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'Dangerously Naive' Aaron Swartz 'Destroyed Himself'
theodp writes "In July, MIT drew criticism after issuing a report clearing itself in the suicide of Aaron Swartz. So, one wonders what Swartz supporters will make of The Lessons of Aaron Swartz, an MIT Technology Review op-edish piece penned by MIT EE/CS prof Hal Abelson, who chaired the review panel. Calling Swartz 'dangerously naïve about the reality of exercising that power [of technology], to the extent that he destroyed himself' (others say prosecutorial overreach destroyed him), Abelson questions 'whether the people who mentored Swartz and helped him achieve such brilliance and power had a responsibility to cultivate not only his technical excellence and his passion as an advocate but also, as my grandmother would have called it, seykhel-a wonderful Yiddish word that means a combination of intelligence and common sense.'"
cynism want everybody to be cynism?
Well, Hal, if this is what it takes to let you sleep at night despite your and your school's part in Swartz's persecution, have at it. But I doubt too many people are buying it; at this late date pretty much everyone's mind is made up anyway.
It seems that "using power responsibly" usually means subordinating oneself to the whims of politicans and bureaucrats; to defy their will using one's technical prowess is immature, irresponsible, etc. The upshot is that if you're not a politician, you should sit down, shut up, and obey. I don't accept that.
Being prosecuted for being a whistleblower, being followed, being harassed... to expect and deal with that is common sense?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Common sense would have dictated a year of probation with a suspended sentence for such a silly offense. Surely Hal has the 'chutzpah' to admit when he's being a shnook.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Since we all know that all the progress depends on unreasonable people, what's the point of trying to make everyone grow up reasonable?
Ezekiel 23:20
Is there a yiddish word for asshole?
The most damage Aaron could have possibly done is damage the profits of a private corporation. For that, he was hounded until he decided to take his own life.
Common sense tells me that his death is a tragedy, period. The only people who should be feeling shame are the sycophants who are defending the right of the powerful to abuse the powerless. May you reap what you sow.
Dangerously naive you say? Well, in that case, it was totally fine to hound him to death for doing nothing wrong.
Hitler would have been proud
CYA by blaming the victim.
Yes, it was his own fault that he was destroyed for being "dangerously naive" in thinking prosecutors wouldn't overreach their bounds. Wow, this is very odd coming from an MIT professor, where students are striving for excellence in often very theoretical fields...not every engineer needs to have his feet on the ground when developing theoretical solutions. Good thing this professor has his head in the clouds, and is "dangerously naive" about how his school helped prosecutors lean on a student, and then justified the school's actions, instead of protecting the student.
I'm sure this professor won't have any negative action from his naive comments.
Aaron Swartz was an activist. He attacked what he perceived as a corrupt system in a more-or-less open manner. That type of activism, in service of a cause he fervently believed in, was and is praiseworthy even if you perceive it as misguided. But it's worth asking whether or not he went in with both eyes open.
Absolutely Aaron Swartz was mistreated by the criminal justice system. He had the full weight of the system thrown at him, and the fact of the matter is that system is harsh. But independently of how harsh the system is, it's worth noting that Aaron clearly had few ideas of the consequences. So in one sense, prosecutorial overreach destroyed him, but in another, behavior without full knowledge of the consequences led him down that same path. Aaron could have gone on to become the next Larry Lessig if he had had guidance on how to moderate his methods and work to change the powers that be from within. Instead, he's dead. Hal Abelson doesn't get this point across well, but that's ultimately what he's trying to say.
This Aaron Swartz affair has guaranteed that none of my kids will be attending MIT.
Will not be getting my renewal payment now.
This opinion piece by Abelson is the equivalent of the childish "why are you hitting yourself?" game.
Swartz commits what in any rational country is a minor infraction at best, local prosecutors decide it's not worth pursuing, so federal prosecutors with immunity from any liability decide to threaten him with a few decades in federal prison.
His response was actually the most logical of all. Highlight what has become a dangerous threat to liberty by becoming a martyr.
co-author of "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", a well-known introduction to the field of computer science, and incidentally, the Scheme language.
I agree with Abelson, Swartz seems like a tormented soul who was looking for a way out, but being a drama queen^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^ dramatic sort, he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. Although the cause he chose - that academic journal articles should be free as in beer, and not just available for those willing to fork over a few bucks on their credit cards, doesn't seem to be in the same class as the type of social change that, let's say, Martin Luther King Jr. or Susan B. Anthony fought for.
So I'm glad that someone associated with MIT with Abelson's stature had the guts to step forward and say what many of his colleagues are probably thinking in private. Aaron Swartz is responsible for his suicide, not the prosecutors, MIT, JSTOR, or anyone else.
MIT professor says messengers shouldn't be so naive. They should know that recipients have the right to strike off their heads for delivering bad news. Their trainers should have told them that.
Oh, the message? Copyright is dead. And what is MIT doing about that fact? Getting chummy with the likes of the RIAA and Elsevier? The RIAA is a confused and vicious organization that is in deep denial about copyright.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I don't know Yiddish but I would now guess that it means something along the lines of: don't fight injustice if this means stepping on some powerful toes. Sure, it's profoundly unjust that scientific publishers profit from the work of scientists that are supported by the taxpayers, and then the taxpayers have to pay again if they wish to have access to the knowledge that was generated by their patronage. But you know what? This system is maintained by pretty powerful guys and you will end up in prison or dead if you mess with them.
A good mentor who understands seykhel could have helped Swartz devote his efforts to more realistic pursuits. If his natural talent to engage people had been used in more neutral ways, maybe one day he could be the respected member of some panel at MIT instead of being dead. So much potential wasted. Snowden is a similar case.
This Aaron Swartz affair has guaranteed that none of my kids will be attending MIT.
Yeah, and the steroid/PED scandal has guaranteed that none of your kids will pursue a career in the major league baseball.
Naïve to think there aren't load of scumbag professors like that one.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
People like Swartz are trying to change the world, much in the way older generations of engineers like some famous person from a large corporation called Steve, who also did things at a younger age that would be very sternly punished now.
Did anyone teach the prosecutors to be reasonable as well? That would be a change. Right now prosecutors across the country wield unreasonable powers to threaten, harass and destroy people's life without check, which is unworthy of a democracy. Is there a review going on? Did anyone caught on that the USA has the highest imprisonment rate of any country? Is the USA really more violent and dangerous than Russia or Cuba? I don't think so.
You might as well expand that to every single major University in the world. They are all the same more or less from that perspective.
I think he was reflecting on Aaron's not getting the full benefit of his Jewish heritage.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I've been trying to make sense of this whole affair, and the above metaphor helps.
Miners used canaries to monitor oxygen and harmful gas levels because canaries are more vulnerable than miners, and while a dead canary is a clear warning, a happy, chirping canary is a true comfort.
