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Aaron Swartz Prosecution Team Claims Online Harassment
twoheadedboy writes "Members of the legal team responsible for prosecution of Aaron Swartz have claimed they received threatening letters and emails, and some had their social network accounts hacked, following the suicide of the Internet freedom activist. Following Swartz's death, his family and friends widely lambasted the prosecution team, who were accused of being heavy-handed in their pursuit of the 26-year-old. He was facing trial for alleged copyright infringement, accused of downloading excessive amounts of material from the academic article resource JSTOR. U.S. attorney for Massachusetts Carmen Ortiz, who headed up the prosecution, and another lead prosecutor, Stephen Heymann, have reportedly become the target of 'harassing and threatening messages,' and their personal information, including home address, personal telephone number, and the names of family members and friends, was posted online. Heymann also received a postcard with a picture of his father's head in a guillotine."
Being constantly harrassed like that must be hell. I'm sure Aaron Swart's family and friends have nothing but sympathy for those poor harried prosecutors.
The prosecution still has the files for the prosecution under a gag order. They are asking to extend this gag order and are using the excuse that their safety could be harmed if a judge lifted it. In reality, all they are trying to do is cover up their misconduct.
For some reason, I just can't seem to feel bad for these assholes.
There is a war going on for your mind.
I think we all know "someone paid me money to do it so it's not my fault" doesn't actually fly. As individuals we have free will and the responsibility to behave ethically. To unquestioningly execute commands is to give up our humanity.
Throughout history we have frequently rejected "I was following orders" and "I was just doing my job". These mantras do not provide absolution.
"prosecution recommended a six-month sentence in a minimal security prison, instead of 35 years ....if he pled guilty to a bunch of bullshit charges (wire fraud? seriously?).
If you think it's OK to get 6 months when pleading guilty to bullshit charges on the threat of 35 years for even more trumped up charges then something is very very wrong with you.
The 35 year thing is part of the appauling farce known as plea bargaining. You should read up on it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Prosecutors recommended a six-month sentence in a minimum security prison...if Swartz gave up his right to a trial. These are scumbags that deprive people of their constitutional rights on a regular basis. They would deserve to rot in prison even if Swartz hadn't committed sucicide.
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The result, of course, is that they now believe that they are entirely justified.
Bullshit, they always did believe they were justifid. Furthermore, these people have no morals -- look up "innocence project" to see how many men prosecutors knew were innocent but still prosecuted and executed.
they recommended this if he accepted a plea bargain declaring himself gulty of several felonies.
Afterwards he would be a convicted felon with limited rights.
And the judge would not be bound by the six month recommendation
As a former DOJ employee involved mainly with the BOP (Federal Bureau of Prisons), I witnessed a long history of overaggressiveness on the part of US Attorneys (mainly, the AUSA's- the Assitants)... my experience with the court people was often that the AUSA's were trying to make names for themselves and build up their resumes, in hopes of: 1) becoming full US Attorneys, 2) seeking phat money employment in the private sector, or 3) eventually running for some political office.
The females I interacted with were often the most aggressive and over the top- often utilizing severe bias based on their personal lives to make decisions affecting cases... female USA's with histories of being abused by men often saw no possibility of innocence in ANY male defendant, regardless of any facts. In several instances I witnessed state prosecutors refuse to indict based on lack of evidence and/or the specifics of the defendant (i.e. no criminal history, relatively minor charge at state level), only to have a federal prosecutor (an AUSA) throw federal charges at the defendant based on something loose like "the crime involved phones (i.e. modem)", so therefore it could be considered interstate blah blah and allow federal jurisdiction. The startling statistics I discovered were the following:
over 90% of individuals indicted at the federal level are convicted without trial (i.e. plead guilty)
of the remaining approx. 10% who go to trial, 90% LOSE, and are convicted
Do we really believe the federal investigators are so good they really only catch that amount of "bad guys"?
The prosecutors often have NO CLUE whatsoever of technical details of complex issues (i.e. computer related incidents, copyright/piracy, etc). They further confuse things by often presenting information that is outright wrong or confusing to judges or others involved in the process, and often play on the fact the defendants often have no clue of the true law and their rights. At the federal level at least IGNORANCE OF THE LAW IS INDEED A VALID DEFENSE. Several federal laws have been changed over the years to add the specific wording "whoever knowingly", because in some cases obscure laws were being abused to prosecute people who had no valid way of knowing that what they did was illegal (i.e. the law was not some "common sense" thing... like a law saying it is illegal to sow grass seed on Tuesday).
I have no comment on the Aaron Swartz case as I don't know all the facts and it is always a damn shame when someone chooses to resort to suicide, but based on my personal experience with "the system" from the inside, I can say that there is no doubt the prosecutor and others on "that side" did indeed play a major role in pushing this troubled young man towards a terrible fate-- and no matter what they say to the contrary, their overaggressiveness in a case involving copyrights for God's sake was truly uncalled for and ultimately serves no proper purpose for the sake of society.
Reading the article helps. He was arrested for "downloading excessive material". In other words, he had a legal JSTOR account, he wasn't accessing it illegally, he just downloaded more material than they wanted him to. Really? That's a crime now? Even the civil matter was settled with JSTOR, but prosecutors went ahead and harassed him anyway.
One day in prison means the likely end of a promising technology career, and is one day too much for someone accused of "downloading excessive material".
Just hope that one day you don't get sent to prison for going over your mobile data usage.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
online harassment?
ONLINE harassment?!
You scum-sucking douches hectored someone into killing themselves with hyperinflated charges intended to "send a message" to score political points. MESSAGE RECEIVED . You should never work in law or government again. You probably should be in jail for abuse of power.
