Slashdot Mirror
DoJ Admits Aaron Swartz's Prosecution Was Political
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from a blog post by Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, founder of corporate watchdog SumOfUs.org and partner of the late Aaron Swartz:
"The DOJ has told Congressional investigators that Aaron's prosecution was motivated by his political views on copyright. I was going to start that last paragraph with 'In a stunning turn of events,' but I realized that would be inaccurate — because it's really not that surprising. Many people speculated throughout the whole ordeal that this was a political prosecution, motivated by anything/everything from Aaron's effective campaigning against SOPA to his run-ins with the FBI over the PACER database. But Aaron actually didn't believe it was — he thought it was overreach by some local prosecutors who didn't really understand the internet and just saw him as a high-profile scalp they could claim, facilitated by a criminal justice system and computer crime laws specifically designed to give prosecutors, however incompetent or malicious, all the wrong incentives and all the power they could ever want. But this HuffPo article, and what I’m hearing from sources on the Hill, suggest that that’s not true. That Ortiz and Heymann knew exactly what they were doing: Shutting up, and hopefully locking up, an extremely effective activist whose political views, including those on copyright, threatened the Powers That Be."
Rolled over at the first sign of adversity?
Are you seriously?
I don't think you have made yourself even remotely familiar with the case, whatsoever, by that statement alone.
The thought of years of federal "pound-me-in-the-ass" prison, combined with his recorded bouts of depression, were plenty to drive him over the edge.
It's not at all shocking that it was politically motivated. What's shocking is that they admitted it.
Of course they can admit it was political. There's no downside to this for them. They can't be successfully sued, and no one will ever be held personally responsible.
"Yeah, we did it for political reasons. But, we didn't use a drone. It just turned out that our unreasonable tactics were extremely effective. And the taxpayers should be happy that they didn't get the bill for a large public trial."
Citation needed
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
This is easy for you to say when you are not in the situation. A young man who was doing it for all the right reasons, but who was naive about the justice system.
Remember he admitted it was him, he surrendered his equipment without warrants, etc.
I hope someone pays dearly for this and I hope the public gets wind of this and revolts against these people that are purchase by corporations.
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master".
Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Yet at the first sign of adversity he rolls over like a stuck pig.
Suicidal depression is a serious mental disease. You can't just wish it away by smiling and singing a plucky song.
People need to understand that mental diseases are actual diseases, and at least as difficult to cure as any physical disease out there.
The idea that someone suffering severe depression can simply just "stand up for themselves" in adversity is incredibly insensitive.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
At least they just prosecuted him instead of launching a Hellfire missile at his house.
sudo make me a sandwich
There's no concrete proof of a link, but the coincidences? They keep uncannily piling on, and as soon as we take a peek under the rug I think we'll find it all out.
Maybe he didn't commit sucide.
This would be like linking to an NRA member's blog about the gun control debate as if it were an accurate reporting on events.
We're all adults here.
Evidently not. You are asserting that a young man's suicide was merely a political statement, and an ineffective one at that. Such a statement bears no relation to a modern understanding of depression and suicide.
Yes, he is serious; he's a RIAA/DOJ/greedist schill, and a comment placed like this gets him a bonus.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
This is awful. The idea that copyright (and in fact ideas about copyright) should be enforced as vigorously as this is absurd.
America has started doing show trials now of people who haven't committed crimes on the basis that their ideas are radical and dangerous?
The copyright lobby has won, apparently. And doing anything contrary to their wishes will cause the government to go after you.
Welcome to the oligarchy folks, it's all down from here. I'm not sure how free of a society you can be when commercial interests lead to something like this.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Because so what if they admitted it? Is anyone going to be held responsible or punished for it? No. At most there might be a slap on the wrist (NOT for the prosecution, but for letting it get out of hand), then it will be business as usual.
Remember, all the rules are there just for the plebs, not for the elites in the ruling class.
"If you steal from one author it's plagiarism; if you steal from many it's research."
As someone mentioned, it's not shocking the prosecution was politically motivated but shocking that they admitted it. I'll add that it's also not shocking that they think they didn't do anything wrong!
tfa has an update at the bottom:
"UPDATE #2: A DOJ official says (in the outlet âoeBroadcasting & Cable,â an odd choice if you ask meâ¦) that my characterization of the prosecution as âoepoliticalâ is inaccurate. No argument as to why or how, so color me unconvinced."
whoever the "doj official" is, is likely out of a job soon..
Keep in mind that you're talking about a kid here, one who in the typical American fashion had been raised on idealism and "good government bullshit" (to quote Goodfellas). It's quite likely he had no idea going in just how hard the government can push back when citizens threaten corporate interests.
It's real easy to envision yourself a hero when you embark on a fight against the man. But when confronted with the very harsh reality that you are engaging in the fight largely alone and against all odds, it can be overwhelming.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
If you are innocent but a little dangerous the system overreacts and goes into bug squish mode. I didn't have the resources to defend myself without being driven to poverty, I am not too big or important to fail, the perfect target. My crime is being invited by a friends kid to give a first aid and rope safety class to some tree worshiping hippies after a fatality, that got me into the sights of a federal prosecutor as a enviro-terrorist. I found out thanks to a college friend in the prosecutors office. I am a natural born in the continental US citizen, fortunately with an inherited second passport, I had the resources to go expat rather than gamble what the feds would do with their new DHS/patriot act powers.
