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MIT Investigating School's Role In Swartz Suicide
The untimely death of Aaron Swartz has raised a lot of questions over the weekend. Now MIT is launching an internal investigation to determine what role the school played in his suicide. From the article: "In a statement, MIT President L. Rafael Reif offered his condolences, saying that the school's community was 'extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many. Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT,' Reif said. 'I have asked professor Hal Abelson to lead a thorough analysis of MIT's involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present. I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made, in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took. I will share the report with the MIT community when I receive it.'"
However it's sad that it took a suicide for them to examine their role here. For a college that pioneered OpenCourseWare, I never understood why they stood idly by.
PocketPermissions Android Permission Guide
MIT has a duty of care for its students. Unlike most other colleges MIT is large enough that it can withstand pressure from external agencies who do not have the students interests at heart. Hopefully they will learn from this and make the results public.
J.
What I have found the most unusual about this situation is the outright-condemnation of techniques such as changing a MAC address, writing scripts, etc.
As anyone with a vague notion of computing can attest to, these are simply 'problem-solving techniques' - and are incredibly far removed from the judge's analogy of "a digital crowbar".
The closest 'real' analogy that I can come up with is someone sneaking into the library to photocopy journals - and when known to the doorman, putting on a hat or a fake moustache.
One can't help but question why the government had such a hardon for the case, considering JSTOR dropped all charges, and MIT didn't really care.
Let's see if the final report:
Clears MIT of any real responsibility.
Talks about the need to listen more to issues that affect its community.
Talks about he need for MIT as an institution to take an active role in trying to educate authorities on technical issues.
Advocates for handling more issues internally but always cooperating with the authorities.
I'd hope the report won't look like the bound edition of this 15-second CYA.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
A crowbar is also a problem solving technique. All sort of times two items are attached too firmly and you need to apply more leverage. A lot of the time this is perfectly legal - stuck doors, opening wooden crates and so on. This is a pretty good analogy for a script.
it's not how MIT acted, but the copyright law, that's what they should investigate. like how come someone can be threatened with 35 years in prison and a $1m fine for making state-funded research papers accessible to people at large?
for killing a person, you only get 4 years.
yeah, for killing Micheal Jackson, you get less than for distributing one song of his 'illegaly'
this has to stop.
The time to reflect on their actions was before their actions contributed to the "death of this promising young man". Now they're just trying to save face.
And when it is not legal and you use a crowbar you get up to 30 days of prison in the worst case scenario for trespassing, but when you do it electronically it magically becomes 35 years.
Based on what I've read and heard so far about this matter, I fail to see how MIT should be responsible for something that Swartz did to himself, in his own apartment.
In fact, it sounds like MIT is very much a victim of this whole ordeal, too, and were dragged into it solely by the actions of Swartz that happened on their property.
MITIMCo is a division of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, created to manage and oversee the investment of the Institute's endowment, retirement and operating funds. As of June 30, 2012, MITIMCo had more than $15 billion of total assets under management. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/institute-endowment-figures-0914.html
I would rather see internal investigation in prosecutor's office. Or if they are unwilling, external one.
What you have to understand is that majority of people posting on this site are anti-copyright zealots, because to them digital stuff should all be free as in beer. Music, movies, games, code, lecture videos, journal articles, whatever. (Ironically, all the stuff which the USA happens to be good at vis-a-vis China and other countries, but that is no matter). So they're going to blame Swartz's death on those who enforced copyright.
Perhaps, but the problem here seems to be the plea bargaining system rather than the actual law.
In the case of a crowbar it wouldn't take too imaginative a prosecutor to come up with an argument for attempted burglary and to consider the crowbar as a weapon.
The plea bargain system only works as it does because the law is draconian enough to allow for decades of punishment as punishment for small crimes. If not for that people wouldn't be forced to take plea bargains regardless of their culpability to avoid the possibility of ridiculous punishments.
"-Aaron did not “hack” the JSTOR website for all reasonable definitions of “hack”. Aaron wrote a handful of basic python scripts that first discovered the URLs of journal articles and then used curl to request them. Aaron did not use parameter tampering, break a CAPTCHA, or do anything more complicated than call a basic command line tool that downloads a file in the same manner as right-clicking and choosing “Save As” from your favorite browser. .bash_history, his uncleared browser history and lack of any encryption of the laptop he used to download these files. Changing one’s MAC address (which the government inaccurately identified as equivalent to a car’s VIN number) or putting a mailinator email address into a captured portal are not crimes. If they were, you could arrest half of the people who have ever used airport wifi.
-Aaron did nothing to cover his tracks or hide his activity, as evidenced by his very verbose
-The government provided no evidence that these downloads caused a negative effect on JSTOR or MIT, except due to silly overreactions such as turning off all of MIT’s JSTOR access due to downloads from a pretty easily identified user agent.
