Sadly, that is true, but it might go some way to prevent another tragedy of "justice" being inflicted on someone else who might otherwise die from such persecution.
Let's not jump to any conclusions as neither of us knew the reasoning behind why he decided to take suicide. There was no suicide note (found), and while he might have suffered from mental illnesses, he was also under a lot of pressure. Could be anything really.
Are we discussing philosophy of morality, ethics, and self-determination vs. predetermination; or are we discussing the law?
If the law, I can't think of a single case citation I could give that would act as precedent for assigning responsibility to the federal prosecutor for Mr. Swartz taking his own life. I'd be interested to see any such citations people have found.
The philosophy of morality, ethics, and determinism is a much wider space where such a thing could be discussed.
I don't think the legal cause of death is particularly relevant here. When suicide is the route there are usually numerous factors and personal mental stability is always going to be one of the big factors. In the past decade we've just started to see more comprehensive laws roll out to address suicide driven by bullying, but it's always going to be a grey zone.
That all said - it seems pretty clear that the guilt and fear from legal threats were an extremely strong motivation for suicide. Whether anyone suffers legal consequences for it - it was wrong.
So stepping outside the legal question and entering the space of philosophy of morality and ethics (i.e. "What should our laws be")...
The US legal system is designed to be adversarial. It isn't the prosecutor's job to worry about the defendant's feelings; that's the defense lawyer's job. The prosecutor's job is to seek legal truth and conviction (and, generally, to err on the side of the latter, on the belief that truth is proved out by the defense working to challenge any hypotheses the prosecutor brings to the table that are countered by evidence). Innocent until proven guilty, but it's the prosecutor's job to prove a defendant guilty, not innocent.
This is, obviously, extremely stressful on the defendant.
And this is not the only model of law. Adversarial finding of guilt-or-innocence a popular model in countries descended from European colonies, but other nations have different models. And the adversarial model has known weaknesses... In terms of introducing scientific facts to the table, the adversarial model encourages both sides to bring expert witnesses and the jury to decide who's version of facts is true, which is somewhat farcical. Some countries use an inquisitive system, in which the Court is empowered to do its own investigation and analysis (as opposed to acting as an impartial referee to the best cases the plaintiff and defendant can build). There are pros and cons to this system (and it's actually used in some pieces of the US).
It's heartbreaking what happened to Aaron, and in general, the American system of governance addresses mental illness extremely poorly. I don't have any good suggestions on how to do better, but that doesn't mean the current design is acceptable.
Most folks on here are developers to some extent - so I'll assume you are but if not let me know and I'll try to come up with a better analogy.
In my company code reviews are an adversarial process - as they are everywhere. The primary developer presents something they think is worthy to merge into the mainline branch - the reviewer inspects this and raises questions and highlights facts in the code that they think need to be address. And, throughout this process the aim isn't to prove the other person is an idiot - it's to arrive at a PR that's better than either of you would have produced on your own (ideally).
We go through this process and ideally avoid being overly critical or a dick about things. I don't reply to some confusing code with "That's dumb!" I'll point out routes to correct the confusion or just highlight my reasoning to feel it's confusing and let the dev decide on their favorite course to resolution.
A trial is certainly going to be more emotionally involved simply by being about the future of someone's life instead of some code that runs a checkout process somewhere - but we can still, as a society, try and minimize how dickish we let people get. In a company someone who is overly combative is going to face problems keeping their job and advancing - you'll generally find financial incentives offered to people that can more reasonably navigate the social aspect of being an employee[1]. Unfortunately in the world of prosecution, while these incentives still exist (people who are dickish overall will be dickish to their coworkers (other lawyers) and likely be held back by that) they tend to be minimized in comparison with performance evaluation based on conviction rates - and that creates a lot of really bad incentives. I think it's a bit of a misstatement to say that both parties in a trial are seeking the truth when one of those parties is being evaluated not on accuracy after the fact - but instead on how many people they manage to line up as guilty.
1. This has some downsides - in particular autism is actually a much bigger impediment in the real world than perhaps it needs to be. I think that's a separate issue though.
I wouldn't say code reviews are adversarial; they're collaborative. All members of a review are working to come to consensus on the best code that can be committed. When I'm doing them, if I see a better way to do an algorithm I'll go ahead and write the suggested code directly (GitHub has some great UI for this, incidentally).
An adversarial code review process would look more like attempting to solve a problem by having two separate teams devise a solution, and a neutral third-party chooses exactly one of those solutions to accept and discards the other. Team A, in this system, is not particularly interested in helping Team B succeed (and, indeed, within the rules of the process, has no incentive to improve the odds that Team B's solution is accepted).
This would be a hellishly-inefficient process (though, funny enough, something similar at the scope of project initiatives has been used at a few more Machiavellian corporate institutions). But it might be the sort of thing one could adopt if one thought, for some reason, that you couldn't trust that all development teams to collaborate cleanly (because their goals weren't aligned).
The notion that innocence or guilt (on a per-charge basis) as a binary state is very deeply built into our criminal legal framework. For any given charge, either the prosecution's case wins, or the defense's case wins. The prosecution isn't incentivized at all to help the defense win. And the judge's incentives optimize for neutrality... Because, the thinking goes, if they aren't neutral, their likeliest bias is in favor of the prosecution as a fellow agent of the State, which gives even more power to the already-powerful State authority, since the whole system assumes two things: (a) the defendant is innocent until proven otherwise, and (b) the State is a good-faith actor until proven otherwise. Generally, faith in (b) is almost never shaken without definitive proof (such as direct evidence of prosecutorial misconduct). Whether this means the prosecution is "dickish" as they pursue their goal of a conviction is a bit in the eye of the beholder, but note that nowhere in this process is the prosecutor obligated to assume the defense is a good-faith actor (and, indeed, if defendants were always good-faith actors, trials would be unnecessary and criminals would just confess their transgressions). And it is entirely possible that this system does not work without prosecutors leaning on defendants (in legal ways) under the assumption (on the part of the prosecutor, not the Court) that the defendant is guilty and hiding it.
This isn't the only model possible, but changing it would basically require restructuring the American criminal legal system from the bedrock up. Not impossible, but I wouldn't bet on it in my lifetime. What is heartbreaking in this case is that the pressure caused Mr. Swartz to take his own life, and without a prior diagnosis of likelihood of suicide / prior involuntary commitment, I have a hard time seeing any way for the legal system to account for that risk and still function. :(
... and of course, all this analysis ignores the elphant in the room that the Supreme Court dumped in the graveyard this week: we probably shouldn't have even thought of putting "used a computer in a way other than the way its owner intended its use" under the aegis of criminal law in the first place! That was a terrible use of the CFAA. But until this week, it wasn't understood that it was not a use of the CFAA.
It is more nuanced than that you think. It is not coming from the extreme mental illness. One of the major factor that led to his death is the federal prosecutor. This POS prosecutor made Aaron to believe that Aaron absolutely have no way out (which not true but this POS don't even care). This prosecutor lead so hard on Aaron and the outcome is Aaron's passing.
That prosecutor should be in jail for pushing Aaron to the edge.
> This POS prosecutor made Aaron to believe that Aaron absolutely have no way out (which not true but this POS don't even care).
How did the prosecutor make Swartz believe that?
Edit: to elaborate, the commentator above is implying that Swartz had a way out that the prosecutor somehow prevented Swartz from finding out about.
I would like to know what that way out was, and how the prosecutor prevented Swartz from finding out about it. Swartz had a legal team defending him who I would have expected to inform him of all his options.
So Aaron's other suicidal episodes, when no one was prosecuting him, aren't relevant to his final suicidal episode? Surely, the prosecution weighed on him, but no mentally healthy person would choose to commit suicide before the outcome of the charges was even determined.
