Some of his writing in this reminds me a lot of David Foster Wallace (who is mentioned), in particular the way he is deeply concerned with seeming humble but feeling egotistical: self-consciously projecting humility but being aware of the humility as a kind of affectation in a recursive and tortuous cycle of self-awareness.
I relate to this so much. The very odd “aggrandizing” that is so often necessary for starting and running a company, coupled with my massive impostor syndrome that is just never going to go away at this point, is a very very hard cognitive dissonance to manage. I’ve done it, and will do it again, but it makes me squirm on the inside.
Do you have any advice or wise words on how you manage this?
I find myself in a leadership position, but I feel immensely uncomfortable when directing others. In my head there's always a nagging voice that replies 'who are you to tell us what to do?'
The sibling comments nailed it, but in short: be authentic. I readily admit to my employees when I am confused, ask for their help when needed, and am as transparent as reasonably possible. In general, we make decisions by consensus (though not always, as some cases necessitate that). I freely admit they are better than me at many things, as that was literally the point of hiring them. My job, in turn, is to ensure they can do theirs spectacularly and with minimal annoyance and maximal happiness. Being a glorified 'shit umbrella' can get lonely, so it's important to find other folks to talk to about it (ideally that are unrelated to the company you work for).
Most importantly: arbitrary decisions will kill your team. If you cannot answer the question "why?" with something other than "because I said so," or worse, "because management said so," you are in for a world of trouble. To build loyalty and get your team to follow you into pretty much any 'battle,' get your hands dirty, fight on their behalf (but this requires knowing what they care about), and help them improve and grow. That is the job of a good manager.
Seems to me the best leader might be someone who forever feels uncomfortable and uses that positively (eg asking for advice, promoting/delegating to betters, expressing gratitude, admitting mistakes, giving due credit) rather than negatively. A leader without discomfort suggests an unchecked ego…a recipe for eventual disaster no matter how long the good times (if any) may last.
Prior to reading your comment, I had not been aware of such feeling.
I aspire to be in a leadership position in the future. However, right now let me tell you why and how I would like to be led or directed by somebody:
- You give me space to voice my opinions as if I am a specialist in the subject;
- You give me space to make mistake and learn from them;
- You are willing to admit that you don't know a certain topic;
- You carry about your own self-development;
- You are willing to support me on areas where I lack knowledge or experience without judging;
- You often show that you care about the people in the team, and whether we are doing what matters;
- You deal with me as the adult that I am, and you are open to have difficult conversations with empathy about topics such as: under-performance, misfit, interpersonal conflicts, or even about letting me go (firing);
"who are you to tell us what to do"
Well, you are the human capable of trusting each member of your team of doing the best they can, and capable of sitting with them when things are not working.
Good leaders don't "tell people what to do" exactly. It's more of a "this is something we as a group must focus on because of reason x".
I'm a new leader of sorts myself and all I do is looking at a Roadmap to see what is important, figure out what my team needs to do and ask people which parts they would like to work on (although some people are better suited for certain tasks, and that's your job to know that by knowing your team).
I don't put myself on any kind of high horse. I'm still hands on myself too, doing work just like everyone else.
If your ego starts to tell you that you are somehow better than any people, you will not be a good leader.
> The irrationalities of power fascinated him, but he found the irrationalities of activism exasperating. Most activists, in his experience, would launch big campaigns about big issues and do things that they guessed would be beneficial, like running television ads or sending out direct mail, but they never did the work to figure out whether what they were doing was actually changing policy.
This is the frustrating thing about any activism: it moves slowly. For someone who cannot finish projects, or needs immediate feedback, it appears to be constant failure. However, activist movements are less like drag racers (the cars ;) and more like xenon ion thrusters that NASA tested a few years back: they spew out tiny ions that individually barely move the satellite, but slowly, over time, the sheer number of the small exhalations translate to colossal speeds. The activists seem to be mired in failure, but they are slowly moving the needle.
I wonder if as he got older he would have learned discipline to stick with longer-lead feedback loops. Or maybe not, perhaps his brain wasn't wired that way.
Swartz was a rare breed of what I think of as real activism. Self-proclaimed activists these days have no skin in the game and don't go further than signal boosting. To really make a difference you have to get burned; most people don't have the guts.
What has been your experience working with activists in NGOs/nonprofits? I've worked with several over the past few decades and emotions certainly are part of it, but trying to change a government doesn't happen overnight. For example, when Working with HIFIVE (Haiti Integrated Financing for Value Chains and Enterprises) I found that having government support was much more effective: things happened on a schedule, same when I worked with Habitat for Humanity. However, when I worked with a local homeless shelter in my city, they were struggling due both outreach and a logistics system that was sadly inefficient b/c none of them had experience with this: the heart was there but not the experience.
I'd be eager to hear what you ran into while working in a nonprofit that turned you off due to being "too emotionally driven." Please share!
Refreshingly well-researched and honest piece from the New Yorker.
My favourite writing by Aaron is his explanation of what happens in the "ending" of Infinite Jest. [1] I'm of the opinion DFW deliberately left it somewhat open to interpretation, and that his famous quote "If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book’s failed for you" was a tad tongue in cheek. That said, Aaron's explanation is certainly the most plausible, and I'd kill to know what DFW would have thought of it.
> Refreshingly well-researched and honest piece from the New Yorker.
My impression is quite the opposite. This piece by Larissa MacFarquhart was a contemptible whitewash of government bullies. "New Yorker" is squarely in the corner of intelligence agencies and law enforcement and against the people, and not just in this particular case.
I'm curious how it's a whitewash of government bullies when that's not the point of the article? It's pretty clear at the start that it's about how his friends and family perceived him, and his backstory - I was aware of the overall narrative, but found it extremely interesting to hear stories of his challenges with interacting with the world.
In general, I respect and appreciate content that takes someone who has been lionized (especially posthumously) and humanizes them. People are complicated, the narrative is rarely as simple as it's distilled down for public consumption.
As far as the "squarely in the corner of intelligence agences and law enforcement" - that wasn't my impression, and while I did not spend hours researching, I went through the "police" tag on the new yorker website, and in the last year, 10 out of 21 articles were overtly critical of police, and only ~2 could be considered positive towards police. The remainder were either neutral, nuanced, or orthogonal (e.g. photo essays about a woman who was embedded with the police for several years). Do you have evidence to back up your assertion?
"His girlfriend Taren always dealt with taxi-drivers, with waitresses."
"The guy in front of me’s leaning all the way back, but I’m in the last row so my seat doesn’t go back, and I have to lift my legs up to stretch out a muscle that was sitting funny while I was asleep"
I feel like Aaron Swartz was never truly an adult, just a boyish intellectual. I can't imagine his submissive behavior was a net positive to his mental health.
And it sounds like he was perfectly aware of this. This feeling of being "not really a man" can be overwhelming, and I feel like this is an incredibly toxic thing perpetuated by our culture.
It's possible to spend an entire lifetime trying to prove the opposite of this statement to the world, and most importantly oneself, and fail at this impossible task. But the saddest part is that because the majority of people think in these "man/boy" terms it's easy to start thinking that all people do.
The next step is to consider oneself hopelessly broken and unworthy of affection, and dismiss any real friendship as a pity party. And yet: there was an outpouring of love and sadness following aaronsw's suicide. So perhaps living up to the stereotype of manliness is not the most important thing in the world.
> So perhaps living up to the stereotype of manliness is not the most important thing in the world.
