“If you add up everyone's responsibility for something, it doesn't equal 100% — it equals a billion percent if it has to, because any number of entities can be fully responsible for the same thing.”
— Ran Prieur, The Mathematics of Responsibility (http://ranprieur.com/essays/mathres.html)
And you are taking the exact opposite stance. Suicide is the one crime where the person is both victim and perpetrator. You can't just choose to look at one and not the other. He is victim and perpetrator in one.
People treating suicide as pure-victim is absolutely wrong, not in the least because it tends to make it look much more appealing. The real victims of suicide are the loved ones and close friends. They are the ones that suffer, and they are the ones that are truly blameless "victims" (in so much as anyone can be blameless). There is a reason why suicide is considered to be a selfish crime. I am not lambasting Aaron here, but you have to treat suicide for what it is, rather than turn it into a heroic act of defiance and finally sticking it to the man. If only to make people think twice about taking the "easy way" out for themselves.
> The real victims of suicide are the loved ones and close friends.
This is bullshit. And so fucking insensitive. This idea, that anybody owes it to their ‘friends’ to force themselves to stay alive when they want to die, just so those ‘friends’ can continue to feel good about themselves and don't have to deal with the reality that their friend wants to die, is completely fucked up. Have some empathy for the people dealing with those feelings, not their selfish ‘friends’.
I think you're being a bit harsh here. As many people have pointed over the last day, most suicide decisions are made in less than an hour, often less than 5 minutes. A substantial portion of people who 'want to die' don't really want to die all the time - they have more and less depressed periods, and during one of those periods they make an impulsive decision.
Suicide has a lasting impact on friends and family; it significantly increases the risk that another family member will also attempt to kill themselves. I don't know if you've ever dealt with depression, but the impact on friends and family is the one thing that consistently stops me when I have suicidal thoughts. I don't think it's a stretch to say that, if your friends and family support you (or don't know), killing yourself impacts them in a substantial way that you should consider.
You're right that most people who want to die don't want to die all the time, and suicide decisions are impulsive to the extent that that they're made when the suicidal person wants to die (which is only some of the time) and not when they don't.
However, I think even when the decision is "impulsive", it's a decision to execute a plan whose details have been worked about over a long period of time. Usually suicidal feelings aren't acted upon the first time they surface. I'd imagine that it's actually very difficult to kill oneself, and it takes a lot of preparation to do it right, and a lot of determination to will oneself into following through with it.
I think "I love my friends and if I kill myself now I'll never get to see them again" is a valid reason to keep oneself alive. But shaming and pressuring suicidal people, making them feel bad (as if they don't feel bad enough already) for the impact their decision will have on others is totally out of order. Everybody has the right to choose to end their life and they shouldn't be shamed for it. At the same time, that choice does not exist in a vacuum, and it's worth looking at the external pressures that influenced the person's decision, and external entities can absolutely be blamed (and held responsible) for a person's suicide.
(I have dealt with some suicidal feelings before, but who hasn't? I don't want to come across as authoritative on this: I'm speculating based on my own experiences and those of other people with whom I've talked about this stuff. I'm completely open to correction and to hearing other people's perspectives and I appreciate your comment. I have no time though for the kind of victim-blaming that some people are doing in this thread.)
I've seen a lot of comments, here and otherwise, with regards to Aaron's suicide with many of them trying to skirt the issue, or apparently not understanding the subject at hand in the slightest. Many of these being people seemingly believing that he didn't think anything through and as if his brain was a processors that received an execute command and simply followed through the actions. However, this post is one of the few that provides insight, a lot of insight into the minds of Aaron Swartz and others like him, and how he may have actually been thinking things through over the course of time. Suicide isn't a person jumping off a ledge it's someone standing at a ledge slowly being pushed off by a thousand little things behind them until they slip.
I was going to write this on the parent, but I didn't because I thought it was tangential. You have to realize this is my personal experience, but it speaks volumes.
The scariest, closest to suicide moment I ever experienced was when I was shopping at a mall. It wasn't very busy, and I was feeling very... manic might be the word. Head down, headphones in, speed walking between errands. I had to keep moving, no matter what. I noticed the sort-of cut-away in the floor, so you could see from the top floor down to the ground. It was only 3 stories, but I had a really strong, sudden impulse to vault over the railing and see what it would do to me. Maybe I could land on my head, that might work. It was something I had never really considered before, it wasn't a very efficient way to do things, but it just gripped me very suddenly and all of a sudden it was a huge crisis.
Being suicidal, generally, is death by a thousand cuts. You have a predisposition, and all the stresses in life push you in that direction (as you've said). But the jumping off the ledge moment is crucial; personally, I have strategies for daily temptations like putting away knives in the kitchen. It's the spur of something unexpected, the sudden, strong, irrational impulse that really scares me.