It's not clear to me how one assigns blame for suicide in most cases, or what the options are for prosecutors. If a quasi-suicidal person cuts me off on the highway and I give them the middle finger, and they go home and commit suicide because of it - am I culpable? If, generally, a prosecutor thinks that a person is not mentally stable enough to face trial for their crimes without commiting suicide, are they just allowed to get away with what they want? Or should they be involuntarily committed?
I don't think threatening to wield what we now know is a poorly constructed law to put someone in prison for nearly the rest of their natural life is the same as giving someone the finger. He faced up to 35 years in prison for doing what many of us consider an effort to make the world a better place based on his own moral principals.
To admit guilt instead of actually defending himself in court. There is something implicitly wrong about getting a different sentence as punishment for actually having your day in court.
Ok so you acknowledge that he was not actually facing a long prison sentence? And yes pleading guilty carries a lower sentence in part because you are rewarded for accepting responsibility for your actions.
He was indeed facing a long prison sentence if he chose to defend himself and rewarding people for pleading guilty makes no sense. You aren't accepting responsibility you are literally making a self serving bet that you will probably lose your case and thereby serve a lesser sentence by taking a plea. Unfortunately innocent people make that same calculation and sometimes accept a short sentence rather than fearing a sentence that represents basically an end to their normal life.
If you are innocent or believe as is in fact the case here that the governments position is legally incorrect you shouldn't face punishment for arguing that in front of a judge. For innocent people whom are inevitably convicted every day in any justice system this represents a punishment for asserting innocence.
The fact that you think this is normal is just a sign that our entire society is itself abnormal and broken.
He wasn't actually facing 35 years. DoJ press releases don't take into account a couple of aspects of sentences when they come up with a number.
First, they ignore that actual sentencing takes into account assorted aggravating and mitigating factors. To get the maximum on a charge you have to have several aggravating factors and few mitigating factors.
Basically, if it is possible that someone could receive 20 years, say, for a given charge--even if to get 20 years they would pretty much have to be that crime's equivalent of Al Capone, then they are going to say 20 years on every press release involving that crime even if it concerns the mildest possible instance of it.
Second, there are often multiple charges that could apply to the same act and would require largely the same elements of proof. Prosecutors can charge you with all of them and let the jury decide which, if any, to convict you of. Many of these are grouped for sentencing, so that if you are convicted of more than one in the same group you only get sentenced for one of them.
Grouping is ignored in the press releases. If you are charged with three things, with a max of 10 years each (and remember, that 10 years is already greatly exaggerated as described earlier), the press release is going to say you are facing up to 30 years.
This really needs to be changed. The DoJ knows what facts they intend to try and prove about your particular instances of the crimes they are charging you with. They are perfectly capable of looking at the aggravating factors for the charge, comparing to what they are trying to prove, and figuring out the real maximum for your case. They are certainly also capable of dealing with grouping. I can't see any good reason they should not do so, and so put realistic maximums in their press releases.
Here's a good article on how press release sentences are misleading [1]. Here's an article that looks at it specifically in the context of Swartz [2].
> So Aaron's other suicidal episodes, when no one was prosecuting him, aren't relevant to his final suicidal episode?
They absolutely are. Suicidal episodes are usually kept quite quiet - people you're extremely close to may have attempted suicide without ever telling you about it due to the societal shame and perception of weakness.
As a general rule, it's a good idea to not emotionally abuse people or induce unnecessary mental stress on anyone since you're not going to be aware of how they're doing internally and, honestly, trying to emotionally abuse people, even when they're able to take it, is just being an abusive ass.
I think your example of flipping a bird on the highway is honestly a good thing for more people to keep in mind in their daily lives - if someone is feeling particularly vulnerable then lashing out at them could tip the balance and you don't want that on your conscience - but I think legally speaking it'll always be a matter of judgement on the specifics. In the highway example it's likely that your bird barely nudged a needle that was already on the brink - while, when it comes to the legal system, prosecutors regularly use emotional abuse to expedite confessions and coerce defendants - as a society I think we tend toward a view where once someone is charged with a crime they are segregated into a different class of people who are unworthy of common respect, we need to change that.
I consider the state of my mental health to be pretty solidly strong, but if I was facing an overzealous prosecutor telling me (convincingly) I was certainly going to jail for a very long time, I might take my own life. It's disturbing and sobering to think about it, but there it is.
I think the question here is: would Aaron Swartz have committed suicide at that particular time if not for the prosecutorial overreach he was mired in? I suspect the answer there is pretty safely: no. Would someone else in his position perhaps not have committed suicide in that situation? Sure. But he did, and it was clearly in no small part due to the circumstances he was in. I'm fine assigning much of the blame to the persecution he suffered under the US government. They wanted to make an example of him, by using a poorly-written, over-broad law that has traditionally been applied selectively depending on the needs of law enforcement. And sometimes when you put people in that position, they can't take it.
If you don't agree, I guess that's fine, but quibbling about semantics here is just in poor taste and not particularly productive.
> If, generally, a prosecutor thinks that a person is not mentally stable enough to face trial for their crimes without commiting suicide, are they just allowed to get away with what they want?
Of course not, and this kind of question makes me feel like you're arguing in poor taste. Prosecutors have a ton of latitude in how they handle cases. Swartz was not some violent criminal who needed to be taught a lesson and be held up as an example to others. He was just a flawed human who believed scientific research (much of it funded by public, taxpayer money) shouldn't be locked up behind a corporation's paywall. The zeal in which this case was prosecuted far exceeded the "crime".
But in general, if a person is a suicide risk during any kind of court proceeding, yes, actions should be taken to ensure that they won't (or aren't able to) commit suicide. If that means being put in a hospital under observation, sure, though that extreme may not have been necessary to save Swartz. We have an obligation as a society to treat everyone with respect and care, even -- especially -- those we've accused of crimes. We're very far off from that ideal, of course.
> I consider the state of my mental health to be pretty solidly strong, but if I was facing an overzealous prosecutor telling me (convincingly) I was certainly going to jail for a very long time, I might take my own life.
Aaron was offered a 6 month sentence in a low security facility
This is an interesting point and one that I disagree almost entirely with. I would make an exception to cases where someone is faced with overwhelming continuous debilitating pain - or the destruction of their mental state (i.e. Sir Terry Pratchett) - but otherwise I think that suicide is pretty much categorically irrational since life is all you've got and while there may be pain involved with it - there is brightness as well. When the road truly seems to be only darkness I'd suggest reaching out to others around you or councilors and talking it out with them because chances are that your observation of there only being negativity is an issue in your perception.
He was offered a 6 month sentence in a low security prison. He could have served that sentence before the trial was even set to begin and resumed his life as programmer and activist - reputation burnished by his conviction, if anything. Suicide is not a rational solution for anyone in that situation.
Investigative tactics are pretty brutal. They talk with you so that you incriminate yourself but are very affirmative during most of the conversation but then start confronting you.
The mental fatigue makes a lot of people just admit the crime they committed.
This is such a bad take. It's embarrassing to (still) see this on HN after all these years.
It has any of several face-palmingly obvious flaws:
* Extremely aggressive federal prosecution is not known for its mental health benefits;
* It desperately tries to avoid a conversation about how unjust the prosecution was and what their motives were in the case by loading all of the fault for the tragic outcome at Aaron's feet now that he's not around to defend himself;
* It is indistinguishable from arguments that people with severe health problems who become ill with covid-19, and die, didn't die of covid-19 but of their health problems;
* It is ignorant of modern understandings or sensitivities towards mental health;
* It argues from the least nuanced and informed view of his situation possible -- it's a knee-jerk reaction from people with a particular moral framework.
It's such a seriously dull-witted argument, it should be confined to screenshots of Facebook.
