I have been digesting this news for a day and even though Aaron was a complete stranger to me, I can't remember feeling outrage this persistent in my entire life.
This was an attack on freedom not carried out by a confused and brainwashed group of people desperate for their lives due to living in an impoverished country or warzone. It was an organised attack, meant to ruin a person's life and deter anyone who wants to fight for information freedom, coordinated by well off, educated people who made conscious choices, had access to all the facts, were reminded repeatedly by the media how ridiculous and immoral their actions were and did it all for the political and financial benefit of special interests and the serfdom of everyone else.
These people were informed, they had to know how malevolent they were acting towards Aaron and those who try to maintain freedom and democracy in the digital world. They were aware and still chose to try to ruin his life even though he was clearly acting entirely in the interest of others and doing it in a manner that was civil and non violent. They did it just because he was smarter than most and thus a greater threat to entrenched powers. The level of evil here is truly off the scale. The fact that it resulted in his death is just... I'm at a loss for words.
This is an excellent explanation of the core outrage in this case. I can't believe there are people in other threads attempting to excuse the actions of the prosecutors. The publisher dropped the case, there should have only been a pursuit for a minor ~30 day tresspass sentence if MIT specifically requested it.
Just for Aaron? Oh man, what about every one else? US law is insane, hurting too many people to list. Mostly, Americans, but also world citizens who don't even get to vote in the US. You need to deal with law its self, not this one single individual. Not just the law, but I suspect your entire value system.
I had sympathy yesterday, but this is turning in to hero martyr worship. Its getting ridiculous. Step back and think. Form a proper long term strategy. Think about Kim Dotcom, Bradley, the British bloke you chaps tried to get, copyright stuff, patent stuff, hell, think about damn drone strikes which I assume will begin to happen in the US eventually. Look at the lot of it in this blokes name, not just one tiny insignificant part of it. Most of all think about the relationship between government and ...... YOU. Its supposed to be YOUR government.
I get the grief, but if all you can think of is this one single case, then expect the world to be a better place you are deluding your selves. Those Wall Street protests amounted to nothing what so ever, which means you have to do much better than them. Think about it.
As say this because I want American people, the intelligent, considered, sensitive people I read here to win their country back.
When it costs $1.5m to prove your innocence you no longer have any right to the word "democracy", less right to point fingers at other countries.
Come on America, be the people the rest of us hope you really are.
"I had sympathy yesterday, but this is turning in to hero martyr worship."
Isn't that how causes start? I feel like I can think of far more effective, mainstream causes that centered around the cult of a person (or a small group of people) than around agreement on an idea.
Like most of HN, I didn't know Aaron personally, but when I express outrage over these kinds of things I can now say, "Like Aaron Swatrz."
The Wall Street Protests failed, because among other things, they had too many vague, overarching goals with no end plan. And so now with Swartz's death, people have a human face to put on the failures of our justice system...and you want to berate them for not being strategic enough?
Really? Taxes on the rich were just a small part of their many, many ideals. In terms of creating real political force, the Tea Party has done far far more.
I'm not saying OWS was useless...I agree with you that the amount of conversation and awareness they raised was far more than I would've suspected walking by their Zucotti Park encampment everyday...they had a decent amount of success despite their wide diversity of goals, and that's admirable. But to the parent commenter's point, their unfocused aims limit their success. The Tea Party, in contrast, is an actual force in Congress.
Lots of political movements have created real political force, but there are many historical examples of real political forces which were not constructive.
It makes it more digestible too. "Save kittens" aka "Save all kittens" - this can divide your attention and distract you thinking about all of those kittens, and then feeling overwhelmed. This of course takes away from focusing on the base issue - much more nuanced and subtle to deal with. It's not easy educating people about nuances either. You need their attention, and you need to cut through all of the noise they've heard.
Guys, you in US really need new kind of anti-establisment movement, because you are fighting against Goliat here. MIT and others ARE part of establishment and if establishment decide to take control over internet, they will do it. Wait, they ARE DOING it right now and as you can see people are getting killed just because someone said "i want you to click and pay". Damn, if someone said to me few decades ago that internet will be this way, i would not belive it. Personally i call last 10 years: era of Internet colonisation.
Sorry on bad English.