-I cannot speak as to the criminal implications of accessing an unlocked closet on an open campus, one which was also used to store personal effects by a homeless man. I would note that trespassing charges were dropped against Aaron and were not part of the Federal case.
http://unhandled.com/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron-swartzs-crime/
First off, I am deeply saddened and distraught that such a prolific person that had already helped the world so much took his own life. I hope his family and friends take solace in the amount of achievements this young man had made before his decision to take his own life.
3% of Americans are under the correctional supervision of their justice system. There are seven times more people in prison in the US as a percentage of the population as there are in Europe.
There is no evidence that this policy is any more effective than things like removing Lead in Gas for reducing overall crime. The rest of the world looks on in horror at prison camp America which locks up slightly more people than the Russians. Ever tried looking in the mirror?
The US Justice System is there to enforce the law. I don't know what relevance this has or what you hoped to achieve with your parroted statistics but I don't find it very helpful here. He was charged with wire fraud, computer fraud among other things and when someone alerts the authorities that this may have taken place, they investigate it. If I bypassed your home's security and installed a laptop in your home that connected to your network and took all your files, would you want there to be laws against that? That's what they were investigating -- is there any evidence of undue or unjust actions in this investigation? I think that's what MIT wants to find out here.
I'm not surprised this guy looked at the options and chose the one he did, it was probably the most rational sane thing to do.
You know, that almost sounds like an endorsement for suicide which is probably one of the most disgusting and vehement posts I've read here so far. There is nothing rational nor sane about taking one's own life. When I was 16 one of my friends committed suicide and more recently a roommate's girlfriend came over while my roommate was gone and committed suicide. As someone who has witnessed the aftermath both to someone who meant so much to me and someone I barely knew, I will tell you right now that it is a terrible act that impacts everyone -- and most often in a profoundly negative way. To call it 'rational' or 'sane' in any case reveals that you do not know anything about suicide.
I didn't know Aaron Swartz although I've been following this case with interest. What I suspect happened was that Swartz wanted to make a statement about opening up journals to the public and he wagered that it would be hard to pin any fallout on himself if he did all of this covertly. And he tried. But at the end of the day they figured out who was taking these articles of information. Did you know he was a Fellow at Harvard University's Center for Ethics? What do you think this meant for his career to be indicted on such charges? How would you, as a student, listen to a lecture on ethics from someone who had broken laws and evaded police? I think that Swartz saw this as a sort of "civil disobedience" but when his peers did not agree, he took the coward's route instead of letting society decide his fate for his actions -- and I think the case was still open!
Let's assume Swartz was completely in the right on all of his actions. What, precisely, would you have MIT and the US Government do differently to prevent this suicide? What actions of theirs do you find culpable for forcing Aaron Swartz into no other choice than to take his own life?
My work here is dung.
I really don't think it is so clear cut. If you bully someone into a corner, with 30 years of imprisonment, which is effectively a life sentence (the guy wouldn't be out until 56), then from a certain perspective committing suicide doesn't seem such like a bad alternative.
I would love to see the prosecutors to be disbard for inappropriate behavior that turned what was otherwise a minor of offence into something that was treated as was worse than murder. I would love to have the prosecutors and judge interviewed to understand why they had such a large axe to grind.
Justice should be about fair and appropriate punishment and not something used to make prosecutors feel like rock stars.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
You seem to think that just because something is breaking the law, it should be punished to the fullest extent. Protips:
1. Most people break the law many times each day. The accumulated penalties for those crimes, in most any western country, even if you took the minimum sentences prescribed by law, would immediately put many a country's population behind bars for millenia or make them owe millions of dollars in fines. Mostly both. Just like that.
2. There's this thing called prosecutorial discretion. As in the prosecutor has full control over what cases they want to prosecute. Just like that.
3. Copyright violations, while a matter of criminal law in the U.S. and thus prosecutable ex officio, require participation of the injured parties. If no party claims that a copyright law violation took place, then there's nothing to prosecute. This is where copyright violations differ, from, say, murders. In an attempted murder, it doesn't matter all that much that the victim forgave the attacker and doesn't want them punished. The prosecutor is free to ignore that. In a copyright violation, the victim has pretty much full say in keeping the legal action going, and it's up to them whether it keeps going or stops. Same goes with regard to criminal trespass -- if the injured party says that there was no trespass, the prosecutor has no leg to stand on. Anything else is vigilante justice and amounts to harassment of the defendant. Just like that.
So there.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
What you have to understand is that majority of people posting on this site are anti-copyright zealots, because to them digital stuff should all be free as in beer. Music, movies, games, code, lecture videos, journal articles, whatever. (Ironically, all the stuff which the USA happens to be good at vis-a-vis China and other countries, but that is no matter). So they're going to blame Swartz's death on those who enforced copyright.