Your counter-points aren't exactly award-worthy either. Aggressive federal prosecution does not usually result in suicide. The argument doesn't "desperately" do anything, much less avoid a conversation. It is distinguishable from arguments about COVID-19 deaths as they are completely different subjects. Sure, you could say it's not a nuanced argument at all, but that doesn't make it face-palmingly bad, it just makes it plain.
Everyone may suffer from some kind of mental illness or depression at some point in their lives. We should probably care deeply about the kinds of things that might push those people over the edge.
Yeah, I’d like to see Snowden exonerated, but the government hasn’t changed. They’re still vindictive about being embarrassed, even though it was clearly whistleblowing and, nearly everyone agrees, ethical.
> I'm sure in hindsight he absolutely make a different choice
This strikes me as disrespectful, unless you have some inside knowledge about the whole event. Respect a persons choice to end their life, as that was their final action.
> Most people want to end their pain not their lives
That might be true. But again, we don't know exactly how he felt, so why assume something? Many people end their lives with purpose as well, not every suicide is about ending pain.
We lost a good one. I think, at times, back to Aaron and his grasp of both code and politics. That ability to empower people, cultivate discussion, and I would argue, solidarity on human basics, is rare.
There are a lot of grave injustices in this world and this was probably not even remotely close to the worst but I am still really bitter about what happened to Aaron after all these years. I remember how upset I was to hear of his suicide and the things that lead up to them. Maybe it was because he was one of "us" or maybe because his works have improved the lives of so many of us. People like him who make that kind of impact usually ends up becoming rich, etc. Instead he was persecuted until he committed suicide for wanting to make knowledge more accessible. The new SCOTUS ruling helps but I'm still quite sad over what happened.
I'm reminded of "The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine." Sometimes this is a feature; we probably don't want frequent, sweeping changes in the legal landscape, or snap decisions based on emotion. But it also means that injustices are righted slowly, and sometimes too late, after people's lives have been destroyed.
"Justice delayed is justice denied." While this SCOTUS decision may vindicate Swartz, he never got the justice he deserved. Now it's too late for that.
There's been a movement on to privatize law to limit rights. One of the sneaky ways they were doing this was taking the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and making contract law violations into criminal law violations. You breach the contract, we can send you to jail, when it would normally would only be money damages or injunctive relief after the court had weighed in on the matter.
If the NY Times and the rest of the Western MSM got behind Assange, that would be the end of it. They haven't, forgetting that Assange's fate is theirs.
I think most folks who work in the news aren't entirely sure of Assange's motives. Wikileak's and Assange's approach and motivations =/ most news orgs.
One way out is a change in leadership in Australia. Assange is an Australian citizen and there's some pressure in Australia to support him. Murdoch is opposed unfortunately and controls the media but people are starting to wake up.
“Then Reagan got spooked by the movie Wargames – yes, the one with Matthew Broderick – and urged the dimbulbs in the Congress and Senate to send the CFAA to his desk. They obliged, he signed it, and CFAA became law in 1986.”
You mean corporate lobbyists wanting federal enforcement of contract terms and corporate interests had nothing to do with it?
Have we seen mass prosecutions under the CFAA at the behest of corporate interests?
I don't think that's the case, tons of people are violating various policies all the time and they're not being prosecuted.
SCOTUS was right in narrowing the focus, but I'm not sure the CCFA really was some corporate conspiracy, if it was ... they didn't make much use of it outside of some terrible, but still isolated incidents.
Even things like the abuse of arbitration agreements I think more likely stem from creative lawyers using existing laws to their advantage, not as much direct legislating as is often claimed.
As a general rule, I think it's unwise to attribute to conspiracy that which can be sufficiently explained by incentive structures and existing rule frameworks.
It's nice to pretend someone's in charge of all the bad things that happen, but as They Might Be Giants reminds us, most of the world is described by individual actors doing what they can get away with in individual circumstances.
TMBG's "The Shadow Government" tells the story of a man going through life extremely paranoid that powerful forces are conspiring personally against him.
In the end, he is (likely) murdered and disappeared by the mayor of his small town for challenging the mayor's right to steal his property, because in reality there is no higher power checking his local government's authority. It's the lack of any massive conspiracy controlling events that kills him.
or maybe it was written for the benefit of Congressional virtue signaling. The utility of bolstering the reputation of Federal Prosecutors via selective prosecution is just an emergent property?
The term “Virtue Signaling” observes the practice of concealing one's true feelings or ignorance in order to publicly communicate an acceptable moral perspective, thus demonstrating good character to some audience. It is a scornful pejorative to label someone’s actions as “Virtue Signaling”, as it implies they may be disingenuous, deceitful, duplicitous, etc.
Thus very popular with elected officials seeking a positive reputation among the electorate or seeking campaign funding.
Still seems like a long way to get to 'i don't like it'.
I have trouble believing anyone pushing the CCFA somehow cared enough to be disingenuous about it... to me that require more than a randomly applied label.
The mass is the fact that every single person is subject to being abused, any time anyone else wants to.
They can't do it to everyone because of simple logistics, but they can do it to anyone.
If you didn't get thrown in prison today, it's not because the problem doesn't apply to you and you are safe. It's only because no one decided it would be super convenient for them if you went away.
Under that definition, there’s no mass prosecutions under any law, right. There aren’t a great number of prosecutions for federal laws. I can’t find any specific statistics for charges brought under CFAA.
I think the issue isn’t the total number but the potential total number. So if there’s mass violation and law enforcement picks and chooses who to prosecute that’s a problem. Although obviously it’s less a problem if they do that 1,000 times a year vs 1,000,000.
No, they didn't. Once Swartz turned over all the data he had collected and promised not to do it again, both MIT and JSTOR said they were satisfied and told the feds they did not want any further action taken. The feds chose to pursue Swartz anyway.
I don’t think that’s accurate. The MIT report [0] says “ The Institute made no public statements regarding the merits of the case against Swartz or whether it should proceed, nor did it attempt to influence the prosecutor’s decisions on the case, other than to tell the prosecutor that the government should not proceed on the assumption that MIT wanted Aaron Swartz to go to jail.”
But I think that’s pretty weasily as having a neutral position while the government is prosecuting means endorsing the status quo. “Not proceeding with the assumption that MIT wanted Aaron Swartz to go to jail” is so BS. How about a statement of “We do not want AS to go to jail.” Or “We do not believe a crime has been committed” or “As the operator of the network, we do not consider this a violation of CFAA” or the million other useful things MIT could have said and done.
Many urged MIT to advocate to not prosecute and MIT chose not to.
Also MIT brought the charges of breaking and entering that led to Swartz’s arrest. And that’s pretty lame given MIT’s mission and what Swartz was doing.
If I was a student and my guest was arrested for B&E that would be bad.
MIT isn’t legally culpable, but they acted poorly and all they needed to do was say “hey don’t do that” instead it led to a large scale prosecution and a suicide.
Spinning this like MIT wasn’t responsible or JSTOR wasn’t responsible is so mealymouthed.
Certainly. Not charging him for breaking and entering. Not charging him for cfaa charges. Not treating like a laptop plugged in is a felony.
Also I think had MIT asked the prosecutor not to prosecute then the case would have been dropped. Without MIT and JSTOR saying Swartz committed computer fraud, the prosecution would have no case. Etc etc.
> Not treating like a laptop plugged in is a felony.
MIT didn't do that either.
> I think had MIT asked the prosecutor not to prosecute then the case would have been dropped
I don't know what you're basing this on. Everything the prosecutor said at the time made it clear that they wanted to make an example of Swartz and would have done much the same thing no matter what MIT and JSTOR said.
> Without MIT and JSTOR saying Swartz committed computer fraud
Neither MIT nor JSTOR ever said that. Charging Swartz under the CFAA was the federal prosecutor's doing.
> The case existed because MIT wanted it to exist.