Somehow I don't think staging a rally for bradely manning, holocaust victims, abused animals, and everyone who has ever been disenfranchised is the answer.
I get your sentiment, but if you start trying to lump too many issues together, your message gets muddled, people get confused or won't be interested.
Using any case to try to enact change is a good thing, and perhaps it will work to help people that would be hurt in similar ways in the future.
OP here. I found the tweet that announced the idea, and shared. Agree today doesn't seem very organized. Maybe there will be just 5 people, but I'll have an open mind.
Today I'm going to exercise our right to peaceably assemble. I'm not going to bring a sign, nor yell, nor point fingers, nor hero worship.
I want to meet other hackers who care enough about what happened to meet, if only for a bit, in person. And, it isn't just enough to meet in person. The gesture can be visible, open in location that has significance to this story.
To simply bear witness to shared grief and concern.
Of course, all of these other cases are ridiculous as well. And there have been protests about many of them. Should we not protest one injustice because another has been committed?
> Look at the lot of it in this blokes name, not just one tiny insignificant part of it.
Do you believe that everyone here cares only about Aaron Swartz, and not the rest of these issues?
The death of Aaron Swartz is a particularly painful wake-up call, but it doesn't mean that people care only about him. It helps that he was a particularly sympathetic character, and that many people in this community knew him personally or were directly involved in his work and writing. Kim Dotcom is a international millionaire, who was violating copyright for substantial personal profit, and who had a mansion with a built-in bunker for just this sort of problem; and has been able to use his wealth and power to much more successfully defend himself. Bradley Manning is more sympathetic, but he did violate his duty to his country by revealing many secret documents that he had access to, without being particularly selective about anything that really showed abuses.
Aaron, on the other hand, was merely trying to preserve access to a large body of academic and scientific work. Nothing he did ever indicated that he intended to profit from his downloading. Heck, he never even distributed any of it. And while he used some techniques that were further into the grey-zone than many of us would try, the prosecution was so clearly out of proportion with the "crime" as to make the absurdity apparent to almost anyone (and the fact that it's treated as a crime rather than a civil matter is patently absurd as well).
It has always been the case that martyrs, or particular example of people persecuted by a system, are far more effective than general complaints about entire populations. There were millions of black people who had been treated unfairly, made to use separate bathrooms, drinking fountains, sit in the back of the bus, before Rosa Parks decided one day that she wouldn't take it any more and refused to move, leading to her arrest, and subsequently leading to bus boycotts and the case that eventually worked its way to the Supreme Court ruling that segregation on the bus system was illegal.
Putting a face on injustice is so much more effective than simply talking about it in the abstract. And when that face is a brilliant and well loved young man, who had many influential connections in the tech industry, who was working in the interests of knowledge and social justice, rather than some kid downloading the latest Hollywood blockbuster or an international millionaire trying to make a buck, it will be much more effective.
The stakes have been raised. We cannot sacrifice our future, and our freedom, in the interests of failing business models.
> Think about Kim Dotcom, Bradley, the British bloke you chaps tried to get, copyright stuff, patent stuff, hell, think about damn drone strikes which I assume will begin to happen in the US eventually.
Well there's no common thread that binds those situations so the message is... "things are bad, we are angry"?
No, the focus on this particular case is better than a vague outpouring of frustration.
Not to rain on anyone's parade or anything, but this might be more poignant on a weekday, when individuals meant to see said protest are actually at work.
That being said It's a great idea and I wish I could be there.
I was about to post something along the lines of, "And to all those people about to post something about how useless this is, STFU." It's not useless, and it will make a difference. Aaron's memory is important, and acknowledging the gross injustice that lead to his death is important. A protest will send a clear signal that we are aware of the governments tendency to overreach, and that we, the people, will stand for it.
Yeah, that is what I was trying to say. Nice gesture, sure. At the same time, I can't help but feel that it is a bit reactionary. As if it was only Aaron's suicide that made people realize that it was a gross injustice and had he not killed himself, no one would have cared.
In fairness, a lot of fairly important details did not surface until today. It was an active case, after all. It is true that a lot of the will to act has come from the catalyst of Aaron's death, but the facts were not as clearly available before (IMO).
Edit : I should add that I believe there would have been a meaningful backlash had he for some reason lost his criminal case and been sentenced to (n > 3) years in federal prison.