I think some things are being conflated here. There is the stereotype of manliness, conforming to which requires you to do or have interest in stereotypically manly things (sports, cars, home improvement, working outside, being tough, being reticent to show emotion). But there's also failure to conform to adultness -- being able to call a cab, order food, pay bills, manage finances, maintain steady employment.
It sounds that Swartz, though not stereotypically manly, was also not stereotypically adult. The former's not a problem -- I'm not manly either, I say as I cuddle my pet rabbit -- but failure to be an adult can cause issues (at least for those without such indulgent friends and family as Swartz had).
True. This one hit close to home for me personally, but I can say with confidence that therapy can make things a lot better.
There's a tendency to either coddle a person with these issues, or try to get them to change through tough love. The reality is that neither of these things is helpful - what is really needed is a good therapist.
P.S.: In case someone is reading this and nodding along: you have likely spent years on the roller coaster of trying to prove yourself through pathological self-sufficiency interleaved with breakdowns and "failure to adult". It's OK to seek help. Even pro athletes use coaches and personal trainers if they are stuck in a rut. This is no different. Oh, and you are far from alone in this.
> I feel like Aaron Swartz was never truly an adult, just a boyish intellectual.
I think it is telling that people close to Swartz, such as Lawrence Lessig, referred to him as a "boy" when talking about him. I have to think that Swartz himself got that vibe from them. The problem is, as the saying goes, you can't send a boy to do a man's job. To Swartz's credit, he didn't shrink from trying to do a man's job; but it might have helped if others around him had reinforced more that he was a man doing an man's job.
I’m not diagnosing, obviously, but a lot of this, including the phobia of fruit and non-white and yellow vegetables seems… on the spectrum, at the very least. I wonder if Aaron had undiagnosed autism of some sort.
He was a super taster. When he stayed with me he insisted on the plainest of food and told me it's because he's a super taster. Although thinking back now, maybe that was just an excuse to cover for something else.
To be honest, I’ve always had a problematic relationship with food. I always liked plain things — the year before college I lived mostly off of eating plain, microwaved bagels. At oriental restaurants I would always just order steamed white rice. Wes Felter, noting I would apparently only eat white food joked, referencing a Science Fiction novel, that I would eat light bulbs, but “only the white ones”. This reached its extremes at a World Wide Web conference where all the food was white, even the plate it was on. Tim Berners-Lee later pulled my mother aside to share his concerns about this diet.
Finally, one day at an oriental restaurant by Stanford (years before I went to school there), we had the typical discussion except this time Cory Doctorow spoke up: ‘are you sure you’re not a supertaster?’ he asked. I had heard the They Might Be Giants song but never considered the possibility. I thought about it as the conversation continued and it seemed to make sense to me. [At this point I imagine a crane shot lifting up and up over the conversation at the restaurant. Fade to:] I did some research on the Internet and did the test (which formally consists of putting blue food coloring on your tongue, taking a piece of paper with a three-hole punch, placing it over the tongue and counting the number of taste buds in it) and indeed, I am a supertaster. This hasn’t eliminated the discussions about my eating habits, but it does shift the blame.
Yeah, my fiancé is a supertaster as well, but still has managed to avoid a literal phobia of various colors of foods. My best friend, on the other hand, has a similar phobia to Aaron's and is, admittedly, probably somewhere on the spectrum (though again, undiagnosed; but we've talked about it and she agrees it's a definite possibility).
> Why do you need to conform to a socially constructed persona?
Being an activist and doing things to further causes you believe in, when those things are predictably going to anger those in power, means you are trying to do an adult's job. And that means you have to be an adult. That's not a "socially constructed persona"; that's a fact of life. You can't be a "boyish intellectual" and take on the establishment.
I think if you speak about it like man/boy it seems sort of abstract. It's more that he wasn't so much of an adult. It seems like he was lacking a lot of responsibility that one would expect from an adult.
well if you're just an everyday introvert, then you need some promting, or else to summon the courage on your own to overcome your aversion to social situations. (digression, but the internet is a big help for this nowadays. you can watch youtube videos that walks you through how to ride the bus or whatever, for people too scared of embarrassing themslves to try).
On the other hand if you have a social anxiety you probably need some kind of stronger help to be able to function.
Either way the alternative of avoiding much of the world and relying on oehters to get by probably isn't preferable.
I have trouble even seeing the implied mechanism of how this article would have any impact on an election. And after reading the article, I wouldn't even be able to guess if people consider it slanted for or against Swartz. To me it reads of an exceptionally well-researched text showing that Swartz was a human being with all the complexity that comes with having a soul. And that a completely ridiculous prosecution was a necessary, but probably not sufficient, condition for his suicide.
I would love to understand some of the rationale behind MIT not reversing it's stance. Is there any public/anon writing from someone inside MIT at the time?
Was there some pressure being employed by scientific publishers to make an example out of Swartz?
It just seems so strange, but then again as we've seen institutions can be easily hijacked and corrupted when populated with the wrong actors.
> It is commonly assumed that the debate over what Swartz did, and, more generally, the debate over whether information does or does not want to be free, is between hacker culture and copyright culture, young people and old people, but this is not true. On the Hacker News site in the fall of 2012, many commenters disagreed with what he’d done, and argued with his supporters on the site that in a nation ruled by laws it was not O.K. for one person to just go and break a law he felt was unjust.
Or, possibly, Hacker News doesn't represent hacker culture, but finance-adjacent right-wing techbro culture, which knows perfectly well which side of the copyright issue its bread is buttered on.
The articles take is the on point one IMO. The quotes are about the action being wrong not the law being right, as were the vast majority of the other negative comments in the post. The post can be found here for reference https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529484 of particular note is the number of hackers that feel the action was noble but still wrong (even if being over prosecuted).
> Or, possibly, Hacker News doesn't represent hacker culture, but finance-adjacent right-wing techbro culture, which knows perfectly well which side of the copyright issue its bread is buttered on.
Spot on. I like HN for certain topics, but it’s by no means representative of the Hacker culture. Even the name seems like duplicitous marketing at best.
As an example, the topic of immigration will bring out the nastiest takes and opinions (and straight up racism).
Actually the opposite is true here; if you talk about certain data which is considered "bad", like crime statistics, your post will be shadowbanned because it's considered wrongthink (or as you might put it, "straight up racism"), just like Twitter.
> if you talk about certain data which is considered "bad", like crime statistics, your post will be shadowbanned
Utter nonsense. Seriously. This is pure claptrap. I've seen so many instances where posters here have brought up "crime statistics" in the context of race or claimed that left-leaning cities are unlivable crime-ridden hellholes, and none where such posts were "shadowbanned".
I challenge you to show me a case where mere presentation of statistics led to a ban, shadow or otherwise.
More likely the "raising of a statistic" was accompanied by a first-order explanation of the number that, besides being trite and lazy, was also "blatantly racist". But it wasn't the statistic that did the job.
"As an example, the topic of immigration will bring out the nastiest takes and opinions (and straight up racism)."
Well, I would argue, that hackers can also be nasty racists.
I mean sure, by my definition the hacker spirit is open minded by definition. But people with a open mind, are also open for some very weird to disgusting ideas.
Depends on where you live. It's not mainstream in the big tech cities. It's not mainstream on the American internet. "Racism" is also arguably not mainstream in most American cities, though there are plenty of accusations that certain areas are still indirectly or implicitly racist because it's a very subjective term.
Racism is expressed by systems that benefit some to the exclusion or detriment of others, based on race.
