The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz (2013)(newyorker.com) |
The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz (2013)(newyorker.com) |
I find myself in a leadership position, but I feel immensely uncomfortable when directing others. In my head there's always a nagging voice that replies 'who are you to tell us what to do?'
This is the frustrating thing about any activism: it moves slowly. For someone who cannot finish projects, or needs immediate feedback, it appears to be constant failure. However, activist movements are less like drag racers (the cars ;) and more like xenon ion thrusters that NASA tested a few years back: they spew out tiny ions that individually barely move the satellite, but slowly, over time, the sheer number of the small exhalations translate to colossal speeds. The activists seem to be mired in failure, but they are slowly moving the needle.
I wonder if as he got older he would have learned discipline to stick with longer-lead feedback loops. Or maybe not, perhaps his brain wasn't wired that way.
I'd be eager to hear what you ran into while working in a nonprofit that turned you off due to being "too emotionally driven." Please share!
My favourite writing by Aaron is his explanation of what happens in the "ending" of Infinite Jest. [1] I'm of the opinion DFW deliberately left it somewhat open to interpretation, and that his famous quote "If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book’s failed for you" was a tad tongue in cheek. That said, Aaron's explanation is certainly the most plausible, and I'd kill to know what DFW would have thought of it.
My impression is quite the opposite. This piece by Larissa MacFarquhart was a contemptible whitewash of government bullies. "New Yorker" is squarely in the corner of intelligence agencies and law enforcement and against the people, and not just in this particular case.
In general, I respect and appreciate content that takes someone who has been lionized (especially posthumously) and humanizes them. People are complicated, the narrative is rarely as simple as it's distilled down for public consumption.
As far as the "squarely in the corner of intelligence agences and law enforcement" - that wasn't my impression, and while I did not spend hours researching, I went through the "police" tag on the new yorker website, and in the last year, 10 out of 21 articles were overtly critical of police, and only ~2 could be considered positive towards police. The remainder were either neutral, nuanced, or orthogonal (e.g. photo essays about a woman who was embedded with the police for several years). Do you have evidence to back up your assertion?
"The guy in front of me’s leaning all the way back, but I’m in the last row so my seat doesn’t go back, and I have to lift my legs up to stretch out a muscle that was sitting funny while I was asleep"
I feel like Aaron Swartz was never truly an adult, just a boyish intellectual. I can't imagine his submissive behavior was a net positive to his mental health.
there was still so much more he could have done.
i never met him but he seemed like a gentle soul that poked the wrong bear.
Was there some pressure being employed by scientific publishers to make an example out of Swartz?
It just seems so strange, but then again as we've seen institutions can be easily hijacked and corrupted when populated with the wrong actors.
https://swartz-report.mit.edu/
-- maybe that includes some of what you're looking for.
Or, possibly, Hacker News doesn't represent hacker culture, but finance-adjacent right-wing techbro culture, which knows perfectly well which side of the copyright issue its bread is buttered on.
What's the alleged "darker side" that isn't just being (in part) a regular person?
I've spent a large portion of my life blaming everyone including Aaron for everything and looking for heroes who would be able to make good on any of what seemed reasonable in his promises. In considering the worth of all these hours of reflections, I can't say I have changed my opinions but I have changed.
What has been written about Aaron's life and accomplishments, let it suffice. The meta text is all now. Not "who was he?", but "what do we think of him?". This is what he wanted, and possibly because it concerns him, he was basically wrong, and this conversation is mostly unhelpful. I propose to ask "what do we think of what we think of him?".
Those who could never see the value in information and knowledge have their knives out for a largely harmless and innocent man, while those who think hacking JSTOR would have unleashed a new age of enlightenment have yet to become cynical and stupid. His friends and family have largely avoided these debates and tried to elevate his achievements and explain his incongruities with compassion and grace, without taking sides, either out of fear of further government overreach or out of a sense that no one can speak to Aaron's entire belief set, and whether it was or would have been coherent and effective.
As much as he held strong opinions on the subjects, he was trying to open a conversation about data, privacy, freedom of information etc., and he encountered a lot of people who realized that that conversation has extremely negative implications for data-driven business models, whether those were content publication models or user data ad-tech models. The corporate-academe was never willing to discuss any of it openly or honestly and was never going to leap to his defense as he might have thought at the time, as a socially-underdeveloped young man.
He probably got it too late that corporate academics are not conservative so much as cowardly, not so much concerned as paranoid, not unaware but purposefully ignorant. And he certainly understood, too late, that the government is these things to an entirely incomprehensible degree. Whatever the personal motivations or ideologies of whichever prosecutor threw the book at Aaron, "the government" wanted him punished.
Ultimately information is the scariest possible thing for any government, and Aaron had spent too much of his life knocking on the doors of the most closed-rank, insular and self-protecting people on earth, demanding a better public understanding of and regulation of data. He did this at a time when NSA et al. were harvesting unprecedented volumes of personal data and while trillions of private-side investment dollars were being spent on doing the same with no accountability.
The hero-thief debate, and the autist-scumbag debate are for kids and morons like the New Yorker. Viz the fact he struggled socially---and to such an extent!--- is a "dark-side", warping his personality traits, his social and personal disorders, and his policy recommendations into a nice big meaningless pile.