Is my life good now, sure, but I still feel that I can not ever visit the US until there is massive change.
Well, for starters you could read the linked article. It has plenty of what you're asking for mr. AC/troll/shill.
Just like Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., etc., etc., etc. "deserved" prosecution.
Did you ever stop to consider, even for a moment, that the reason Aaron Swartz was going to continue this pattern of behavior might just possibly be that he was right?
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Remember when it came out, that the FBI actively worked with the banks, to forcibly (and illegally anyway) shut the movement down? They added agents provocateurs, false flag operations, and sowed the seed of conflict, to get them to fall apart.
The *exact* same thing happened to Wikileaks.
There's a highly active and highly powerful force in the USA, that shuts down everyone and everything that goes against he enforced groupthink or doesn't let them distract him.
It's why there are no real other parties, why the media only focuses on two views that are virtually the same and are portrayed as the most extreme differences there could be, and it's especially the reason why there aren't constant riots and attempts to overthrow the dictatorial government, even though it's ripe since a looong time.
The CIA, the FBI, Homeland Insecurity, the TSA, the NSA, and especially those most powerful government agencies no-one has ever heard of but which somehow are involved in everything. They're all part of it.
And the people live in extreme schizophrenic denial, flee to the delusions of religion, the reality distortion of the "American dream", and the lies of the "free market".
Civil disobedience of that calibre isn't punished with 30 years of gulag. Except maybe back when Stalin was still alive. It's punished with fines in civilized world, and maybe short term prison in 3rd world.
After Stalin died, even in USSR they didn't push for those kinds of punishments for that calibre of "civil disobedience".
Worth noting that current for profit prisons are arguably worse then gulags. On one hand, you have better conditions (i.e. no risk of freezing to death during winters), on the other hand many prisoners helped each other in gulags because they were all in it together.
His manifesto shows conspiratorial intent... He declared he wanted to make all information "free" and then he went in and STOLE the information to distribute it.
The DOJ was doing its job and Taren is the one politicizing it.
But if we way to go there, lets... Why did OBAMAs DOJ feel the need to persecute and torture Swartz like they did?
A Justice Department representative told congressional staffers during a recent briefing on the computer fraud prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz that Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” played a role in the prosecution, sources told The Huffington Post.
Doesn't sound quite the same as "admitting it's political". In fact, let's see what the HuffPo said:
The "Manifesto," Justice Department representatives told congressional staffers, demonstrated Swartz's malicious intent in downloading documents on a massive scale.
... yeah. Sorry, Submitter, but we mock that kind of Gotcha Journalism when Fox News or Breitbart twists someone's words to make a splashy headline, or when James O'Keefe does one of his out-of-context videos to smear Planned Parenthood.
Well if ever you need to remind people why anonymity is so important, perhaps the Aaron Swartz case illustrates it.
No doubt they'd get a girl to seduce him, then prosecute him for rape if all else failed.
From what I've read he broke a TOS, not the law.
"Political persecution is fine if it 'screws with research' (read: disrespects corporate 'intellectual property')" -- Anonymous Coward.
It's the new slashdot system that flagged you as copyright enforcer and gave you a captcha you can type in without typos.
More like you speed and get a ticket for felony reckless driving.
The point isn't that he was prosecuted, it was that A) he was prosecuted beyond any reasonable interpretation of the wrongdoing B) the prosecutor drew up a huge list of charges to try and scare him into taking a plea C) the reasons for A and B, it has just been admitted by the DOJ, were political. That shouldn't happen in the US, it just shouldn't. There shouldn't even be the shadow of a possibility that it could possibly have happened.
Mental illness is very serious and sometimes people get pushed beyond their limit. I can't imagine the need for any government employee to push someone that far.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5284311
The story was reported yesterday on Hacker News, and the headline on /. is just as sensational as it was in the other forum.
There is no admission, and there is no source. The anonymous staffer who will not be named is some underling with no pull or sway, and nobody has resigned. He didn't even say what the headline claims he said.
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
The thing is, he really didn't break the law, he took freely available, public domain documents from JSTOR and published them on the internet so that the public didn't have to pay 10 cents per page to get access to them. The law being used against him was the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), specifically the section that was put in for ATMs. Lawyers creatively turned this section of the CFAA to apply to terms of service agreements by saying the 10 cents per page was a network based "financial transaction." Basically, they used a law that was never designed for a networked computing based world and applied it to a network computing based world. The same law basically bans the world wide web, requiring you to have explicit permission to visit any computer on the internet, so congratulations on committing several felonies by browsing today.
That's part of the issue. If you break the TOS, you have voided the contract granting permission to access a computer system. If you access it, you are accessing a computer system without authorisation - a criminal offence in the US under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Legally, it's really no different from cracking your way in. That's why the maximum penalty he was threatened with was so high, and why there is such an outcry: The law used was not intended to criminalise violating a website TOS, but it implicitly does just that.
Drive down any highway in the United States. If the Speed Limit is 70 mph, the troopers aren't pulling over every car going 71 mph and up. They are pulling over whom they choose to pull over; sometimes its the guy going 85, sometimes its the car going 71 and "happens" to be driven by a minority.
Police departments throughout the United States don't have a history of profiling or racism through selective application of the law. What happened to Swartz is no different; just at a higher level.
Who's Andrew?
The idea that someone suffering severe depression can simply just "stand up for themselves" in adversity is incredibly insensitive.