I think you are mistaken. I think the case existed because the federal prosecutor wanted it to exist. That's not to say MIT made no mistakes, but we should put the blame for the CFAA prosecution and the threat of decades in jail where it belongs.
> MIT brought the charges of breaking and entering that led to Swartz’s arrest
That's because they didn't know who it was that was doing it. Their main purpose in getting the police involved was to find out.
> Many urged MIT to advocate to not prosecute and MIT chose not to.
Yes, that's a fair point (and IIRC the Abelson report makes a similar point), and it was an overstatement on my part to say that MIT asked that no further action be taken. (I believe JSTOR did, though.)
However, that's still very different from saying that MIT (or JSTOR) "lobbied the feds to pursue Swartz", which is what the post I was originally responding to claimed. Neither MIT nor JSTOR did any such thing.
> Spinning this like MIT wasn’t responsible or JSTOR wasn’t responsible is so mealymouthed.
I don't think either MIT or JSTOR were responsible for "pursuing" Swartz. They certainly weren't responsible for threatening him with decades in jail. That was the federal prosecutor.
One could argue that MIT was "responsible" because they didn't work harder to persuade the feds not to pursue Swartz. But that could just as easily have been because they couldn't wrap their minds around the idea that a federal prosecutor would go so overboard until after it had actually happened, at which point it was too late.
> all they needed to do was say “hey don’t do that”
It's not at all clear to me that that would have made a difference, given the attitude of the federal prosecutor. That's not to say MIT shouldn't have done it (I think they should have), but it's also not an argument, IMO, for MIT being responsible for what happened to Swartz. Prosecutorial overreach is the responsibility of the prosecutor--and of the government that empowers the prosecutor, and ultimately of all of us citizens who empower the government.
> Have we seen mass prosecutions under the CFAA at the behest of corporate interests?
This is a case where a small number of people had a very profitable racket going, selling access to publicly funded scientific papers, and Swartz posed a threat to their racket.
I can understand that but I was responding to someone who claimed "You mean corporate lobbyists wanting federal enforcement of contract terms and corporate interests".
Isn't protecting the interests of a wealthy few exactly what happened in this case?
Look at all the recent Federal activity aimed at shutting down Sci-Hub.
>A reminder that Elsevier made
$6 BILLION selling your academic journals and articles behind paywalls, and made more profit than Amazon, Google and Apple every year for YEARS...
And paid the academics who wrote the articles $0
And paid the reviewers of the articles $0
“I can understand that but I was responding to someone who claimed ''You mean corporate lobbyists wanting federal enforcement of contract terms and corporate interest.''”
You left off the "had nothing to do with it?” part, which was a rhetorical assertion of equivalent hyperbole, but not a direct claim. If you want to interpret it that way you should to include the question mark in the consideration of your response....
Except both MIT and JSTOR did not press charges. It was an ambitious US Attorney, Carmen Ortiz, who wanted a notable scalp to boost her career. That career is now in tatters for completely independent reasons:
Prosecutorial malfeasance is a serious problem in the US, probably worse than police shootings in sheer number of lives broken, notably due to the abusive plea deal system where innocent people have a Hobson's choice to accept a plea just to avoid the risk of draconian penalties if they take the chance of a trial and whatever attorney will be assigned to them.
Congress bans things based on pop culture fiction movies all the time. They banned switchblade knives in 1958 because of gangster movies. Half the federal firearm regulations (such as the Undetectable Firearms Act) seem to be motivated by learning about guns from action movies.
Agreed, I an I think there is a dangerous precedent here for "selling" fear via movies. Entertainment as mass propaganda to enable the passing of unjust laws.
I would not be surprised if the recent upticks are directly correlated with privatized prisons.
There’s a corporate interest right there! Having some experience from within (healthcare industry, original DRG implementations and TEFRA), I can say that not everything you can get Congress to implement (at the behest of lobbyists) works out beneficially for your particular corporate or industry interest.
His personal grudge against Reagan detracts from the overall article. I mean, this law being "one of Ronald Reagan's many idiocies?" Like no one else involved in drafting and passing the law was an idiot? Or that, say, Clinton didn't pass several idiotic laws that have proven disastrous in retrospect? It's troubling to me that Congress always has single-digit approval numbers, and yet people who ought to know better continue to lay blame everywhere EXCEPT Congress.
Yeah, I'd like to see some documentation of that claim. Congress wrote the CFAA. The President probably had nothing to do with writing the CFAA -- he only signed it. We can't blame Presidents for all that they sign, especially when the convention is to veto very very few bills ever.
Fantastic article, thanks for sharing. Also, this little bit, "... I really wanted to talk about WarGames because it’s the one movie I can think of that’s had the most direct influence on any technology policy issue." made me think of another film, which I would argue had a great effect on technology policy. The film was Disney's "Victory Through Air Power" [1]. (See, specifically, the "impact" section [2] of the Wikipedia article.)
The film is an astonishing piece of animation (which in places resembles an almost manga style), education and propaganda. I cannot recommend it highly enough and it is available at the Internet Archive [3].
Just wait until you all start hearing about the punitive psychology being actively used by law enforcement against U.S. Citizens. Methods and procedures trained against Guantanamo detainees. Awful stuff to do to any human.
> Prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz didn't dispute that Aaron was allowed to access the articles he retrieved. Rather, they said that the WAY he accessed them (using a script instead of clicking on links) was a terms-of-service violation and hence a crime.
I'm sorry, but isn't that a major oversimplification of what he did?
That's what the article is about. Basically the federal hacking law defines computer crime as "exceeding your authorization" on a computer that didn't belong to you. Hence violating terms of service would be computer crime.
Essentially, the Computer Fraud and Abuse act was being interprated waaaaaaaaaay too broadly, because it could be. Here's the discussion on the supreme court win
Under Van Buren, merely saying in the ToS that [X] part of website is restricted access would not be enough to make it a crime under the CFAA.
In the Van Buren case, SCOTUS was very concerned with the potential for innocent actors to unwittingly run afoul of the CFAA. The website would likely have to take further steps to make the restrictions on access known to the user (such as a warning when trying to access [X], and probably also take actual steps to limit access to [X], such that one would only be able to access [X] deliberately knowing that they don't have authorized access to it.
I think that's true of some people, but it's important to remember that all he did was violate the terms of service of a corporation that was (IMO) already behaving unethically and being poor stewards of the data given to it. (I am fundamentally opposed to allowing the result of scientific research -- especially when much of that research benefited from public funding -- to be locked behind paywalls.)
Swartz did not deserve to be driven to suicide for this. He did not deserve jail time, or to be arrested. At worst he deserved to be the defendant in a fairly low-stakes civil suit, and maybe even lose. But that's it.
He’s certainly responsible for his actions, but they were not wrong, I think. And he was obviously unjustly persecuted for his actions.
I think it’s accurate for us to celebrate SCOTUS ruling that the way the feds prosecuted Swartz was wrong and recognize that it will help prevent future Swartz.
You could argue what you want about the legality of his right to have a local copy of the entirety of JSTOR, but he hid equipment in a wire ring closet that was left unlocked on MITs network to carry out his scraping and that’s definitely not something that is “not wrong”.
It doesn’t matter what the action of the equipment or the morality of it. It’s not like it would be bad for a student or professor to put up crypto miners, but then good if they donate them to charity.
And that is not to even mention the fact that his actions caused effectively a denial of service attack on jstor from MIT.
I suppose we can argue since sticking a laptop in a closet isn’t nefarious but just an efficient way to get on the network.
I’ve attended and visited quite a few universities and they all had liberal network access policies. So the idea of anyone caring about someone plugging a laptop into a lanport and downloading millions of text files is not remarkable and happens all the time, I expect.