If we give the canary some free will, mixed with smarts and some innocence, we get a bird who wanted to look at the miners, who was willing to accept some degree of risk associated with flying in a mine, but who instead unexpectedly encountered poison gas.
No, the metaphor doesn't teach any lessons directly, but it does let all the participants have roles in the story, to think about them in isolation and in combinations.
When you end up with a dead canary, it is important things to discover *all* the whys.
But it may be more important to ponder the silence. To think about the fate of future canaries.
The biggest tragedy about the actions leading to Aaron Swartz's death is that he's become a martyr for a ridiculous cause. Swartz once worked with a friend of mine, and from what I've been told, "naive" isn't too far outside his personality. I'm told he was an idealist, with little regard for consequences, and often a blind faith that things would work out with good triumphing over evil. Unfortunately, he was stuck living in the real world.
While I agree on the principles of his actions, that science should be freely available, the actions he took to accomplish his goals were asinine. Wantonly breaking the rules of the institution you're trying to change will not actually bring about change; it just makes your opponents mad. When your opponents have vastly superior power, that's a pretty bad idea.
What makes civil disobedience an effective form of protest is that the laws broken are trivial, but the trials must be public, so the whole affair is a PR campaign. Few remember that Rosa Parks' disobedience was not the first of its kind, but rather just the best candidate to go through a full (and widely-publicized) trial. By Parks becoming a celebrity over an injustice, the whole civil rights movement gained popularity.
What I see now is a disturbing trend of irresponsible lawbreaking, under the banner of "protesting". Websites are hacked, contracts are ignored, and people with small problems feel entitled to disrupt all normal business until somebody takes care of them. Somewhere, people have forgotten that change comes slowly.
Bradley Manning could have released his information in small quantities to human rights advocates. Edward Snowden could have sent information anonymously to the EFF. There are responsible channels for changing the world, but they are slow and often frustrating. Swartz had already founded Demand Progress to fight various forms of online censorship; adding scientific lockdown to that campaign would not have taken much effort, and would be much more likely to succeed than going after JSTOR directly.
Can we as a society please stop this madness? Let's stop glorifying leaks, stop vilifying our opponents, and stop encouraging concerned citizens to become martyred heroes. Instead, let's promote patience, compromise, and a steady societal change, rather than an overnight revolution.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Generation Y (that is, the reddit crowd) sure does have a rather weird sense of "responsibility", in general.
Why should anyone aside from Mr. Swartz feel responsible for something harmful that Mr. Swartz did to himself, by himself, completely voluntarily? They shouldn't, of course.
So many members of Generation Y completely pervert the concept of responsibility in all respects. Not only is Mr. Swartz incorrectly absolved of his responsibility in this ordeal, but others with no responsibility at all are somehow considered to be "responsible".
Here we have nearly an entire generation completely misunderstanding a very basic concept like responsibility. It's quite unusual, quite absurd, and to some extent quite scary.
If mental torture didn't work, nobody would try it.
If bullying didn't work, nobody would try it.
But you're a shit, so what the hell am I doing? You're not listening.
I think the real lesson to be learned here is how dangerous the legal system really is. I do say legal system because it's not a justice system as there was no justice served here.
It's abhorrent how people can simply claim they had nothing to do with it when their actions or lack there of are the most critical aspect in this case.
May the gravity of their [in]actions weigh upon those participating or complicit in this farce. This is not a penalty or punishment, this is your wage.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
When any organised religion exercises its power (throughout Human History) to destroy an individual, afterwards they ALWAYS make a report or announcement in exactly this form of language, decrying that the 'dangerous' individual destroyed himself (vanished few examples of females considered significant enough to be given this treatment) with 'naive' behaviour patterns. They always say that the 'Church' did not want to hurt the individual, but were left with no choice.
So MIT acts and responds like a depraved religious entity. We should not be surprised. The governance of MIT has NOTHING to do with science or engineering- just power and corruption. The vast sums of money that flow from TAXING every student at entry for 'access' to papers that do not benefit the authors, ensures that managers at places like MIT will do anything it takes to protect the yearly kick-backs that enrich their bank accounts.
This is the 'American Way'. Remember that in the USA it is EXPECTED that politicians who begin their careers as virtual paupers will end it worth hundreds of millions of dollars via the "politicians are exempt from corruption and insider trading laws" mechanism that your masters put into place when the USA gained 'independence'.
At least you can be grateful that the monsters work hard to rub your face in the truth, so even if you are naive enough to attempt to be an apologist for MIT, that line of self-delusion cannot be sustained.
with a length of rope.
It's dangerous and futile to assign blame in a suicide to anyone other than a victim. Swartz's death is not MIT's fault.
That doesn't mean that mean that MIT is off the hook for killing a plea bargain deal that JSTOR was happy with. That was wrong, but it would have been wrong even had Swartz not taken his life.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That would sure be a lot nicer than having to admit to yourself that your harsh actions led directly to the death of someone who was still basically a child in your care, wouldn't it? Well, he's still dead, you're still an asshole and thousands of idealistic young kids like him still apply to your school every year, so I guess it all worked out for just about everyone, didn't it? Perhaps as part of the new student orientation you should give the Fight Club "God Hates You" speech to all the new students. Then at least they'll know what they're in for.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I think that is blatantly apparent, but thanks for having the nerve to point it out.
Hardly. MIT operates a national laboratory (Lincoln Lab) and is essentially an off-shoot of the federal government. Yes, all schools take funding. Schools like Caltech, MIT, and others which operate national labs are extreme examples of federal entanglement.
Rather than allow this to blow over, you decided to write a self serving piece to somehow make your report look unbiased.
Someone is dead, your institution was involved in the series of events that lead to it no matter what you try to otherwise claim.
You seem dangerously naive about what a knee jerk reaction from a university can cause to happen, completely moronic about attempting damage control, and have managed to bring the ire for your employer back to the forefront.
Maybe you really should have listened to your Grandmother and taken her words to heart yourself.
Sometimes it is better to remain silent and appear a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
> What's Yiddish for "Always throwing your Jewish heritage into every fucking conversation"?
There isn't an English word for this concept because the Xians spent the last 2000 years trying to keep everyone illiterate and ignorant rather than making you pass a literacy test before you could breed.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Part of using "civil disobedience" as a form of protest is paying the price. In fact, that's pretty much what makes it effective as a form of protest: it's a vital part of constructing the image you want to convey. Swartz did the deed without being prepared to pay the price. In that sense, he did indeed bring it upon himself.
Aaron Swartz did a lot of things, most of them good, some of them not so much. But the man was a fallen zealot, not a saint. It does nobody any good to put him on a pedestal.
Can we as a society please stop this madness? Let's stop glorifying leaks, stop vilifying our opponents, and stop encouraging concerned citizens to become martyred heroes. Instead, let's promote patience, compromise, and a steady societal change, rather than an overnight revolution.