People saying that are stupid, not insensitive. You might as well tell someone with diabetes or AIDS to just "stand up and shake it off."
The anti-segregation activists were breaking the law too. The fact that there is a law doesn't necessarily make it good, you know? How else can one fight immoral laws?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
"Politician admits obvious truth everyone knew already" ...really IS "news". /sigh /downfalloftherepublic
-Styopa
Aaron Swartz was many things, but as it happens gay was not one of them. TarenSK was his girlfriend.
But who would expect insightful commentary from someone who hasn't noticed even that?
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
You are of course correct - stupid is a much better characterization than insensitive. I was angry at the op, and so chose to tone down my original language to avoid being inflammatory :-)
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
No, the modern understanding is that even when you succeed at life you can still fall into a depression. And the modern understanding is also that depression is a disorder where the brain chemistry and functions change in a measurable way. If the technology existed to easily sample brain chemistry levels, that is how depression would be diagnosed. There are studies that have found that you can diagnose and differentiate different types of depressions with fMRI, which may be the way it is diagnosed in the future. So yeah, it is real and it is not self-caused (except in the sense that depression can be 'self-caused' by abuse, sexual assault, or genetics).
If he was wanting to make a political statement, he should have just self-immolated himself on the doorsteps of capital hill, that would have really made a media circus out of it.
Remember he admitted it was him, he surrendered his equipment without warrants, etc.
Everything about what was done to him was wrong, but this was seriously fucking stupid. Don't admit anything. Don't even admit you were there. Nuke everything. Better to be harassed for concealing evidence (and if there's no evidence, how can they prove you destroyed anything incriminating?) than to be raped for not even committing a crime.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
But. . We are the public. .
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
And don't we have anti-bullying laws now?
I mean seriously, these guys are getting away with what has now literally (and I'm using the term accurately) been defined as MURDER.
Remember that case where another "private citizen" bullied some young girl over the internet, that young girl committed suicide, and then the bully was put on trial for her murder?
So why is the prosecutor, who performed EXACTLY the same act, still walking free, and is probably still bullying others into killing themselves?
Nice dual-justice system there, America.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Of course, the prosecution was motivated by his views on copyright, just like the prosecution of a pot grower is motivated by their views on growing pot. What people still don't seem to get is that the DOJ position represents the majority view of the elected representatives, both on copyright and on computer fraud.
I would not really call it a "political" detention, but rather a "coporate" detention. Views on copyright do not really reflect on political issues but rather on corporate profit issues.
Sure copyrights and patent are part of the legal process of civil society decided by our politics. But in the end their purpose as defined in the laws that enact them is purely to drive a profit.
Aaron Shwartz, death by corporate agenda.
Yes and, those Guns do you a lot of good when Tanks and Jet's are pounding your ass. You think they wouldn't do it?.
But your view of traffic law might lead to you getting forcefully removed from your car, detained, arrested, pepper sprayed, beat, tazed, additional charges, impounded and even killed if the officer that ticketed you doesn't like your view enough and has a long history of doing those things and getting away with it. That's the point here.
Yeah, you know... Jesus carried his own cross to his crucifixion, so you can't blame his death entirely on the Romans. He was mostly to blame for his own death. If he had just shut up when he was told to, he could have lived a long and happy life.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
What he took was not public domain documents. Some parts of the JSTOR database are public domain documents and are accessible to the public.
You're a real idiot, you know that?
You either have no ability to feel empathy for your fellow man, or you're just a bitter old bastard who's too stupid to understand that the racial slurs he's throwing at the brown people are insulting. Either way, you're an idiot.
I grew up with depression, and I suffer with it every day of my life. It is a disease, its a mental issue. There were people like you once, who threw people like me into mental institutions because you couldn't understand. You didn't want to understand, to deal with it. It was easier to just say "you're weak!" and lock them up.
People who find themsevles in these sort of situations are not fully responsible for their own actions. They view what they're doing as the right thing to do, no matter how wrong that actually is, because the pain they're feeling is distorting their world view. If someone held a red hot iron against your arm for a few hours, you'd suddenly find yourself wishing you were dead, you'd want the pain to stop, you'd be screaming for mercy. It's no different here, only the pain is not physical, and it takes way longer than a few hours to reach that point.
Every waking moment spent dreading, being afrade, being a burden, knowing at you and you alone are at fault for all of it. You dont eat because you think you're fat and horrible. You eat too much because you use it as an escape from the pain you feel. You cant stand living anymore because everywhere you look you seem to make life worse, not just for you, but for those you love and care about. You rob someone because you lose the path needed, nobody gives you want you need and you dont know how to earn it yourself, you're desperate, and you need what they have, even if you dont.
You dont have an empathy deficiency disorder, you're just a fucking jerk.
Basically, they used a law that was never designed for a networked computing based world and applied it to a network computing based world
What the hell? Don't those losers know you're supposed to patent this sort of shit first?
He was primarily charged with violations of the CFAA, loosely speaking, breaking into MIT's network and causing trouble.
He didn't have any TOS to violate because he wasn't even a legitimate user on the network he was accessing.
After all, Hollywood spent a lot of money on Barack and they don't want to see their investment wasted.
Your description is perhaps valid for his use of the wireless network. But on the wired network, he didn't lose legitimate access by violating the TOS, he never had legitimate access in the first place.
