rhetoric isn't entirely wrong. That he wasn't treated any different from any other suspect doesn't mean the way he was treated didn't contribute to his death.
If a suspect dies from law enforcement SOP due to a pre-existing health condition (e.g. tackling someone who already has trouble breathing) we tend to be outraged about that, SOP or not. In this case the health condition was depression with suicidal ideation -- it's not unreasonable to blame the behaviour of the prosecutors for bringing about his death even if the same behaviour wouldn't have led to the death of a healthier suspect.
Personally I think this is more of a failure of mental health care than of the prosecution -- although one could debate whether their indifference to his condition, or the general politics involved in their decisions, is indicative of other problems. He should have been under professional mental care and counselling. Prosecutors aren't mental health care professionals -- they're not qualified to judge his stability or risk to himself.
> Carmen Ortiz as the prosecutor was the law at that moment
No, she was a prosecutor attempting to apply the law; rather than have his day in court, Aaron chose suicide. It is the judge and jury that are the law and Aaron never saw them.
> so it is a circular reasoning and sophistry to say that killing Aaron Swartz was not unlawful
It is nothing of the sort.
> And it was Carmen Ortiz' choice to bring Aaron into a position where he didn't see any other escape than suicide.
That's still Aaron's fault, not hers, he could have chosen to have his day in court and she could have lost. We'll never know because his will was too weak to even face the possibility of a trial. Committing suicide to avoid a trial is never the prosecutors faults.
It's not unreasonable to choose death over living under an unjust and corrupt regime, whose laws you don't agree with. In fact, there are many people in the world today who make that very choice.
I'm assuming you've never had a helpless moment where you truly felt powerless. In that moment, even death seems preferable to a life where you are helpless.
Personally, I would rush head on into the barrels of guns pointed at me, rather than live with my head bowed and my spirit broken.
> It's not unreasonable to choose death over living under an unjust and corrupt regime, whose laws you don't agree with.
Who said it was? I said it wasn't murder. Aaron killed himself, that is an indisputable fact of the case. No one agrees with all the laws of the country, anywhere on the planet; that's life everywhere. He didn't choose to die over the corrupt regime; he chose to die to avoid facing jail, he was just fine living in the corrupt regime before jail looked like the final option.
> Personally, I would rush head on into the barrels of guns pointed at me, rather than live with my head bowed and my spirit broken.
Brave words, but they're just words; people react differently when actually faced with such circumstances.
That's not a prosecutor's job to worry about the mental state of a defendant. It's their job to prosecute the case if the evidence is there, and it was. The defense can worry about the defendants state of mind, that's part of their job. This prosecutor was overzealous in the charges being made, but there's no doubt they had a strong case against him and he was guilty of a felony.
I think it's just in sharp contrast of how say top officers of major banks that laundered 378.4bn USD in drug money were treated (Wachovia, Wells Fargo ...).
>It's not unreasonable to choose death over living under an unjust and corrupt regime, whose laws you don't agree with. In fact, there are many people in the world today who make that very choice.
You know we have this thing called planes right? In no way was Aaron forced to stay in the US.
> It's not unreasonable to choose death over living under an unjust and corrupt regime
You presumably live under the same regime, yet here you are, breathing and posting. Not at all rushing into gun barrels?
What gives, man?
> I'm assuming you've never had a helpless moment where you truly felt powerless. In that moment, even death seems preferable to a life where you are helpless.
Don't extrapolate yourself to others. I have been in that situation, more than once, and it only ever imbued me with a ferocious will to live.
To whom? It's clearly useful to us or we wouldn't be discussing it. I see nothing ambiguous about the situation, he broke the law willingly, got caught, couldn't handle the consequences, so he committed suicide. What's ambiguous about that?
How do we even know he killed himself over his prosecution? He didn't leave a note. He had already admitted to having suicidal thoughts after he sold reddit to Conde Nast.
I'm still disgusted by the behavior of the MIT officials in all of this. Whenever I see or hear 'MIT' the first thing that comes to mind is: "that's the school that was responsible for the death of Aaron".
And why would that come to mind when none of it is true? Firstly, Aaron is responsible for his own death, it was suicide. Secondly, it's the zealous prosecutor you should be mad at, MIT is not to blame here; Aaron broke many laws and they were well within their rights to have him arrested. Good intentions aside, what Aaron did was illegal and he deserved to be arrested for it; what he didn't deserve was more than probation and a slap on the wrist.
Aaron was responsible for for his own death, in the same way that every human being is responsible for their own life once they reach adult-hood. To say that he was responsible is to say nothing at all really, because most of us in a forum such as this have that mental model of person-hood.
Studies of suicide show that during harsh times such as during a crisis or a drought suicides go up. Of course those extra suicides are responsible for their actions but we recognise that external factors _can_ cause some people to go on downward spirals resulting in their deaths.
