Slashdot Mirror
Aaron Swartz Case: Deja Vu All Over Again For MIT
theodp writes "On Saturday, questions for MIT's Aaron Swartz investigation were posted on Slashdot with the hope that MIT'ers might repost some to the MIT Swartz Review site. So it's good to see that MIT's Hal Abelson, who is leading the analysis of MIT's involvement in the matter, is apparently open to this workaround to the ban on questions from outsiders. In fact, on Sunday Abelson himself reposted an interesting question posed by Boston College Law School Prof. Sharon Beckman: 'What, if anything, did MIT learn from its involvement in the federal prosecution of its student David LaMacchia back in 1994?' Not much, it would appear. LaMacchia, an apparent student of Abelson's whose defense team included Beckman, was indicted in 1994 and charged with the 'piracy of an estimated million dollars' in business and entertainment computer software after MIT gave LaMacchia up to the FBI. LaMacchia eventually walked from the charges, thanks to what became known as the LaMacchia Loophole, which lawmakers took pains to close. 'MIT collaborated with the FBI to wreck LaMacchia's life,' defense attorney Harvey Silverglate charged in 1995 after a judge dismissed the case. 'I hope that this case causes a lot of introspection on the part of MIT's administration. Unfortunately, I doubt it will.'"
MIT sure seems like a petty and vengeful institution. I hope this makes some potential students think about their decision of school.
"install a laptop, script file downloads,"
You know those two things are legal don't you?
"evade security, hide my identity"
Yep, this too, completely legal. You as Anonymous Coward should know it's legal to hide your identity! Even Ortiz can come here and spout random garbage hiding her identity.
"lie to campus police and be let go free of charge"
This too, completely legal, campus police are just security guards with no special right to be told the truth.
What he was charged with, was copyright infringement (possibly trespass), written up as hacking and wire fraud. The investigation is to whether the prosecutor was inflated the charges for her political gain. She has a history of it, the prosecutors office wasn't planning on big charges, then she took it off him.
MIT are concerned that they may be a conspirator to this inflation-for-political-gain. See they can see the charges were inflated and they want to make sure their hands are clean of it. Prosecuting a crime based on the law of the crime is one thing, prosecuting on random inflated implausible charges in order to force a plea bargain to score a nice prosecution on your CV, is something quite quite different.
The question now is if Ortiz can remain in office when her view of the law is so departed from the actual laws themselves.
At best she's malicious, at worst she's incompetent*. Either way, that's not someone who should be a prosecutor, let along a head prosecutor.
* I don't think she was incompetent, when she described copyright infringement as 'theft if theft' it showed a disregard for the law she was completely aware of.
1a. You can be (i)charged, (ii)prosecuted and a (iii)jury determines your guilt. This situation was at the first stage (i). No foul.
So the next time you get a parking ticket, if you're charged with murder, you'd be OK with that because you'd get the chance to defend yourself in court?
A gross exaggeration of course, but your statement "no foul" about the gross prosecutorial overreach in this case makes me feel sick. How can anyone possibly say that in good conscience???
On one hand supporters want to say that he isn't a criminal because he wasn't convicted. The same group wants to say he was punished unfairly though he received no sentence. Contradiction.
Not at all. Being subjected to grossly exaggerated charges that only relate to your actual actions in the demented mind of a lunatic prosecutor, spending a fortune on lawyers, and living under the threat of bankruptcy AT BEST and at worst conviction with a monstrously disproportionate sentence--is most certainly punishment. You have to be a fucking sociopath to claim otherwise.
The material he downloaded was all public domain, meaning he is 100% free to share anything he downloaded. What he did that was wrong was he violated the EULA which stated that the end user couldn't mass-download or use scripts to download.
Essentially he got charged with wire fraud for breaking an EULA.
They detected an intruder illegally breaking into their network and worked with the authorities to catch the perpetrator in the act. What happened afterwards is not MIT's fault. If you decide to "stick it to the man" then be prepared for some blowback.