It is surprising that they admit it after he killed himself. They could just have denied it. Nobody who cares would have been fooled but it was "plausibly" deniable.
...so you deal with him as an idealogue. I happen to agree with Schwaz's ideology when it comes to open and free access to information, especially information that was accumulated via tax-funded research. My tax dollars are also funding those prosecutors, though -- I want to make sure that if they are going after an ideologue (even one that I happen to agree with) they aren't hampered in the process, because there are other ideologues out there that I would like to see swing if they (like Schwarz did) trip up and violate a law. The defense's job is to get their client off the hook, and is given great leeway in doing so. But the prosecution's job is to keep him on the hook, and should have the same amount of leeway to build their case.
Corporations have done much worse than this, and yet the system that foments this still stands as strong as ever. You would think that after the American civil war, people would say this is no way to run a circus. But here we are, killing people for money.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Ajd, to rebut those negative lyrics, I gift to you and all here, Monty Python. Sounds to me like you need this...
______
Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown
And things seem hard or tough
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft
And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough...
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned
A sun that is the source of all our power
The sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars
It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side
It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick
But out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide
We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point
We go 'round every two hundred million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whiz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvD4N70V5mE
Ugh. I disagree with the AC troll you're responding to but I find your post just as distasteful. I sincerely doubt that Schwartz's suicide has much to do with medical depression. Undoubtedly the situation would have made him depressed -- facing life in prison would make anyone depressed -- but I'm inclined to believe that he committed suicide because he 1) thought he would lose 2) decided that a life in a cell wasn't worth living. That's not a disease, that's a conscious decision that's actually pretty logical. I usually have little sympathy for suicides -- if a person takes their own life because their girlfriend dumped them or because people make fun of them, I'm glad that idiot is no longer on the planet -- but in Schwartz's case I may have done the same thing if I were in his shoes.
One of the biggest problems with medical terminology is this word, "disease." If a person is infected with a harmful virus, bacteria, or parasite then they're diseased. If their cells reproduce uncontrollably they're diseased. If they're born with a genetic predisposition that makes life difficult, they're diseased. Worst of all, if they think sad thoughts they're diseased. Basically, anything that's a non-injury that disrupts homeostasis is a disease.
I'm not going to argue that depression and other mental abnormalities aren't diseases. I just have a semantic problem with the word 'disease' itself. It's far too broad and the problem with those who make a living from treating mental health problems is that they try to equate having sad thoughts with something like AIDS. It's not as serious.
For most people, to cure their 'disease' of depression, all they have to do is change their diet. Seriously, most people who suffer from depression just consume too many saturated fats and not enough vitamins. It slows down their heart and deprives their body of the nutrients it needs to function at an optimal level of homeostasis. In turn, they don't feel like doing anything, which makes them sad. There's no reason to feel sorry for these people, they just need to stop eating fast food every day. They do not need medication.
People who are depressed because their life is terrible -- say, because they're persecuted by a prosecutor who's trying to make an example of them -- have every reason to be sad. If they didn't feel depressed under these circumstances, then I would seriously question whether they suffered from a much more severe mental abnormality than depression. They do not need to be medicated (though I'm sure the prosecutor would love that, seeing as how it would make their victim more complacent).
So sure, mental diseases are actual diseases, but that doesn't make them comparable to viruses and the like. Disease is an umbrella term and when people throw out the whole, "mental diseases need to be taken seriously as diseases" crap, they're really just advertising for quack shrinks. Even among mental diseases, there is no comparing depression to something like schizophrenia. People actually can control depression, they can't control schizophrenia. Most people are just too naive or stupid to realize why they feel depressed -- they don't examine their diet, they don't have gratifying hobbies, they are spiritually void.
The typical person thinks of disease as something they need a doctor's help to cure. So when people like you push this whole, 'take mental diseases super serious' crap, you should probably include the caveat that depression isn't something one needs to seek professional help over. The worst thing someone can do for depression is take anti-depressants. Like pain-killers, they make one stop feeling the problem, they do nothing to fix the problem. Transcendental meditation, coupled with a healthy diet and productive hobbies, is the cure for depression. But no pill-peddling shrink will tell you that.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Maybe having him alive was worse then having a martyr.
Who would have expected publicly defying the law would motivate prosecutors to come down hard on a suspect?
The "law" was a TOS/AUP. Are you saying you've never violated any of the terms of a network or website's TOS/AUP? I strongly doubt that you even read them (nobody else does either.. you may remember the game vendor who included a term ceding ownership of the user's soul to the publisher, and nobody even noticed). Do you agree that violating any of those terms ("defying the law", as you phrase it) should be treated as a felony?
by voting for a Stalinist candidate in November 6th, 2012. Enjoy your North Korean style democracy.
New Economic Perspectives
But hey, lets just take an out of context quote written in one of the worse online 'papers'(Huffpoo) and simply believe it becasue it agrees with a unproven cognitive bias.
It's a political view blog. Not journalism. Its' a non paid for blog.
stupid stupid stupid.
This shit pollutes the actual story.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Actually, the linked article is crap. The DOJs actions and reason are well documented and available.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's not easy, lot of bad in the world gets reported, because bad news sells papers.
A lot of stuff goes really great in the world. The bad news are just the minor exceptions reported. :)
Indeed.
Jesus carrying his own cross is nothing more than a symbolic gesture when the authorities were prepared to drag him to his doom by force kicking and screaming.