As another commenter here noted, like anyone with a soul he was a complex person.
"The Darker Side of MIT and the Academic Publishing Industry"
While the Internet has been hailed from its inception as a tool that would open up access to information for the whole world, the reality has not matched that expectation. Much of the most important and useful information generated by scientists, engineers, historians and others remains hidden behind paywalls and is not accessible to the vast majority of people, regardless of whether they have access to the Internet or not.
The reason is that academic research - the vast majority of it financed heavily by federal science agencies, i.e. the taxpayer - remains under the control of a small group of academic publishing houses, who earn exorbitant fees for licensing access to universities and other institutions. For example, if you want to manufacturer an antibiotic, you'd want access to the complete research record - the initial discovery of the antibiotic, the detailed production technology (found perhaps in the methods sections of papers published in the 1970s and 1980s, say), more modern biotech methods of production of said antibiotic (papers from the 1990s and 2000s), etc.
Given the obvious benefit to all (except the parasites collecting the fees) of providing that information to anyone with Internet access, it's at first glance hard to understand why MIT - one of America's leading federally-financed research institues - chose to persecute Aaron Swartz for downloading the jstor archive, instead of merely warning him not to do it again. Clearly the MIT administration wanted to make an example of Swartz - the question is, why?
The most rational explanation involves the corporatization of academic research in the USA in general, which began in the 1980s with passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities to exclusively license inventions created with taxpayer dollars to private entities, rather than the prior situation, in which anyone could obtain such a license. This 'public-private' partnership situation has corrupted American academics, placing the profitability of research well ahead of the accuracy and reliability of research.
As part of this sea change in American academia, the control of information has become more important than the prior academic norm, which was the open sharing of information (widely understood to increase the pace of scientific discovery). Now, many corporations have simply outsourced their R&D divisions to the murky public-private academic sector, utilizing financing provided by NIH or other federal agencies, while retaining control of the results of academic research (*and paying off the cooperating professors and administators by buying the academic start-up operations and giving them stocks in their larger corporations). This can be seen today in the highly profitable COVID vaccine and treatment business, in which initial academic research (such mRNA technology) was co-opted by the private sector under said exclusive licensing agreements (and note how open-sourcing the patents globally is continually blocked by pharma sector lobbying efforts).
Hence, MIT - an institution which, along with the University of California, spearheaded the transition to corporate-controlled academic research, wanted to make an example of Aaron Swartz to warn other researchers that if they tried to open-source information - thereby harming corporate profit opportunities - that they would be severely punished.
Well, at least there's scibhub, although their coverage is still spotty.
Pretty hard slap, that.
[0]https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/why-did-...
Sometimes, the law is unjust and it is greater injustice to administer any punishment at all.
(My reading of IJ is that wherever a parallel to Hamlet can be credibly drawn, it's probably right, and that JOI was murdered by CT & Avril.)
It's possible to spend an entire lifetime trying to prove the opposite of this statement to the world, and most importantly oneself, and fail at this impossible task. But the saddest part is that because the majority of people think in these "man/boy" terms it's easy to start thinking that all people do.
The next step is to consider oneself hopelessly broken and unworthy of affection, and dismiss any real friendship as a pity party. And yet: there was an outpouring of love and sadness following aaronsw's suicide. So perhaps living up to the stereotype of manliness is not the most important thing in the world.
I think some things are being conflated here. There is the stereotype of manliness, conforming to which requires you to do or have interest in stereotypically manly things (sports, cars, home improvement, working outside, being tough, being reticent to show emotion). But there's also failure to conform to adultness -- being able to call a cab, order food, pay bills, manage finances, maintain steady employment.
It sounds that Swartz, though not stereotypically manly, was also not stereotypically adult. The former's not a problem -- I'm not manly either, I say as I cuddle my pet rabbit -- but failure to be an adult can cause issues (at least for those without such indulgent friends and family as Swartz had).
I think it is telling that people close to Swartz, such as Lawrence Lessig, referred to him as a "boy" when talking about him. I have to think that Swartz himself got that vibe from them. The problem is, as the saying goes, you can't send a boy to do a man's job. To Swartz's credit, he didn't shrink from trying to do a man's job; but it might have helped if others around him had reinforced more that he was a man doing an man's job.
Being an activist and doing things to further causes you believe in, when those things are predictably going to anger those in power, means you are trying to do an adult's job. And that means you have to be an adult. That's not a "socially constructed persona"; that's a fact of life. You can't be a "boyish intellectual" and take on the establishment.
On the other hand if you have a social anxiety you probably need some kind of stronger help to be able to function.
Either way the alternative of avoiding much of the world and relying on oehters to get by probably isn't preferable.
Spot on. I like HN for certain topics, but it’s by no means representative of the Hacker culture. Even the name seems like duplicitous marketing at best.
As an example, the topic of immigration will bring out the nastiest takes and opinions (and straight up racism).
Well, I would argue, that hackers can also be nasty racists.
I mean sure, by my definition the hacker spirit is open minded by definition. But people with a open mind, are also open for some very weird to disgusting ideas.
I disagree. Every time I criticize the (auth) left I get buried in downvotes. Big tech and a lot of HN seems to be vehemently left wing.