Remind me, what are the "mainstream" demographics of big tech companies?
Tech companies are famous for externalizing their problems into their local communities. How is that expressed in terms of race?
Capitalism simply doesn't work without an underclass. Capitalism exploits labor the most efficiently with a divided underclass, because class awareness and solidarity undermines capitalism. As such capitalism is invariably paired with racism. Every capitalist economy is built on some form of bigotry.
A long time ago now, the word "hacker" was captured by regular programmers screwing around who wanted to sound cool. I doubt anyone is confused about which definition HN is concerned with.
"We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals."
"My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like."
I wouldn't argue that "hacker culture" is necessarily a monoculture or immune to racism, but I feel that this disembodied ethic is core to the origins of the culture.
Just like this is a hacker news site and not the exclusive one. And all in all, despite the ads and some other things, like intransparent moderation at times, I think they cultivate a quite good hacker spirit here. Otherwise we wouldn't be visiting.
Maybe it isn’t. My understanding of Hacker ethos has been that of a curiosity driven by truth seeking of any system (not just technological). Racism seems like lazy conventional thinking, so it seems prima facie to be incoherent with that culture.
Try posting any article about racism or misogyny in Silicon Valley. It'll be flagged faster than you can say "Cancel Culture" five times.
Speaking of "cancel culture": HN is the only community where it tends to be almost accepted truth that Cloudflare or Youtube or Telegram doing anything to stop the vilest hate groups from using their platforms is tantamount to the end of democracy.
Do you know who ran Theranos? Do you know who ran Enron? Why not? Yes, there's a difference of a few years. I bet a text analysis would also show the female CEO being mentioned in connection with the demise of their company than the men do. See also: Ellen Pao.
HN went all-in on 'Gamergate'. For a brief time, it certainly did toy with the whole QAnon bullshit, although that went so crazy so fast, it couldn't take hold, thankfully.
It's more populism than right-wing canon these days, but this very thread has a few examples of mindless theorizing about the New Yorker picking its subjects with corrupt intentions. It is beyond me how someone would read this article and consider it a "hit piece", or anything a campaign or the CIA would want to see published. If the military-security-complex wants to change your thinking, they fly F-15 over football stadiums, not get the New England intelligentsia to put out 5,000 word essays sublimely sneaking in their ideas.
Ok piece, but clickbait title. I read through the whole thing and couldn’t find any dark side. The only person trying to make him look bad is his girlfriend, and all the reasons seem to be due to their private relationship. I don’t see why they’re any different or special compared to most other relationships. All I saw in this was the description of a human being who was remarkable in some ways, flawed in others, and deeply normal in the rest. Like basically almost everyone else.
I don't agree that "the system" punished a smart altruist.
As this article makes clear, Swartz did something he knew to be illegal. This was not his first brush with mass copyright violation. He was then prosecuted for his crimes. IMO, the charges were vastly disproportionate, but you expose yourself to prosecutorial overreach when you (knowingly) commit crimes.
This appears to have been a trend with Swartz. He seems to have had something of a God complex. And thus, for him, the ends justified the means, because he was right and they were wrong.
He does not even appear to have been especially ethical or rational. For example, Reddit sells to Condé Nast. A condition of the sale was that he would work out of Condé Nast's SF offices. He took the money, but then rejected the terms post hoc and disappeared. When he was tracked down and it was clear that he'd simply flown the coup, he was justifiably fired. All of which he, and his enablers, viewed as a great injustice! They don't seem to entertain giving back the money though...
He was a human, with all the attendant frailties and blindspots. He was not murdered. He was a person who struggled with mental illness, like so many of us. He committed suicide.
His suicide is tragic. He was clearly a bright and dynamic person. But he also seems to have been pretty misguided, and his darker tendencies appear to have been rationalized, justified, and enabled by his family. That to me, is the greater tragedy. It didn't have to be like this.
> I don't agree that "the system" punished a smart altruist.
>
> As this article makes clear, Swartz did something he knew to be illegal.
Depending on the laws, sometimes an altruist must do things that are illegal.
In the extreme case, consider that when authoritarian regimes round up ethnic or religious minorities, they invariably make non-cooperation with their attrocities illegal.
Laws should align with altruistic ideals, but it's a grave error to assume they always do.
I think it's a big deal that the charges were disproportionate in this case.
Maybe what he did was illegal on paper, but it was not unethical.
Disturbingly, there seems to be increasingly many things in our modern society which are ethical yet illegal. You'd think that in those cases, authorities should be more lenient; that they would have a sense of what is right and wrong from the perspective of the average citizen. The fact that they seem to be particularly more aggressive in those cases is what I find disturbing and why I'm saying that altruism is being punished.
In many countries, the concept of right and wrong is increasingly being decided from the perspective of a tiny minority. We appear to be reverting to a society of lords and serfs. The government's moral compass is increasingly based on the elites' perspective.
I don't agree that what he did was ethical. For me, and I think many people, it is clear that what he lied and stole. The works that he stole fall under clearly defined and well established copyright laws and which have licenses to which Swartz would have had to agree. He knew all of this and stole them anyway. He knew exactly what he was doing. This is why he hid his laptop and concealed his face when retrieving that laptop.
In terms of how this IP is copyrighted and distributed, that should be corrected at the funding level. The U.S. government (and other funding sources) should forbid publication and distribution via publications that do not make the information freely available for any science which they fund. But... we live in society of laws. You don't get to just decide which you like and thus will follow.
> right and wrong is increasingly being decided from the perspective of a tiny minority
I'm not sure I agree with you. I suspect your point might be motivated by a worldview (i.e. an ideology), as a opposed to be borne by evidence.
But I could definitely be wrong. To that end, point me to a law that is 1) written from the perspective of a tiny minority of elites and 2) forbids something that most people would consider ethical. By this I mean, not your outsider opinion on the law, but rather, real evidence that it is written to serve the elites and that the forbidden activities are considered perfectly ethical by the majority of people.
> we live in society of laws. You don't get to just decide which you like and thus will follow.
Tell that to Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Thoreau, and the many benefactors of mankind who have seen a law was wrong, and refused to obey it! And all those that admire their courage and efforts.
The legal system destroys people. It's what they do. The noticeable difference here is how much other people care and how much the person had to lose. How well would you bounce back from a felony conviction and jail time? There was some random teenaged idiot where I grew up that did some stupid miscief to the wrong category of property, and ended up committing suicide too.
Altruism isn’t a fantasy like Robin Hood, there’s a way to do it correctly; it’s why Aaron was interested in policy. Dumb altruists are in a worst position, and giving out free information from the internet doesn’t affect libgen. Aaron was a dumb altruist in the way he didn’t just listen about how to download JSTOR articles.
This is such an insightful observation. I think to the critical thinker its clear capitalism doesn't allow dissent past a certain point. Sure, you can be an altruist in small way that don't threaten the status quo like giving to charity or volunteering, but when you go against the under-pinnings of our system, namely intellectual property laws, then you're going to be defeated. We also saw this with Lawrence Lessig who is now an entirely unknown person but before was a Kardashian-level celeb on the internet due to his criticisms of copyright and patents.
So there's no place for a smart and motivated altruist in capitalism, because capitalism's oppression is what this person will fight and capitalism is usually the better fighter.