Similiarly, if Aaron hadn't offed himself the feds would still be after him like a pack of rabid wolves.
The only reason the feds didn't get a piece of him is because the grim reaper got it first.
The idea that someone suffering severe depression can simply just "stand up for themselves" in adversity is incredibly insensitive.
People saying that are stupid, not insensitive. You might as well tell someone with diabetes or AIDS to just "stand up and shake it off."
That's because depression is not a same kind of beast. Depression, while it can be of physical causes too, is also a state of mind. You certainly have more voluntary control over it than over diabetes or AIDS.
Being diagnosed with mental disorders, or yelling at people in cancer wards? ... or both?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
If you were someone who was prone to depression you might understand better. You thought what you were doing was no more than a slap on the wrist... probation at most... Then all of a sudden you are getting threats of YEARS in prison. Your lawyer tells you there is a plea of only 6 months in prison... But your record would be destroyed. You will have trouble finding an apartment, a job, no gun ownership, you can never vote, etc... being a felon gives you a certain stigma, and prevents you from doing a lot of shit in life. So, it is probably going to cause you to have a bit of a mind fuck. Especially if you are politically active! If you are already prone to depression, you guessed it, depression sets in, you lose your shit and the probability of suicidal thoughts increase dramatically.
Even if they were just trying to scare him into accepting the plea, so they could win the case, these tactics need to fucking stop. When you deal with someone who isn't your average piece of shit(murderer,rapist,etc), or in this case, somewhat fragile... the case needs to be handled with more care. Ultimately, the goal shouldn't be to scare someone to get the win, it should be "justice". But clearly it isn't and that's what the entire premise of this is about. The unfortunate thing is, his death is probably the only thing that caused this to get the publicity it did.
Personally, I couldn't ever off myself. I would go live in the middle of nowhere so I couldn't be found before I did that. But in his mind, this was the way out. He took it. More balls than I would have had.
Marty Weinberg, who took the case over from Good, said he nearly negotiated a plea bargain in which Swartz would not serve any time. “JSTOR signed off on it,” he said, “but MIT would not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/01/15/humanity-deficit/bj8oThPDwzgxBSHQt3tyKI/story.html?s_campaign=sm_tw
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Strong grip, huh? Blood dripping from his hands after strangling someone? Maybe you meant that Cheney the Torturer ripped the kid's head off?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
You have no control over the hand you are dealt.
But you have complete control over how you play that hand.
Spoken like someone who doesn't understand and hasn't even really thought about mental illness.
Hint: The thing you think gives you "complete control" is the thing affected by the disease.
The enemies of Democracy are
addendum to myself:
the actual thing that finally got me on my feet was the song The Ride, from Chris Ledoux. always a bit of an underground country singer, i'd been listening to him for a few years. his songs were what got me interested in teh genre; having grown up in nevada they appealed to me.
The Ride ultimately is about death. the thing that will get us all eventually. its in the closing lines:
"Well, I know some day, farther down the road
I'll come to the edge of the great unknown
There'll stand a black horse riderless
And I wonder if I'm ready for this
So I'll saddle him up and he'll switch his tail
And I'll tip my hat and bid farewell
And lift my song into the air
That I learned at that dusty fair
(refrain) Sit tall in the saddle, hold your head up high
Keep your eyes fixed where the trail meets the sky
And live like you ain't afraid to die
And don't be scared, just enjoy your ride
Now, don't be scared, just enjoy your ride"
You see, when he wrote that he was facing a monster far bigger, far more powerful and unstoppable than most of us ever will.
He had a liver cancer. Treated before, but it had come back.
He was dying.
And instead of doing what most of us would do, he was going down swinging. Or singing, as it were.
And that there is what got me to get back on my feet. Maybe it'll help someone else like it did me.
Most of our monsters are treatable, and not nearly so big and scary.
But first you gotta make that decision for yourself. No one else can make it for you and force you up.
And though I'll help anyone who wants/needs it, if you decide the other way, I'll abide by that too.
Though I really wish you wouldn't go that route.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I sound like a caustic uncaring bastard for daring to post this? I must have some sort of empathy deficiency disorder.
In keeping with your viewpoint, I would say that no, you do not have an empathy deficiency disorder. You could just be a heartless prick.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
What "contract"? For example, what consideration was involved in this "contract"?
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
How many times does the government that supposedly represents us need to openly declare war on us, the citizens, before we respond?
I hope everyone is signing the White House petitions to fire these 2 prosecutors for overreach in this case.
Petition for Carmen Ortiz: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-states-district-attorney-carmen-ortiz-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck
Petition for Steve Heymann: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/fire-assistant-us-attorney-steve-heymann/RJKSY2nb
I know, I don't have a lot of faith in this petition system but, I'm hopeful that enough people will keep making noise on this one that some action will actually be taken. With this latest development that politics at least played a role in Aaron's persecution they should be jailed for bullying but we all know prosecutors don't go to jail so at least they should be fired and disgraced. Imagine if people don't make enough noise, nothing is done, and in 5 or 10 years these jerks are sitting on the bench as Federal Judges!
Less *is* more.
Plucky songs may not be useful for "wishing it away", but sometime the right music, the right words, really small things, can make getting through one day possible. Having serious mood and anxiety disorders myself, I must say that on the really bad days feel like serious adversity. And that's just what my fucked-up brain chemistry is doing. I shudder to think about how Swartz must have felt towards the end there, if even the functionality for daily living can be a struggle.