Let's see if they do it to this comment too.
Speaking of "cancel culture": HN is the only community where it tends to be almost accepted truth that Cloudflare or Youtube or Telegram doing anything to stop the vilest hate groups from using their platforms is tantamount to the end of democracy.
Do you know who ran Theranos? Do you know who ran Enron? Why not? Yes, there's a difference of a few years. I bet a text analysis would also show the female CEO being mentioned in connection with the demise of their company than the men do. See also: Ellen Pao.
HN went all-in on 'Gamergate'. For a brief time, it certainly did toy with the whole QAnon bullshit, although that went so crazy so fast, it couldn't take hold, thankfully.
It's more populism than right-wing canon these days, but this very thread has a few examples of mindless theorizing about the New Yorker picking its subjects with corrupt intentions. It is beyond me how someone would read this article and consider it a "hit piece", or anything a campaign or the CIA would want to see published. If the military-security-complex wants to change your thinking, they fly F-15 over football stadiums, not get the New England intelligentsia to put out 5,000 word essays sublimely sneaking in their ideas.
As this article makes clear, Swartz did something he knew to be illegal. This was not his first brush with mass copyright violation. He was then prosecuted for his crimes. IMO, the charges were vastly disproportionate, but you expose yourself to prosecutorial overreach when you (knowingly) commit crimes.
This appears to have been a trend with Swartz. He seems to have had something of a God complex. And thus, for him, the ends justified the means, because he was right and they were wrong.
He does not even appear to have been especially ethical or rational. For example, Reddit sells to Condé Nast. A condition of the sale was that he would work out of Condé Nast's SF offices. He took the money, but then rejected the terms post hoc and disappeared. When he was tracked down and it was clear that he'd simply flown the coup, he was justifiably fired. All of which he, and his enablers, viewed as a great injustice! They don't seem to entertain giving back the money though...
He was a human, with all the attendant frailties and blindspots. He was not murdered. He was a person who struggled with mental illness, like so many of us. He committed suicide.
His suicide is tragic. He was clearly a bright and dynamic person. But he also seems to have been pretty misguided, and his darker tendencies appear to have been rationalized, justified, and enabled by his family. That to me, is the greater tragedy. It didn't have to be like this.
Depending on the laws, sometimes an altruist must do things that are illegal.
In the extreme case, consider that when authoritarian regimes round up ethnic or religious minorities, they invariably make non-cooperation with their attrocities illegal.
Laws should align with altruistic ideals, but it's a grave error to assume they always do.
Disturbingly, there seems to be increasingly many things in our modern society which are ethical yet illegal. You'd think that in those cases, authorities should be more lenient; that they would have a sense of what is right and wrong from the perspective of the average citizen. The fact that they seem to be particularly more aggressive in those cases is what I find disturbing and why I'm saying that altruism is being punished.
In many countries, the concept of right and wrong is increasingly being decided from the perspective of a tiny minority. We appear to be reverting to a society of lords and serfs. The government's moral compass is increasingly based on the elites' perspective.
Altruism isn’t a fantasy like Robin Hood, there’s a way to do it correctly; it’s why Aaron was interested in policy. Dumb altruists are in a worst position, and giving out free information from the internet doesn’t affect libgen. Aaron was a dumb altruist in the way he didn’t just listen about how to download JSTOR articles.
So there's no place for a smart and motivated altruist in capitalism, because capitalism's oppression is what this person will fight and capitalism is usually the better fighter.
Smart altruists do become evil to be successful because of this, think of how many left-leaning idealistic early silicon valley types and their ethos was entirely shed to become, functionally, the same as any MBA or Chicago school economist and now, not capitalism's critic, but its driver and the wielder of the hammer that crushes people like Swartz or Lessig. Let's remember Steve Jobs, who is beloved and seen bizarrely as a "hippie" threatened Blackberry with his questionable patent portfolio over email because of "poaching." Poaching in this context being people leave jobs for better ones, but Steve felt a feudal-like ownership of his workers and used the corrupt mechanisms of capitalism to control them and suppress wages.
I'm sure there are other examples, but 'hippie turned ruthless capitalist' is pretty much the story of the boomer generation, who quickly figured out that they can get defeated by the system on some level, or they themselves become the oppressors. They chose to become the oppressors. The same is true of millennial idealism when its thrown out the window when you have an IPO looming, Facebook being the most obvious millennial led company that is about as evil as you can be for a webpage and app.
The problem with right-leaning entrepreneurship spaces like HN is that there's no class consciousness and no real capitalism critiques. So Swatz was killed by the "government" not the capitalism that government serves. Or like this article says he was a depressed immature weirdo, so this was unavoidable. Neither of that is true. He became a valid threat to capitalism and the hammer fell on him. If not via this prosecutor (who enforces laws written by the oligarchy) then by something else (see Jobs using civil suits as a defacto government himself). He could have been sued for damages for all the PDFs he "stole," for example, if the wealthy couldn't wield the DOJ to their liking.
I can't think of any high profile idealists, IP critics, or capitalist critics in online spaces today. The system took down Lessig, Swatz, Doctorow, etc pretty easily. Swatz, of course is dead, but the others are now marginalized characters no one cares about and copyright and patent reform an entirely dead political horse. Instead the pendulum has shifted to an outright worship of billionaires, to the point of putting one in the presidency and filling the cabinet with them, on top of questionable Elon and Bezos worship, which seemingly gets stronger by the day.