Smart altruists do become evil to be successful because of this, think of how many left-leaning idealistic early silicon valley types and their ethos was entirely shed to become, functionally, the same as any MBA or Chicago school economist and now, not capitalism's critic, but its driver and the wielder of the hammer that crushes people like Swartz or Lessig. Let's remember Steve Jobs, who is beloved and seen bizarrely as a "hippie" threatened Blackberry with his questionable patent portfolio over email because of "poaching." Poaching in this context being people leave jobs for better ones, but Steve felt a feudal-like ownership of his workers and used the corrupt mechanisms of capitalism to control them and suppress wages.
I'm sure there are other examples, but 'hippie turned ruthless capitalist' is pretty much the story of the boomer generation, who quickly figured out that they can get defeated by the system on some level, or they themselves become the oppressors. They chose to become the oppressors. The same is true of millennial idealism when its thrown out the window when you have an IPO looming, Facebook being the most obvious millennial led company that is about as evil as you can be for a webpage and app.
The problem with right-leaning entrepreneurship spaces like HN is that there's no class consciousness and no real capitalism critiques. So Swatz was killed by the "government" not the capitalism that government serves. Or like this article says he was a depressed immature weirdo, so this was unavoidable. Neither of that is true. He became a valid threat to capitalism and the hammer fell on him. If not via this prosecutor (who enforces laws written by the oligarchy) then by something else (see Jobs using civil suits as a defacto government himself). He could have been sued for damages for all the PDFs he "stole," for example, if the wealthy couldn't wield the DOJ to their liking.
I can't think of any high profile idealists, IP critics, or capitalist critics in online spaces today. The system took down Lessig, Swatz, Doctorow, etc pretty easily. Swatz, of course is dead, but the others are now marginalized characters no one cares about and copyright and patent reform an entirely dead political horse. Instead the pendulum has shifted to an outright worship of billionaires, to the point of putting one in the presidency and filling the cabinet with them, on top of questionable Elon and Bezos worship, which seemingly gets stronger by the day.
No one seems to talk about this, but the late 90s and early 2000's financial and IP idealism was entirely crushed by the system. Today's smart altruists saw this and I imagine they are going to pick the Steve Jobs path, not the Swartz path going forward. They don't want to get destroyed either.
Source: someone who is older and witnessed all this in real time and is heartbroken over how everything turned out
When I read this, I think of one of my fav poems by Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse. It begins like.. ‘they fuck you up, your mum and dad’… except it’s not mum and dad anymore but the entire ‘village’ that is raising you.
Everything ever written about Aaron and everything Aaron ever wrote are part of one continuous humming noise that no one can hear. The difficulties Aaron lived need to be judged or diagnosed or both. There is neither redemption nor responsibility, but guilt and symptoms of a larger social or spiritual sickness.
I've spent a large portion of my life blaming everyone including Aaron for everything and looking for heroes who would be able to make good on any of what seemed reasonable in his promises. In considering the worth of all these hours of reflections, I can't say I have changed my opinions but I have changed.
What has been written about Aaron's life and accomplishments, let it suffice. The meta text is all now. Not "who was he?", but "what do we think of him?". This is what he wanted, and possibly because it concerns him, he was basically wrong, and this conversation is mostly unhelpful. I propose to ask "what do we think of what we think of him?".
Those who could never see the value in information and knowledge have their knives out for a largely harmless and innocent man, while those who think hacking JSTOR would have unleashed a new age of enlightenment have yet to become cynical and stupid. His friends and family have largely avoided these debates and tried to elevate his achievements and explain his incongruities with compassion and grace, without taking sides, either out of fear of further government overreach or out of a sense that no one can speak to Aaron's entire belief set, and whether it was or would have been coherent and effective.
As much as he held strong opinions on the subjects, he was trying to open a conversation about data, privacy, freedom of information etc., and he encountered a lot of people who realized that that conversation has extremely negative implications for data-driven business models, whether those were content publication models or user data ad-tech models. The corporate-academe was never willing to discuss any of it openly or honestly and was never going to leap to his defense as he might have thought at the time, as a socially-underdeveloped young man.
He probably got it too late that corporate academics are not conservative so much as cowardly, not so much concerned as paranoid, not unaware but purposefully ignorant. And he certainly understood, too late, that the government is these things to an entirely incomprehensible degree. Whatever the personal motivations or ideologies of whichever prosecutor threw the book at Aaron, "the government" wanted him punished.
Ultimately information is the scariest possible thing for any government, and Aaron had spent too much of his life knocking on the doors of the most closed-rank, insular and self-protecting people on earth, demanding a better public understanding of and regulation of data. He did this at a time when NSA et al. were harvesting unprecedented volumes of personal data and while trillions of private-side investment dollars were being spent on doing the same with no accountability.
The hero-thief debate, and the autist-scumbag debate are for kids and morons like the New Yorker. Viz the fact he struggled socially---and to such an extent!--- is a "dark-side", warping his personality traits, his social and personal disorders, and his policy recommendations into a nice big meaningless pile.
As another commenter here noted, like anyone with a soul he was a complex person.
This article carefully avoids any analysis of the reasons why MIT chose to persecute Aaron Swartz. Here's a quick take on the actual situation, off the top of my head:
"The Darker Side of MIT and the Academic Publishing Industry"
While the Internet has been hailed from its inception as a tool that would open up access to information for the whole world, the reality has not matched that expectation. Much of the most important and useful information generated by scientists, engineers, historians and others remains hidden behind paywalls and is not accessible to the vast majority of people, regardless of whether they have access to the Internet or not.
The reason is that academic research - the vast majority of it financed heavily by federal science agencies, i.e. the taxpayer - remains under the control of a small group of academic publishing houses, who earn exorbitant fees for licensing access to universities and other institutions. For example, if you want to manufacturer an antibiotic, you'd want access to the complete research record - the initial discovery of the antibiotic, the detailed production technology (found perhaps in the methods sections of papers published in the 1970s and 1980s, say), more modern biotech methods of production of said antibiotic (papers from the 1990s and 2000s), etc.
Given the obvious benefit to all (except the parasites collecting the fees) of providing that information to anyone with Internet access, it's at first glance hard to understand why MIT - one of America's leading federally-financed research institues - chose to persecute Aaron Swartz for downloading the jstor archive, instead of merely warning him not to do it again. Clearly the MIT administration wanted to make an example of Swartz - the question is, why?
The most rational explanation involves the corporatization of academic research in the USA in general, which began in the 1980s with passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities to exclusively license inventions created with taxpayer dollars to private entities, rather than the prior situation, in which anyone could obtain such a license. This 'public-private' partnership situation has corrupted American academics, placing the profitability of research well ahead of the accuracy and reliability of research.
As part of this sea change in American academia, the control of information has become more important than the prior academic norm, which was the open sharing of information (widely understood to increase the pace of scientific discovery). Now, many corporations have simply outsourced their R&D divisions to the murky public-private academic sector, utilizing financing provided by NIH or other federal agencies, while retaining control of the results of academic research (*and paying off the cooperating professors and administators by buying the academic start-up operations and giving them stocks in their larger corporations). This can be seen today in the highly profitable COVID vaccine and treatment business, in which initial academic research (such mRNA technology) was co-opted by the private sector under said exclusive licensing agreements (and note how open-sourcing the patents globally is continually blocked by pharma sector lobbying efforts).
Hence, MIT - an institution which, along with the University of California, spearheaded the transition to corporate-controlled academic research, wanted to make an example of Aaron Swartz to warn other researchers that if they tried to open-source information - thereby harming corporate profit opportunities - that they would be severely punished.