The articles were from publicly funded research. We the people already paid for the research once, why should the results not be free to us? If the public is going to fund the research the results should be made freely available to them.
I won't make the same claim for children, but when an adult commits suicide, the only one responsible, is that individual. I don't care how much somebody verbally abuses you, the only person who can be blamed, if you commit suicide, is you. That doesn't mean that other people are not jerks, but you can not blame them for somebody else's decision to take their own life.
Most suicides are the result of a mental problem, because situations where a suicide would be a sane and rational decision would be very rare. Mental problems _can_ be created or made worse by other people's actions, for example depression.
I suggest people should take responsibility for their actions (that's what Americans always say), and if someone kills themselves because of the shit some jerk told them, then that jerk should take responsibility for his actions.
Take your penultimate question and look at it a bit broader
(not that others haven't done that already -- therefore my surprise).
Look at proportionality. Keep your suspicions out of the picture.
Good luck.
Tough guy? No, but old enough to have known a few people who committed suicide. People like to blame others as a means of coping. That is human nature. Emotion causes people to act in strange ways. Unfortunately, we now have a society that can't deal with death without blaming somebody or something. For example, take the recent school shootings in Connecticut. While we do give casual blame to Adam Lanza, society can't hold him accountable since he took his own life. So instead we blame the guns. In this case society can't hold Aaron Swartz to blame, so we blame MIT. BAH!
You alluded to untreated mental illness, and I agree that more can be done in this arena. But we need to stop blaming others for somebodies decision to commit suicide.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
I'm not surprised this guy looked at the options and chose the one he did, it was probably the most rational sane thing to do.
You know, that almost sounds like an endorsement for suicide which is probably one of the most disgusting and vehement posts I've read here so far.
Just as a reminder, Swartz was subject to bouts of extreme depression. Although it's a human tendency to want to find external causes and somebody to blame, it is most likely that depression has more to do with his suicide than any other factor.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Seems a little late now, doesn't it?
There are a lot of ethical action which are unlawful and vice versa, a lot of unethical action which are perfectly lawful. I would certainly hear the lecture of somebody which know the difference between ethical and lawful and the ramification.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
That is the maximum punishment for trespassing. Arguably they can charge you with damage to property if you destroy a lock too, although that wouldn't be a good analogy here, as Swartz never destroyed anything in his trespassing.
It's not "copyright law" that should be changed because somebody committed suicide.
Copyright law should be changed anyway, not just because someone commited suicide.
Is there actually any question as to exactly what MIT did? What new questions remain to be answered?
Nothing is rational or sane about suicide. It is the ultimate selfish act for cowards.
The first sentence is true, the second only half true; I see you've never had the misfortune of knowing anyone with clinical depression. You can no more blame a suicide's death on the suicide victim than you can blame the victim of a heart attack for his. It's a disease; clinically depressed people can't just shrug it off any more than you can shrug off cancer. It needs professional treatment, and like cancer treatments, sometimes they fail.
Free Martian Whores!
Fine, we won't hold the prosecutor responsible for killing Aaron. However, she did want to lock him up in a violent prison for some 30 years for taking something the offended party (JSTOR) had decided not to care about.That's really not much better.
And for what? Unless she supplies something that can explain the extreme overreaction better, I will assume it was to curry favor in the US political system, in particular the Democratic party. It's not as if we haven't seen such behavior before, in the US and other countries.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
In the current political climate, that isn't going to happen. They couldn't explain it coherently either. In a politicized judicial system, you do what you think the political authorities will approve of as a matter of course, to advance your career. It's not the first time for Carmen Ortiz, and she's already being suggested as a candidate for the senate or a governorship.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
In hearing all the horror stories about prison life, I imagine "not taking me alive" might be the best solution when looking at 35 years.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Seems to me that before his suicide would have been better timing.
Good news everyone! Our self investigation shows we were not at fault for anything
You know there is a good chance that his untimely death wasn't connected to JSTOR. He seemed to be a brilliant individual. He could have been battling depression all this time and the environment he found himself in just exacerbated the problem. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family.
I think if you don't know all the facts then it is probably best to not say anything.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Understanding why hackers do this may prevent some future suicides anywhere in the hacker community.
Up to a half dozen students commit suicide any year. Several large lawsuits from the parents of suicide victims in the past decade prompted MIT to beef up round-the-clock mental health care help. Most recently the MIT student newspaper conducted and extensive study of stress in student life. Its almost like coming out gay- plenty of students think they are the only ones suffering from stress and retreat into their personal hell-holes. The need to talk to each other and professionals.
Actually if they loved him they should feel relieved that he was able to avoid 30 years in jail. Legal liability is irrelevant.
Nothing is rational or sane about suicide. It is the ultimate selfish act for cowards.