No one seems to talk about this, but the late 90s and early 2000's financial and IP idealism was entirely crushed by the system. Today's smart altruists saw this and I imagine they are going to pick the Steve Jobs path, not the Swartz path going forward. They don't want to get destroyed either.
Source: someone who is older and witnessed all this in real time and is heartbroken over how everything turned out
It didn't. Read the Abelson report (which has been discussed ad nauseam in past HN threads). MIT did not want Swartz prosecuted, and told the prosecutor that. The prosecutor chose to go after Swartz anyway. MIT's error was that they didn't push back harder on the prosecutor (for example, by making a clearer public statement along the lines of the one JSTOR made, that since the stolen data was returned, no further action was necessary or desired).
> Clearly the MIT administration wanted to make an example of Swartz
No, it didn't. It just made an error of judgment (described above). It had nothing against Swartz and was not trying to make an example of him. The Federal prosecutor was the one trying to do that.
from the Abelson report (pg 53, https://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.p...):
"With regard to substance, MIT would make no statements, whether in support or in opposition, about the government’s decision to prosecute Aaron Swartz"
Am I missing something? Been a while since I read the report in full.
"While MIT did not conform precisely to this rule, in this sense of similar responses MIT—broadly speaking—did not side with the prosecution, nor did it side with the defense. In consequence of the differences in the powers, timing, and goals of the two parties in the case, neutrality in responses was not consistent with neutrality in outcomes, and MIT was not neutral in outcomes."
I agree that MIT was not trying to make an example out of him. But it wasn't that "they didn't push back harder on the prosecutor", it was that they didn't push back at all. The Ableson report correctly criticizes MIT for this.
> This 'public-private' partnership situation has corrupted American academics, placing the profitability of research well ahead of the accuracy and reliability of research.
Private profitability research is no different. I don’t understand what you mean by losing accuracy, for some research corporate hardware or copyrighted work is required or the best choice.
I thought they gave the ability for other pharma to make the mRNA drugs that require incredible investment, to make it seem open.
Most of the information we mentioned is out there now. But it’s much more fun watching tiktoks and liking posts.
Prior to that, if academics wanted to get involved in industry and make some money thereby, the route to take was called consulting, which seems fine with me, as long as conflicts of interest are stated honestly.
MIT was called Boston Tech when it was founded in 1861 to bring to life William Barton Rogers's vision for a “new polytechnic institute”
There's a tendency to either coddle a person with these issues, or try to get them to change through tough love. The reality is that neither of these things is helpful - what is really needed is a good therapist.
P.S.: In case someone is reading this and nodding along: you have likely spent years on the roller coaster of trying to prove yourself through pathological self-sufficiency interleaved with breakdowns and "failure to adult". It's OK to seek help. Even pro athletes use coaches and personal trainers if they are stuck in a rut. This is no different. Oh, and you are far from alone in this.
Most importantly: arbitrary decisions will kill your team. If you cannot answer the question "why?" with something other than "because I said so," or worse, "because management said so," you are in for a world of trouble. To build loyalty and get your team to follow you into pretty much any 'battle,' get your hands dirty, fight on their behalf (but this requires knowing what they care about), and help them improve and grow. That is the job of a good manager.
Everything else is secondary.
I aspire to be in a leadership position in the future. However, right now let me tell you why and how I would like to be led or directed by somebody:
- You give me space to voice my opinions as if I am a specialist in the subject; - You give me space to make mistake and learn from them; - You are willing to admit that you don't know a certain topic; - You carry about your own self-development; - You are willing to support me on areas where I lack knowledge or experience without judging; - You often show that you care about the people in the team, and whether we are doing what matters; - You deal with me as the adult that I am, and you are open to have difficult conversations with empathy about topics such as: under-performance, misfit, interpersonal conflicts, or even about letting me go (firing);
"who are you to tell us what to do"
Well, you are the human capable of trusting each member of your team of doing the best they can, and capable of sitting with them when things are not working.
I'm a new leader of sorts myself and all I do is looking at a Roadmap to see what is important, figure out what my team needs to do and ask people which parts they would like to work on (although some people are better suited for certain tasks, and that's your job to know that by knowing your team).
I don't put myself on any kind of high horse. I'm still hands on myself too, doing work just like everyone else.
If your ego starts to tell you that you are somehow better than any people, you will not be a good leader.
Finally, one day at an oriental restaurant by Stanford (years before I went to school there), we had the typical discussion except this time Cory Doctorow spoke up: ‘are you sure you’re not a supertaster?’ he asked. I had heard the They Might Be Giants song but never considered the possibility. I thought about it as the conversation continued and it seemed to make sense to me. [At this point I imagine a crane shot lifting up and up over the conversation at the restaurant. Fade to:] I did some research on the Internet and did the test (which formally consists of putting blue food coloring on your tongue, taking a piece of paper with a three-hole punch, placing it over the tongue and counting the number of taste buds in it) and indeed, I am a supertaster. This hasn’t eliminated the discussions about my eating habits, but it does shift the blame.