If the justice system had been more merciful and compassionate Aaron would undoubtedly still be alive. Yes, he was responsible for taking his own life. Yes, the pressure he was put under was indirectly a cause in him taking his own life. The laws are unjust and the penalties are too harsh.
Well oftentimes colleges can and will exercise discretion when it comes to having a student arrested and they will perform their own internal inquiry to determine whether an offense warrants arrest and prosecution. That's just the way it goes. Colleges should do the right thing for their students and protect them when appropriate because all kids do stupid things. MIT would have known pretty well what type of prosecution he would face. Do you think all students who do something illegal on campus get arrested for it?
He didn't just do some silly illegal thing; he illegally hacked a network from a closet he should not have been in and hit it with so much traffic that he caused legitimate users of the network to suffer loss of access for multiple days and he did this multiple times after being kicked out. Legitimate users were harmed, regardless of what what anyone feels, Aaron committed a felony and was rightfully arrested.
Beyond that, you seem to be overlooking the fact that it wasn't MIT that was after Aaron, but JSTOR, who constantly pushed MIT to help them locate the hacker who was taking their data from the MIT network. MIT didn't have the option to just handle the matter internally, a third party was involved who was being hacked through the MIT network.
You know what happens when you're a hacktivist; you go to jail. Aaron knew he was guilty, he knew he was breaking the law when he did it, it was willful civil disobedience by his own admission. His suicide was likely the result of his knowing jail was coming even if the prosecutor hadn't been overzealous because he committed a felony and knew it and he couldn't deal with facing the consequences of his actions.
He wanted to change the system, he went about it the wrong way and figured that out too late.
You can't say that it was wilful civil disobedience and then say that he went about it the wrong way, you contradict yourself as that's kind of the definition of civil disobedience.
If you're saying that he ought not to been civilly disobedient then that's a different matter but what he did makes him a sort of modern-day hero. That he took his own life makes him a martyr in a weird kind of way. I know that hero and martyr are emotive words but I think I nearly feel that way about all this.
And it's not theft, it's copyright infringement. Repeat after me: you can't steal bits and bytes, only copy them, and copying is infringement, not theft.
> You can't say that it was wilful civil disobedience and then say that he went about it the wrong way, you contradict yourself as that's kind of the definition of civil disobedience.
I didn't mean "morally" wrong, I mean wrong approach. That's not contradictory at all; civil disobedience is not always the correct way to go about change. Sometimes it is, like when its done en-masse; going it alone, wrong approach.
> And it's not theft
Fine, infringing their data, irrelevant to the conversation; a crime no matter what label you want to apply.
The right approach is to lobby to get the law changed, not break it by yourself and hope you don't get hammered.
> Sometimes it is, like when its done en-masse; going it alone, wrong approach.
Perhaps, perhaps not. There's certainly safety in numbers. But this issue is not a huge social issue like, say, nationalist causes or other political issues. This is a kind of geeky issue that only a small fraction of the population gets but that everybody should care about. Also the law-breaking is doing no-one any physical harm. Nobody is going to go hungry because they are deprived of food.
Some argue that mp3 downloads have not affected the music industry's revenues and profits, or at least not by the vast amounts they claim. Similarly I imagine the out of pocket hit to JSTOR to be pretty small, but couple that with the fact that a lot of academic papers were funded by public money then people start seeing things differently. Hence the open-access journal movement and Arxiv and so on. And what about the benefits to society brought about by giving wider access to knowledge? One could start to take a pretty dim view of the ridiculous prices the JSTORs and Elseviers charge.
> it's irrelevant to the conversation.
It's not totally irrelevant. Stealing/theft sounds worse than infringement.
Look, I'm not having a go at you. I just think that Aaron was justified in what he did and I admire him for what he did. There are times for emailing and times for plugging in a network cable, Aaron chose the cable and I don't think that was the wrong approach even though it ended tragically.
Hey, I agree with Aaron's position that the data should be freely accessible, so no need to sell me on that or the fact it was non-violent, that's not in contention.
> Stealing/theft sounds worse than infringement.
It's not relevant because this conversation isn't about how it sounds, it's about who's to blame for his death. None of which has anything to do with what the particular charges were.
> I just think that Aaron was justified in what he did and I admire him for what he did. There are times for emailing and times for plugging in a network cable, Aaron chose the cable and I don't think that was the wrong approach even though it ended tragically.
And that's your right, personally I admire the principles, but his approach was naive and imho not worth admiration; his suicide tragic and also not worth admiration. It was the wrong approach because a bad outcome for Aaron was predictable from the onset that led to a needless suicide of a very talented individual. You can't flagrantly commit federal crimes and think jail isn't an option, regardless of the merits of those laws.