The first sentence is true, the second only half true; I see you've never had the misfortune of knowing anyone with clinical depression. You can no more blame a suicide's death on the suicide victim than you can blame the victim of a heart attack for his. It's a disease;
Having personally known people who committed suicide after suffering intense attacks of depression, I will agree. But then you shouldn't blame a suicide's death on MIT or the Justice Department, either. They didn't cause the disease. (Swartz had written about depression years before; no, being charged with a computer break-in did not cause his depression.).
clinically depressed people can't just shrug it off any more than you can shrug off cancer. It needs professional treatment, and like cancer treatments, sometimes they fail.
I'll agree here-- suicide is not a heroic act of defiance against the system; it is, for the most part, the result of a disease that is difficult to cure and far too often fatal. Clinical depression is not to be taken lightly.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-states-district-attorney-carmen-ortiz-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck There's also this.
The stories and info posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only fools would take it as fact.
In other words we will take the Warren Report, change the name from Kennedy to Swartz, feed it back throught the MIT Paper Generator, and provide it everyone. Proving, that our lack of action in the previous year provided us with the ability to have an annual discourse on our probable deniability, fully exonerating us of apathy, poor judgement and a full disclosure of our tenacious mendacity. Thank you, I'll have my tea now.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Yeah, but what was described was burglary, not mere trespass.
Swartz decided that the JSTOR information should be free. They charged for access to it. His copying of the articles violated their terms of service (they don't even let paying customers do what he did in terms of downloading that volume of articles). He used MIT's paid for access to JSTOR to vilated JSTOR's terms of service. He put JSTOR's business at risk by downloading large amounts of articles that could be freely distributed. Basically he had a philosophical disagreement with JSTOR and decided that he was a one man army who could secretly destroy their business and get away with it. He hid his face with a bicycle helmet when accessing the closet (it's my understanding that legally this shows he knew what he was doing was wrong) and continued to attempt to access the data, even when JSTOR fought back by limiting MIT access. His downloads were large enough to disrupt other users of JSTOR. All of this is in the criminal complaint. Look, there are plenty of companies that I don't like or disagree with and I don't buy their products. But trying to drive someone out of business and tampering with their income got the US government interested and perhaps (it's arguable) led to overzealousness in the prosecution, but that's why he faced serious charges. Whether you like what JSTOR does or not, there is nothing illegal in the USA about their business and trying to destroy that business via unauthorized access isn't legal.
Interesting read and can be used to get chicks if you know what you're doing.
I worked in the MIT Libraries and in I/S (now IS&T) and was aware of the various tensions between making information freely available and honoring copyright laws, as well as maintaining the security of the MIT's Network. I've been out of the loop for awhile but there's a lot of simplistic discussions around the case. There are a couple of points to keep in mind:
1. Historically, MIT is committed to academic exchange and freely making research and information available. Open Courseware, MIT License, and the layout and accessibility of the campus are all demonstrate that commitment to the open exchange of information. MIT has been quite aware and resistant to the closing and monetization of research results.
2. The MIT Libraries labor under a scholarly copyright regime that monetizes research publication to an almost absurd degree. When an institution has to essentially buy back at great expense the research papers written on campus by its faculty the absurdity of the academic journal system is apparent to no one more that the Institute's librarians. Virtually always, copyright issues prevented us from making information available electronically rather than actual technical issues.
3. MIT's network is one of the most open networks I've ever seen for it's size and scope. The only way they've been able to maintain that openness is by having an almost paranoid level of vigilance over its physical integrity. They can not tolerate random protocols or rogue attachments.
The goals of point 2 can be supported by the activity to support point 3. In that way, much of the information can be made available as openly as possible for everyone at MIT as well as visitors to the campus.
Jason violated point 3 rather egregiously. As to whether that was in support of openness or not does not change the fact of the violation and, in fact, he put the free access of the information at risk to the MIT community.
I totally agree that the level and degree of the prosecution was completely out of proportion to the offense but I think it absurd to claim that he committed suicide because he was being hounded by the Feds. If he was trying to make a point for academic openness by civil disobedience he should have been prepared for the consequences.
I can hope that MIT's review will honor the spirit of Jason Schwartz' work by working forcefully to support serious reform of the academic and research distribution models which are demonstrably corrupt.
The plea bargain system works (for the government) because the government, as the first step of the indictment process, freezes all of the target's bank accounts, forcing them to either accept a plea or attempt to defend themselves against highly-paid, very resourceful federal prosecutors with a court-appointed, as-dumb-as-they-can-make-them public defender (who, by the way, is basically telling you that accepting a plea is the only option).
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Aaron had no connection to MIT. He was trespassing, physically, and stealing network resources, power, and space he had no right to.
Please help metamoderate.
You say that, but there are underlying causes for depression. In this case, facing 30 years of being raped
Um, he had been arrested for breaking into a computer system and downloading content. This is not the equivalent to being raped for thirty years. You read too many bad pulp novels.
would make me kill myself, or head for the border. The punishment doesn't fit the crime, and MIT should have had his back.