There was no “denial of service” on jstor as it was still available during the whole time. And if jstor can’t handle a single laptop scraping every article, then that seems to be more of a problem with jstor.
Students scrape jstor and other journal sites frequently and seems like a pretty decent use case that I want to support at my university, if I had one.
Crypto miners are a different story as they consume resources and if Swartz had set up a hundred laptops or a bunch of gpus and used university resources, I’d have a different story.
But the idea that a single laptop running in a closet for a weekend had any material impact on MIT or jstor is so laughable that I don’t understand how anyone honestly presents it as an argument.
He was literally a saint. Sorry, but there aren't many people who were as consistently good as him and who also did so much to fight for justice. You're entitled to your opinion, but I disagree very strongly.
Swartz set up a laptop surreptitiously plugged directly into a networking switch in a controlled-access closet on the MIT campus to which he did not have authorized access.
Importantly, Swartz's prosecution would not have been blocked by the SCOTUS decision in Van Buren because they make a distinction between improper use of computer access and improper access of a computer: Swartz did not have authorized access to the networking switch.
However, if he had used Wifi, to connect to the MIT networking, the charges would have been unsustainable under the Van Buren decision because guests were permitted on the MIT wifi network (and he had a JSTOR account through his Harvard employee account), and his use of it would merely of been improper use at best (since he effectively DDOS'd JSTOR for other users and got MIT's IP range blocked) rather than improper access.
EDIT: Note: a friend pointed out that the DDOS'ing of JSTOR could technically constitute a crime under the CFAA, depending on intent. In Swartz' case, the DDOS was an unintentional side effect of trying to download too much data at once for archival purposes so malicious intent was missing, but someone doing the same thing for the purpose of preventing access to the system could still be guilty of a crime.
> However, if he had used Wifi, to connect to the MIT networking, the charges would have been unsustainable under the Van Buren decision because guests were permitted on the MIT wifi network.
That's not clear to me, because MIT tried several times to revoke his permission to use their guest network by repeatedly banning him by IP address, and then by MAC address. He kept changing those to evade the revocation of permission.
That seems like it would be enough to distinguish from the Van Buren case.
The world would be a better place with Aaron Swartz still in it. Unfortunately I don't think we've lived up to the mantle he placed on us with his passing.
Federal criminal law is an absolute travesty. Not only are the sentences typically very harsh (10+ years in prison is typical) but also many of the statutes are incredibly broad. The book “ Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent” by Harvey Silverglate was a real eye opener for me. There are so many criminal statutes that prosecutors could lock away virtually any American, even if they’ve not really done anything that a reasonable person would think is wrong.
Except they are often intimidated from invoking things like jury nullification. Selection of juries is highly political and then the court decides whether information is relevant to be given to the jury. I don't see juries really providing much protection.
While in theory a ruling 'fixing' CFAA is exactly what we've been waiting for I have two problems with it:
The first is a principled objection (and thus in some ways less important): the rulings below were probably correct applications of a terribly drafted law. The way to fix the law in a functioning government would be legislative.
But anyways I really want to share the second objection which is entirely pragmatic: if the only time we ever limit the scope of laws which are badly drafted like this is when we're trying to find some excuse to let bad cops get away with their behavior, then this will have two outcomes: first, bad cops will get away with their bad behavior more often; second, we will find that these precedents don't actually stick when it comes to protecting actual innocents. These are related problems because judges can always find some way to distinguish bad cop cases from innocent private citizen cases to ensure that precedents need not apply.
People talk about the first and second and fourth (... and fifth, sixth, tenth, etc.) Amendments to the US Constitution as being under attack, and the interstate commerce clause as being long dead. But like all stillbirths, no one likes to talk about the equal protection clause.
My opinion here is going to be unpopular, and honestly, I don't care for the way the legal (and political) system has handled any of these issues either. I also haven't thought enough about the Supreme Court decision to decide what I think about it.
But I think this particular article is garbage.
To begin, here's a small point that many engineering types fail to internalize: the legal system is built to deal with intentions. A piece of code or a device doesn't care what your intentions were when you built it, or what the user's intentions are when they use it. It just does what it does. On the contrary, intentions matter in the legal system. Hitting someone with your car is not automatically murder. It may not even be a crime. And stealing bread if you are starving is almost universally recognized as not a crime.
"Prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz didn't dispute that Aaron was allowed to access the articles he retrieved. Rather, they said that the WAY he accessed them (using a script instead of clicking on links) was a terms-of-service violation and hence a crime."
I'm a bit ambivalent about this part of Swartz's case, but it is certainly not mustache-twirling evil on the part of the prosecutors. I'm sure Doctrow, like the prosecutors, isn't going to dispute some of the facts in the case: Swartz intended to make those articles free. He was going to take those articles from the system that allowed him to access them and re-publish them in violation of their owner's wishes. Now, I don't like the information property system we have any more than anyone else, but it is the system we have and we get to live with it until we can change it. Swartz was not using a script to download the articles so he could read them later, he was using a script to make copies so he could redistribute them.
And the prosecutors weren't saying, "oh, ho, using a script is bad, you just can't do that." They were arguing that using the script was evidence of Swartz's intentions regarding the copies he was making. Doctrow is here violating one of Hacker News' guidelines, "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Security researchers who audit systems and warn their users about defects in them are silenced with CFAA threats, giving companies a veto over who can criticize them and how."
Yes, "security researchers" who have not bothered to clear their activities with their targets beforehand have faced legal problems. Some who have have also faced those, but the legal system is supposed to tell the difference and generally does a fair job. What would you prefer as the alternative?
"Nevertheless, prosecutors charged him under the CFAA, saying that while he was allowed to access the database, doing so for an improper purpose was a hacking crime, because he "exceeded his authorization."
"This may sound sensible – or just expedient – to you. But if the prosecutors were right – if accessing a computer you were authorized to use, but in an unauthorized way – is a felony, then almost everyone is a felon."
Yes, I would argue, that is a hacking crime. (Insider threats are one of the biggest problems with computer systems because they're impossible to secure against---can anyone explain to me the authorization logic that would allow Van Buren to do his job, which apparently includes looking up "personal information", while preventing him from doing anything illegal with that information?) What else do you think you can charge him with, illegally accepting a gift in the process of doing his job?
But mostly, this article is almost entirely scare mongering. "This correct interpretation (far narrower than the DoJ's) safeguards security researchers, competitors, and other researchers ...
Law or not, it seems completely absurd that I should be able to go through any database I have a license to view and just scrape all the content, especially if my purpose is to release their content to vitally damage their business.
At the same time, I don’t see why we should consider it a crime if I ssh into an insecure server and steal a persons credit card information, but if someone at the bank has an old password and go into the same server to get the same information then suddenly it’s ok? I mean the crime in a breaking and entering isn’t that you manage to break the lock, it’s the entering that’s the problem.
Whenever I see his name I think of our collective failure to change the rules around research publishing.
...adding, its not just that we failed. It seems like we didn't even try. At least, nowhere near the level that would seem commensurate with outrage years ago.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadIn other news, the victim didn't die from the bullet, he died from cardiovascular collapse following the bullet incident.
If the law, I can't think of a single case citation I could give that would act as precedent for assigning responsibility to the federal prosecutor for Mr. Swartz taking his own life. I'd be interested to see any such citations people have found.
The philosophy of morality, ethics, and determinism is a much wider space where such a thing could be discussed.
That all said - it seems pretty clear that the guilt and fear from legal threats were an extremely strong motivation for suicide. Whether anyone suffers legal consequences for it - it was wrong.
The US legal system is designed to be adversarial. It isn't the prosecutor's job to worry about the defendant's feelings; that's the defense lawyer's job. The prosecutor's job is to seek legal truth and conviction (and, generally, to err on the side of the latter, on the belief that truth is proved out by the defense working to challenge any hypotheses the prosecutor brings to the table that are countered by evidence). Innocent until proven guilty, but it's the prosecutor's job to prove a defendant guilty, not innocent.