Well, at least there's scibhub, although their coverage is still spotty.
> it's at first glance hard to understand why MIT - one of America's leading federally-financed research institues - chose to persecute Aaron Swartz for downloading the jstor archive
It didn't. Read the Abelson report (which has been discussed ad nauseam in past HN threads). MIT did not want Swartz prosecuted, and told the prosecutor that. The prosecutor chose to go after Swartz anyway. MIT's error was that they didn't push back harder on the prosecutor (for example, by making a clearer public statement along the lines of the one JSTOR made, that since the stolen data was returned, no further action was necessary or desired).
> Clearly the MIT administration wanted to make an example of Swartz
No, it didn't. It just made an error of judgment (described above). It had nothing against Swartz and was not trying to make an example of him. The Federal prosecutor was the one trying to do that.
"With regard to substance, MIT would make no statements, whether in
support or in opposition, about the government’s decision to prosecute
Aaron Swartz"
Am I missing something? Been a while since I read the report in full.
"While MIT did not conform precisely to this rule, in this sense of similar responses MIT—broadly speaking—did not side with the prosecution, nor did it side with the defense. In consequence of the differences in the powers, timing, and goals of the two parties in the case, neutrality in responses was not consistent with neutrality in outcomes, and MIT was not neutral in outcomes."
I agree that MIT was not trying to make an example out of him. But it wasn't that "they didn't push back harder on the prosecutor", it was that they didn't push back at all. The Ableson report correctly criticizes MIT for this.
> it wasn't that "they didn't push back harder on the prosecutor", it was that they didn't push back at all
It's been a while since I read the report too, thanks for linking to it.
I had thought there was more detail in the report about the private conversations between MIT's Office of General Counsel and the prosecutors, referred to on p. 52, where it says that after a June 21, 2011 discussion, "OGC inferred that further presentations of MIT’s opinions were unlikely to have an effect on the prosecution: the views of both potential victims had already been taken into account". My understanding during previous discussions here (which was quite a while ago) had been that OGC did push back in private conversations with the prosecutor (and the "further presentations" in what I just quoted also can be read that way), but the prosecutor was not receptive, and the June 21 conversation was basically the end of MIT's private attempts to influence the prosecutor. However, since the report does not give any more details about that, I might have gotten that impression from other sources around that time. Clearly, even if MIT did make such attempts, they weren't successful, and could not have been all that emphatic.
If you ever see this phrase: 'public-private' partnership, you can be assured that the losses/costs will be public while the gains/profit will be private.
public-private partnership is one of the pillars of neoliberal win-win politics. At least this is how it's being sold. However, it's one of the biggest clues that regardless of who you vote for in America (left or right), the shareholders will always be taken care of..
Hasn’t it always been corporate interests in academia? Stanford was a joke when it was founded, MIT was being petitioned into becoming a tech school. Patrons of sciences have always been funded by private interests, there isn’t any corruption.
> This 'public-private' partnership situation has corrupted American academics, placing the profitability of research well ahead of the accuracy and reliability of research.
Private profitability research is no different. I don’t understand what you mean by losing accuracy, for some research corporate hardware or copyrighted work is required or the best choice.
I thought they gave the ability for other pharma to make the mRNA drugs that require incredible investment, to make it seem open.
Most of the information we mentioned is out there now. But it’s much more fun watching tiktoks and liking posts.
As I noted, it's really Bayh-Dole exclusive licensing that's the problem. Make all exclusively licensed federally financed patents held by academic institutions available to anyone who wants to utilize them via a no-fee license, that's the fix.
Prior to that, if academics wanted to get involved in industry and make some money thereby, the route to take was called consulting, which seems fine with me, as long as conflicts of interest are stated honestly.
I’m reading the law and I don’t see that issue. All the issues are from the requirements of the FDA, making it patent free solves nothing, unless you’re talking about another industry, the cases are all from healthcare patents from the wiki. This isn’t new or something unusual, most of the issues are in healthcare and the requirements to produce them are not going to be fixed by removing patents.
Academic papers do submit sponsorships and conflicts of interest, and there’s also the case of academia wanting cutting edge equipment from private companies and doing deals with them. This is much more honest than the smoking research, the federal government has an interest in maintaining patent law, it has no incentive to give free access to no fee licensing. There’s lots of laws with access to healthcare information, which requires industry knowledge where the information is freely given to corporations to do research on, which would not be allowed federally. The researchers are not usually working because they’re interested in making their research public information, and while post grads are funded by government, they are free to develop royalty free information, they choose not to and the government wants to partially fund corporations. I don’t see the problem, people want to make money and they want to do cutting edge research.
I see academia and research papers as advertising rather than a patent minefield. There are plenty of people who want to work for the common good, but the government wants to fund private entities to produce products, government contracts is what the US does instead of its own production.
I see computer science papers with non of these issues under the current law.
Alexandra Elbakyan is still alive and well, and Sci-Hub is going strong. Swartz' prosecution and persecution were totally pointless. Copyright is unenforceable.
The article says they offered a 6 month jail time plea bargain though. It sounds like from his own writing that he was cognizant of the fact he broke the law, but didn’t agree the law should have been a law in the first place. It also sounds like he didn’t really expect there would be any consequences whatsoever.
Look at this from the prosecutors point of view. They have hard evidence of a crime. They have evidence of consciousness of guilt from the perpetrator. It’s a slam dunk at trial so why should it get to that point? It’s a waste of everyone’s time and money. That’s why the plea deal was so generous compared to the downside of taking it to court. You want to entice them to take a slap on the wrist plea deal so everyone can avoid the cost of forestalling the eventuality of the jury’s verdict.
It’s true that prosecutors can be overzealous in their prosecutions, but 6 months does not sound like the disproportionate punishment many make it out to be.
Isn't incarcerating a person who's not a danger to others and who's crime had no harmful outcomes a waste of everyone's time and money?
> 6 months does not sound like the disproportionate punishment many make it out to be
I encourage you to learn about the conditions in prisons. Imprisoned persons are frequently subject to physical and sexual violence at the hands of guards and other incarcerated people. These are inhumane conditions to subject anyone to, mass murderer and copyright-infringer alike.
There’s a big difference between a maximum security prison and a minimum security camp. We probably share many opinions about the former, non-violent penny ante white boy offenders go to the latter.
“Bob’s Story:
“I was in the minimum security camp at Fairton for about nine months. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected prison to be. The place was clean, the food wasn’t bad, and I didn’t feel any tension between the guys. If I wanted to avoid someone, I could stay to myself.
“There were fewer than 100 guys serving sentences in the federal prison camp and I didn’t feel much in the way of harassment from anyone, staff or inmates. With the help of an orderly, I coordinated a prison job for myself in the library. It was just a small room with lots of books and I passed my days catching up on reading. I hadn’t read at all since I was in college because work kept me too busy. During the time I was at the camp I read about 30 great books and I lost 25 pounds. I’m back down to the same weight I was when I was in school and I feel better than ever. My wife loves the new look. She says the prison sentence probably gave me an extra ten years to live.”
> Isn't incarcerating a person who's not a danger to others and who's crime had no harmful outcomes a waste of everyone's time and money?
Yes, but I think the solution is to make fewer things criminal through the democratic process first. Enforcement of laws is important.
It’s one thing to put people in jail who don’t belong there. But according to this article it kinda seems like Swartz did deserve some jail time.
He knowingly broke the law and showed no remorse. Instead his view was that the law should not apply to him because he did not agree with it. That’s a dangerous mindset to have for an individual with money and power.