IANAL but AFAIK, a TOS is not a contract.
That shouldn't happen in the US, it just shouldn't. There shouldn't even be the shadow of a possibility that it could possibly have happened.
The fact that there is no law criminalizing this behaviour shows that it is by design.
Funny, I have not seen any forced famines in the bible belt or conservatards and libertardians rounded up and sent to FEMA camps. I have not seen political rivals of Obama accidentally falling and landing head first on a bullet. You are full of shit and have no clue what Stalinism really is.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
> "That Ortiz and Heymann knew exactly what they were doing: Shutting up, and hopefully locking up, an extremely effective activist whose political views, including those on copyright, threatened the Powers That Be."
Darth Vader: Your powers are weak, old man.
Obi-Wan: You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Obama has firmly established the legal framework for tyranny. Universal surveillance (SCOTUS just approved this), arbitrary and indefinite detention and arbitrary assassination without charge or trial. If he has his way, the people will be disarmed as well.
The fact that he has not YET exercised this power on a large scale is completely irrelevant. Maybe it will be Obama, maybe it will be some other president you don't like. The government believes they have the power and they intend to use those powers.
The specific crime is not the point. The point is that Swartz was singled out for specifically harsh treatment because the federal government didn't like him for reasons other than the crime.
A fair and just government would apply the rule of law in a uniform manner and not engage in politically-motivated prosecution. Too bad we don't have such a government in the USA.
Why does the discussion always center around suicide and Aaron's courage or lack of it? It is now obvious that the Department of Injustice was actually out to get him. It is also now clear that they targeted him for his views and not his actions. Given these facts, how can we -- netizens, citizens of the USA, citizens of the world, humans... take your pick -- allow entities like JSTOR and PACER to continue to exist? And why are we not looking for the people who orchestrated this fiasco (as opposed to the lowly public servants who coldly executed their wishes in obvious contravention of their oaths of office and their duties to the Constitution and people of the US and the world)?
Where are the executives of JSTOR who clandestinely pulled strings to bring on this relentless and unmerited legal assault? Why was the mysterious JSTOR "contact" who complained repeatedly to MIT officials and asked them to take action not identified? Directly or indirectly, JSTOR is responsible for this tragic death. When are they going to apologize or try to make things right? When is the information Aaron sought going to be available to us all? When are we going to ban JSTOR and PACER's theft from the public? When are JSTOR and PACER going to return their ill gotten gains to the people whose documents they stole?
For those who will make the argument: Copying is not theft. Keeping people from accessing things they rightfully own or should have access to is. A car is stolen when the owner cannot use it anymore, not when the same model is produced again by the factory. The owners of these documents are all the members of the public. Denying access to anyone for any reason is theft.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Oh, I'm sure that they would have no qualms about committing mass murder if they thought it was in their best interest. Think about it though. Did the Nazis use panzer divisions and the Luftwaffe to round up people and ship them to concentration camps? Obviously not. You don't bomb a building full of the sheep you're trying to subjugate just to kill a few political dissidents who decide to resist.
When tyranny comes, the government goons will be kicking down doors in the middle of the night and snatching specific people off the streets. Precisely why firearms will be very useful.
And the "Powers That Be" don't seem to change with a change in the political party that controls the legislative and/or executive branches of government. Now that SCOTUS has lost much of its principle of judicial oversight, checks and balances no longer really exist.
Intent to break the law is not breaking the law
.
You {don't / can't / ought not} prosecute "intention to break additional laws". The only activities than ought to be prosecuted ought to be actual breaking of laws. Mens rea is just a part of it. Intention without action is not breaking the law.
Fucking anonymous pussy,.
Alas, you are so right. Some documents came to light after the fall of the wall in my motherland and I was stupid enough to read them. Lost my sleep for quite a while..
Hmm, how about we drop back to an older and more generic use of the words "ill" and "well"? Before the advent of modern medicine, and the understanding of disease organisms, genetic disorders and mental disorders, a person was ill or well. That encompassed all of these conditions, plus a general sense of self. I'm not saying we should toss all the modern medicine, but this terminology would certainly cover your concerns.
Though people want to prove they did what they did for political reasons, the DoJ statements are not proof they had political motivations. For their charges to stick in court, hey for their charges to even survive summary judgement, they must show that he intended to distribute the JSTOR articles. The manifesto was going to be their proof. This is not proof that they did what they did for political reasons, it's just proof that they intended to use what he said against him.
The DOJ has told Congressional investigators that Aaron’s prosecution was motivated by his political views on copyright.
A Justice Department representative told congressional staffers during a recent briefing on the computer fraud prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz that Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” played a role in the prosecution, sources told The Huffington Post.
Since when is "[a] Department representative" the same as the DOJ? Since when does a manifesto playing a role make it political? Perhaps the role the manifesto played was "Wow, someone is following this manifesto and if we don't do something about it we may have a big problem on our hands. We don't want Swartz to go to every hacker conference and say 'I got away with it and so can you'". To me, that is the manifesto playing a role with good reason.
Another point is that this "information" went through many hands. I doubt any of it was written down and verbal communication is known to be inaccurate. According to the article the DOJ representative told congressional staffers and that information got to "sources" who may not have even been in the meeting then to the Huffington post and finally to the article author. Hasn't anyone ever played the telephone game? In this case there is at least 5 information transfers and interpretations. Any information that has been passed that many times is suspect at best.