There are no previously agreed to boundaries that can be used as a shield against retaliation. When retaliation comes there are no limits to the level of punishment that can be applied. Blaming the victim is exactly the reaction those with power are hoping to elicit. The wife-beater says "Look at what you made me do!". Congratulations for your support of the wife-beater mentality.
We can stop the madness by not appeasing out-of-control aggression.
It's not a Generation Y thing, it's a philosophical question. You're basically arguing that a defendant is wholly responsible for the consequences of his action regardless of the weight of those consequences and the arbitrary nature in which they seem to be applied. Some argue that society has some responsibility to enforce laws evenly, clearly and with consequences weighted appropriately to the harm against society done.
Those are the symptoms of a victim of autoerotic asphyxiation, which the family ALWAYS wants to be relabeled as a suicide. Are we sure Aaron didn't just make a terrible mistake while trying to get off?
Do you really not get the irony of mentioning the civil rights movement while speaking about "patience, compromise, and steady change?" Do you know why there was this relatively sudden burst of demonstrations, protests, marches, and so on and so forth? Because for the past fifty years since the Atlanta compromise, gradualism was mainly used by the government as an excuse to do nothing about existing issues with no real plans on the agenda for integration. From 1895 until the 1950s, "patience, compromise, and steady change" did jack shit and only served to retard progress. That's why there even was a civil rights movement. People didn't feel like spending generations as second class citizens, waiting patiently for their great-grandkids to have a future they won't be around for and can't say for certain will even come around. There is no way to have slow, steady change on an order less than many generations, because thoughts and cultural memes get entrenched and passed from parent to child, and the only thing that'll force them out is conflict.
What you're talking about are all symptoms of a dysfunctional society and a refusal of the new social strata, and your examples are riddled with holes and victim blaming, especially because Bradley Manning couldn't've released his information piecemeal because between the volume of data and the constant threat of feds busting down your door, and regardless of what the law says there's nothing right about fifty years in jail for a few minutes in a closet unless you're taking someone's life, and then constant legal issues to the point where you kill yourself just to escape. While you're saying to stop vilifying opponents who well earned their reputations and stop glorifying leaks, what's really being said, be it your intent or not, is to just shut up, bend over, and hope it'll be over quicker this time. Change doesn't come from people lining up and merely wishing things were different, and attitudes like those don't make it happen at all. Stop blaming the victims and look who's really making people into martyrs.
We do need some laws that would limit the threats a prosecutor can make or imply. We saw a similar problem with condominiums in Florida. The condo associations would file suits for huge sums against a condo owner. The condo owner would be forced to retain expensive legal talent to defend and then the association would drop the suit. The condo owners were made aware that they could be bankrupted by that tactic as numerous suits just might be filed against them. The legal solution was to force the completion of each suit filed by a condo association. The same could be done for criminal law. A defendant could only be tried for the highest charge stated or implied. Since the prosecution knows they only intend to prove a lesser charge it forces the prosecution to only indict for the actual crime they feel they can prove. It takes bluffing out of the game.
A lesson for his kids. How to not be proud of daddy.
Don't know if it really can be legitimately called a legal system when it clearly does not work--- tomatoes are vegetables, corporations are people, HSBC launders billions in drug money... banks commit outright fraud that crashes economies around the planet... minorities get higher sentences... innocent people go broke or plea to things they are not guilty to.... people spend YEARS in court and jail without a swift trial, and my favorite one: the prisons can't even the keep illegal drugs out!
Seriously, if you can't keep drugs out of a PRISON you are a joke.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
"And we only want people to have just enough so that we can sell you more of it."
Aaron was, by every measure, an extraordinarily brilliant individual and we collectively suffered a great loss earlier this year. He was a champion of the kind of freedom that the forefathers of any free country would have themselves admired. Were it not for him, we might have been seeing people with ten-year prison sentences for downloading movies by today.
MIT feared him because because of this brilliance and brazenness. They knew he was on the fast track to upsetting the establishment. Then they continued acting like cowards and looked the other way while the full force of the US Government sought to destroy his life for the "horrible crime" of publicizing publicly-funded research (with an added dose of vindictiveness for doing the same with PACER ... also publicly-funded knowledge).
Aaron, like many of us, was frustrated and angered at how the establishment deliberately moves at a snail's pace and seeks to hold knowledge at ransom. Knowledge that gives the people power. They fear people with this power. This, apparently, includes MIT and they should be ashamed of themselves. After all, an intelligence organization that fears intelligence? Historically, not awesome.
And, if you want to honestly talk about the dangers of exercising the power technology gives you, there's a three-letter government agency I'd like to bring to your attention who's been dangerously and recklessly abusing the power of technology in all sorts of ways. Maybe you've heard of them, they've been in the news a lot lately.
Hmm what's yiddish for "let's kill all those who do not have (sufficient) intelligence and common sense"? The holocaust?
Have you bought your ticket Hal? Surely you don't expect the rest of us to to pay for your idiocy. Feel free to bring your lovely grandmother.
Did I Godwin the thread? Nope! Hal himself introduced the untermensch aspect —I only called him on it.
Go to hell MIT.
I thought the word for that was "Yiddish".
(On the other hand, trying to make something about yourself part of a conversation on an unrelated topic isn't particular to any ethnicity. Narcissism is a human vice, not an ethnic one.)
Naivety neither warrants decades in prison, nor a felony conviction! Abelson, you are more than naive, you are criminally culpable for his taking of his life! So, go suck eggs!
Where does that leave all of you Othodox Stallmanites now?
And that's putting it gently.
What I see now is a disturbing trend of irresponsible lawbreaking, under the banner of "protesting".
Copyright infringement was only recently criminalized. Now its like the war on drugs only with 10X the potential for persecution.
Bradley Manning could have released his information in small quantities to human rights advocates.
Small is a relative term, especially in view of the gargantuan apetite government and large corporations developed for our personal information. And anyway, Manning approached papers like the New York times but they weren't interested in handling the info until there was a whipping boy (Wikileaks) between them and the federal government.
The events surrounding the death of Aaron Swartz have irreversibly tainted MIT in my eyes. Every time I see some colleagues' affiliation to include MIT, I can't help but take a dim view of them.
This type of post event manipulation of public opinion is a hallmark of good propaganda. You start with getting them dirty with exaggerated claims that disassociate the person from the people who might sympathize, then smear them until they are forgotten.
It looks very much like the actions of a wolf pack leader that sees a threat to their position. First cut the offending subordinate out of the pack. Then proceed to punish them until they submit or die. Then strut and publicize dominance.
A more recent example comes to mind and I can't ever know the real facts if everybody is just cherry picking to promote their own interests. I model the process and wonder why every event follows the same script?