Did you not see the quotes around it? Some people do turn to suicide because they perceive it to be a solution to their problems. Painting suicide victims is heros and martyrs as doing no one a service.
Can you point me to where I said they were heroes or martyrs? I said there was complex psychology involved, not pop-psych extremism.
duairc's point is that multiple parties can be responsible for something - that it's not appropriate to just blame the victim. duairc wasn't painting Swartz as a hero, a martyr, a villain, or even just a regular guy - or even that he's not primarily responsible.
We really need to get away from the idea that responsibility can only ever be assigned to one entity.
There's nothing ridiculous about claiming Aaron caused his situation and killed himself. There is a prosecutor, defendant and a judge. Prosecutors typically exaggerate their case, defendants typically downplay their side, and the judge is responsible for determining the outcome.
Wasn't she just doing her job? She was brought a high profile case. It involved a notorious internet prodigy who stashed a laptop and wrote a program to download 4M+ articles that otherwise would have cost a ton of money. A quick search revealed prices around $30. $30 * 4M = 120M. What am I missing?
Absolutely not. There is a reason that prosecutors have prosecutorial discretion and this case is it. The prosecutor's job is not to zealously convict anyone they encounter with everything they can convict them with, it is to represent the interests of the people. There is no fathomable way that sending Aaron Swartz to prison for 35 years could possibly do that.
But let's not put all of the blame on the prosecutors. The prosecutors did wrong here, but we allowed it to happen by giving them the authority to do wrong. We are, as we speak, allowing laws to remain on the books that make "crimes" that should be a minor misdemeanor at worst (and not illegal at all at best) into felonies punishable by a sentence of imprisonment longer than the sentences received by many unrepentant criminals who have committed premeditated murder.
These outrageously disproportionate laws are what allowed these prosecutors to abuse their discretion. Get rid of the laws, or cut the penalties by a factor of a thousand, and you get rid of the problem. That should be the goal here. Making an example of these prosecutors is not a bad first step, but actually prohibiting what they did by removing their ability to levy outrageous charges at minor offenders has to be the long-term solution.
Critical thinking skills. Instead, you're repeating a tired emotional appeal to top-down prescribed "morals".
Here is a program to download "4M+" articles:
i=1;while true;do wget http://foo/$i;i=1$i;done
I'll license my Unary Downloader Pro to you for $120MM. Oh wait, you just copied it into your brain and then reverse engineered it even!? You just did $120MM+ worth of damages!
I didn't realize simplicity had anything to do with the severity of a crime. How hard is it to kill someone? How hard is it to download something on Pirate bay? How hard is it to stash a laptop in an unused MIT closet and write code to download 4M articles? Why does it matter how hard one of these things is?
He used the Internet as it was meant to be used. MIT had no security, JSTOR had no security. Issuing a GET request to a web server is not, and should not be a crime.
That's a separate matter entirely. The point being discussed is whether Aaron did in fact violate the law. I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone here who believed Aaron deserved the sentence or the prosecution brought upon him, but personally I find it incredible how quick people are to absolve him entirely.
Every persecution of a hacker invariably emphasizes how they created some scary powerful tool in furtherance of their goal. It's the modern day witch hunt. Your average slob thinks "I can't even write a program to download one file, he must have dangerous knowledge and powers". If they knew it was one step beyond rightClick->saveAs, and felt like anybody could do the same with little effort, they would wonder why the plaintiff had failed to secure something so simple if it really were as important as claimed.
But this was not even a copyright case. They accused him of hacking. He had access to wifi network with free access to JSTOR. He scraped JSTOR. They banned his IP. He connected directly to the network (didn't break into anything, didn't hack into anything) and began scraping again. If this was against the law, how could it be anything more than a misdemeanor?
How many other illegal things can I do in this country now? If violating a TOS is hacking, so is sniffing and port scanning and every other imaginable "unusual" activity. This is worse than locking away a phreaker for 50 years -- at least a phreaker may have bypassed technical restrictions. What he "intended" to do with the files is irrelevant. If I put in my website's TOS "You cannot scrape our website!" and Google did, should Google be indicted for wire fraud and a host of other made up charges?
If Hacker News has gotten to the point where they're willing to call a prosecution of 50 years for a "crime" like this the way of the world I really can't imagine you have any heart for this industry anymore. Aaron was one of you.
He didn't kill someone with a knife, he put butter on his toast with a knife. There was literally no crime committed, certainly no crime worthy of federal prosecutors and decades of potential incarceration.
He downloaded a bunch of files using a publicly accessible computer network, from a web site that was available without authentication from that network. He didn't crack any passwords or encryption schemes, he didn't access any material he was supposed to pay for without paying, he simply didn't do anything to warrant the type of prosecution that was launched against him.
The article below explains a lot. What Aaron Swartz did was rude, not illegal.