It's been a while since I read the report too, thanks for linking to it.
I had thought there was more detail in the report about the private conversations between MIT's Office of General Counsel and the prosecutors, referred to on p. 52, where it says that after a June 21, 2011 discussion, "OGC inferred that further presentations of MIT’s opinions were unlikely to have an effect on the prosecution: the views of both potential victims had already been taken into account". My understanding during previous discussions here (which was quite a while ago) had been that OGC did push back in private conversations with the prosecutor (and the "further presentations" in what I just quoted also can be read that way), but the prosecutor was not receptive, and the June 21 conversation was basically the end of MIT's private attempts to influence the prosecutor. However, since the report does not give any more details about that, I might have gotten that impression from other sources around that time. Clearly, even if MIT did make such attempts, they weren't successful, and could not have been all that emphatic.
Academic papers do submit sponsorships and conflicts of interest, and there’s also the case of academia wanting cutting edge equipment from private companies and doing deals with them. This is much more honest than the smoking research, the federal government has an interest in maintaining patent law, it has no incentive to give free access to no fee licensing. There’s lots of laws with access to healthcare information, which requires industry knowledge where the information is freely given to corporations to do research on, which would not be allowed federally. The researchers are not usually working because they’re interested in making their research public information, and while post grads are funded by government, they are free to develop royalty free information, they choose not to and the government wants to partially fund corporations. I don’t see the problem, people want to make money and they want to do cutting edge research.
I see academia and research papers as advertising rather than a patent minefield. There are plenty of people who want to work for the common good, but the government wants to fund private entities to produce products, government contracts is what the US does instead of its own production.
I see computer science papers with non of these issues under the current law.
In terms of how this IP is copyrighted and distributed, that should be corrected at the funding level. The U.S. government (and other funding sources) should forbid publication and distribution via publications that do not make the information freely available for any science which they fund. But... we live in society of laws. You don't get to just decide which you like and thus will follow.
> right and wrong is increasingly being decided from the perspective of a tiny minority
I'm not sure I agree with you. I suspect your point might be motivated by a worldview (i.e. an ideology), as a opposed to be borne by evidence.
But I could definitely be wrong. To that end, point me to a law that is 1) written from the perspective of a tiny minority of elites and 2) forbids something that most people would consider ethical. By this I mean, not your outsider opinion on the law, but rather, real evidence that it is written to serve the elites and that the forbidden activities are considered perfectly ethical by the majority of people.
Tell that to Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Thoreau, and the many benefactors of mankind who have seen a law was wrong, and refused to obey it! And all those that admire their courage and efforts.
"We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals."
"My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like."
I wouldn't argue that "hacker culture" is necessarily a monoculture or immune to racism, but I feel that this disembodied ethic is core to the origins of the culture.
Just like this is a hacker news site and not the exclusive one. And all in all, despite the ads and some other things, like intransparent moderation at times, I think they cultivate a quite good hacker spirit here. Otherwise we wouldn't be visiting.
The prosecutor was trying to railroad Aaron for political gain and used every shenanigan in his bag of tricks to leverage Aaron into confessing -er- agreeing to a plea bargain. It was wrong, and very much revisionist to say otherwise.
Not sure if you genuinely believe justice is blind. Something that has never been true.
White boys don’t do hard time for hiding in the closet to copy the library’s computer.
The judge appears to be a conservative old navy man. I haven’t dealt with him, but I think I’ve been in front of the type. Trial would go something like this: On the morning of day 3, so before the second day of testimony, the judge calls the attorneys into chambers and lays into them, sometimes loud enough for half the courthouse to hear, for wasting everyone’s time on such a stupid case, and that the prosecutor better have really good evidence of hard damages otherwise he’s going to be pissed. And then you go out, talk to your clients, and settle.
As opposed to a wealthy, well-connected Harvard research fellow and entrepreneur who stems from an upper class family?
However racism doesn’t fit that category does it? Racism is a mainstream idea and not a novel one.
Remind me, what are the "mainstream" demographics of big tech companies?
Tech companies are famous for externalizing their problems into their local communities. How is that expressed in terms of race?
Capitalism simply doesn't work without an underclass. Capitalism exploits labor the most efficiently with a divided underclass, because class awareness and solidarity undermines capitalism. As such capitalism is invariably paired with racism. Every capitalist economy is built on some form of bigotry.
And then use critical analysis to hack the concept apart and see, if it is solid or not.
I for example, see the common racism concept as not solid for lots of reasons. But I am open to listen to arguments from the other side in general.
(but not here and now)
Utter nonsense. Seriously. This is pure claptrap. I've seen so many instances where posters here have brought up "crime statistics" in the context of race or claimed that left-leaning cities are unlivable crime-ridden hellholes, and none where such posts were "shadowbanned".
Now I'm wondering, does SF count as a "left-leaning city"? Sure, it's a single datapoint but still.
More likely the "raising of a statistic" was accompanied by a first-order explanation of the number that, besides being trite and lazy, was also "blatantly racist". But it wasn't the statistic that did the job.
You're basically writing fan fiction here. There's no evidence this would have been the case, and frankly I rather doubt it. There's nothing to suggest the judge would have reacted this way, nor that Swartz should have anticipated that he would.