In hindsight, there was a great deal of empathy to be shown to an individual who was being financially and emotionally drained by the legal system. However, that's the sort of stuff that doesn't readily occur to most people (myself included).
One thing I wish Aaron had done while he was alive was be as diligent as rallying support for himself as he did for the anti-SOPA efforts. For civic-minded people, it's almost always easier to drum up support for a cause than for yourself...still...had he been relentless -- he could've posted bimonthly updates on the case and made the top of HN, Reddit, BoingBoing, etc -- all of us would've had his case near the top of our minds. As it is, I can't be the only one who hadn't thought about JSTOR in awhile, and had assumed that his defense (given his skills and his alliances) was going as well as it possibly could.
Have you considered disenrolling? Based on what has come out that this entire case has been pushed by MIT officials and JSTOR was opposed to it, affiliation with MIT right now, even as a student, looks to me like affiliation with the Nazi youth. Financial support of MIT through tuition looks like support of what is a terrorist organization.
There is no hyperbole here. People who voluntarily affiliated with the Nazis suffered a permanent black mark on their reputations, even when they were not aware of what was going on at the time. Those who, after the extent of their evil actions were known, continued to choose to be affiliated with them, were considered exceptionally vile.
Those retaining voluntary affiliation with MIT after these events are vile. I choose, as a matter of personal morality, going forward to have nothing but disgust towards them and will not cooperate or affiliate with them anymore than I would with Neo-Nazi Skinheads. Those who had affiliation with MIT in the past, such as graduated students, provided they disavow all connection or affiliation with this organization might be redeemed, just as Nazi youth who have since disavowed their affiliation have become tolerable. The affiliation though will always be a black mark on someone's record regardless of whether they knew the details of the evil committed by their organization.
The MIT bureaucrats who let this terrible machinery get out of hand will have to do some soul searching and stand public scrutiny, but until it can be shown that their raisin d'être is to exterminate people, I think we should refrain from comparing them to the Nazis.
> I choose, as a matter of personal morality, going forward to have nothing but disgust towards them and will not cooperate or affiliate with them anymore than I would with Neo-Nazi Skinheads.
People who voluntarily affiliated with the Nazis suffered a permanent black mark on their reputations, even when they were not aware of what was going on at the time. Those who, after the extent of their evil actions were known, continued to choose to be affiliated with them, were considered exceptionally vile.
That's revisionist history. Those people who voluntarily affiliated with Nazis were generally forgiven unless they benefited from the affiliation in ways beyond mere survival. The Nazis had a nasty tendecy to kill those who opposed them, so "affiliating" and even "accomodating" with Nazis was a valid survival technique so long as affiliation or accomodation did not turn into mutual cooperation. Many people in the French Resistance were officially "affiliated" with the Nazis in some way; this is part of what made them so effective. The same is true of those who helped Jews flee from Nazi-controlled areas.
I've been having a tough time tracking down more information on this so I'll ask here. What exactly did MIT do (or not do) that people want to protest? Is it that MIT pursued legal action, or did not try and help Swartz out?
I've been taking all of this in trying to both formulate a reasonably valid mental framework to understand and, yes, be able to personally judge or form an opinion about this entire story. Not an easy task when you don't have direct knowledge of the facts and the people involved and, to make matters worst, morons add noise to the wire.
To say that this is a catastrophe at many levels is an understatement. This should not have happened.
While I did not personally know Aaron I have lost at least one good friend to the pressures and stresses of running a business and colliding with the legal system. I've seen it happen right in front of my eyes.
These things are not worth a person's life.
Of course, we have a natural "who done it?" attitude and now want to find someone to blame for his untimely death. At some level you do have to blame him. No, not for downloading files but rather for making the decision to end his life. Nobody but him made that decision. I have suffered enough in business to actually understand how a person can get there, how, before you know it, mental stress and anguish walks you right up to the edge of that precipice. And, once there, only an external force can keep you from jumping off. In my case this "non-mascable interrupt" were my kids. I know they saved my life, even though they had no clue they were doing so. I can't even guess as to why this young and brilliant man did not have someone to pull him away from the edge.
