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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.
Swartz was an American computer programmer, writer, archivist, political organizer, and Internet activist. Swartz co-authored the "RSS 1.0" specification of RSS, and built the Web site framework web.py and the architecture for the Open Library. He also built Infogami, a company that merged with Reddit in its early days, through which he became an equal owner of the merged company.
On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested in connection with systematic downloading of academic journal articles from JSTOR, which became the subject of a federal investigation.[2][3] JSTOR offended Swartz mainly for two reasons: it charged large fees for access to these articles but did not compensate the authors and it ensured that huge numbers of people are denied access to the scholarship produced by America's colleges and universities.[4][5] On January 11, 2013, Swartz was found dead in his Crown Heights, Brooklyn, apartment, where he had hanged himself.
- Wikipedia
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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".
Typical american. You'd fight to have Guantanamo closed and I'm sure you criticize him for keeping the place open -- yet when it comes to someone you don't like, you have no problem condemning them to torture, physical and otherwise. You're no better than the attorney himself.
If you want to stop something like this from happening again you need to take a good, long look in the mirror as a country. You're all guilty, guilty of negligence by putting these people into power and then sitting on your thumbs when they commit atrocities like this. Flail your arms and point fingers all you want but you are ALL TO BLAME.
Because the whole case was a sham put forth by the US AGO. Even JSTOR, the "offended" party, didn't want to pursue the matter. It was the US government that butchered this man with their brutal legal system and relentless pursuit of him. Make no mistake about that.
The pursuit was even more vicious and determined than that of the MPAA and RIAA with their letters and lawsuits over copyright violations.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
A lot of people are outraged over the prosecutorial overreach in this case (and, by extension, the tradition of prosecutorial overreach in most cases prosecuted by the federal government), and a petition has popped up to remove the DA in charge of this case: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-states-district-attorney-carmen-ortiz-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck
It's a start, though what I'd really like to see is some proper judicial reform, so we can bring some sanity to the judicial system.
Links to the Ars coverage of this story:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/internet-pioneer-and-information-activist-takes-his-own-life/
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/family-blames-us-attorneys-for-death-of-aaron-swartz/
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
1. To reform the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 to rationalize it with the 21st century by the following measure
A. Repeal any and all language from the CFAA that originated in the Espionage Act of 1918 or its amended forms such as the McCarran Internal Security Act or the Subversive Activities Control Act of the 1950s.
B. Alter the definition of "Protected Computer" so that the act only covers Federal Government and Financial computer systems, and no others.
C. Remove any and all language that creates a crime simply because a computer is involved in an activity, where otherwise the activity would not be considered a crime.
D. Specifically state that the Interstate Commerce Clause does not apply to the Act. Almost all modern communications are 1. done on a computer, and 2. interstate in nature. Whereas it is against the spirit of the Founding Fathers to have the Federal Goverment control every single communication in a Free country, this act should be adopted by the congress and signed by the President.
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".
No, we expect prosecutors not to be utter shitbags.
But we do expect them to be shitbags. We reward prosecutors based on conviction rates, rather than just outcomes. Prosecutors are especially rewarded for winning "tough cases" (ie, cases where the defendant is likely to have been innocent).
This one Carmen M Ortiz is obviously a psychopath that should never ever serve in a public office.
Stop blaming an individual, when the real problem is the adversarial system.
Systems like this have been fixed before. In the 1970s and 1980s police were evaluated by their arrest rate. So the police were "successful" as arrest rates climbed as crime rates soared. In the 1990s we switched to evaluating the police on overall crime rates, and gave them an incentive to proactively discourage crime rather than just react to it. The result has been lower crime rates, and especially lower violent crime rates.
Now it is time to do the something similar for prosecutors.
So hiding a laptop in a closet in order to download scientific articles is a crime worthy of decades in prison?
Palm trees and 8
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.
About 30 days in jail and a hundred bucks for trespassing. That'd be the going rate.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/12/aaron-swartz-heroism-suicide1
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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
This is not a commentary on right or wrong. We're not talking about a young man with an IQ of 65 on death row for a crime he may not understand. Aaron Schwartz was by every reckoning a very smart man. He must have at least considered there could be consequences and repercussions for his actions. Imagine the idea that zealously prosecuting famous people publicly is a career maker...the Giuliani Axiom, if you will. 35 years? IANAL, but you never see these white collar cases serving or being sentenced to anything close to the maximum of all the charges stacked together. Mr Schwartz was intelligent enough to realize these things. It is highly likely, given his incredible success at such a young age, that he was ill prepared to deal with bad things happening to him. ______________Feel free to mod this down without conscience: I was born poor, stayed that way for a good while, and bad things and I are not at all strangers.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
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.
Kevin Mitnick got royally shafted for the crimes he committed. He was grossly mistreated and denied a swift trial, access to the evidence in the case against him and by all means, fair representation. What can happen to Mitnick, could happen to any white/grey/blackhat hacker, regardless of what they are accused of or how much of what they are accused of is actually true. In reality, Swartz could very well be looking at 5 years behind bars and the rest of his working life probation. For some reason US courts tend to put people in jail longer for hacking a computer and not stealing anything than for multiple violent armed robberies lately. He may not have gotten 35 years, but losing everything you have and not having a way to get back on track when you're out of jail is going to make most people rather depressed.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I have an alternate proposal. The total cost of investigation + prosecution must be available for the defense. That is, if the cops and the crime lab and the prosecutors office spend $500,000 on the case, then you get that amount for the defense.
The reason is simple - if someone is clearly guilty, the investigation is comparatively cheap. And if the cops spend a million bucks on prosecution, this usually means their case is weak and they are trying to amplify this weak signal as much as possible.
Anyone who starts a moral sermon with "Son" is appealing to emotions and not logic in order to hide their own lack of reason. You can dismiss what they say right from the start.
There's so much wrong with this bullshit that I don't even know where to start. So I won't. I'll just let this stand here as a testament to the sanctimonious bullshit that people can spew out.
Well, it seems somebody can't handle the truth.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
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.'
...and what law was broken?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/family-blames-us-attorneys-for-death-of-aaron-swartz/
Stamos goes on to write that MIT runs an “open, unmonitored and unrestricted network on purpose. Their head of network security admitted as much in an interview Aaron’s attorneys and I conducted in December. MIT is aware of the controls they could put in place to prevent what they consider abuse, such as downloading too many PDFs from one website or utilizing too much bandwidth, but they choose not to.” In addition, he wrote, MIT did not require users of its network to agree to any terms of use, nor did JSTOR take any steps to prevent large-scale downloads of its PDFs.
"millions of dollars".. in ACADEMIC papers? really?
worst case is trespassing because he entered the network closet w/o permission. tresspassing does not warrant 30 years. ever.
overzealous resume padding is the reason the US Atty continued with this sham.
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.