I wonder what effective [as far as achieving an ends] civil disobedience looks like in the era when such is relegated to free speech zones? Will it look like asymmetric, guerrilla like tactics that subvert/coop mechanisms of power that make it hard to leverage garden variety lawyers?
I imagine that any form of non-violent civil disobedience is fair game. I imagine that collective action is always more troubling for the system because the systemic response is more challenging to orchestrate.
Some things change by themselves. We can see that marijuana is slowly transitioning from being a criminalised substance a decriminalised one. I don't partake myself but society is heading that way, that's plain to see.
Same with civil rights of all kind. Yes, it might take centuries but the arrow of equality is clearly pointing in just one way. But it does take civil disobedience and protest.
In this specific case (academic articles) I personally believe that we ought to cover the cost of storage and distribution and that's it. Because this is not a civil rights issue, more a, I don't know, societal expectation(?), a right to knowledge so that society can be improved quicker rather slower. These rent-seekers are like grit in well oiled machinery gunking up the works. I more or less think the worst form of money-making is rent-seeking.
Handling it internally was precluded by the fact that Swartz had no association with MIT. He was never a student there. There was no way for them to handle it internally.
He was also caught by the MIT Police which has full state-vested arrest power, so I'm not sure if there's any turning back from the legal system at that point.
That's a very good point. It's pretty common when a sexual assault happens for the school to handle it internally rather than notify the authorities. Apparently, this is the case at MIT, and 1 in 6 female students have reported being sexually assaulted[1].
When a school sends police after someone for downloading academic files, and yet decides to not send the police after sex offenders (dealing with them internally and not even expelling them), they have pretty screwed up priorities.
Ask Harvard to take away his JSTOR access? It doesn't seem like it would have been difficult to have found some punitive measures that didn't involve the police.
You misunderstand what happened, Harvard wasn't involved, he went onto the MIT campus where he was not a student, to take advantage of their on campus anonymous access to JSTOR, he was abusing MIT's open anonymous policy to get the data and he kept moving around to different terminals whenever they'd kill his access to the one he was at; he finally ended up sneaking into a network closet and plugging directly into the network to get access because the public terminals he'd be using had all been shut down to lock him out. He didn't have access, he was't logged in, he was taking advantage of MIT's anonymous policy.
While you certainly have a point, MITs actions in this case, and in the case of Star Simpson show what looks to me (as an outsider who really wants to go to an elite college) like MIT doesn't stand behind their students the way that I would expect an elite college to stand behind their students.
I mean, maybe that's just the way it is; maybe being a student at an elite institution just doesn't come with the level of privilege than I think it comes with; Maybe Stanford would have done the same thing (though my impression is that they would not.) like I said, I'm an outsider here, but the actions of MIT faculty in these two cases have significantly diminished how much I want to become a student there.
MIT 2020 admit here: yes, it is still in the hearts and minds of the newest classes. When discussing some of our idols, one student and I both agreed upon Aaron Swartz. He may be gone, but never forgotten and the new students look up to his legacy.
Whenever I visit MIT to work with some researchers there I always manage to sneak in an Aaron reference and love watching their faces. People can justify what happened by citing that he broke the Law™, but this is still a sore thing for many on the campus, that I think those who want to, shouldn't miss the beat to rub salt in MIT's wounds, especially because of the history around hacking at MIT.
People won't think twice about things they don't like unless you make it unavoidable.
Yeah, I just want to live my life as whatever the fuck random people who really don't give a damn about me (and vice versa) equate to being as "professional"… lol
Surprisingly, it doesn't stop people who want to work with me. I guess it helps when you can do useful stuff a couple standard deviations away from the vapid/banal bullshit most seem satisfied working on and aggrandizing such efforts :P
Your use of professional reminds me why I hate such cliche words. We are remembering a soul, whom we all feel guilty of letting down in our own ways. I am actually delighted that the GP, displays their humanity and caring, even when does not need to. Professionalism be damned, quirks and caring makes us human.
Edit: And why people downvoted the GP? Are they passing their judgement on GP's raising the topic with MIT people they interact with. Please note GP is just sharing it, in an after-the-act relevant discussion.
For dark fabric: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6fL4G1FVF-AdHhCdVU4UHhCNk0...
For lighter fabric: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6fL4G1FVF-AblFNYlBrWTJmems...
Source Inkscape SVG: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6fL4G1FVF-AbHB3ZW9CZWNDVmc...
Based on a photo by Sage Ross (CC BY-SA) http://ragesoss.com/blog/2013/07/12/the-use-aaron-swartz-pho...
I printed one on zazzle.com on a dark t-shirt but it seems I can't share the design without becoming some kind of t-shirt vendor and take a royalty which I don't care to do. If you want one, you will have to upload the image yourself.