And so, as much as one can blame Aaron for taking his own life, it also took external forces to cause him to walk to the edge of the precipice. Sadly, it seems, these forces originated with actions taken by MIT and were amplified by the DOJ. I find myself strangely contemplating the idea that, perhaps, just perhaps, pro-gun extremists who believe the government is out to get us might know something that we don't. But I digress.
Who done it? Well, MIT and DOJ. At least that's how I read it. I also think JSTOR is at fault, even though they seem to be washing their hands. Negligence through inaction.
Can anything make this right? Well, not really. You can't replace a life. Yet, the part of me that always wants both sides of an equation to balance has been searching for something that might at least make this horrible event make some sense.
I love MIT, but I get the horrible feeling that they fucked up in a big way. Admittedly I have formed this opinion without direct access to the facts. I have to concede at least that to be fair. Still, one idea keeps circling around in my head and I just had to come here and put it out there:
JSTOR can no-longer exist. MIT, needs to acquire JSTOR, release all content to the public domain and disband the organization. MIT, shouldn't even have direct control of this data. perhaps it should be handed over to Wikipedia for dissemination (along with the requisite financial support).
If it is true that MIT initiated this and they, along with JSTOR, could have made tons of noise to pull back the DOJ, they really need to engage in deep introspection in order to make sure this never happens again. And they need to make JSTOR ancient history. If, despite their substantial financials, this acquisition is beyond their capabilities industry giants such as Apple and Google need to intervene. One of the best ways I can think of honoring Aaron's memory is for this data to be free for anyone, anywhere, to access.
> At some level you do have to blame him. No, not for downloading files but rather for making the decision to end his life. Nobody but him made that decision.
At the risk of being branded insensitive, I do have to agree with this sentiment. My view on Aaron's suicide is much the same as that of the nurse Jacintha Saldanha last month [1].
In both cases, these people were subjected to incredible stress and anguish by external forces, but crucially, the reasonable person could not have predicted their response to these pressures would have been to take their own lives.
Aaron wasn't on suicide watch. Nobody foresaw this.
JSTOR don't own any content, they just make content available online as a service. Subscribers pay a fee which covers costs and pays for the licenses from the publishers. The whole operation is non-profit. It's meaningless to talk about buying JSTOR in order to own their content.
Yeah I didn't realize that initially either. JSTOR are actually the "good guys" in terms of releasing content to the public compared with the journals that they aggregate. You can argue that they should be pushing journals to let them open up even more, but at the moment a world with JSTOR is better than one without.
> If it is true that MIT initiated this and they, along with JSTOR, could have made tons of noise to pull back the DOJ, they really need to engage in deep introspection in order to make sure this never happens again.
A person suspected of breaking federal law will be prosecuted by the Federal government at its own discretion. The alleged victims get no say in that. Their forgiveness may be taken into account by a judge at sentencing, but it has nothing at all to do with the pursuit of prosecution. In fact, a federal prosecutor would be behaving in an impeachable way to fail to pursue a violation of federal law.
In fact, a federal prosecutor would be behaving in an impeachable way to fail to pursue a violation of federal law.
Citation needed.
Particularly considering the fact that prosecutors do not have the resources to pursue all violations of federal law. Doubly so given that multiple states currently have extremely uneven enforcement of federal law around the sale of marijuana.
Federal prosecutors swear an oath to uphold all federal laws, and are generally bound by that oath unless an executive order by the president directs them not to enforce a particular law (in which case the president, not the prosecutor, would be subject to potential impeachment).
State and local prosecutors do not have the resources to pursue violations of federal law; they also do not have the jurisdiction to do so.
Federal prosecutors have several billions in resources to pursue violations of federal law, and are effectively not capped in their pursuit of "justice".
Doubly so given that multiple states currently have extremely uneven enforcement of federal law around the sale of marijuana.
Federal prosecution of drug laws regarding marijuana are fairly even. The difference is that states which have legalized marijuana make it far easier for federal prosecutors to find defendants than states where it is illegal (because defendants in those states do not distribute their marijuana in the public eye).
A prosecutor's duty and role is to seek justice[0]. Justice isn't always black and white, but it certainly isn't applying the toughest charges that could possibly be made to stick nor seeking the highest possible penalty in every case. The prosecutor should attempt to determine what a just outcome to a case would be, then seek to achieve it.