Shots fired at the Capitol, Woman shot policeman, Woman shot at police, Woman is shot, Woman has baby with, Woman didn't shoot at police, Woman was crazy, Woman believed that government was spying on her "which is absurd" so don't think that way. Baby is safe in the arms of the people who killed their mother. NSA records of the spying on her reveal many incidents of paranoia about being spied on. Obviously deranged. Praise to the soldiers in full battle gear with machine guns that faced such a dangerous situation with such courage.
To me it looks like a directed graph that is designed to start at various points and ends where it is driven.
There is quite a difference between a nation joined in willing common pursuit and a nation where fear of consequence and psychological manipulation is the driving force. These kinds of situations never end well for anybody.
your attitude is not just absurd, it's completely asinine.
Or sour grapes.
Like the title says, there is enough to go around.
The prosecution could have acted unethically and unprofessionally and Aaron could have applied more common sense.
One does not preclude the other.
Gregor Mendel, you mean.
Generation Y (that is, the reddit crowd) sure does have a rather weird sense of "responsibility", in general.
Responding as a member of Generation X to your rather obvious troll, I will say that what I see in Generation Y a hope for the future that we failed at. Are you really so far gone that you have lost all sense of justice, of morality, of just basic decency and fair play? Do you really believe the vitriolic slime that was Thatcherite doctrine that every man is an island, alone?
The best thing anyone of my age can do is give all the help they can to the generations beneath us - we failed to wrest power away from the hippes that turned into yuppies, but if we pass on our knowledge and experience, but not our jaded cynicism then there might yet still be hope. Personally I think the average Generation Y's morality is a lot less warped than Abelson's will ever be.
It's easy to say the "other guy" should change, but that approach will rarely get you anywhere. My reading of Hal's opinion isn't that what happened to Aaron was right or reasonable, rather that there are a lot of things in this world that aren't fair and reasonable. Knowing how to fight those injustices without becoming a martyr, recognizing the potential outcomes of your actions (right or wrong), and a better understanding of how our technological powers fits into society are extremely important (particularly if you're trying to cause waves), perhaps we should be better teaching these "soft" skills, lest we waste another brilliant mind.
(On a different note, MIT is not a single individual, there are many forces at work. MIT made poor decisions, some people there supported those decisions some people fought them, and many more were likely busy working in the fields they love and unaware of the situation or it's severity. Why not take this opportunity to push MIT to become a better institution, rather than to condemn it).
My brief experiences on the wrong side of the law, way back when I was a youngster, lead me to firmly believe that Prosecutors are way more interested in scoring wins, making examples of people and furthering their careers than in truth and justice. To that end, they always strive to apply as many charges as they can think of and pursue the most harsh punishments available to help ensure they have the maximum leverage and/or win at least something regardless of the facts and circumstances and/or consequences (sound familiar House Republicans?). It's very easy for the accused, especially if young and naive, to be overwhelmed by this process, even with a good, reassuring defense attorney. If I faced the behavior of the Prosecutors in this case, I might also see the ultimate path Aaron chose as the only way out...
From Wikipedia:
On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by MIT police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after systematically downloading academic journal articles from JSTOR. Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution and supervised release.
Meaning, he bypassed a website pay/firewall and downloaded some (okay, many) articles. Is that something warranting 35 years in prison? I think not. We could easily enumerate many, many worse crimes - against actual people - that get less severe punishments. It's seems there's a disconnect in this country between "protecting the innocent" - especially people vs. corporations - and the actual crime and damages. I won't say "punishing the guilty" because Prosecutors don't actually care what someone is guilty of - as long as they win.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Has it really just dawned on anyone, that it was Aaron's own lack to deal with reality of the situation that did him in? It really seems that these whistle blowers lately assume that if they feel like they are doing the right thing, there won't be any consaquences for their actions. Both Manning, Assenage, and Snowden leaked top secert material, and all of a sudden they were shocked when the force of the US government decided they didnt like that and came down on them all with the power of many suns. They all either fled, or in Manning's case had such a break down that he turned into a woman. I hate to break it all to you kids sitting in your basement, but in the real world even if you think you're doing the right thing, there will be consequences that you will have to answer for. This MIT thing is just a bunch of out of touch professors trying to make themselves feel better for trying to save their own skin because look at that they understood there would be repercussions, so I dont even know why anyone would give this the light of day. But if you want to change the world, you have to deal with what might come of it. Aaron couldn't, and he opted out.
So what you're saying is that only the minor ones are actual universities? Fair enough, that makes them better in every possible way.
That's how much you should trust MIT. What else is there to say?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I wonder what Professor Abelson's views are on the reality of exercising the powers of criminal prosecution, and the responsibilities of prosecutors to exhibit seykhel.
Doing something I disagree with.
We do need some laws that would limit the threats a prosecutor can make or imply.
We had one. The Constitution. It didn't work.
He was depressed and killed himself. Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
As the cliche goes, if you can't do the time - don't do the crime. Especially if you're mentally unstable like Aaron Swartz was. Poor guy needed some antidepressants.
Gen Y are in the military now, dunkass
'dangerously naïve about the reality of exercising that power [of technology], to the extent that he destroyed himself'
They are trying to set their conscience at ease by Blaming the victim.
Schwartz did not destroy himself. They destroyed him.
MIT was complicit in everything that happened to him.
Schwartz did nothing wrong.
There is a scene in Shindler's list were jewish prison laborers are constructing the baracks of a concentration camp. One of them, a young woman, goes to some nazi overseers and tells them the constructions are being done wrong, she is apparently an engineer.
She is shot for daring to talk to them.
Who do YOU blame for the outcome of that scene? The woman or the nazi? You might think that if she had kept quiet she would have been fine... but that just shows you have a lousy grasp of history. But if someone had pulled her back, she would not have died that day. And that is the message being send by this article. Don't make waves because the powers that be might kill you.
It is after all common sense to let sleeping dogs lie. I used to think of that saying as "let that otherwise friendly dog sleep" not "let the guard dog keeping you in the prison compound sleep". Possibly because that last one hardly rolls of the tongue.
Was Swartz naive in assuming there would be no consequence to disrupting the status quo? To easily panicked when he threw the snow ball and he got caught in the avalanche? Maybe but is the lesson to learn from this to never question the status quo? That would be terrible, for us all to turn into sheep because we might get slaughtered if we don't behave like sleep.
Yes Swartz was naive. Yes those around him should have been more supportive of him but the fault for his death lies solely and alone with those who prosecuted him.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Pardon me? You, your parents and your grandparents have not fought for anyone's freedom.
If you're Generation X, then you were born in America between 1965 and 1980. You may have served in Afghanistan and Iraq, but those wars were never about freedom.
Your parents were born in America between 1945 and 1965. They were Boomers. The ones born earliest may have experienced Vietnam, but again, that war was never about freedom.
Your grandparents were born in America between 1925 and 1945. They were born well after WWI, and most were children during WWII and Korea. Then again, of those wars, only WWII is remotely tied to freedom in any way, but America's involvement certainly was not related to freedom.