This is, obviously, extremely stressful on the defendant.
And this is not the only model of law. Adversarial finding of guilt-or-innocence a popular model in countries descended from European colonies, but other nations have different models. And the adversarial model has known weaknesses... In terms of introducing scientific facts to the table, the adversarial model encourages both sides to bring expert witnesses and the jury to decide who's version of facts is true, which is somewhat farcical. Some countries use an inquisitive system, in which the Court is empowered to do its own investigation and analysis (as opposed to acting as an impartial referee to the best cases the plaintiff and defendant can build). There are pros and cons to this system (and it's actually used in some pieces of the US).
It's heartbreaking what happened to Aaron, and in general, the American system of governance addresses mental illness extremely poorly. I don't have any good suggestions on how to do better, but that doesn't mean the current design is acceptable.
In my company code reviews are an adversarial process - as they are everywhere. The primary developer presents something they think is worthy to merge into the mainline branch - the reviewer inspects this and raises questions and highlights facts in the code that they think need to be address. And, throughout this process the aim isn't to prove the other person is an idiot - it's to arrive at a PR that's better than either of you would have produced on your own (ideally).
We go through this process and ideally avoid being overly critical or a dick about things. I don't reply to some confusing code with "That's dumb!" I'll point out routes to correct the confusion or just highlight my reasoning to feel it's confusing and let the dev decide on their favorite course to resolution.
A trial is certainly going to be more emotionally involved simply by being about the future of someone's life instead of some code that runs a checkout process somewhere - but we can still, as a society, try and minimize how dickish we let people get. In a company someone who is overly combative is going to face problems keeping their job and advancing - you'll generally find financial incentives offered to people that can more reasonably navigate the social aspect of being an employee[1]. Unfortunately in the world of prosecution, while these incentives still exist (people who are dickish overall will be dickish to their coworkers (other lawyers) and likely be held back by that) they tend to be minimized in comparison with performance evaluation based on conviction rates - and that creates a lot of really bad incentives. I think it's a bit of a misstatement to say that both parties in a trial are seeking the truth when one of those parties is being evaluated not on accuracy after the fact - but instead on how many people they manage to line up as guilty.
1. This has some downsides - in particular autism is actually a much bigger impediment in the real world than perhaps it needs to be. I think that's a separate issue though.
An adversarial code review process would look more like attempting to solve a problem by having two separate teams devise a solution, and a neutral third-party chooses exactly one of those solutions to accept and discards the other. Team A, in this system, is not particularly interested in helping Team B succeed (and, indeed, within the rules of the process, has no incentive to improve the odds that Team B's solution is accepted).
This would be a hellishly-inefficient process (though, funny enough, something similar at the scope of project initiatives has been used at a few more Machiavellian corporate institutions). But it might be the sort of thing one could adopt if one thought, for some reason, that you couldn't trust that all development teams to collaborate cleanly (because their goals weren't aligned).
The notion that innocence or guilt (on a per-charge basis) as a binary state is very deeply built into our criminal legal framework. For any given charge, either the prosecution's case wins, or the defense's case wins. The prosecution isn't incentivized at all to help the defense win. And the judge's incentives optimize for neutrality... Because, the thinking goes, if they aren't neutral, their likeliest bias is in favor of the prosecution as a fellow agent of the State, which gives even more power to the already-powerful State authority, since the whole system assumes two things: (a) the defendant is innocent until proven otherwise, and (b) the State is a good-faith actor until proven otherwise. Generally, faith in (b) is almost never shaken without definitive proof (such as direct evidence of prosecutorial misconduct). Whether this means the prosecution is "dickish" as they pursue their goal of a conviction is a bit in the eye of the beholder, but note that nowhere in this process is the prosecutor obligated to assume the defense is a good-faith actor (and, indeed, if defendants were always good-faith actors, trials would be unnecessary and criminals would just confess their transgressions). And it is entirely possible that this system does not work without prosecutors leaning on defendants (in legal ways) under the assumption (on the part of the prosecutor, not the Court) that the defendant is guilty and hiding it.
This isn't the only model possible, but changing it would basically require restructuring the American criminal legal system from the bedrock up. Not impossible, but I wouldn't bet on it in my lifetime. What is heartbreaking in this case is that the pressure caused Mr. Swartz to take his own life, and without a prior diagnosis of likelihood of suicide / prior involuntary commitment, I have a hard time seeing any way for the legal system to account for that risk and still function. :(
... and of course, all this analysis ignores the elphant in the room that the Supreme Court dumped in the graveyard this week: we probably shouldn't have even thought of putting "used a computer in a way other than the way its owner intended its use" under the aegis of criminal law in the first place! That was a terrible use of the CFAA. But until this week, it wasn't understood that it was not a use of the CFAA.
That prosecutor should be in jail for pushing Aaron to the edge.
How did the prosecutor make Swartz believe that?
Edit: to elaborate, the commentator above is implying that Swartz had a way out that the prosecutor somehow prevented Swartz from finding out about.
I would like to know what that way out was, and how the prosecutor prevented Swartz from finding out about it. Swartz had a legal team defending him who I would have expected to inform him of all his options.
It's not clear to me how one assigns blame for suicide in most cases, or what the options are for prosecutors. If a quasi-suicidal person cuts me off on the highway and I give them the middle finger, and they go home and commit suicide because of it - am I culpable? If, generally, a prosecutor thinks that a person is not mentally stable enough to face trial for their crimes without commiting suicide, are they just allowed to get away with what they want? Or should they be involuntarily committed?
If you are innocent or believe as is in fact the case here that the governments position is legally incorrect you shouldn't face punishment for arguing that in front of a judge. For innocent people whom are inevitably convicted every day in any justice system this represents a punishment for asserting innocence.
The fact that you think this is normal is just a sign that our entire society is itself abnormal and broken.
First, they ignore that actual sentencing takes into account assorted aggravating and mitigating factors. To get the maximum on a charge you have to have several aggravating factors and few mitigating factors.
Basically, if it is possible that someone could receive 20 years, say, for a given charge--even if to get 20 years they would pretty much have to be that crime's equivalent of Al Capone, then they are going to say 20 years on every press release involving that crime even if it concerns the mildest possible instance of it.
Second, there are often multiple charges that could apply to the same act and would require largely the same elements of proof. Prosecutors can charge you with all of them and let the jury decide which, if any, to convict you of. Many of these are grouped for sentencing, so that if you are convicted of more than one in the same group you only get sentenced for one of them.
Grouping is ignored in the press releases. If you are charged with three things, with a max of 10 years each (and remember, that 10 years is already greatly exaggerated as described earlier), the press release is going to say you are facing up to 30 years.
This really needs to be changed. The DoJ knows what facts they intend to try and prove about your particular instances of the crimes they are charging you with. They are perfectly capable of looking at the aggravating factors for the charge, comparing to what they are trying to prove, and figuring out the real maximum for your case. They are certainly also capable of dealing with grouping. I can't see any good reason they should not do so, and so put realistic maximums in their press releases.
Here's a good article on how press release sentences are misleading [1]. Here's an article that looks at it specifically in the context of Swartz [2].
[1] https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
[2] http://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-aa...
They absolutely are. Suicidal episodes are usually kept quite quiet - people you're extremely close to may have attempted suicide without ever telling you about it due to the societal shame and perception of weakness.
As a general rule, it's a good idea to not emotionally abuse people or induce unnecessary mental stress on anyone since you're not going to be aware of how they're doing internally and, honestly, trying to emotionally abuse people, even when they're able to take it, is just being an abusive ass.
