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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."
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.
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.
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!
The result was pretty much the same, though. No?
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.
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.
It was far worse. Hellfires tend to be relatively quick and painless. They basically threatened him until fear and despair drove him to suicide.
I'll take hellfire over that kind of torture any day.
From what I've read he broke a TOS, not the law.
They may not have fired a Hellfile missile at his house, but the end result was just as lethal nonetheless.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.