So it's pretty clear that you, and your parents, and even your grandparents have never fought for freedom, have never fought in just war, and have never been on the good side of any international conflict.
Spanish may be the best language for swearing, but Yiddish is the greatest language for insulting people. I'm sure it has many words that would be appropriate here.
From what I have been able to research on the guy, he had lots of friends, was not isolating himself and was very active in what he believed to be correct human behaviour with regards to compassion and what that means in the pursuit of knowledge.
He was also worth millions.
He had no reason, whatsoever to take his own life, in fact from what I have seen had every reason to be quite happy.
He had some problems, but to the extent that would warrant his personality profile to kill himself. Also the manner of such "suicide" doesn't fit the personality profile of someone who is clinically depressed.
-Hackus
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
The op-ed seems self serving but I do respect Hal Abelson. I would really appreciate a thoughtful response from Lawrence Lessig, maybe even a debate. Anyone have access to the bat signal?
I would be interested to know more about this "reality" of the situation the professor goes on about, and in particular a reality more adequately captured by a Yiddish saying than a perhaps more verbose English explanation.
Does he mean the reality that power will crush you if you are seen to threaten it?
Maybe he means the reality the only truth is the consensus of the powerful?
Or maybe he means that MIT is not so much interested in the pursuit of knowledge and an enlightened society as in the preservation of its status as a policy influence?
This reality you speak of, please tell me more.
To work around that, the prosecutor would simply break the charges down to multiple suits. Even though the Fifth Amendment prohibits a single offense to be tried twice, the same act typically involves multiple offenses and multiple counts and can be tried separately.
It simply has to become more common knowledge that prosecutors can use any intimidation tactic, including pressing charges that are way out of the ballpark, but it is the final court ruling that holds. It also must become common knowledge that appealing is the legal remedy to fight unfavorable court rulings. As an extension of Miranda Rights, there should be law restricting the interaction between the defendant and the prosecutor. In addition to the right to remain silent, the defendant has the right to dismiss any contact with the prosecutor, maybe even going as far as allowing the defendant to file restraining order for himself and on behalf of his family and friends to be free from harassment from the prosecution. The right would openly state that cooperating with the prosecutor will not result in leniency.
I once had a signature.
What about the prosecutor that threatened Mr. Swartz with 30 years in jail for actions that most civilized people think should have been dealt with by the University administration, or maybe by the civil courts. Was it responsible to threaten a person with 30 years in jail for disregarding an EULA?
Mr. Swartz's case highlighted the odious and unjust practice of threatening people with completely out of proportion punishments to induce them to plea bargain. And as far as I can tell this is done to gain political points in the next stage of the prosecutors's career, not to improve justice.
Anarchists never rule
You've completely ignored the real issue, which was Swartz choosing to voluntarily end his own life. The prosecution he was facing due to other, previous actions is completely irrelevant. It in no way "forced" him to commit suicide, regardless of how much some Generation Y members would like to mistakenly claim that it did.
In any case of suicide, there's only one person who is ultimately responsible: the person who has killed himself or herself. Society is not responsible. Members of the judicial system are not responsible. An academic institution that was dragged into legal proceedings by the actions of an unaffiliated party is not responsible.
It becomes a generational issue because people of earlier generations generally have a good understanding of responsibility, and who is truly responsible for what happened in this unfortunate situation. They know that when somebody does something voluntary to himself or herself, that any harm that arises is the responsibility of that person, and that person alone.
So many members of Generation Y, on the other hand, feel it necessary to (incorrectly, of course) blame just about everybody except the party who directly and voluntarily performed the harmful action. This proves that they just don't understand the concept of responsibility. It's really that simple, I'm afraid to say. They just don't understand it.
So, uh, you believe in instituting a Literacy Test to everybody before they are allowed to breed? Maybe even an IQ test?
This is a new twist on the ideology you generally champion here on Slashdot. Maybe you can elaborate further for us.
So basically, it's "learn to serve the status quo or die"?
I'm losing no sleep over a thieving cunt who killed himself because he couldn't accept the consequences of his own actions.
Apparently many members of Generation Y don't even have a basic understanding of how the judicial systems works in certain Western nations.
Prosecutors often aim for a much higher degree of punishment, knowing full well that the sentence in the end will be somewhat, or even significantly, less than what they've suggested. And that's assuming that there isn't an acquittal, or that charges are dropped, and so on.
Whether it is "right" or "wrong" to aim for stricter punishments is irrelevant; what does matter is that the judicial process must be allowed to proceed to a conclusion. Committing suicide to avoid this process, for example, is not a responsible thing to do.
The judicial system and those involved with it should not be considered responsible if somebody else involved chooses to voluntarily act in a self-destructive manner.
The only takeaway from this case is that our society values paywalls and ownership of information more than human lives. Our legal system will go to any length to protect the ownership and control of information by corporations.
FUCK YOU. ASSHOLE.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I guess he wasn't able to handle it, either. Or any of the others who got naively mixed up in a certain plot. How naive they must have all been. Not smart, and capable, like all the others above and around them.
On a slightly diffrent tone, there was this Mr. Hastings. Also, apparently, extremely naive. Then, there was once this guy called Allende. Not to mention a large number of unbelievably naive journalists and protesters, for decades on end.
Yes, if so many say so, so vociferously. Acting in decent causes or speaking out loud about them, and being hounded into desperation, well, that must be just naïvité. What else could there be?
Disobedience is Mental Illness.
Apathy is good.
Obedience is good.
Lazyness is good.
Self betterment. Resisting preconceived notions. Is bad.
There's a big difference between obedience and discipline.
Fuck you fuckers controlling the flow of information and thought. Fuck you. Damn you to hell. We are angry as fuck. You will pay.
Federal prosecutors knowingly threatened a physically small guy with no criminal record with decades of prison rape for what could be described at worst a non-violent, victimless crime.
Has anyone actually read the report? Everyone presumes it clears MIT. It does no such thing. The report was released on July 30. It was 180 pages. John Schwartz' article in the New York Times appeared on July 30. Either John is the world's greatest speedreader, or the NY Times published an article on a report prior to having read it, presuming MIT would act like most corporations. It's clear from these comments no one on Slashdot has actually read it.
The report is an open, factual description of what happened. It does not judge the moral value of what happened, either in clearing MIT or in vilifying it. There is a minimal bit of commentary in the conclusion.