I think your example of flipping a bird on the highway is honestly a good thing for more people to keep in mind in their daily lives - if someone is feeling particularly vulnerable then lashing out at them could tip the balance and you don't want that on your conscience - but I think legally speaking it'll always be a matter of judgement on the specifics. In the highway example it's likely that your bird barely nudged a needle that was already on the brink - while, when it comes to the legal system, prosecutors regularly use emotional abuse to expedite confessions and coerce defendants - as a society I think we tend toward a view where once someone is charged with a crime they are segregated into a different class of people who are unworthy of common respect, we need to change that.
I think the question here is: would Aaron Swartz have committed suicide at that particular time if not for the prosecutorial overreach he was mired in? I suspect the answer there is pretty safely: no. Would someone else in his position perhaps not have committed suicide in that situation? Sure. But he did, and it was clearly in no small part due to the circumstances he was in. I'm fine assigning much of the blame to the persecution he suffered under the US government. They wanted to make an example of him, by using a poorly-written, over-broad law that has traditionally been applied selectively depending on the needs of law enforcement. And sometimes when you put people in that position, they can't take it.
If you don't agree, I guess that's fine, but quibbling about semantics here is just in poor taste and not particularly productive.
> If, generally, a prosecutor thinks that a person is not mentally stable enough to face trial for their crimes without commiting suicide, are they just allowed to get away with what they want?
Of course not, and this kind of question makes me feel like you're arguing in poor taste. Prosecutors have a ton of latitude in how they handle cases. Swartz was not some violent criminal who needed to be taught a lesson and be held up as an example to others. He was just a flawed human who believed scientific research (much of it funded by public, taxpayer money) shouldn't be locked up behind a corporation's paywall. The zeal in which this case was prosecuted far exceeded the "crime".
But in general, if a person is a suicide risk during any kind of court proceeding, yes, actions should be taken to ensure that they won't (or aren't able to) commit suicide. If that means being put in a hospital under observation, sure, though that extreme may not have been necessary to save Swartz. We have an obligation as a society to treat everyone with respect and care, even -- especially -- those we've accused of crimes. We're very far off from that ideal, of course.
Aaron was offered a 6 month sentence in a low security facility
The mental fatigue makes a lot of people just admit the crime they committed.
Or just anything, after a certain point.
It has any of several face-palmingly obvious flaws:
* Extremely aggressive federal prosecution is not known for its mental health benefits;
* It desperately tries to avoid a conversation about how unjust the prosecution was and what their motives were in the case by loading all of the fault for the tragic outcome at Aaron's feet now that he's not around to defend himself;
* It is indistinguishable from arguments that people with severe health problems who become ill with covid-19, and die, didn't die of covid-19 but of their health problems;
* It is ignorant of modern understandings or sensitivities towards mental health;
* It argues from the least nuanced and informed view of his situation possible -- it's a knee-jerk reaction from people with a particular moral framework.
It's such a seriously dull-witted argument, it should be confined to screenshots of Facebook.
I've seen better retorts on Facebook, frankly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This strikes me as disrespectful, unless you have some inside knowledge about the whole event. Respect a persons choice to end their life, as that was their final action.
In the same way, we can solve hunger and war. Theroretically yes, practically very hard.
That might be true. But again, we don't know exactly how he felt, so why assume something? Many people end their lives with purpose as well, not every suicide is about ending pain.
Safe Travels Aaron, you are missed.
"Justice delayed is justice denied." While this SCOTUS decision may vindicate Swartz, he never got the justice he deserved. Now it's too late for that.
Well, a draftee, involuntarily having it taken for the good of everyone else. Damn that's no better.
I don't want to enjoy benefits that were aquired by theft and murder.
I tried. There is no good here and no way to make it ok.
Thanks.
You mean corporate lobbyists wanting federal enforcement of contract terms and corporate interests had nothing to do with it?
Have we seen mass prosecutions under the CFAA at the behest of corporate interests?
I don't think that's the case, tons of people are violating various policies all the time and they're not being prosecuted.
SCOTUS was right in narrowing the focus, but I'm not sure the CCFA really was some corporate conspiracy, if it was ... they didn't make much use of it outside of some terrible, but still isolated incidents.
Even things like the abuse of arbitration agreements I think more likely stem from creative lawyers using existing laws to their advantage, not as much direct legislating as is often claimed.
It's nice to pretend someone's in charge of all the bad things that happen, but as They Might Be Giants reminds us, most of the world is described by individual actors doing what they can get away with in individual circumstances.
Remind me where they remind us? This is the crucial content I'm here for.
In the end, he is (likely) murdered and disappeared by the mayor of his small town for challenging the mayor's right to steal his property, because in reality there is no higher power checking his local government's authority. It's the lack of any massive conspiracy controlling events that kills him.
CCFA beyond the situation described to me still serves a purpose / can be used responsibly.
Thus very popular with elected officials seeking a positive reputation among the electorate or seeking campaign funding.
I have trouble believing anyone pushing the CCFA somehow cared enough to be disingenuous about it... to me that require more than a randomly applied label.
The article has Aaron Swartz in the title, so yes. MIT and JSTOR lobbied the feds to pursue Swartz and there are many more examples.
They can't do it to everyone because of simple logistics, but they can do it to anyone.
If you didn't get thrown in prison today, it's not because the problem doesn't apply to you and you are safe. It's only because no one decided it would be super convenient for them if you went away.
I think the issue isn’t the total number but the potential total number. So if there’s mass violation and law enforcement picks and chooses who to prosecute that’s a problem. Although obviously it’s less a problem if they do that 1,000 times a year vs 1,000,000.
No, they didn't. Once Swartz turned over all the data he had collected and promised not to do it again, both MIT and JSTOR said they were satisfied and told the feds they did not want any further action taken. The feds chose to pursue Swartz anyway.
But I think that’s pretty weasily as having a neutral position while the government is prosecuting means endorsing the status quo. “Not proceeding with the assumption that MIT wanted Aaron Swartz to go to jail” is so BS. How about a statement of “We do not want AS to go to jail.” Or “We do not believe a crime has been committed” or “As the operator of the network, we do not consider this a violation of CFAA” or the million other useful things MIT could have said and done.
Many urged MIT to advocate to not prosecute and MIT chose not to.
Also MIT brought the charges of breaking and entering that led to Swartz’s arrest. And that’s pretty lame given MIT’s mission and what Swartz was doing.
If I was a student and my guest was arrested for B&E that would be bad.
MIT isn’t legally culpable, but they acted poorly and all they needed to do was say “hey don’t do that” instead it led to a large scale prosecution and a suicide.
Spinning this like MIT wasn’t responsible or JSTOR wasn’t responsible is so mealymouthed.
[0] https://news.mit.edu/2013/mit-releases-swartz-report-0730
Also I think had MIT asked the prosecutor not to prosecute then the case would have been dropped. Without MIT and JSTOR saying Swartz committed computer fraud, the prosecution would have no case. Etc etc.
The case existed because MIT wanted it to exist.
Why not? He did that.
> Not charging him for cfaa charges.
MIT didn't do that. The federal prosecutor did.
> Not treating like a laptop plugged in is a felony.
MIT didn't do that either.
> I think had MIT asked the prosecutor not to prosecute then the case would have been dropped
I don't know what you're basing this on. Everything the prosecutor said at the time made it clear that they wanted to make an example of Swartz and would have done much the same thing no matter what MIT and JSTOR said.
> Without MIT and JSTOR saying Swartz committed computer fraud
Neither MIT nor JSTOR ever said that. Charging Swartz under the CFAA was the federal prosecutor's doing.
> The case existed because MIT wanted it to exist.
I think you are mistaken. I think the case existed because the federal prosecutor wanted it to exist. That's not to say MIT made no mistakes, but we should put the blame for the CFAA prosecution and the threat of decades in jail where it belongs.