Being aware of a situation where it is probable to win a conviction under the letter of the law in no way obligates a prosecutor to seek that conviction.
"At some level you do have to blame him. No, not for downloading files but rather for making the decision to end his life."
I wouldn't blame him for ending his life. I would say there is responsibility however on his part, to have found and kept enough support around him to counter-balance whatever he was diving into; There's also responsibility on society's part to provide and facilitate that support - and to make sure powers/controls are kept in check and balance (proportional to the alleged offense, and based on society's evolving values). Perhaps he thought he was though and underestimated the pressures and how it would affect him. Sometimes when I have eureka moments, on the positive side, they initiate a very powerful chain reaction in my thinking and focus. I could see the same thing happening if you've created lots of justifications as to why "pending doom" may not hit you, may not be real - and something could happen that makes it very real and all of that pending doom could flood in and cascade as doom.
Personally, I am now doing so. I will no longer cooperate with or work with individuals who maintain affiliation with this fascist organization. MIT should be shut down and its assets sold.
It's really sad, I'm younger than Aaron and he was like an example of a white hat hacker, great example.
It's sad that people started to protest after his death, hey, where you'we been before?
Had anyone imaged that Aaron decided to suicede just to wake people up, he did so many great things and was so altruistic for to internet freedom that this could be a real scenario...
It is not just wrongful prosecution that leads one to depression. The much harder thing is the feeling of lack of support. We should have been protesting when Aaron was alive, it's too late now. We are to blame for his death, and we should make a lesson out of it.
I don't understand. I've downloaded articles from JSTOR, Project Muse, books on top of books, and am publicly re-hosting them through my own Dropbox, which I publicly link to on my own Website.
Maybe I'm missing something here. Was he made an example? Is this the fundamental nature of the protest and the outrage, that we perceive that he was made an example of, that we are aware, and that it is unfair, in some essential way, for them to target leaders who are no less perpetrators than the rest of us?
Because we do that to them when BoingBoing or Anons cry to bring down or apply heat to CNN or pundits. I'm not playing devil's advocate, but I'm trying to understand the nature of the protest. I believe these questions can be fairly asked about [the protest] without counting as some sort of insincerity toward Mr. Schwartz.
If I had to name the cause of the outrage, it is that the charges were so disproportional to the alleged offense that it drove a good man to suicide. If he had been charged with an offense for which the penalty was proportionate to what he is alleged to have done, e.g. a misdemeanor with a $500 fine or a fortnight in jail, I have to imagine that there would be very little protesting going on, and for that matter that he would still be alive. But they decided they had to break him, and they did, so here we are.
I'm just going to state this, as statefully as I can, without trying to be sensationalist. Everyone I come across these days insist on calling me "schizophrenic" or "paranoid" or what have you:
But "Marshall Law", as I understand it, is _more or less_ in effect, and a lot of people are talking about Obama's UAVs and whatever it is they do. (I know it was repealed. But you get what I mean. We're all consuming roughly the same information; so can we just bootstrap past the facts, please? I don't want to play semantics, pedantics, or any kind of fact-checking game.)
So I must ask: Is this a civil war? When do we call it that? 100 years ago, it meant having a militia or something of that order. Now we all play slapstick at our keyboards and write "modules" and pentests. Is it possible to call a spade a spade?
I'm asking seriously here. Every week I have to stop and ask myself, "Should I read the news? Will there be another episode or thread of death that I'll have to keep track of on account of something our government did?"
I really do appreciate Mr. Schwartz efforts and work. But this country is taking heavy demoralizing blows every week.
Beating someone down who isn't trained or prepared to fight is a different matter from beating down leaders, ideologues, activitists, and fighters. It seems like this country, our communities, are being served heavy blows, in much the same way the U.S. demoralizes the "Middle East" with its extended arm of Social/Big Media.
I don't know if you can call it a civil war when only one side has a military. There are no defined "sides" even. Not everyone in government or politics is a bad guy -- look at Sen. Wyden or Rep. Lofgren, for example.
It's almost like the internal struggle we all face in our own lives. Doing the right thing is hard, doing the wrong thing is convenient. So the people we have running our government are human, they pick the wrong thing sometimes. Most of the time they probably don't even realize they're acting like the bad guys. People can rationalize anything.