Really. Why the heck should MIT "have the back" of a college drop-out who repeatedly broke into their computer systems to steal stuff because his personal philosophy was that anything that isn't nailed down was free, and anything that could be pried up isn't nailed down?
You don't just get into MIT because it was convenient.
In his case, he didn't get into MIT at all. He was a Stanford drop-out.
["Osiris Ani" wrote in response to the statement "You say that, but there are underlying causes for depression]:
Very often, those underlying causes are related to brain chemistry, not external factors.
Right. And in his case, he had written about his depression well before being arrested, so being arrested clearly wasn't the "underlying cause" in any case.
I wish I had mod points to mod parent up.
He actively opposed SOPA and especially those making profits off of firewalling tax-payer funded research.
He fought against moneyed interests and they sent in the Pinkertons; it's just that the cause of death was a little unusual.
with a side order of willful obtuseness thrown in for good measure.
Where the hell is the wire fraud in this case? And where the hell are the prosecutions for the banks and Buscho torturers?
Over 100 people were tortured to death under the Bush Administration. Banks stole millions, billions, trillions of dollars and none of them have faced any prosecution. HSBC laundered billions for drug cartels and Al Queda, and they're not prosecuted. Meanwhile, a mother who is found to have 5 pounds of cocaine in her attic - possibly left there by her drug-dealing ex - is sentenced to life in prison for her priors, and because she had no information to give prosecutors. The actual drug dealers were able to cut deals and are now out of prison.
"Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigor of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind." - Edward Gibbon
Would I want you charged with trespassing, or hit with terrorism and home invasion charges and threatened with 30 years in prison? Are you really so obtuse as to not see the draconian response to the actual offense? Are you filling out visa applications so you can see some shoplifters hand cut off for allegedly stealing a pack of gum in Saudi Arabia?
You know, that almost sounds like an endorsement for suicide which is probably one of the most disgusting and vehement posts I've read here so far.
You almost sound like your priorities are fucked up on a galactic scale. Threatening someone with 30 years in prison for what is, at worst, breaking and entering: not a problem. Talking about suicide to avoid 30 years in prison, probable rape in prison, bankruptcy, and a felony record that makes you neigh-unemployable: now that's a tragedy.
You almost sound like the Church Laddies that were more upset that pictures were published of bodies floating in New Orleans then the fact that a major American city was allowed to drown by a careless and indifferent government.
Gee, maybe not make a literal federal case out of it to begin with? Or if they do, make the charges fit the alleged crime? Simple answers for bloody stupid questions...
FFS, he was NOT a student. They had no purvue over him! The authorities were the only ones who did!!!
Okay, so strike that line and go with the "community service" option. It doesn't change much.
OK. Community service seems like a reasonable sentence for the judge to impose. For him to be given a sentence of community service, however, first he would have to be found guilty-- you can't sentence somebody to "community service" without charging them with a crime. But there aren't any crimes the description of which is "subject to a maximum sentence of community service"-- that's something that the judge might chose to impose at the sentencing hearing, but it's not what the newspaper puts in the headline after "possible penalties as high as."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
In related news, he vehemently criticized the President's kill-list:
http://www.infowars.com/obamas-kill-list-critic-found-dead-in-new-york-city/
Do not criticize the kill-list, ever.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Burglary requires the building to be a dwelling-house, i.e. and habitation. People need to live there.
That's the old common law definition, but it depends on the state.
from: http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/burglary-definition.html :
Burglary is typically defined as the unlawful entry into almost any structure (not just a home or business) with the intent to commit any crime inside (not just theft/larceny). No physical breaking and entering is required; the offender...
In New York, for example, it's first or second degree burglary if the building entered is a dwelling, third-degree burglary if it's not. http://definitions.uslegal.com/b/burglary/
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Is this the guy who repeatedly spoofed MAC addresses as his machine got blocked so he could get back in? Is this the guy who actually connected a network device to the MIT network by sneaking into a wiring closet (covering his face from the security cameras the whole time) so he could spool off data? Was this the guy who had agreed to abide by the TOS on use of JSTOR? Was this the guy who decided that he was above the system and the rules didn't apply to him 'cause he was so special that he would never get caught. We won't ever know what punishment would have been meted out so all that speculation is idle talk. Hacking is serious, breaking into networks is serious. The old days of fun hacking for status and prestige are gone. If you get caught the legal machine starts to move and it grinds exceeding fine.
Basically, MIT is investigating the investigation that MIT was performing? To that, I say who cares? It would be interesting if some third party was investigating MIT's investigation.
It's pretty clear from many of the top voted comments that most people here have no clue what Swartz was actually doing. On the off chance that some people might want to base discussion on facts, here's a nice post by a law professor who has worked, for both defense and prosecution, on these kind of cases, covering what Swartz was actually alleged to have done and analyzing the charges.