Edit: as sibling post says. The rest of the comment is equivalent to fan fiction.
Look at this from the prosecutors point of view. They have hard evidence of a crime. They have evidence of consciousness of guilt from the perpetrator. It’s a slam dunk at trial so why should it get to that point? It’s a waste of everyone’s time and money. That’s why the plea deal was so generous compared to the downside of taking it to court. You want to entice them to take a slap on the wrist plea deal so everyone can avoid the cost of forestalling the eventuality of the jury’s verdict.
It’s true that prosecutors can be overzealous in their prosecutions, but 6 months does not sound like the disproportionate punishment many make it out to be.
Isn't incarcerating a person who's not a danger to others and who's crime had no harmful outcomes a waste of everyone's time and money?
> 6 months does not sound like the disproportionate punishment many make it out to be
I encourage you to learn about the conditions in prisons. Imprisoned persons are frequently subject to physical and sexual violence at the hands of guards and other incarcerated people. These are inhumane conditions to subject anyone to, mass murderer and copyright-infringer alike.
“Bob’s Story: “I was in the minimum security camp at Fairton for about nine months. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected prison to be. The place was clean, the food wasn’t bad, and I didn’t feel any tension between the guys. If I wanted to avoid someone, I could stay to myself. “There were fewer than 100 guys serving sentences in the federal prison camp and I didn’t feel much in the way of harassment from anyone, staff or inmates. With the help of an orderly, I coordinated a prison job for myself in the library. It was just a small room with lots of books and I passed my days catching up on reading. I hadn’t read at all since I was in college because work kept me too busy. During the time I was at the camp I read about 30 great books and I lost 25 pounds. I’m back down to the same weight I was when I was in school and I feel better than ever. My wife loves the new look. She says the prison sentence probably gave me an extra ten years to live.”
https://www.whitecollaradvice.com/whats-it-like-in-the-priso...
Remember, maximum security is expensive.
Yes, but I think the solution is to make fewer things criminal through the democratic process first. Enforcement of laws is important.
It’s one thing to put people in jail who don’t belong there. But according to this article it kinda seems like Swartz did deserve some jail time.
He knowingly broke the law and showed no remorse. Instead his view was that the law should not apply to him because he did not agree with it. That’s a dangerous mindset to have for an individual with money and power.
It’s important to show remorse and contrition in these circumstances, otherwise we can just assume the behavior will continue. And Swartz had a history of this kind of behavior starting with PACER, so really it should have been expected that failing to prosecute in this instance would have been taken by Swartz as a signal to behave like this with impunity.
> I encourage you to learn about the conditions in prisons.
I 100% agree with you, and know all about this topic, but that’s really a different conversation.
From the article, it seems that he was concerned about how being a convicted felon would hurt his career prospects. It would reduce his likelihood of being able to save the world. Not that he would have, anyway, but I think that's part of the thought process.
Speaking for me personally, six months in federal prison would feel like an almost life-ending scenario. I'd lose my job (obviously) and would have trouble finding another in the field for which I'm educated and trained. My fiancee would not have sufficient income to pay our mortgage so we'd lose our house, and I'm not sure what we'd be able to do for the many pets we love dearly. My situation's much different from Swartz's but I can empathize that a six month sentence could have such dramatic consequences that it wouldn't feel like a slap on the wrist.
It's an analogous situation to blackmail. Suppose Alice has found evidence that Bob robbed a bank. Alice is legally allowed to reveal that evidence to the police, but is under no obligation to do so outside of a subpoena. However, even though both choices are legally permissible, Alice is not allowed to make her choice be conditional on receiving payments from Bob, as that would cross the line into blackmail.
Plea bargains are a form of extortion, and should not be part of the legal system.
So you think that every case should be tried, even if it's plainly obvious the perpetrator is guilty? After all, even if the perpetrator has a 1% chance of winning, there's no reason not to go to trial under that system.
The prosecutor made the offer of a 6-month plea deal to Swartz's lawyer. Who presumably discussed it with Swartz, who seems to have decided not to accept it. Possibly, if you accept the analysis above, on the advice of his lawyer.
If it was a slam dunk at trial and 6 months was a fair sentence, then why is there a need to threaten so much more to avoid granting him his right to a trial?
Aaron's case is not unique in this regard and is indicative of the casual brutality and inhumanity inherent in the way that our justice system works. We desperately need to threaten reform how plea bargaining works and the amount of power we give prosecutors.
What actually happens in sentencing is that you look up the relevant sentencing guidelines in the (public, easily downloaded) federal sentencing guidelines. The guidelines are broken up by groups of statutes. They establish offense levels, from 1 (jaywalking) to 43 (mass murder). You take the offense level and look it up on a chart against your offender history (Swartz had no criminal history) and get a sentencing range.
Each guideline starts with a (usually low) base offense level, and then a series of clauses that adjust that level upwards or downwards based on the conduct charged. For CFAA, modifiers include stuff like using sophisticated means to evade detection, or making a bunch of money, or putting critical systems in danger.
The actual sentencing is a phase of the trial, occurring after conviction. The court has the probation office write a PSR, which is a confidential memo suggesting a sentence based on the guidelines. The prosecution argues for upwards departures for the PSR; the defense does the opposite; the judge ultimately decides.
