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US Attorney Chided Swartz On Day of Suicide
theodp writes "The e-mail that Defendant Swartz's supplemental memorandum (pdf) cites as paramount to his fifth motion to suppress [evidence against him] is relevant, but not nearly as important as he tries to make it out to be,' quipped United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz (pdf) in a court filing made on the same day Aaron Swartz committed suicide. In the 1-7-2011 e-mail Ortiz refers to, which was not produced for Swartz until Dec. 14th — almost two years after his 1-6-2011 arrest — a Secret Service agent reported to the Assistant U.S. Attorney that he was 'prepared to take custody anytime' of Swartz's laptop, although no one had yet sought a warrant to search the computer. In Prosecutor as Bully, Larry Lessig laments, 'They [JSTOR] declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the "criminal" who we who loved him knew as Aaron.' Swartz's family also had harsh words for MIT and prosecutors: 'Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron.' With MIT President Emeritus Charles M. Vest currently serving as a Trustee of JSTOR parent Ithaka as well as a Trustee of The MIT Corporation, one might have expected MIT to issue a statement similar to the let's-put-this-behind-us one JSTOR made on the Swartz case back in 2011."
It used to be the home of the hacker culture.
Fuck off asshole. If you are facing decades in prison and being forever named a felon, wouldn't you consider it?
These prosecutors need to pay for their crimes. They need to be fired, disbarred, and then thrown in jail.
Culprit #1: Stephen P. Heymann, the head of the Cybercrime Unit and lead prosecutor
Culprit #2: Carmen M. Ortiz, US Attorney (and Bostonian of the Year as Twitter tells me)
Sign the petitions:
[1]
[2]
These people seem to be soulless automatons devoid of any compassion and quite willing to destroy a life without good reason just so they can advance their own careers a bit. This behavior is the hallmark of dangerous psychopaths. People like that belong into a closed mental institutions, not into positions of power.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
we'll criticize people that had no personal tie to a person for not recognizing their true mental state? How many immediate family members do not recognize a suicidal condition in someone? But we expect a lawyer to see it?
Who or what are you talking about?
Maybe you would be suicidal too if facing 35 years for downloading scientific articles, when the people you downloaded them from don't want to proceed but the justice department says "too bad".
That's the point the poster is making, isn't it? It doesn't matter who it is, being on the receiving end of a witch hunt is enough to ruin anyone's life.
35 years in prison for downloading scientific articles. Really? What a great country he and I share, where we give those convicted of murder softer sentences than we do for some "copyright infringers".
Suicide can only be blamed on the person that did it.
I absolutely agree with you.
That doesn't preclude charging the prosecutors with a whole array of harassment and misconduct-related actions.
Unfortunately, the US has a serious problem wherein prosecutors have effectively infinite resources to harass someone; on top of which, we reward them for convictions, not for serving justice. On the flip side of that, public defenders lose money for every hour they spend on a case vs working at their "real" jobs; and since they don't generally do it as their primary job (more like an act of compulsory charity on the side), they have little incentive to care how they perform in that role. Thus, you have a supposedly-antagonistic system where both sides have strong incentive to push everyone brought up on charges to settle, regardless of guilt.
You want to fix the system? We need to have "prosecutor pays" for privately retained defense; and we need to ban settlements entirely.
Yes, that means every two-bit punk who shoplifts gets to hire Johnny Cochran. And yes, I realize how much the second point there would slow down the system - Or more accurately, it would mean nonviolent cases with no "real" damages, such as Swartz', would never have made it past a private student misconduct panel at MIT, and we'd have a brilliant but bored kid still alive.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You're questioning his strength of character? He was charged because he wanted to liberate academic documents. He drew the ire of the Feds because he freely released court documents. He stood up against SOPA. And he helped launch Creative Commons. I'm pretty fucking sure he had a shitload of "strength of character".
What part of 'contributed to his death' do you not understand?
It's established at this point that he had bouts of depression. But it's also obvious that facing the prospect of 35 years in jail would be extremely stressful and was in all likelihood what he was depressed about when he committed suicide.
And yes, he probably wouldn't have gotten the 35 years, but you can't dismiss that point, for at least two reasons.