I don't understand why Swartz didn't even try to flee. That's what I would have done. Apparently he had the money. There are lots of better places to live than the US. In fact it would be easier to make the much shorter list of worse places. With the defendant possibly facing 30 years or more in prison (regardless of how trivial the actual 'crime' was), I think it would occur to the prosecutors that he might try to bolt. It seems strange that they let him out on bail. As soon as my attorney told me how serious the charges were against me I would be into survival mode. Sneak across the Mexican or Canadian border if I were prevented from just flying somewhere without an extradition treaty. Like nearby Cuba for instance.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Keep telling yourself that if it makes you feel better. The timing was just a big coincidence. Riiight. Meanwhile the rest of his can stay focused on the actual real world that exists outside of our heads. The case against him was obviously not solely to blame for his death, but it is clearly what pushed him over the edge. When you are already unhappy and this kind of thing happens that's all it takes to make life not worth living.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
In the state of Massachusetts, if you use a crowbar to gain entry to someone else's property, it is known as burglary (or breaking & entering), and carries a 2 - 10 year sentence (per offense), in the best case of B&E during the day, without a weapon, and not "putting anybody lawfully therein in fear." (Source: Mass. General Laws.)
Depending on the circumstances - i.e., you do it armed, at night, and/or threaten occupants of the building - it can easily carry up to a 20 year sentence.
Where you're getting this "30 day" number from, I don't know, but simple breaking & entering in Massachusetts will get you a lot more than that.
If you're going to try and draw parallels, at least draw realistic ones.
To make it burglary you need to do it with the intention of committing a crime inside. If everything you do is to enter some building, with no one inside, it is just trespassing and at most destruction of property if you damage anything in your way in.
You'd have a great point, if anything you said were even remotely true under the law.
Breaking & entering to access someone else's property with the intent of committing another crime inside is most certainly not trespass. Given the steps he took to cover his tracks and disguise his access, it's clear that he knew he was not "authorized" to access the server closet, network, and JSTOR servers in the way he did. He went in there with a specific intent, and that specific intent was to commit a crime. In this case, the crime was a felony, even if he really wished it wasn't a felony. Ignorantia juris non excusat, and deliberately ignoring the law that you know exists is even less of an alibi.
Mass General Laws, Part IV, Title I, Chapter 266, Section 16 has this to say about it, and it very specifically does NOT limit itself to residences, while outlining a maximum penalty of 20 years:
Doing so with the intent of only committing a misdemeanor carries with it a 6 month maximum:
And daytime B&E with intent to commit felony will get you up to 10 years per offense:
Even under the most liberal reading, Massachusetts state law does not suggest he would "only" face 30 days. Given the nature of what he did (that is, commit a felony once he broke & entered a non-residential building), Mass laws would suggest he'd be on the hook for a maximum of 10-20 years per offense.
Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress...
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Breaking & entering to access someone else's property with the intent of committing another crime inside is most certainly not trespass.
You are good at linking laws. Horribly bad at understanding them, though.
He trespassed in order to access archives to which he already had legal access. If he had distributed the files it would be another history, but he never did. He never committed any crime, except trespassing. Even more, neither JSTOR nor MIT pressed charges of anything against him.
I often wonder if people who espouse this existential nihilistic viewpoint are just depressed
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
1. A few people break the law many times a day. Most people break the law a few times. The accumulated man-hours for administering to every offense would logjam the courts, however, fortuitously only a fraction of offenders & offences are discovered, uncovered, and indicted. 2. Regarding prosecutorial discretion: in practice, even the fraction of offences that get the Grand Jury stamp of 'Proceed' are massive in number. Those Law & Order District Attorney-types do an order of magnitude more plea agreement drudgery than the crafty courtroom closing arguments. Whether that is at their discretion or the only way to stem the tide is debatable. 3. Right on target here and I can't add anything constructive except it probably does weaken the "Peoples' Case" a variable degree in an attempted murder when the victim and/or witnesses recant.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
It goes the other way round. It means that the prosecutor can choose not to prosecute. That's what it's meant to be used for.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Of course the man hours for prosecution would logjam the courts until the thermal death of the universe. We know that. The prosecutorial discretion is so that a prosecutor can't hide behind "but oh we had to prosecute or else". Sure Grand Juries overdo it, but prosecutors overdo it too. That's what I meant. The grandparent thought that just because there's a law on the books means that people should be prosecuted no matter what. My point was to show it normally should be far from that.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The law, and reality, disagree with you.
He entered illegally a space he had no right to be, with the express intention of committing a felony. Redistribution of the files is irrelevant - he accessed the MIT network and the JSTOR servers in a manner which he was not authorized to do. If we can agree he did that, then he's guilty of at least a few of the charges that were leveled at him - and those charges are felonies.