It’s important to show remorse and contrition in these circumstances, otherwise we can just assume the behavior will continue. And Swartz had a history of this kind of behavior starting with PACER, so really it should have been expected that failing to prosecute in this instance would have been taken by Swartz as a signal to behave like this with impunity.
> I encourage you to learn about the conditions in prisons.
I 100% agree with you, and know all about this topic, but that’s really a different conversation.
Agreed, unfortunately it seems that we selectively enforce laws based on political pressure. Look at the numerous high profile cases targeting white collar criminals, for example with Purdue and the Sackler family.
They got away with zero jail time and a slap on the wrist (financially), all because they were able to hire the right political actors who could influence the outcome of legal procedures.
I'm sure if Swartz was similarly connected (for example a family who was a Senator), this whole thing would have gone away quietly.
Alas, the laws that apply to the commoners do not apply to the elite.
> I'm sure if Swartz was similarly connected (for example a family who was a Senator), this whole thing would have gone away quietly.
I think Swartz made himself an easy political target without realizing it. From his perspective, he was just a guy in a room trying to “save the world.”
From the outside a different picture can be painted. He positioned himself as an activist, and amassed a great deal of resources and even an active following. He was well connected in that he was on a first name basis with billionaires, and probably even had the personal numbers of a few in his phone.
So I think all this made Swartz a target without him really intending to be one. Or at least he didn’t think that in the process of “saving the world”, that the world would fight back. That seems to be one of the central points of TFA at least.
Adding to this, there's the overwhelming despair of a young idealist being forced to accept an unacceptable situation. It's plain to the pragmatically disillusioned that the right course of action is to plead guilty. However, not all people, especially at that age, are prudent self-interested agents. Aaron had the choice to surrender to the system he was born into it or violently exit it.
> 6 months does not sound like the disproportionate punishment many make it out to be
From the article, it seems that he was concerned about how being a convicted felon would hurt his career prospects. It would reduce his likelihood of being able to save the world. Not that he would have, anyway, but I think that's part of the thought process.
Speaking for me personally, six months in federal prison would feel like an almost life-ending scenario. I'd lose my job (obviously) and would have trouble finding another in the field for which I'm educated and trained. My fiancee would not have sufficient income to pay our mortgage so we'd lose our house, and I'm not sure what we'd be able to do for the many pets we love dearly. My situation's much different from Swartz's but I can empathize that a six month sentence could have such dramatic consequences that it wouldn't feel like a slap on the wrist.
A prosecutor choosing to seek a 6-month jail sentence is acceptable. A prosecutor choosing to seek a 50-year jail sentence is also acceptable. A prosecutor who is offering a 6-month jail sentence in exchange for waiving basic human rights, while threatening a 50-year jail sentence if those rights are exercised, has crossed the line into persecution.
It's an analogous situation to blackmail. Suppose Alice has found evidence that Bob robbed a bank. Alice is legally allowed to reveal that evidence to the police, but is under no obligation to do so outside of a subpoena. However, even though both choices are legally permissible, Alice is not allowed to make her choice be conditional on receiving payments from Bob, as that would cross the line into blackmail.
Plea bargains are a form of extortion, and should not be part of the legal system.
>Plea bargains are a form of extortion, and should not be part of the legal system.
So you think that every case should be tried, even if it's plainly obvious the perpetrator is guilty? After all, even if the perpetrator has a 1% chance of winning, there's no reason not to go to trial under that system.
> So you think that every case should be tried, even if it's plainly obvious the perpetrator is guilty?
If the perpetrator is willing to plead guilty, there is no need for a trial.
Threatening people with massively larger penalties if they exercise their right to a trial rather than take a plea deal (often time limited before the defense has a chance to see the evidence) is coercive extortion and is morally wrong. There is plenty of evidence of innocent people (especially poor people) taking plea deals due to these prosecutorial tacits of threat and decite.
What about giving a more lenient sentence if the person is remorseful and admits what they did was wrong? Because that's effectively the same thing as a plea deal. Even innocent people would still sometimes admit guilt and apologize, destroying their chances of winning at trial either way, to get a shorter sentence.
Leniency during sentencing is not effectively the same as plea bargaining at all. A plea deal comes from threats and fear, a lenient sentence handed down by a judge comes from remorse and judgment. Lenient sentences can come without a guilty plea anf a guilty plea doesn't guarantee leniency. The incentives are entirely different.
The incentives are identical, less jail time. The fact that one is guaranteed deal while one is a standard sentencing practice is a distinction without a difference. The effect will be the same, innocent people "admitting" guilt. In Japan, plea bargains were illegal until recently. Yet standard police behavior when arresting someone was to notify them how much more lenient the system wold be on them if they admited guilt. And they were just stating facts about how the system works, not guaranteeing you anything... and racking up a 99.9% conviction rate. A lawyer in any country would tell you the same thing if your chances didn't look good.
> If the perpetrator is willing to plead guilty, there is no need for a trial.
I don't really think courts should take guilty pleas. I believe in some times/places in the middle ages, courts would not take guilty pleas in case the prisoner had gotten coerced into pleading. Sometimes, we have people with mental illness or other issues that will plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit.
Along the same lines of "reasonable doubt" in the US generally being enough to escape criminal conviction, I think we should err on the side of safety and perhaps even inefficiency in (not) letting the state exercise its monopoly power of force, coercion, and imprisonment against anyone for any reason, ever.
While you make very valid points about plea deals in general, I don’t think they apply in this specific case. Swartz was very rich, and well represented. He also actually did the thing in question, and demonstrated consciousness of guilt.
It’s okay for guilty people to be offered plea deals. It’s actually probably in their best interest sometimes.
> He also actually did the thing in question, and demonstrated consciousness of guilt.
He did a thing, that doesn't mean that thing qualified as a felony, or even a crime. It certainly did not merit 50 years in prison.
> It’s okay for guilty people to be offered plea deals. It’s actually probably in their best interest sometimes.
It is simply not OK to threaten people with penalties that are well more than an order of magnitude higher than the plea deal.
This isn't the kind of plea deal that furthers justice by obtaining a cooperative witness in a more serious case. This sort of plea deal is offered to advance the Prosecutor's career.
> Swartz was very rich, and well represented.
As the article explains, Swartz was out of money, well into debt, and faced with begging people for money to continue fighting the case.
I get the sense that you are channeling a general distrust of the system into this specific case. I will say I’m in agreement with your points in a general sense.
But as far as this case goes, I’m not sure. The alleged crime is a very technical one. The facts are all recorded and they paint a clear picture. The only question is how they apply to the law and whether or not they raise to the level of a crime.
That’s the job of a jury. They will receive a document with a list of charges, and the prosecution will lay out a very clear roadmap as to how each element of their case maps to the elements of the relevant statutes being charged.
Since this is a very technical crime, most of the evidence would be document-based and very convincing to a jury. It’s hard to create reasonable doubt in such document-heavy cases. So the only question will be how many charges can the prosecutor make the facts fit. That’s where these “50 years” claims come in, by stacking charge after charge in serial.
But importantly, neither the prosecutor nor the jury decide the sentence. That’s the job of the judge under the sentencing guidelines. This is what makes those “50 years” claim of the prosecutor bogus, and what any well-represented individual should understand.
I think Swartz did understand that because he opted to go to trial.