One, he shouldn't have been on trial in the first place; the 'victim' dropped its claims against him; at worst, he should have been charged with mischief.
The second reason relates to prosecutorial bullying: if they don't expect to get all 35 years, then part of their strategy obviously involves charging people with crimes they can't be convicted of in an attempt to get them to settle. It is intimidation by the prosecutor.
As an outsider looking in it appears that the prosecutors in this case had no sense of proportion and/or threw everything they could think of at him in the hopes that some things would stick.
Remember if you might what actually happened to precipitate this sad series of events:
- He wrote a script using wget or similar to download JSTOR articles (which by the way are freely accessible to the public if you are on a public terminal on campus, at least at my alma mater).
- He left a laptop in a utility box overnight, running the script
That's it. He was caught, he returned the downloaded JSTOR articles, JSTOR dropped any civil charges it had (because there was no harm done).
But MIT left him out to dry and the prosecutors charged him with a series of crimes totaling 35 years in prison, leaving him to spend years and, from what I heard, a huge part if not all of his savings, defending himself in court.
It is patently ridiculous. Overloading of charges has got to stop. The prosecutors in this case should be fired as an example to other US prosecutors.
A lot of words to say that the Feds don't need to have any sense of perspective.
A bank can money launder terrorists' and drug producers' money, and face no time (HSBC) or can almost single handedly cause a nationwide mortgage crises (Angelo Mozillo), and face nothing but a small (on a percentage of income basis) fine. A kid can trespass and face virtually the rest of his life in jail.
You: Gotta love the Feds. More power to them!
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
If the GP AC had made more than just a passing joke (tying in recent gun and sexual assault cases at the same time, it takes some skill and luck to pull something like that off), then AC would not have been marked a troll. Throw in the response that JSTOR *withdrew* its allegations, but the prosecutors pursued the case anyway, and we have a situation where there are serious questions about the prosecutors.
Specifically:
Why did they pursue a case when the plaintiffs want out?
a) Was it because they thought what he allegedly did was so terrible that it must be prosecuted?
b) Were they thinking this was a meal ticket to fame?
I don't know, and I'd sure as hell like to find out. If it was a), then I'd like to know what's happening with our laws and to our justice departments so make a copyright case like this so "life and death." This is especially damning in the light of the US attorneys not pursuing HSBC for aiding terrorism and organized crime. If it was b), then these people are pretty sick, and I would hold them partly responsible for Aaron Swartz's death, at least morally if not legally.
this was his final statement, his final way of making a point.
When I was in grad school, there was one tenured professor who was true scum; had only graduated 3 PhD's in 15 years, had an affair with a student, had one student who had previously committed suicide, I can go on. At the same time, he had over 300 publications and books to his name, was known and respected in his field, and was a fellow of a prestigious academic society. During my third year, his second student committed suicide. This was the tipping point; within the year, the professor was forced to retire and is no longer overseeing students.
I can only hope this tragic event becomes a tipping point for copyright reform as well.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
So hiding a laptop in a closet in order to download scientific articles is a crime worthy of decades in prison?
So many people here seem to have no sense of perspective. Yes, what Swartz did was (probably) illegal. It was civil disobedience, not malicious or for personal gain, but I think some punishment would have been reasonable: a misdemeanor (at most), maybe a fine or probation or community service. But a felony and significant federal prison time? That's fucking insane. There was no damage. He was an asset to the community, not a threat. Lessig said is best: 'Somehow, we need to get beyond the “I’m right so I’m right to nuke you” ethics that dominates our time.'
Stop blaming an individual, when the real problem is the adversarial system.
No. Fuck that.
I'm tired of the sentiment that the system is to blame, or "don't hate the player, hate the game". At some point, an individual made the decision to do this. They checked their morals at the door, and decided to abuse their authority for their own personal gain.
While the system is set up to reward that behaviour, it doesn't change the fact that Carmen M Ortiz chose to do this. At some point, we need to hold people who make decisions like this, whether or not the system encourages them to, responsible, and hold them up as the immoral SOBs that they are.
If we don't, the system will never change.
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.