Actually, I'd like to go the other direction and be more specific rather than more broad. Another word I dislike is 'germ.' If a bacteria causes me to be ill, then it's a germ. But what about a bacteria that causes one person to be ill and not another? Or a virus that some are immune to? Whether a micro-organism is a germ or not is relative to what is hosting it -- but a micro-organism cannot be said to be a germ in and of itself.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
I think the confusion here is the difference between the colloquial use of "depressed" as in "I feel bad" and the clinical use of "depression" meaning "an imbalance of the endocrine system that manifests in pain, discomfort, mental confusion, feelings of severe sadness/lack of self worth, and helplessness." (My own definition I'm paraphrasing from my understanding.) If you get dumped and feel bad about it, you might say "I'm depressed" but you don't have the disease "depression". The endocrine imbalance can indeed be caused by bad nutrition, but it can also be caused by long-term stress hormone reactions, genetics, and other as-yet-unknown triggers.
We're not just talking about feelings here. Those are a symptom, not the disease itself.
E pluribus unum
According to the DOJâ(TM)s testimony, if you express political views that the government doesnâ(TM)t like, at any point in your life, that political speech act can and will be used to justify making âoean exampleâ out of you once the government thinks it can pin you with a crime.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I think the confusion here is the difference between the colloquial use of "depressed" as in "I feel bad" and the clinical use of "depression" meaning "an imbalance of the endocrine system that manifests in pain, discomfort, mental confusion, feelings of severe sadness/lack of self worth, and helplessness."
I agree - I think that this is the confusion some people are having in this thread. I'll go further and say that the survival instinct is pretty much the strongest instinct all humans have, and if you have clinical depression overwhelming the brain such that it is capable of acts of suicide, or even lesser acts of self-harm, then we are no longer talking feelings, and are definitely dealing with mental illness.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
I think all prosecutions are political, in several dimensions.
They're political because criminal law is political -- it is the outcome of a political process, legislative lawmaking.
They're political because prosecutors are political; in many (most?) places in the US the county attorney is a directly elected position, and the person who wins that job has an inherently political mindset and at minimum a public constituency, and in practice, a much larger private constituency -- police, judges, politicians, etc. Even in situations where the position isn't directly elected, it's arguably more political because the positions are appointed by politicians and are often at an elevated political level (eg, assistant US attorney).
And then there's the power political component -- prosecutorial power, is, like many forms a power more or less depending on how you exercise it. So there's an element of wanting to use prosecutorial power in a way that enhances it rather than detracts from it, and that generally means winning, so you pick easier targets.
Like many people, he is unable or unwilling to contemplate all the implications of determinism, in regard to human behavior and decision making. Like many, he appears to hold a silly view that humans aren't more than very sophisticated computers.
Clearly, "free will" is magical, unquantifiable, and defies the laws of physics at work inside the brain!
Cause, like, just being a wetware robot with haywire software just isn't fashionable.
People bringing up charges against you FAR IN EXCESS of the crime committed mean he was more like "pushed" into depression.
The charges were increased because he had a LEGAL viewpoint that cause the people passing laws to CHANGE THEIR MINDS. So he did EXACTLY what they intended, and those new Internet anti- bullying laws should be used.
They got wast they wanted, he's shut up. They know nothing will happen because they do this for a living.
I really wish somebody would just link to an original story. This may be Slashdot, where everyone is supposed to know about everything going on with copyright, but I can't be the only one who doesn't know off-hand what the story is with Aaron Swartz. I'm even at least 50% sure I am aware of this story, but the name alone doesn't bring the whole thing back. In the future, please, just a little reminder at least.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
No he didn't, you moron.
"arbitrary and indefinite detention"
wrong.
"arbitrary assassination without charge or trial."
also wrong.
"If he has his way, the people will be disarmed as well."
he as never said or indicated anything of the sort.
You are an unthinking alarmist piece of shit.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I think most people here are missing an interesting angle. Granted, the headline and summary are misleading, and the quoted article does seem to make way too much out of what was actually said by the prosecution, so not surprising that the discussion so far has focused mainly on those issues. But to my mind the most interesting thing in the original HuffPo article is the last paragraph. Check it out:
Some congressional staffers left the briefing with the impression that prosecutors believed they needed to convict Swartz of a felony that would put him in jail for a short sentence in order to justify bringing the charges in the first place, according to two aides with knowledge of the briefing.
I don't know, this seems like a rather damning admission by the prosecution if true, because it shows they knew damn well they were on shaky ground, and that they were playing to public perception rather than truly seeking justice. It is also IMO much more likely to be true than the "prosecuted for his political beliefs" angle, which seems debatable at best.
:
That just shows how dead they wanted this guy.
People bringing up charges against you FAR IN EXCESS of the crime committed mean he was more like "pushed" into depression.
It's known that his money had just run out, and he was also legally prevented from raising money for his defence. His parents were on the verge of having to mortgage their house. We don't know exactly what was going through his mind, but it was mostly likely a large number of things, most of them not good.
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I hope someone pays dearly for this and I hope the public gets wind of this and revolts against these people that are purchase by corporations.