Crucially: the sentencing guidelines generally don't work by multiplying the number of counts against the suggested offense level. Rather: like charges group, and you're generally sentenced based on the highest offense level of the group.
We don't really have to guess about what Swartz faced. We don't just have this New Yorker article to go on; Swartz's own attorney discussed the likely sentencing ranges. This article suggests that prosecutors were looking for 6 months on a guilty plea (they seemed hell-bent on coming up with some custodial sentence for Swartz; there seems to be something to the idea that they had a grudge against Swartz). More importantly, though, we have some of their rationale for the supposed 80 month sentence they said they'd seek if Swartz went to trial: they intended to argue that Swartz incurred 2 million dollars worth of losses. That's a self-evidently stupid argument, because there's no plausible way Swartz could have recouped even $1 from his offense, let alone $2,000,000. The documents he hoped to release had virtually no commercial value. Any damage (ie: worker hours burned cleaning up for what he did) he caused was incidental, and likely well below six figures. But the guideline offense level modifier implies the opposite of this fact pattern.
Swartz's attorney believed it was likely that had Swartz gone to trial and lost on all counts, his ultimate sentence would still could have come in below the level at which the guidelines recommend straight probation; that is: he believed Swartz could have gone to trial, lost, and still did better than the plea deal offered by the prosecutors.
It's not really the fault of anyone on HN that these lurid potential sentences get tossed around in discussions, because federal prosecutors issue press releases that discuss the maximum possible sentence in those terms. The media abets that dishonesty by repeating the claim, or by doing insufficient homework and using the same math.
You should be irritated when you read written sources that talk about naive maximum sentences this way.
At any rate: there is no chance Swartz was unaware of any of this. Not just because he had an excellent attorney who no doubt explained all of this stuff very early on in the process, but because Swartz was exactly the kind of nerd who would have had the federal sentencing guidelines bookmarked somewhere in his browser.
https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
Well, it is called 'guidelines' and your post uses words like 'suggesting'. So if relevant people went crazy and just decide to ignore these guidelines and choose, say, 20 years, would such decision be legal?
Note here that to reach 20 years, you have to do more than disagree with the guideline offense levels; you have to somehow disagree with the grouping rules. 20 years wasn't on the table to begin with (again: the prosecutors threatened a much lower sentence), but it couldn't seriously have been put on the table either.
I was unaware of these nuances, and remember at the time there was a lot of talk of using the legal sledgehammer to set an example (possibly the same media echo chamber you mention).
And agree completely with your assessment of prosecutors and press releases - I told my US Attorney that I only wanted to see him on TV after a conviction. Alas, I hate defending prosecutors, but it seems completely unfair to blame her for his death.
As you suggest, my guess was that the sentence was largely going to be driven by the damages. My understanding is that the “victims” had been sufficiently browbeat into being reluctant witnesses and as you suggest, it would have just been cleanup costs.
There are crimes where I think 2B1.1(b) probably makes sense (like, if you're literally stealing, or deliberately incurring monetary damage --- remember, your intent in committing a crime is extremely important, despite a common message board belief that it is somehow unknowable and a non-factor in legal decisions). But in a lot of cases, it's literally just the induction variable in a loop, and it makes no sense to boost an offense by 10 levels because you wrote "2000" in your for-loop instead of "20".
It's 2B1.1(b) that takes you from offense level 8 (0-6 months, probation eligible) to level 24 (5 years) based on 2 million dollar of incurred loss.
Again, though: the 2 million dollar figure is highly implausible. Prosecutors could have argued for it (they can argue anything they want), but it's hard to see them getting it for a non-remunerative crime that involved publishing academic journal articles.
Swartz's attorney was probably a bit rosey-eyed here, though: figure any charged computer offense probably incurs losses at least in the mid-5 figures (almost mechanically, because real companies have insurance obligations to conduct external forensic investigations when incidents like this happen), and you get to a year and change sentence pretty easily.
So yes. Not just the plea deal and not just this case. In any situation, if the only evidence of something is the word of the state prosecutor, that only means so much.
Agreed, unfortunately it seems that we selectively enforce laws based on political pressure. Look at the numerous high profile cases targeting white collar criminals, for example with Purdue and the Sackler family.
They got away with zero jail time and a slap on the wrist (financially), all because they were able to hire the right political actors who could influence the outcome of legal procedures.
I'm sure if Swartz was similarly connected (for example a family who was a Senator), this whole thing would have gone away quietly.
Alas, the laws that apply to the commoners do not apply to the elite.
Don’t give up hope yet!
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/202...
> I'm sure if Swartz was similarly connected (for example a family who was a Senator), this whole thing would have gone away quietly.
I think Swartz made himself an easy political target without realizing it. From his perspective, he was just a guy in a room trying to “save the world.”
From the outside a different picture can be painted. He positioned himself as an activist, and amassed a great deal of resources and even an active following. He was well connected in that he was on a first name basis with billionaires, and probably even had the personal numbers of a few in his phone.
So I think all this made Swartz a target without him really intending to be one. Or at least he didn’t think that in the process of “saving the world”, that the world would fight back. That seems to be one of the central points of TFA at least.