I would have no problem if someone PHYSICALLY broke each and every one of your collective kneecaps.
It involves a noose.
In Swartz's case, he wasn't doing anything strictly illegal
No, he was. As has been quite widely discussed here and elsewhere he was accused of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and, from what I've read, he probably was actually "guilty". And, yes, 35 years is the actual punishment. Sure, the prosecutors have discretion in prosecuting crimes, but I continue to be amazed that all of our abuse is heaped upon the prosecutors for trying to enforce a law THAT CONGRESS ACTUALLY PASSED. Don't get me wrong, I think that 35 years (or, really, any punishment at all) for what Swartz did is nuts.And I think that there is an under-appreciated moral dimension to the prosecution decisions that US attorneys make. But then again, do we really want a system where the prosecutors feel free to enforce a law or not based on their own preferences? Isn't this what a legislature is for? Why are we focusing on the prosecutors who tried to enforce it instead of the actual people who passed and have the power to fix the law?
caritj.org
Reading the article helps. He was arrested for "downloading excessive material". In other words, he had a legal JSTOR account, he wasn't accessing it illegally, he just downloaded more material than they wanted him to. Really? That's a crime now?
Where were you when we went over this in all its gory detail? Yes, this is Slashdot and everything The Man does is evil, so I get the whole simplification thing. But the real situation was actually a bit complicated. He basically tried to download every article they had, which went beyond the terms of use of the service. His downloads impacted other users of the service at the time by slowing them down because - wait for it - he was trying to download everything and chewing up resources to do it. His plan was to make all these articles available for free when access to them required a paid service. He also hid the computer doing the work in a closet and took actions to hide his face from security cameras when going to the closet to check on his equipment. From a legal standpoint, this can be interpreted to mean he knew his actions were wrong. There's a lot wrong with how the prosecutors handled this, but he was hardly some innocent school boy who got bullied for no reason.
I never knew.
He broke an EULA? WHERE'S MAH PITCHFORK?
FFS, why on earth hasn't she been sacked yet?
She tried to undermine the courts using an insane number of BS claims, trying to force Aaron to accept a guilty plea rather than let the court decide.
THAT'S NOT HER JOB. It's the OPPOSITE of her job.
She made political speeches on the back of this case, to promote her political career. At some point she should have been fired for misconduct, but she wasn't. The threats and anger relate to HER INCOMPETENCE at the job.
Just resign already Carmen, nobody wants you, every prosecution with your name on it, is tainted, because judges will automatically assume you're doing another insane overreach. Do the nice thing, hand in your resignation, you made a mistake, you want to spend more time with your family and FUCK OFF.
He was offered a choice, and one of those choices was "take this case to trial." He wasn't "deprived of" shit, until he "deprived himself of" living.
He was offered a choice. That choice was to exercise his constitutional rights and face years in prison, or don't exercise his rights and face months in prison. If you can't exercise a right without facing punishment from the government, you don't really have a right at all.
Plea barganing is nothing more than punshment for exercising your rights. It should be abolished entirely.
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If injustice turns into justice, resistance becomes an obligation.
For your information (and in this case I don't even mind invoking Godwin), acceptance (not support, mere acceptance) of inhumane, unjust laws is what makes dictatorships possible in the first place. You think everyone in Germany between 1933 and 1945 was a die-hard Nazi, hell bent on eliminating the Jews and all other "Untermenschen"? Trust me, no. It was a rather small minority. But they made the laws. What made it possible was the great majority of people who went "it's the law, what should I do?"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What civil disobedience? What the hell was the crime?
He downloaded a lot of documents. Documents that were public and not copyrighted in the first place. Public court documents that anyone could download any time from anywhere. Hell, I could have, and I'm not even in the US. He (allegedly) had the intent to spread them using P2P software. Again, where's the crime? Distributing non-copyrighted documents is afaik (ok, IANAL) not a crime either.
The documents were stored on a server that charged you a few cents per page you wanted to see. That's ok, someone who makes something available can ask to be compensated for this service, for his expenses and his running costs, but again, this someone has no right to the documents not being republished because the documents were not "his", they were public.
Swartz' crime, it seems, was to step on someone's toes who has found a neat way to make money with government documents, and that someone had a few "friends" where it matters. That's the crime. There wasn't even any "civil disobedience" in the whole deal. What did he do? He saw public information being "sold", he knew the information doesn't belong to the person selling them, he most likely assumed (as would I, to be honest) that the service only charges this to keep the operation running, so he thought he'd do his country a service actually by making the (public, government!) information information available for free and take the burden of keeping it available off their shoulders. It sure as hell looked like a service the government (or a subsidiary) provides to its citizens and such things are usually not done with the intent for profit, quite the opposite, they tend to cost more than they produce in revenue.
Quite seriously, I fail to see the crime, or even the criminal intent, here.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Guilty of what amounts to a pretty minor infraction. The notion that a punishment should fit the crime should have been the overwhelming concern of the prosecutors, but they showed themselves to be power-mad maniacs, or at least in one case, a sociopath who couldn't have given the tiniest shit about justice and was trying to pave a way to political career with some sort of "tough on crime" record.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
When you are commit a crime you forfeit some of your constitutional rights.
Does the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" ring a bell? Until you've had a trial and been found guilty, you retain all of your rights.
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He was offered a chance to plead guilty with a punishment of 6 months.
If he forfeited his right to a trial. Why is that so hard to understand? Rights are only meaningful if you can exercise them without interference from the government.
If I tell you that if you put your hand in a wood chip you will lose your hand. That's a fact not a threat.
If you tell me that I must plead guilty to a crime or you will put my hand in a woodchipper, that is a threat. That's what happened to Swartz, and every other victim of plea bargains.
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