I get that people want there to be a clear moral story here. One perspective is that Swartz was a child prodigy, a beloved activist, someone who challenged the system, and then succumbed to pressure when it bore down on him with the full weight of the federal government.
But it’s not as clean as that. On the other hand he was a well connected, high net worth individual who repeatedly flaunted the system, and thought he would never face consequences. In my opinion, that’s the profile of someone ripe for heavy handed prosecution.
> The only question is how they apply to the law and whether or not they raise to the level of a crime.
It was a fairly unique and novel application of those laws and some of the charges depended on making arguments about what the intent was with the data. There absolutely was a great deal of prosecutorial discretion and even imagination in coming up with those charges. We will never know if which of those would have stuck.
> the profile of someone ripe for heavy handed prosecution.
Why are other things like the prosecutors words to be believed in the article. But not Swartz’s money issues? Why would the article bring up going into debt if he’s a high net worth individual?
Others have brought up people like Lori Loughlin. No one would talk about her or any of the college scandal wealthy parents going into debt.
I believe he spent a lot of money on his defense, but that's the point: he used money to buy representation, so I think it's hard to complain that he was bullied by prosecutors when he was well-represented.
> I get the sense that you are channeling a general distrust of the system into this specific case.
You said this about the other commentator. I’m not sure how you aren’t doing a similar thing here. Prosecutors words are believed at face value. Phrasing Swartz as a high net worth individual as if it was known he was still a high net worth individual at the time of his passing. Since now you said you believe he spent a lot on his defense. And the other commenter said he didn’t have money. If you spend all your money. You aren’t high net worth any more.
> so I think it's hard to complain that he was bullied by prosecutors when he was well-represented.
This is simplifying any justice system situation in my opinion. Which adds to the point of you doing similar to what you thought the other commenter is doing. And yes I am also doing a similar thing with my adamant defense of Swartz!
You've implied I'm taking the prosecutors words at face value, but I'm really not basing any of my opinions on the prosecutors words at all. The plea deal was communicated by Swartz' lawyer. The evidence against him is documentary and laid out in the indictment. There's expert testimony as well. Swartz' consciousness of guilt is laid out in video evidence as well as on his blog in his own words. There's very little the prosecutor has to say in the case against Swartz.
> If you spend all your money. You aren’t high net worth any more.
I said Swartz was prosecuted because he painted a big target on himself. Yes, being high net worth and well connected to billionaires is part of that. It really doesn't matter what his net worth was at the time of his demise, when at the time he allegedly committed the crime and caught the eye of prosecutors he was a high net worth individual.
Yes, that is correct. A guilty plea may be given, but any incrementally added incentive for somebody to give a guilty plea also incrementally removes the right to have a trial.
"The prosecutor, Stephen Heymann, told Swartz’s lawyer, Elliot Peters, that if Swartz pleaded guilty to all counts he would spend six months in jail; if he lost at trial, it would be much worse."
The prosecutor made the offer of a 6-month plea deal to Swartz's lawyer. Who presumably discussed it with Swartz, who seems to have decided not to accept it. Possibly, if you accept the analysis above, on the advice of his lawyer.
The New Yorker doesn’t link to a citation. Rolling Stones does. Which links to a statement by lead prosecutor, Ortiz. Heymann was the assistant prosecutor.
My point was how do we know this is an “analysis”. Based off Rolling Stones, this is just the prosecutors words.
How about semi-straight from the horse's mouth? Was his defense attorney working with prosecutors to minimize the threats? Is the Boston Globe in on it? (Conspiracy theories are so much fun! Ever read Foucault's Pendulum?)
If I recall the prosecutor’s future political ambitions got derailed because of this. That makes it even more likely to not believe anything they are saying without more to go on.
So yes. Not just the plea deal and not just this case. In any situation, if the only evidence of something is the word of the state prosecutor, that only means so much.
They threatened him with much, much more than 6 months to try to get him to plead guilty as a felon. They drained his financial coffers and drove wedges between him and his support network.
If it was a slam dunk at trial and 6 months was a fair sentence, then why is there a need to threaten so much more to avoid granting him his right to a trial?
Aaron's case is not unique in this regard and is indicative of the casual brutality and inhumanity inherent in the way that our justice system works. We desperately need to threaten reform how plea bargaining works and the amount of power we give prosecutors.
There was also the fact that he would be branded a felon, which as the article mentioned would have prevented him from working in the White House or other institutions from where he could continue his work
He faced nothing resembling 50 years, even on paper, even in the least charitable plausible analysis. You get to these nosebleed sentences by assuming that there are no sentencing guidelines, and no grouping of charges, and that instead you're likely to serve the sum of the maximum sentences spelled out in the statutes you violated. That makes no sense even as a story: the CFAA statutes capture behavior ranging from abusing a login you were given legally to snoop on your coworkers performance evaluations to coordinating a multinational multi-billion-dollar heist by penetrating financial services firms.
What actually happens in sentencing is that you look up the relevant sentencing guidelines in the (public, easily downloaded) federal sentencing guidelines. The guidelines are broken up by groups of statutes. They establish offense levels, from 1 (jaywalking) to 43 (mass murder). You take the offense level and look it up on a chart against your offender history (Swartz had no criminal history) and get a sentencing range.
Each guideline starts with a (usually low) base offense level, and then a series of clauses that adjust that level upwards or downwards based on the conduct charged. For CFAA, modifiers include stuff like using sophisticated means to evade detection, or making a bunch of money, or putting critical systems in danger.
The actual sentencing is a phase of the trial, occurring after conviction. The court has the probation office write a PSR, which is a confidential memo suggesting a sentence based on the guidelines. The prosecution argues for upwards departures for the PSR; the defense does the opposite; the judge ultimately decides.
Crucially: the sentencing guidelines generally don't work by multiplying the number of counts against the suggested offense level. Rather: like charges group, and you're generally sentenced based on the highest offense level of the group.
We don't really have to guess about what Swartz faced. We don't just have this New Yorker article to go on; Swartz's own attorney discussed the likely sentencing ranges. This article suggests that prosecutors were looking for 6 months on a guilty plea (they seemed hell-bent on coming up with some custodial sentence for Swartz; there seems to be something to the idea that they had a grudge against Swartz). More importantly, though, we have some of their rationale for the supposed 80 month sentence they said they'd seek if Swartz went to trial: they intended to argue that Swartz incurred 2 million dollars worth of losses. That's a self-evidently stupid argument, because there's no plausible way Swartz could have recouped even $1 from his offense, let alone $2,000,000. The documents he hoped to release had virtually no commercial value. Any damage (ie: worker hours burned cleaning up for what he did) he caused was incidental, and likely well below six figures. But the guideline offense level modifier implies the opposite of this fact pattern.
Swartz's attorney believed it was likely that had Swartz gone to trial and lost on all counts, his ultimate sentence would still could have come in below the level at which the guidelines recommend straight probation; that is: he believed Swartz could have gone to trial, lost, and still did better than the plea deal offered by the prosecutors.
It's not really the fault of anyone on HN that these lurid potential sentences get tossed around in discussions, because federal prosecutors issue press releases that discuss the maximum possible sentence in those terms. The media abets that dishonesty by repeating the claim, or by doing insufficient homework and using the same math.
You should be irritated when you read written sources that talk about naive maximum sentences this way.
At any rate: there is no chance Swartz was unaware of any of this. Not just because he had an excellent attorney who no doubt explained all of this stuff very early on in the process, but because Swartz was exactly the kind of nerd who would have had the federal sentencing guidelines bookmarked somewhere in his browser.