That's the wrong way to look at it. The process had wiped him out financially and almost certainly damaged his mental state. It doesn't matter if you're acquitted if you are punished before the trial even begins.
Again, it doesn't matter if it's extremely easy to run someone over with a car or whether it's easy for a computer programmer to bypass download limits and sneak a laptop into a closet at MIT with a spoofed MAC. Simplicity has nothing to do with it.
What is wrong with you? You keep posting this article wanting it to say what you think it says, but it doesn't. Maybe you should read it. Better yet, read the actual indictments which are linked on that page.
* Computer Fraud (7 counts, for each time he 'deceived' JSTOR) "the defendent, knowingly and with intent to defraud, accessed a protected computer -- namely, a computer on MIT's network and a computer on JSTOR's network -- without authorization and in excess of authorized access"
* Unlawfully Obtaining Information from a Protected Computer (12 counts??? These weren't even protected computers!)
* Recklessly Damaging a Protected Computer (because he downloading the files fast enough to impact other users)
* Wire Fraud (because he was logged in as a guest on MIT's network and downloading JSTOR articles)
They throw in details like him using a mailinator email as if it's illegal to do that. It's ridiculous. You're ridiculous for trying to justify it.
And yes, all of these charges are basically 'hacking' charges. He was not charged with copyright infringement or anything of that nature.
Nothing is wrong with me, I'm just shocked at the amount of hero worship going around and complete ignorance of the facts of the case. He didn't just break the TOS and he wasn't charged with "hacking" as you keep referring to it. He was charged with several crimes.
Without even getting into the morality of Aaron's actions (though I think you're a pretty shit person if you don't support them), it's pretty clear that the actions of the prosecutor did contribute to Aaron's death. This means that if the prosecutor didn't take those actions, or took different actions, Aaron would still be alive. Therefore, the prosecutor's actions caused Aaron's death. This is simply an objective fact, independent of any moral framework. The fact that the prosecutor's actions were taken as a part of her "doing her job" doesn't change that they caused Aaron's death. If you agree that it is immoral to cause somebody's death (or at the very least that it was immoral to cause Aaron's death in this case), then the prosecutor's actions were immoral. If her actions are a part of her job, then her job is immoral (and maybe the entire ‘justice’ system needs to be smashed). As for the argument that the prosecutor couldn't possibly have foreseen that her actions would have caused Aaron's death (which I imagine you or somebody else would make): of course she could have. People kill themselves because of shit like this all the time, and you don't have to be an empathic genius to understand how the pressure of facing possibly 30+ years in prison could drive someone to suicide.
Not to mention that he intended to distribute the articles for free, turning this into a billion dollar case. I am 100% for open access, but the public and current law isn't. People blaming prosecutors are looking for a scapegoat where there just isn't one.
| Not to mention that he intended to distribute
| the articles for free, turning this into a
| billion dollar case
No where does it mention this in their case against him. Calling it a 'billion dollar case' is over-stating the fact. Especially since JSTOR withdrew their complaint against him and recommended that the US government back off.
The people that he supposedly hurt said that they don't care, and to leave him alone. Attempting to use the 'harm' to them as justification makes no sense.
> The people that he supposedly hurt said that they don't care, and to leave him alone
From the perspective of the state, that matters only as far as the details of "Can I still get the evidence needed without victim's support" and "How should I prioritize this case from here?"
Often going through with a prosecution is just a further hassle for the victim (a process of "re-victimization"). In real life sometimes the trial would reveal further unpleasant things about the victim to public view. Maybe the victim wants to take care of it themself. Maybe they genuinely don't want any consequence to befall the suspect.
But the responsibility of the state is to society at large. A prosecutor wouldn't refuse to charge a serial rapist that they had enough evidence for even without the victim's support, because of the risk to society if the serial rapist were allowed to go free.
While Aaron was charged with far different things, he had shown a propensity for flouting the law on this particular topic, and escalating each addition time he did so, so it's not really that surprising that the D.A. would decide to continue with the case, especially given that they still had some of the other 'victims' supporting the prosecution.
I say this all as a proponent of Open Access (certainly would have been nice while I was in college instead of having to use my university's proxy servers all the time). But the D.A. doesn't get to decide which laws are on the books and which aren't (as others have mentioned, this is how white people were mysteriously never charged of racial crimes in the Jim Crow-era South).
JSTOR only withdrew their complaint cause he got caught. If Aaron succeed they certainly wouldn't have dropped it. My point is his intent was certainly criminal in terms of billions of dollars in the eyes of the law and public, even if they aren't in mine and most of HN.
“If you add up everyone's responsibility for something, it doesn't equal 100% — it equals a billion percent if it has to, because any number of entities can be fully responsible for the same thing.” — Ran Prieur, The Mathematics of Responsibility (http://ranprieur.com/essays/mathres.html)