Here are some comments from Prof Lessig after Swartz was arrested and indicted in the JSTOR case, but before Swartz's suicide:
http://mediafreedom.org/2011/07/larry-lessig-responds-says-swartzs-alleged-actions-crossed-ethical-line/
Lessig's post is fairly short and is thoughtful and balanced. Here is how it ends:
Unlike, say, Wall Street (and what were the penalties they suffered?), this wasn’t behavior designed to make the man rich. Nor, if the allegations are true, was this behavior designed to interfere with any of JSTORs activity... What it was is unclear. What the law will say about it is even more unclear. What is not unclear, however, to me at least, is the ethical wrong here. I have endless respect for the genius and insight of this extraordinary kid. I cherish his advice and our friendship. But I am sorry if he indeed crossed this line. It is not a line I believe it right to cross, even if it is a line that needs to be redrawn, by better laws better tuned to the times.
Swartz was a research fellow under Lessig at Harvard.
The prosecutor aims for a high degree of punishment because they hope for a plea bargain, with every intention of keeping the maximum sentence recommendation intact in the event that the case actually goes to trial. It is a way to undercut the constitutional guarantee of trial by jury by raising the stakes so high that a jury trial becomes an untenable gamble.
Thus the Ortiz-Heymann tactics in this case should be seen as what they were, an untenable subversion of basic constitutional rights, by persecutors with a goal of putting notches in their belt, hoping to gain political points with an ignorant public afraid of any and all "crime".
He should have gone into finance.
Exactly, that's why Western countries are the most developed in the world.
> Committing suicide to avoid this process, for example, is not a responsible thing to do.
What is your opinion of armed rebellion against an unjust government? Because the particular case of Swartz's suicide strikes me as a strange kind of passive-aggressive version of armed rebellion.
On a related note, I just finished using my $14.90 "quarterly free" allocation on PACER to upload documents to RECAP. Some history about RECAP can be found here. I encourage everyone who admired Swartz to open a PACER account and continue the work of populating RECAP.
Even if what Ableson said was true, which is hardly the case,
a person with class and intelligence and human sensitivity simply
does not say such things, especially not in public.
What a horrible example of how not to behave as a decent human being.
Actions and their consequences should be clearly defined and predicable. To ask whether his mentors gifted him with an education in common sense, is to to imply that common sense would predict the the vindictiveness with which he was treated.
I think people would argue that no one with common or any other kind of sense could have predicted the response he got.
His death is not his fault and not the prosecutors fault. It is the fault of our society in not clearly delineating the consequences to be expected for actions and giving prosecutors more and more laws to pile on the charges until death seems the best alternative.
... somebody doing HER JOB. The guy was a CRIMINAL, he wasn't a saint healing children.
He broke the law and the prosecution was seeking the maximum penalty for the crime. That was HER JOB. That is what she was supposed to do.
Just because you sympathize with the criminal does not change the fact that he broke the law.
There are consequences for your actions. Being threatened with the maximum penalty for the crime is one of them.
He did it in his own home and at the time he killed himself we wasn't even charged with the crime.
The prosecution was just threatening him with the max penalty available by law ... something that they do in every case hoping that the criminal will just confess and settle for a lesser charge and avoid having to go to court.
There are caps to damages that can be sought in civil cases. Caps to the monies awarded. I think we need to look into prosecution caps: Rules that make it impossible to pile on charges in cases where no human was threatened or harmed and no property permanently damaged or destroyed.
common sense doesn't change the world to be a better place... common sense frequently fuels or at least immobilize acting against most tragedies of this time
Whether or not Swartz was naive, or not, or his suicide was justified, or not, all of us who respected what he stood for can continue his work on such a low flame that none of us runs any significant risk.
For example, I just finished using my $14.90 "quarterly free" allocation on PACER to upload documents to RECAP. Some history about RECAP can be found here. I encourage everyone who admired Swartz to open a PACER account and continue the work of populating RECAP.
Generation Y (that is, the reddit crowd) sure does have a rather weird sense of "responsibility", in general.
Why should anyone aside from Mr. Swartz feel responsible for something harmful that Mr. Swartz did to himself, by himself, completely voluntarily? They shouldn't, of course.
So many members of Generation Y completely pervert the concept of responsibility in all respects. Not only is Mr. Swartz incorrectly absolved of his responsibility in this ordeal, but others with no responsibility at all are somehow considered to be "responsible".
Here we have nearly an entire generation completely misunderstanding a very basic concept like responsibility. It's quite unusual, quite absurd, and to some extent quite scary.
Have you ever driven over the speed limit? What would you do if you were stopped for speeding, but instead of being given a speeding ticket you were put on the evening news and a prosecutor told you he was going to destroy your life because what you were doing was endangering children.
Stuff I wrote five years ago about Princeton, but applies to MIT as well: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html ... We are witnessing a historic end to scarcity of many things (maybe not all, but enough to be a new global Renaissance). But is Princeton University helping prepare either students or the rest of society for these changes? Or is it instead an institution under stress, crashing into these trends instead of moving with them? Or is it perhaps conflicted in how it sees itself and its future, and so trying to do both these conflicting approaches at once? :-) "
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
...a person persecuted such that they suicide doesn't choose retaliatory homicide instead. If you are checking out anyway that removes the consquences for taking out the enemy.
If you die, they win. If they die, you win.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Remigius van Haanen (1812-1894) - Faggot Gatherers in Winter Landscape (Unknown).jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Remigius_van_Haanen_%281812-1894%29_-_Faggot_Gatherers_in_Winter_Landscape_%28Unknown%29.jpg
I am pretty sure you are wrong. I was born in 1980, the end if generation x and my grandfather fought in ww2. Parents were born in 1980. I believe my grandfather was 19 when his enlisted. So this means that gen x people who are older than me have grandparents older than mine, right?
Feeling a sense of connection and responsibility for your fellow humans is a very good thing, and those who don't feel it are called psychopaths for a reason.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
> Do you really believe the vitriolic slime that was Thatcherite doctrine that every man is an island, alone?
Humans are born alone and die alone. Any pretence to the contrary is histrionics.
> ...but if we pass on our knowledge and experience, but not our jaded cynicism then there might yet still be hope.
Jaded cynicism is an emergent property, and tends to develop as a result of prolonged contact with reality.
Can someone tell me why it's newsworthy that MIT clowns exonerate themselves & blame their victim?
Other than to demonstrate how low some people can go.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Because last I checked, this thread is about MIT and aaron. Not canaries.
Manning tried to hand his info to the NY times and the washington post. Botg ignored him. But of course, to a brainwashed sycophant like yourself, federal prosecutors threatening someone with life in prison for a civil suit the prosecution originally dropped is less offensive than a culture where power is routinely threatened by leaks. Poor fucking baby. Cold fjord, is that you?!
A. Hey, this guy's really smart! B. Therefore, any character judgent he has ever mafe about anyone in his industry is correct
C. ???
D. Profit
Have you ever driven over the speed limit? What would you do if you were stopped for speeding, but instead of being given a speeding ticket you were put on the evening news and a prosecutor told you he was going to destroy your life because what you were doing was endangering children.
I sure as hell wouldm't kill myself.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Seriously. It's not typical corporate whitewashing.