Overcharging offenses, with the ranges of any possible punishments, is done precisely to pressure people into settling for an outcome the DA finds politically expedient. There is a TERRIBLE amount of uncertainty in EVERY STEP you've outlined, and we see examples EVERY DAY of judges who throw the book at people, especially when they are unknown loners who have offended powerful corporations. PLEASE don't suggest that being accused in this situation wouldn't place someone under ENORMOUS fear and pressure about what could have happened, even if "everyone" thinks those outcomes were unlikely.
I think you stopped reading before the last paragraph of my comment. Or, really, one of the first ones, because, again: the prosecutors are on the record with the sentence they were actually threatening Swartz with, and, as I said, and Swartz's attorney said, and this New Yorker article said: it was nothing resembling 50 years.
Whether it's 50, 20, or 6, the real number is beside the point. Potential "years" of prison will scare the crap out almost anybody, and our government ALWAYS uses this tactic to coerce people into whatever outcome looks good for their careers.
I think we can leave this at "I disagree that there's no meaningful distinction between a threat of single-digit years and double-digit years sentence".
There's a pretty good Popehat article on federal sentencing guidelines from back before Ken White discovered twitter and mostly stopped writing interesting articles about law stuff.
> What actually happens in sentencing is that you look up the relevant sentencing guidelines in the (public, easily downloaded) federal sentencing guidelines
Well, it is called 'guidelines' and your post uses words like 'suggesting'. So if relevant people went crazy and just decide to ignore these guidelines and choose, say, 20 years, would such decision be legal?
It would be unprecedented and appealable, but mostly it just wouldn't happen. Judges aren't required to adhere to the guidelines (anymore), but they overwhelmingly do --- presumably, not least because the primary input to the sentencing process is a PSR that is derived directly from the guidelines.
Note here that to reach 20 years, you have to do more than disagree with the guideline offense levels; you have to somehow disagree with the grouping rules. 20 years wasn't on the table to begin with (again: the prosecutors threatened a much lower sentence), but it couldn't seriously have been put on the table either.
Thank you for the detailed reasoning and explanation.
I was unaware of these nuances, and remember at the time there was a lot of talk of using the legal sledgehammer to set an example (possibly the same media echo chamber you mention).
There's still a lot to the argument that they were taking a sledgehammer to Swartz in order to make an example of him. It's just that no part of the real argument involves him doing 50 years.
Thank you 10,000x over. The reporting about this aspect really couldn’t have been any worse and drove too many equally misinformed opinion pieces.
And agree completely with your assessment of prosecutors and press releases - I told my US Attorney that I only wanted to see him on TV after a conviction. Alas, I hate defending prosecutors, but it seems completely unfair to blame her for his death.
As you suggest, my guess was that the sentence was largely going to be driven by the damages. My understanding is that the “victims” had been sufficiently browbeat into being reluctant witnesses and as you suggest, it would have just been cleanup costs.
This, to be fair, is the biggest problem with the CFAA. It's sort of an inchoate statute (you generally use computers as a means to conduct other offenses --- in fact, some of the reason we have a CFAA in the first place is that legislators felt that there weren't statutes that addressed computer crimes that didn't have immediate financial benefits, which themselves could be charged as fraud). The major sentencing knob CFAA comes with is 2B1.1(b), which is a table of offense level by dollar loss incurred.
There are crimes where I think 2B1.1(b) probably makes sense (like, if you're literally stealing, or deliberately incurring monetary damage --- remember, your intent in committing a crime is extremely important, despite a common message board belief that it is somehow unknowable and a non-factor in legal decisions). But in a lot of cases, it's literally just the induction variable in a loop, and it makes no sense to boost an offense by 10 levels because you wrote "2000" in your for-loop instead of "20".
It's 2B1.1(b) that takes you from offense level 8 (0-6 months, probation eligible) to level 24 (5 years) based on 2 million dollar of incurred loss.
Again, though: the 2 million dollar figure is highly implausible. Prosecutors could have argued for it (they can argue anything they want), but it's hard to see them getting it for a non-remunerative crime that involved publishing academic journal articles.
Swartz's attorney was probably a bit rosey-eyed here, though: figure any charged computer offense probably incurs losses at least in the mid-5 figures (almost mechanically, because real companies have insurance obligations to conduct external forensic investigations when incidents like this happen), and you get to a year and change sentence pretty easily.
> Again, though: the 2 million dollar figure is highly implausible. Prosecutors could have argued for it (they can argue anything they want), but it's hard to see them getting it for a non-remunerative crime that involved publishing academic journal articles.
Actually this ran in parallel with the tail end of the Jammie Thomas-Rasset lawsuit, in which the various damage figures thrown around for sharing two albums' worth of stale, degraded-quality top-40 songs did include one in the seven-figure range.
The story of the Thomas-Rasset suit --- a civil suit, not a 2B1.1(b) criminal sentence argument --- is basically about how those 7 figure sums don't hold up in actual court. And that suit was about material with clear commercial value, not 1942 editions of botany journals. I think this example supports my point, rather than challenging it.
A 6 figure sum did hold up in actual court though -- it initially landed there a few months before he died, and was finalized a few months after. So from the perspective of someone watching this at the time, it's still really not that ridiculous of a worry.
Says the judge when you admit to what you did and plead. He’s the same one that gave Lori Laughlin and Mossimo 6 months in minimum security “camp” and not the bazillion years the prosecutor originally threatened.
> Says the judge when you admit to what you did and plead. He’s the same one that gave Lori Laughlin and Mossimo 6 months in minimum security “camp” and not the bazillion years the prosecutor originally threatened.
The prosecutor was trying to railroad Aaron for political gain and used every shenanigan in his bag of tricks to leverage Aaron into confessing -er- agreeing to a plea bargain. It was wrong, and very much revisionist to say otherwise.
White boys don’t do hard time for hiding in the closet to copy the library’s computer.
The judge appears to be a conservative old navy man. I haven’t dealt with him, but I think I’ve been in front of the type. Trial would go something like this: On the morning of day 3, so before the second day of testimony, the judge calls the attorneys into chambers and lays into them, sometimes loud enough for half the courthouse to hear, for wasting everyone’s time on such a stupid case, and that the prosecutor better have really good evidence of hard damages otherwise he’s going to be pissed. And then you go out, talk to your clients, and settle.
> the judge calls the attorneys into chambers and lays into them, sometimes loud enough for half the courthouse to hear, for wasting everyone’s time on such a stupid case,
You're basically writing fan fiction here. There's no evidence this would have been the case, and frankly I rather doubt it. There's nothing to suggest the judge would have reacted this way, nor that Swartz should have anticipated that he would.
Blind to what? You just stated “white boys”. So you agree justice isn’t blind. Then bringing up a rich, famous, American icon celebrity and how they were handled does not make sense.
Edit: as sibling post says. The rest of the comment is equivalent to fan fiction.
Yes. Unless this family is absurdly rich like hundreds of millions. If that’s true I am wrong. Otherwise, the wealthier American icon is still different enough where a [direct] comparison does not work.
If someone said it was, would you avoid reading it? If I can guess, maybe your hero worship (I presume) of this guy is making you unobjective.
Now when I say "hero worship", it sounds like I'm saying he's the opposite of a hero, to be honest I just know the name and the case, I haven't dug deep into it to make my own judgement, but I've seen a lot of comments championing him as a hero, and to me it seems their view of him clouds their judgement.