What we have to do is to stop them when they do wrong. The check on the common criminal is law enforcement. The check on law enforcement is Congress. The check on Congress is the people.
Something needs to be done, I agree, but I do not understand what you mean when you say "we the people". (I'm not sure how one reads the Internet Declaration of Independence and walks away thinking that phrase is meaningful in any politically relevant sense.)
And honestly. I'm sure a majority of us here are prepared to print a gun and build a quadcopter at the drop of a pizza slice.
[Ugh. Of course that doesn't mean "let's go out and get crazy!" I just want to make it clear that something is emerging socially in this country, and it is due to the fact that weaponry is so widely available. (And even further, by the Bureau for Justice Assistance, my Terminal is technically considered a weapon.) Many of us defend the idea of printing a gun, and this in itself is problematic for something like a "Congress" that cannot even begin to understand, in any practical sense, what 3D printing amounts to economically and socially.]
I've been trying to get a handle on my own feelings of outrage all day. Lots of people are given what amounts to life in prison for a few ounces of weed thanks to ridiculous "three strikes" laws, and while I'm outraged, its orders of magnitude less than what I feel in this case.
It could just be that Aaron was a "kindred spirit" but what I think at last is that it comes down to the fact that someone who was so valuable to us was taken from us by the actions of someone who offered us so very little with their own life, for nothing more than a small amount of personal gain for themseleves.
Its the same feeling I get when I learn an NFL star or a merit scholar was killed in a mugging over a few hundred bucks by some worthless thug.
He was made an example of because he didn't think small.
Aaron actually had the chops to pull these things off and make them stick.
Witness the PACER affair for example, if this wasn't a direct retaliation you have to wonder if there wasn't a link between that and this.
In the aggregate your dropbox and everybody else's probably contain at least as many articles as Aaron downloaded, but JSTOR isn't scared of that because it isn't centralized for easy access. That's when their little gravy train becomes endangered. Don't be misled by them being a 'non profit', there is plenty of money made around non-profits.
I want to take this opportunity to talk about myself. And to those who might say that I'm using Aaron's death to further my self promotion, show me a post where he says I'm not awesome.
..you need to look up the definition of "burden of proof", possibly in conjunction with "social norms".
Erm, this sounded more to me like: people who are frustrated he was persecuted, come here to figure out how to take action on his beliefs which we share. Bad wording to be sure but the spirit was healthy.
I sincerely do feel that "sharing beliefs" is an understatement.
I know that smile. That is my smile. I make it often. And perhaps many others do too. It's when I know I have no other business being exactly where I am except for the fact that I'm right.
I did not know him personally, yet I benefited personally from his mind, such that many of my projects were successful because I started mouthing off ideas that depended on RSS.
What if you collaborated with Newton? Spinoza? Even that fat bastard Leibniz? Huygens? Popper? Russell? Whitehead? What if you slogged through those theorems, or those symbols, or those programs? Did you simply "share beliefs"? What about those times, for brevity, you had to assume, at least in some partial, pseudometaphysical way, assume the identity of that author, and speak as if you were them, for clarity, gusto and confidence?
I cannot fully fathom these feelings, but even that "they took our kin from us" is an understatement.
We are building something here. An Architect of the Web was given no light to see, given no capacity to imagine his work come to fruition. There's more than belief sharing going on. "Sharing is caring" but that doesn't quite get at the right picture.
This was an attack on freedom not carried out by a confused and brainwashed group of people desperate for their lives due to living in an impoverished country or warzone. It was an organised attack, meant to ruin a person's life and deter anyone who wants to fight for information freedom, coordinated by well off, educated people who made conscious choices, had access to all the facts, were reminded repeatedly by the media how ridiculous and immoral their actions were and did it all for the political and financial benefit of special interests and the serfdom of everyone else.
These people were informed, they had to know how malevolent they were acting towards Aaron and those who try to maintain freedom and democracy in the digital world. They were aware and still chose to try to ruin his life even though he was clearly acting entirely in the interest of others and doing it in a manner that was civil and non violent. They did it just because he was smarter than most and thus a greater threat to entrenched powers. The level of evil here is truly off the scale. The fact that it resulted in his death is just... I'm at a loss for words.
And they call themselves department of justice.