How do you know who made it? Did you forget to log into one of your sock puppets before posting? You fucked up. You disinfo trolls are terrible at this--so many fake avatars and you can't manufacture a false consensus to save your lives.
What about the prosecutor that threatened Mr. Swartz with 30 years in jail for actions that most civilized people think should have been dealt with by the University administration, or maybe by the civil courts. Was it responsible to threaten a person with 30 years in jail for disregarding an EULA?
He wasn't facing anywhere near 30 years. The prosecutors told Swartz that they thought the judge might go as high as 7 years. That was if he went to trail, lost, and the prosecutor's largest damage number was accepted. If he pled guilty, the most he was facing was 6 months. See Orin Kerr's detailed analysis.
It appears the argument was that he believed the threats aimed at people around him and so killed himself to stop those threats from being carried out. For some reason that's supposed to be his fault and not the fault of those issuing the threats, who we are supposed to all assume by default are liars exceeding their authority?
Here's a suggestion - jail those who lied about their authority for impersonating people who do have that authority and manslaughter as well.
Snowden ran. Manning was successful at concealing his identity until someone he trusted sold him out. Assenage used to be described as paranoid before he took up residency in an embassy toilet. With all three of your examples they were definitely worried about some sort of consequence instead of suddenly shocked as you suggest.
This is akin to calling a rape victim dangerously naïve. Aaron was destroyed by cynical scum trying to advance their career and generate headlines by destroying a life. Let's not blame the victim of a heartless system of injustice dangerously naïve because he lacked the cynicism of his persecutors.
Good to know your kids will get a subpar education because you're butt hurt about things the hivemind tells you to be butt hurt about. Swartz was an idiot, get over it.
Time tested and true, cocaine fixes women. They will do whatever you want, whenever you want. They will go work a strip bar and make you $$$$. They will steal, fight, cook , clean and swallow for cocaine. Ask any hardcore biker.
Pardon me? You, your parents and your grandparents have not fought for anyone's freedom.
If you're Generation X, then you were born in America between 1965 and 1980.
a bit late to the party on this thread but i need to say this, my siblings and i span 1967 to 1988 in birthdates, our grandfathers certainly did their thing in ww2, one was a fireman in coventry and one was a boffin, their contemporaries were certainly dying overseas in one of the few wars where despite certain questionable actions by the allies the general cause was clearly right.
Help me understand why Wikipedia hasn't added this to their listing of manifestos.
"A manifesto is a published verbal declaration of the intentions, motives, or views of the issuer, be it an individual, group, political party or government."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifesto
"Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for
themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries
in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of
private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the
sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought
valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure
their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But
even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future.
Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their
colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them?
Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to
children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.
"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they
make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal â"
there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's
already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources â" students, librarians, scientists â" you have been
given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world
is locked out. But you need not â" indeed, morally, you cannot â" keep this privilege for
yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords
with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been
sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by
the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or
piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a
ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral â" it's a moral imperative. Only
those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate
require it â" their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they
have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who
can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the
grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public
culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with
the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need
to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific
journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open
Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the
privatization of knowledge â" we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
Aaron Swartz
July 2008, Eremo, Italy
"
https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt
15TW = 15,000 Nuclear Reactors. (Approx. one accident a month.)
6 months.... and a felony conviction. From the point of view of "special deterrence", the felony conviction was the major point. You can't do much reforming as a felon; surviving takes all your effort.
Orin Kerr's major point seems to be that they screw people over this way all the time and we're fine with it, we only complain when it's a rich white nerd, so he got his just desserts. Of course, the fact is that no, we're NOT all fine with it. And even if we were, one injustice wouldn't justify another.
where 960 Jews, under a hopeless siege, committed suicide rather than submit to Roman overlords.
The rest of the "I did nothing wrong" trope is -- "And if I did, it was all the victim's fault." Just ask Prof Hal Abelson, who proves that while he knows the words needed for responsibility, intelligence, and common sense (even in Yiddish), he has zero comprehension of their meaning. Just like doctors investigating doctors and cops investigating cops and lawyers investigating lawyers, one should not be surprised when a university sets up a panel to investigate itself, that the investigation turns up nothing in the way of wrong-doing, and it will use that "nothing" to explain away its culpability. Legally speaking, he is probably correct. It was an ambitious, out-of-control DoJ p.o.s. who deliberately drove Aaron Swartz to his death. But MIT did nothing to even try and stop it and may even have exacerbated the situation by just plain standing by as this case unfolded in its Kafka-esque way. So morally speaking, their hands are just as red with his blood. What's the Yiddish word for that, Professor Abelson?
Some argue that society has some responsibility to enforce laws evenly, clearly and with consequences weighted appropriately to the harm against society done.
More to the point, ethical conflict of interest on the part of legal professionals, to the benefit of that profession, has historically been the single most important driver in determining the nature, scope, and form of the US legal system. This is the reason the USA is known as the "Land of the Lawsuit", it's the reason the USA has massively broken intellectual property law, it's the reason the USA has enormous numbers of laws on the books (most seldom enforced and of dubious merit); it's the reason the USA has hundreds or thousands of laws that directly contradict it's own Bill of Rights; it's the reason the USA has laws that are hundreds (Patriot Act) or thousands (Obama Health Care) of pages long (the Supreme Court admitted to not having read the whole thing); it's the reason the laws governing the actions of ordinary people are written in language that is vague, ambiguous, and incomprehensible to ordinary people; and it's the reason people are really, really unhappy with the legal profession and the government (with the real and unfortunate possibility that another revolution or civil war will happen at some point in the next few decades).
Society has a responsibility to ensure that the laws reflect ethical practice of law, and ethical government. Even the appearance of conflict of interest on the part of members of government and legal professionals must be avoided whenever possible.
Aaron Swartz made the mistake of assuming that because he had integrity, other people would as well, namely the people responsible for passing the laws, prosecuting the laws, and judging the laws. On the whole, that hasn't been true for a very long time. There are individual exceptions, of course.
It is a mistake to assume that the lessons of Nuremberg have been learned by people in positions of responsibility in the USA, and that even if illegal laws and precedents were created, the individuals responsible for actually implementing these illegal laws would refuse to enforce them.
It is always essential to remember that James Madison created an open-ended Bill of Rights, allowing the people to assert rights "retained by" or "reserved to" them as needed when government or the legal system gets out of line. It is another mistake to forget this power reserved to the people. Government officials have a responsibility to ask themselves, when creating laws, when enforcing laws, and when creating precedents, whether their actions can reasonably be supposed to violate any rights that might be so asserted.
It is said that the tree of liberty must be occasionally watered by the blood of patriots. The alleged suicide of Aaron Swartz must be regarded as another death in the cause of liberty and justice.
Description
Blueprint for information revolution.
Creative Commons license: Public Domain Mark 1.0
Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for
themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries
in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of
private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the
sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought
valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure
their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But
even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future.
Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their
colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them?
Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to
children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.
"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they
make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal â"
there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's
already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources â" students, librarians, scientists â" you have been
given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world
is locked out. But you need not â" indeed, morally, you cannot â" keep this privilege for
yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords
with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been
sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by
the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or
piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a
ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral â" it's a moral imperative. Only
those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate
require it â" their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they
have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who
can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the
grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public
culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with
the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need
to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific
journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open
Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the
privatization of knowledge â" we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
Aaron Swartz
July 2008, Eremo, Italy
https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt
Why isn't this on wikipedia's list of manifestos?
15TW = 15,000 Nuclear Reactors. (Approx. one accident a month.)
Apparent or not, it counters the AC's original point. AC was suggesting that bringing up Jewish heritage was just semi-solipsism (or not-so-semi narcissism) on the part of the author of the article. And I was countering that it was actually a relevant perspective because Aaron, the subject of the article, shared in that heritage.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I am ignorant of the case and its implications, but this is what I gleaned from a quick read at the links. 1. Swartz hacked into a system and stole its contents using the MIT network. 2. Boston legal found Swartz and prosecuted. 3. Swartz kills himself under the pressure. 4. MIT said that its hands were clean. Where is this talk of Democracy, NSA, and freedom coming from in this thread? I see property stolen. Unless Jstor is taking public domain and hiding it behind a paywall, where does anyone begin to think that work is theirs and not the originators/owners? Unless MIT gave consent for Swartz to use their network in this endeavor they had nothing to do with this theft beyond the ethical teachings on their campus. Again, I don't know the depths of this case or issue so maybe I am missing the obvious, but from a quick read this is not at all that amazing.
The guy had no girlfriend at all.
Apparently many members of Generation Y don't even have a basic understanding of how the judicial systems works in certain Western nations.
They understand the way it works, but they also think it's a disgusting perversion of actual justice. Prosecutors routinely overreach as a way to game the system and deny people their basic constitutional rights. I suppose you'll claim that people routinely give up their right to a fair trail "voluntarily". Of course they do, just like businesses "voluntarily" pay for "protection" from organized crime.
Maybe just my "naive" outlook, but does this not look like someone trying to deflect attention away from a murder investigation? How certain are we that the cause of death was indeed suicide?
"He goal was to download every paper and article ever published. He could never do this use a remote link, so used the download requests of other people to achieve this. But in effect, he was intercepting the thoughts and ideas of other people."
When I see somebody who "intercepted the thoughts and ideas of other people" for the sake of intellectual freedom and public benefit rather than control and personal profit, I am tempted to view him as something of a heroic character.
Does this view really put me at odds with society? I find the possibility that this may be true somewhat lonely and frightening.
It's still unclear whether he actually committed a crime.
Humans are born alone and die alone. Any pretence to the contrary is histrionics.
That's right, all humans are born completely alone. Barring doctors, nurses, paramedics, midwives, family, friends, taxi cab drivers, etc. True not all births have any of those. But there's one significant person present at every birth who is kind of important to the process. She may sometimes be unconscious or in a vegetative state or even clinically dead in such a way that the newborn can be considered to be alone, but that's a very, very rare circumstance and usually has to be of quite short duration otherwise the newborn doesn't last long...
So, basically what you're saying is nonsense. It sounds like some sort of philosophical/poetic viewpoint which might be valid in its own philosophical framework. Of course, you can come up with philosophical frameworks which claim the opposite: that we're never alone, even if we're born from a clone machine in an isolated one-man outpost on the moon. Why? Because we carry the legacy of all humans who have come before within us, maybe? As good an argument as your aloneness argument (especially since you didn't provide an argument).
uhm, the Prosecutors have pushed for and received broad, sweeping laws from Congress and the States that allow them to "crack down on crime." The problem is as the net has gotten bigger, there are cases everywhere where small fish get caught up and suffer tortuous charges for very petty things. That's how our Liberals and Conservatives in the country can sleep better at knight knowing that their jack-booted law enforcement is on the case. I had to hire an attorney a few years ago for my son because he decked a kid in school who'd taken a swing at him. He was facing a misdemeanor assault charge with up to a $4000 Fine and 6 months in jail. This was at 14 and happened because the schools are now treating petty incidents as crimes and it's happening all over the country because of the war on drugs and zero-tolerance policies. It's a direct result to make our schools "safe." https://www.aclu.org/racial-justice/arrested-futures-criminalization-school-discipline-massachusetts-three-largest-school
It doesn't make them safe and schools all over the country now resemble prisons in terms of their policies and on-site police to enforce bullshit. It's a great lesson to teach our youth. How about breaking your arm for leaving crumbs on the ground? Doodling on your desk? Flying a paper airplane?
Yet, you want more laws to reign in prosecutors? We have enough laws and enough police all wearing their swat gear and bullet proof vests all supplied with funds from the DHS. While we were sleeping, this nation became a Police State and from your rights on the street to the prosecutors the deck is stacked against you and while we fault the Prosecutors here, which they should be, we also have to remember that if there wasn't a set of laws on the book that they could charge him with there wouldn't be a problem. The CFAA is overly broad and needs to be changed, narrowed or eliminated but the risk here is that we could get worse legislation by that band of Retards on Capitol Hill. http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/hackers_hell_many_want_to_narrow_the_computer_fraud_and_abuse_act/
Swartz is one case, he at least had visibility. Think of all those souls in Prison who had a public defender and a plea deal lessening the charges or the duration of the sentence possibly faced. That's the game, build a case so big that if you go to trial the Prosecution by leveraging these vague laws will try to throw the book at you and put you away forever. That's why Aaron took the route he did, a big case, felony charges, years and years in prison and the Prosecution had the tools to do it. He should have put his faith in a Jury and the Legal Process and fought, instead he died and everybody is still debating it but not really doing anything about it. Why? Because we've become accustomed to all these new broad laws and powers we put in the hands of our government. That's so we're taking an active part in stopping crime. Crime is bad, so let's give the police and the prosecutors the tools they need to fight crime. The problem is broad-scoped laws can be used against you even though you send one too many e-mails or encourage to your members to do so.
It's time that the American public took back it's government and removed the Democrats and Republicans or at least took the approach of voting out all the incumbents. That's your last bastion of hope here folks because if you don't you'll get the same bunch of retards being re-elected over and over again and since they don't fear the voter, they'
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
20th Century psych test:
> MIT?
> pranks
21st Century:
> MIT?
> Aaron Swartz
Is Theop sucking Timothy's dick? Or, is it Timothy sucking Theop's dick? Or, are they in a grand shit covered dick 69 after fucking each other in the ass?
we failed to wrest power away from the hippes that turned into yuppies
Wow, when did this happen? I was there and I never saw hippies with any power, who knew?
What in the hell are you talking about?