That's good, but it doesn't go far enough. The best case scenario is wholesale reform of the system. Items that should be on your hitlist include:
Elected prosecutors
Grand juries
Plea bargaining
Elected judges
For-profit prisons
Capital punishment
The last three are part of the overall problem, though are not specifically relevant in Aaron's case AFAIK.
All of these are archaic and barbaric, and only serve to pervert and corrupt the criminal justice system. Almost all of the rest of the world has done away with them. You need to eliminate both the incentives and the opportunity for prosecutorial overreach, bullying, and oppression. Everyone will be better off.
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It's important to remember that there are two ways to make the world a better place:
1. Reduce the suck.
2. Increase the awesome.
Suck gets reported more than awesome in the MSM.
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Who would have expected publicly defying the law would motivate prosecutors to come down hard on a suspect?
The "law" was a TOS/AUP. Are you saying you've never violated any of the terms of a network or website's TOS/AUP? I strongly doubt that you even read them (nobody else does either.. you may remember the game vendor who included a term ceding ownership of the user's soul to the publisher, and nobody even noticed). Do you agree that violating any of those terms ("defying the law", as you phrase it) should be treated as a felony?
No. I'm saying that if you're going to commit a felony, telling the world that you're going to do it an encouraging others to do so is a pretty reliable way to get a prosecutor's attention.
Aaron Swartz was many things, but as it happens gay was not one of them. TarenSK was his girlfriend.
But who would expect insightful commentary from someone who hasn't noticed even that?
I guess that explains why she defends Schwartz and claims he was doing nothing wrong even when he knew he was breaking the law.
And this attitude is exactly the incentive that they need to go on abusing.
I doubt it, no booze or shotguns were involved...
Face facts. He tilted at windmills because he put his dignity ahead of his well being. The people that took umbrage at his behavior wanted him dispensed with. Dead is just fine, it meets the bottom line. 30 years in prison would have been fine too. This was a political assassination plain and simple. The people who've made it their jobs to deny you any civil rights chalk up another in the win column.
Of course for profit prisons have become America's new answer to global slave labor, we're now competitive with the worst confined labor environments in the world, by just throwing people into jail for decades at a time for pot, then using them as slave labor for large corporations... talk about a sweat heart deal, could you ask for better!
yes, this is TOTALLY flamebait.
another mod system abuser
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
in typical typical slashdotter fashion, you didnt even read it before replying did you? anytime someones says anything other than "people with mental illness are completely helpless" he is called "insensitive", told "he doesnt get it", "doesnt understand".
And the ultimate irony is that typically these things are said by people themselves have never been there. and dont understand.
So if you had actually read the entire thing you would see that i'm saying that I HAVE been there. I DO KNOW what it is like to be at the bottom of that pit.
So dont tell me I dont understand and have never thought about it. I'm probably better aquainted with it than most of the people talking about it in this thread.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
same goes for you.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
"If you wish to keep slaves, you must have all kinds of guards. The cheapest way to have guards is to have the slaves pay taxes to finance their own guards. To fool the slaves, you tell them that they are not slaves and that they have Freedom. You tell them they need Law and Order to protect them against bad slaves. Then you tell them to elect a Government. Give them Freedom to vote and they will vote for their own guards and pay their salary. They will then believe they are Free persons. Then give them money to earn, count and spend and they will be too busy to notice the slavery they are in."
-Alexander Warbucks
Casteism
"Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it." -- Albert Einstein
Casteism
You say that like its a bad thing, or that I would find it offensive.
If something is true, no matter what you think about it matters. I don't worry or obscess over it anymore than I worry about or obscess over my gender, eye color, or skin color.
Being a biochemical computer with a self-modifying architecture isn't something I feel negatively about. A rose by any other name, as the saying goes. Much like said rose, accepting it as what it really is, and discarding the mystique associated with it, leaves you a more rational agent. The same goes with accepting what science says about how we are put together.
My point is that it's not really a disease -- it's feeling like crap because one lives an unhealthy lifestyle. There's a reason that people who eat healthy foods and exercise regularly don't commonly suffer from depression. The endocrine imbalance may cause the feeling like crap, but living an unhealthy lifestyle causes the endocrine imbalance.
It's not like a genetic disease where one is born with it, or a virus that one contracts just by breathing -- it's something that people do to themselves by gouging on fast food and then spending all their free time watching television. If one lives like crap one feels like crap.
It's sort of like when people call obesity a disease (which people do). Sure, the person may have a low metabolism, but that doesn't mean their lifestyle isn't solely to blame. Except in extremely rare cases, no one has to be fat.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
in typical typical slashdotter fashion, you didnt even read it before replying did you?
Of course I read it. And all I saw was you saying that you "got dealt some shitty hands"; nothing about mental illness.
And I assumed that this "shitty hand" was something else, because if it was mental illness you were talking about and you actually understood mental illness, you wouldn't have said something so fucking stupid.
nytime someones says anything other than "people with mental illness are completely helpless"
But you didn't say just anything other than that. You said they had complete control and can just pick themselves up and dust themselves off and move on. Which is a fucking stupid way to say "they aren't completely helpless" because that's not the same thing.
So dont tell me I dont understand and have never thought about it.
What you said demonstrates that you don't, so tough shit, I'm telling you that you don't. You understand your own journey, which I don't know or care about. As a generalization, as a statement intended to demonstrate understanding of mental illness and others who suffer from it, "you have complete control of how you play that hand" is stupid and wrong.
The enemies of Democracy are