My point was how do we know this is an “analysis”. Based off Rolling Stones, this is just the prosecutors words.
How about semi-straight from the horse's mouth? Was his defense attorney working with prosecutors to minimize the threats? Is the Boston Globe in on it? (Conspiracy theories are so much fun! Ever read Foucault's Pendulum?)
Boston Globe link wasn’t here before. Now it is. It changes things. Seems straight forward to me.
Actually this ran in parallel with the tail end of the Jammie Thomas-Rasset lawsuit, in which the various damage figures thrown around for sharing two albums' worth of stale, degraded-quality top-40 songs did include one in the seven-figure range.
If the perpetrator is willing to plead guilty, there is no need for a trial.
Threatening people with massively larger penalties if they exercise their right to a trial rather than take a plea deal (often time limited before the defense has a chance to see the evidence) is coercive extortion and is morally wrong. There is plenty of evidence of innocent people (especially poor people) taking plea deals due to these prosecutorial tacits of threat and decite.
I don't really think courts should take guilty pleas. I believe in some times/places in the middle ages, courts would not take guilty pleas in case the prisoner had gotten coerced into pleading. Sometimes, we have people with mental illness or other issues that will plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit.
Along the same lines of "reasonable doubt" in the US generally being enough to escape criminal conviction, I think we should err on the side of safety and perhaps even inefficiency in (not) letting the state exercise its monopoly power of force, coercion, and imprisonment against anyone for any reason, ever.
It’s okay for guilty people to be offered plea deals. It’s actually probably in their best interest sometimes.
He did a thing, that doesn't mean that thing qualified as a felony, or even a crime. It certainly did not merit 50 years in prison.
> It’s okay for guilty people to be offered plea deals. It’s actually probably in their best interest sometimes.
It is simply not OK to threaten people with penalties that are well more than an order of magnitude higher than the plea deal.
This isn't the kind of plea deal that furthers justice by obtaining a cooperative witness in a more serious case. This sort of plea deal is offered to advance the Prosecutor's career.
> Swartz was very rich, and well represented.
As the article explains, Swartz was out of money, well into debt, and faced with begging people for money to continue fighting the case.
But as far as this case goes, I’m not sure. The alleged crime is a very technical one. The facts are all recorded and they paint a clear picture. The only question is how they apply to the law and whether or not they raise to the level of a crime.
That’s the job of a jury. They will receive a document with a list of charges, and the prosecution will lay out a very clear roadmap as to how each element of their case maps to the elements of the relevant statutes being charged.
Since this is a very technical crime, most of the evidence would be document-based and very convincing to a jury. It’s hard to create reasonable doubt in such document-heavy cases. So the only question will be how many charges can the prosecutor make the facts fit. That’s where these “50 years” claims come in, by stacking charge after charge in serial.
But importantly, neither the prosecutor nor the jury decide the sentence. That’s the job of the judge under the sentencing guidelines. This is what makes those “50 years” claim of the prosecutor bogus, and what any well-represented individual should understand.
I think Swartz did understand that because he opted to go to trial.
I get that people want there to be a clear moral story here. One perspective is that Swartz was a child prodigy, a beloved activist, someone who challenged the system, and then succumbed to pressure when it bore down on him with the full weight of the federal government.
But it’s not as clean as that. On the other hand he was a well connected, high net worth individual who repeatedly flaunted the system, and thought he would never face consequences. In my opinion, that’s the profile of someone ripe for heavy handed prosecution.
I am sympathetic to both perspectives.
It was a fairly unique and novel application of those laws and some of the charges depended on making arguments about what the intent was with the data. There absolutely was a great deal of prosecutorial discretion and even imagination in coming up with those charges. We will never know if which of those would have stuck.
> the profile of someone ripe for heavy handed prosecution.
It was most certainly a political prosecution.
Others have brought up people like Lori Loughlin. No one would talk about her or any of the college scandal wealthy parents going into debt.
You said this about the other commentator. I’m not sure how you aren’t doing a similar thing here. Prosecutors words are believed at face value. Phrasing Swartz as a high net worth individual as if it was known he was still a high net worth individual at the time of his passing. Since now you said you believe he spent a lot on his defense. And the other commenter said he didn’t have money. If you spend all your money. You aren’t high net worth any more.
> so I think it's hard to complain that he was bullied by prosecutors when he was well-represented.
This is simplifying any justice system situation in my opinion. Which adds to the point of you doing similar to what you thought the other commenter is doing. And yes I am also doing a similar thing with my adamant defense of Swartz!
You've implied I'm taking the prosecutors words at face value, but I'm really not basing any of my opinions on the prosecutors words at all. The plea deal was communicated by Swartz' lawyer. The evidence against him is documentary and laid out in the indictment. There's expert testimony as well. Swartz' consciousness of guilt is laid out in video evidence as well as on his blog in his own words. There's very little the prosecutor has to say in the case against Swartz.
> If you spend all your money. You aren’t high net worth any more.
I said Swartz was prosecuted because he painted a big target on himself. Yes, being high net worth and well connected to billionaires is part of that. It really doesn't matter what his net worth was at the time of his demise, when at the time he allegedly committed the crime and caught the eye of prosecutors he was a high net worth individual.