No matter HOW hard you try to spin this, under the law as it exists and as it is written he did far more than "trespass." And what's really amusing to me is that you don't see the irony in your own claims that I don't understand the laws I've explained to you.
There's a difference between "what I, fredprado, think the laws should be!" and "what the laws, on the books, are." Your wishes and preferences don't change the laws on the books.
Massachusetts lawyer: Told prosecutor Aaron Swartz was suicidal
Oh, Ortiz, Heymann, and Garland, they're such kidders!
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Nope, your distorted interpretation of the law disagrees with me. Either way none of the laws you linked apply to his case and he wasn't charged with any of them. What we are doing here is trying to find analogies to which your linked laws could apply. Imperfect as all analogies may be mine is still much better than yours.
There is a difference between what you think the law says and what the law says. It is not because a bully prosecutor made ridiculous charges against him that he is guilty of them. Now we will never know, because he is dead, but if it went to trial he could as well end acquitted. Not that the outcome would be good for him even then. Even if he had been found innocent he would still have lost every penny he had defending himself, that is how fair US justice system is.
So, let me rephrase your argument: "If he had done something completely different from what he's accused of, the penalty would be way less!"
By jove, I think you've got an amazing legal career ahead of you.
Seriously, don't quit your day job.
Apparently your understanding of my argument is about as good as your understanding of the law and probably of everything else. You, my good sir, have a great career at manual labor ahead.
MIT is now an animal of the government. They are "examining" ? , Hey MIT, go look up your anus. I first ran into female MIT EE (electrical engineer) Bachelors graduates in 1993. MIT was a college I did not even apply to, thinking they were too good for me. But this first female EE I worked with from MIT, in 1993 did not know how a transistor worked nor could she figure out a resistor network. She was a government "diversity" product. MIT does exactly what fed gov wants, just as your leg will jerk from a knee tap. MIT (military industrial tag-a-long).
A bar complaint? You must not have been around lawyers much. That's like complaining to a demon about satan's behavior. This is how you do it lad: you give to them what they give to us, and they hate it more than anything else. A taste of their own medicine. Recall the gun rights hates of NY, and publishing the name of innocents, and a political ploy. Dig into the history of the prosecutor. Publish all about him/her. if the relative are proud of them, they wont mind having their association with such scum published on the web. I once had just such a scum giving me grief. So, I started investigating. He had been disbarred, and finally let back in the bar. And he had been in jail for an unlawful gun possession, with a changed name, pre-college. I published that too. And I made the judge aware of it, and let his bar association choke on it (seems he had forgotten to tell them of his conviction). Most lawyers and prosecutors are skunks, so there's much better than a 50/50 chance the prosecutors team, are made up of ex-jail birds, pornographers, embezzlers, pimps, molesters, drug dealers..all sorts of interesting stuff. The job of lawyer, naturally draws from those previously mentioned professions, in the last sentence.
Even if they don't freeze accounts, in the US the draconian justice system basically guarantees that you'll bankrupt yourself fighting off the charges even if you're found innocent.
If you're facing 30 years in prison your choices are to either plead guilty to something like 5 years (which is rather extreme for publishing some academic journals - it wasn't like this guy was a risk for assaulting people while planting devices on the network), or mount a VERY strong defense (since you're facing 30 years if you don't take the plea bargain). A vigorous defense is extremely expensive, which means you're talking about tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills even if you win.
This whole thing should have been 30 days in prison or maybe a few thousand dollars in fines. That would deter almost anybody from just doing something like this any time they felt like it (and frankly, those journal articles should be public domain anyway - at least the ones funded by taxpayers, which is virtually all of them). Instead we're talking about years in prison and tens of thousands of dollars in "fines" even if found innocent.
Plea bargains should be illegal. They're highly unfair to the innocent, and they replace the power of the jury with the power of the prosecutor.
As anyone with a vague notion of computing can attest to, these are simply 'problem-solving techniques'
A soldier shooting an enemy soldier who's firing at him in the head is employing a problem-solving technique too. Your point is meaningless. If the problem requires breaking the law, in the real world you are a criminal.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
And when it is not legal and you use a crowbar you get up to 30 days of prison in the worst case scenario for trespassing, but when you do it electronically it magically becomes 35 years.
Yeah, I'm sure if you were caught crowbarring your way into someone's house they'd let you off with a trespassing charge.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
To make it burglary you need to do it with the intention of committing a crime inside. If everything you do is to enter some building, with no one inside, it is just trespassing and at most destruction of property if you damage anything in your way in.
YANAL, I hope.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Stop it girls, you're just being spiteful now.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
A frustrated child may scream: "I'm going to hold my breathe until I turn blue!" The wise parent, however, will not succumb to the ploy.
It's fun watching them try, though.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Can we please stop using the untimely before the word death? Placing that adjective in front implies that there are timely deaths, which is never the case.
"Untimely" just means "before the expected time" when you apply it to deaths. It doesn't mean "undeserved" or anything similar. Anyone who dies before 80 is pretty much an untimely death in the modern developed world.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
There's this thing called prosecutorial discretion. As in the prosecutor has full control over what cases they want to prosecute. Just like that.
Aha, so this is how they can go after Assange even though there are no charges against him. It's just all evil psychopaths manipulating media, the law and politicians. Brilliant!
Just wait until Assanage is in a country that is more friendly towards the US extradition-wise. There aren't any charges against him because filing charges would be counter-productive to arresting him.
When the FBI finally gets enough evidence to arrest a spy do they mail him an arrest warrant and tell him that if he doesn't turn himself in within a week they'll go after him? No, as soon as they are in a position to do something about it they nail them first, and then file charges within 24 hours as required by law. Doing it the other way around just tips their hands.
You can bet that as soon as the FBI is sure that filing charges will lead to him being on a plane to the US that they will do so.
Summing up, I think the way that Swartz went about it was ethically wrong, even if I agree with the principle behind it and with you.
His actions were hardly unethical. They were certainly illegal, and perhaps unwise, but I find it difficult to call them unethical.
Research funded by the public should be in the public domain. If people want to publish it with that caveat they are welcome to do so, but the articles will be redistributable. If nobody wants to publish articles as a result, then the NIH or whatever can just set up a website to do it - the cost would be a fraction of what a single academic institution spends on its annual journal subscriptions.
The ongoing challenge is how to make it happen.
It won't. Lots of people make money from the status quo, and few voters are directly hurt by it in ways they understand. This is why special interests are so hard to reign in under democracy.
In the US it seems many prosecutors will prosecute to the maximum, even if they think there's a large possibility the defendant is innocent or acted with little or no malicious intent.
There's there's the way they use the threat of mandatory minimums to get the defendant to plead out on the condition of snitch testimony on whatever amount of people are required, all just to run a snitch snowball to get bonuses based on forfeiture values. Look at Tulia, Texas (or was it Union, Alabama) where it seemed that that just about every black family that owned property was dragged up by the snitch snowball & got forfeitured to buggery - with no evidence what so ever except snitch testimonies forced out of people via the threat of mandatory life sentences (Coke was found in only 2 of the hundreds of families the LEOs ransacked. Even then that tiny amount of coke found matched Coke used by a paid freelance undercover cop in a previous operation)). In Western Europe the vast majority of them would not even have been facing doing any time at all, hypothetically.
You know that even with China having at least 3 to 4 times the population of the US, the US both incarcerates v& executes more people than China does, thats by the total number, NOT per capita. BTW per capita the only place with a higher incarceration rate than the US is the West Bank or Gaza (I can't remember which Palestinian Territory was mentioned when I read that).
I like how the entire media bandwagon is jumping all over the suicide story and looking instead for who to blame. No one has even suggested that it wasn't a suicide, or whether there might be a coverup, or how the trials might have been if he had lived, or who might have been involved if it was murder, or how the investigation into whether it was a murder is progressing, or pathology reports, toxicology reports, autopsy results. Nothing.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
Hey, Rafe! Time for a little seppuku?
Responsibility is not delegated.
I don't have a decent katana, but I'll let you use my santoku.
--
There is a danger of assuming incompetence where there's corruption.
That "condolence statement" from MIT is nothing more than crocodile tears.
MIT did not stand idly by when all these happened.
MIT was instead, actively siding with the US government against Mr. Swartz and others.
I still do not understand why the journals are locked away in the first place.
I mean, if the journals (some of them anyway) are sensitive in nature, like nuclear science or biological warfare or stuffs that could be employed by the terrorists, then I wouldn't have any objection if the journals are kept in a safe place.
But if the journals do not contain sensitive information, why locked them up in the first place??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Nobody can blame Mr. Swartz suicide on anybody else other than Mr. Swartz himself.
After all, he was the one who carried it out.
But ... what Mr. Swartz faced _BEFORE_ he committed suicide, the unbelievable pressure that Mr. Swartz was facing, the lies upon lies that had been heaped upon him by the prosecutor, and the fact that MIT was involved with the prosecutor all the way ...
MIT should stop telling the world how sorry they were about Mr. Swartz death.
MIT is, in all manner as guilty as the prosecutor in making Mr. Swartz life a living hell.
No word of condolence from MIT is believable.
And for that, MIT should go to hell !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
-- Former Convict Reveals How Hard It Is To Be Targeted By One Of Aaron Swartz's Prosecutors
I'd like to know if people are actually guilty or not, and this business of forcing plea bargains seems guaranteed to put the innocent away along with the guilty.
It's another data point for Heymann and Ortiz, and with enough of them, you'll eventually get a pattern.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."