That's because they didn't know who it was that was doing it. Their main purpose in getting the police involved was to find out.
> Many urged MIT to advocate to not prosecute and MIT chose not to.
Yes, that's a fair point (and IIRC the Abelson report makes a similar point), and it was an overstatement on my part to say that MIT asked that no further action be taken. (I believe JSTOR did, though.)
However, that's still very different from saying that MIT (or JSTOR) "lobbied the feds to pursue Swartz", which is what the post I was originally responding to claimed. Neither MIT nor JSTOR did any such thing.
> Spinning this like MIT wasn’t responsible or JSTOR wasn’t responsible is so mealymouthed.
I don't think either MIT or JSTOR were responsible for "pursuing" Swartz. They certainly weren't responsible for threatening him with decades in jail. That was the federal prosecutor.
One could argue that MIT was "responsible" because they didn't work harder to persuade the feds not to pursue Swartz. But that could just as easily have been because they couldn't wrap their minds around the idea that a federal prosecutor would go so overboard until after it had actually happened, at which point it was too late.
> all they needed to do was say “hey don’t do that”
It's not at all clear to me that that would have made a difference, given the attitude of the federal prosecutor. That's not to say MIT shouldn't have done it (I think they should have), but it's also not an argument, IMO, for MIT being responsible for what happened to Swartz. Prosecutorial overreach is the responsibility of the prosecutor--and of the government that empowers the prosecutor, and ultimately of all of us citizens who empower the government.
This is a case where a small number of people had a very profitable racket going, selling access to publicly funded scientific papers, and Swartz posed a threat to their racket.
Swartz posed a threat to the ability to privately profit off of publicly funded science.
Look at all the recent Federal activity aimed at shutting down Sci-Hub.
>A reminder that Elsevier made $6 BILLION selling your academic journals and articles behind paywalls, and made more profit than Amazon, Google and Apple every year for YEARS...
And paid the academics who wrote the articles $0 And paid the reviewers of the articles $0
https://twitter.com/DrJessTaylor/status/1390798132632596488?...
You left off the "had nothing to do with it?” part, which was a rhetorical assertion of equivalent hyperbole, but not a direct claim. If you want to interpret it that way you should to include the question mark in the consideration of your response....
https://theintercept.com/2021/02/15/marty-walsh-aaron-swartz...
Prosecutorial malfeasance is a serious problem in the US, probably worse than police shootings in sheer number of lives broken, notably due to the abusive plea deal system where innocent people have a Hobson's choice to accept a plea just to avoid the risk of draconian penalties if they take the chance of a trial and whatever attorney will be assigned to them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/movies/wargames-and-cyber...
I would not be surprised if the recent upticks are directly correlated with privatized prisons.
There’s a corporate interest right there! Having some experience from within (healthcare industry, original DRG implementations and TEFRA), I can say that not everything you can get Congress to implement (at the behest of lobbyists) works out beneficially for your particular corporate or industry interest.
https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/wargames-ronald-reagan-c...
The film is an astonishing piece of animation (which in places resembles an almost manga style), education and propaganda. I cannot recommend it highly enough and it is available at the Internet Archive [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Through_Air_Power_(fil...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Through_Air_Power_(fil...
[3] https://archive.org/details/VictoryThroughAirPower
I'm sorry, but isn't that a major oversimplification of what he did?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27382752
In the Van Buren case, SCOTUS was very concerned with the potential for innocent actors to unwittingly run afoul of the CFAA. The website would likely have to take further steps to make the restrictions on access known to the user (such as a warning when trying to access [X], and probably also take actual steps to limit access to [X], such that one would only be able to access [X] deliberately knowing that they don't have authorized access to it.
Swartz did not deserve to be driven to suicide for this. He did not deserve jail time, or to be arrested. At worst he deserved to be the defendant in a fairly low-stakes civil suit, and maybe even lose. But that's it.
He’s certainly responsible for his actions, but they were not wrong, I think. And he was obviously unjustly persecuted for his actions.
I think it’s accurate for us to celebrate SCOTUS ruling that the way the feds prosecuted Swartz was wrong and recognize that it will help prevent future Swartz.
It doesn’t matter what the action of the equipment or the morality of it. It’s not like it would be bad for a student or professor to put up crypto miners, but then good if they donate them to charity.
And that is not to even mention the fact that his actions caused effectively a denial of service attack on jstor from MIT.
I’ve attended and visited quite a few universities and they all had liberal network access policies. So the idea of anyone caring about someone plugging a laptop into a lanport and downloading millions of text files is not remarkable and happens all the time, I expect.
There was no “denial of service” on jstor as it was still available during the whole time. And if jstor can’t handle a single laptop scraping every article, then that seems to be more of a problem with jstor.
Students scrape jstor and other journal sites frequently and seems like a pretty decent use case that I want to support at my university, if I had one.
Crypto miners are a different story as they consume resources and if Swartz had set up a hundred laptops or a bunch of gpus and used university resources, I’d have a different story.
But the idea that a single laptop running in a closet for a weekend had any material impact on MIT or jstor is so laughable that I don’t understand how anyone honestly presents it as an argument.
Importantly, Swartz's prosecution would not have been blocked by the SCOTUS decision in Van Buren because they make a distinction between improper use of computer access and improper access of a computer: Swartz did not have authorized access to the networking switch.
However, if he had used Wifi, to connect to the MIT networking, the charges would have been unsustainable under the Van Buren decision because guests were permitted on the MIT wifi network (and he had a JSTOR account through his Harvard employee account), and his use of it would merely of been improper use at best (since he effectively DDOS'd JSTOR for other users and got MIT's IP range blocked) rather than improper access.
EDIT: Note: a friend pointed out that the DDOS'ing of JSTOR could technically constitute a crime under the CFAA, depending on intent. In Swartz' case, the DDOS was an unintentional side effect of trying to download too much data at once for archival purposes so malicious intent was missing, but someone doing the same thing for the purpose of preventing access to the system could still be guilty of a crime.
That's not clear to me, because MIT tried several times to revoke his permission to use their guest network by repeatedly banning him by IP address, and then by MAC address. He kept changing those to evade the revocation of permission.
That seems like it would be enough to distinguish from the Van Buren case.
[Looks around]
I must agree with you.
(https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...)
https://twitter.com/CrimeADay
The first is a principled objection (and thus in some ways less important): the rulings below were probably correct applications of a terribly drafted law. The way to fix the law in a functioning government would be legislative.
But anyways I really want to share the second objection which is entirely pragmatic: if the only time we ever limit the scope of laws which are badly drafted like this is when we're trying to find some excuse to let bad cops get away with their behavior, then this will have two outcomes: first, bad cops will get away with their bad behavior more often; second, we will find that these precedents don't actually stick when it comes to protecting actual innocents. These are related problems because judges can always find some way to distinguish bad cop cases from innocent private citizen cases to ensure that precedents need not apply.
People talk about the first and second and fourth (... and fifth, sixth, tenth, etc.) Amendments to the US Constitution as being under attack, and the interstate commerce clause as being long dead. But like all stillbirths, no one likes to talk about the equal protection clause.
He simply found out about the vast swamp of pedophile professors -- THAT was the REAL story he wanted to go public.
Of course [they] couldn't allow this to happen...
When Trump will Be Back (later this Summer), you might want to ask yourself some serious question about how the world is REALLY going...
Happy Great Awakening to everybody (iff you decide to want to like to try it, that is).
But I think this particular article is garbage.
To begin, here's a small point that many engineering types fail to internalize: the legal system is built to deal with intentions. A piece of code or a device doesn't care what your intentions were when you built it, or what the user's intentions are when they use it. It just does what it does. On the contrary, intentions matter in the legal system. Hitting someone with your car is not automatically murder. It may not even be a crime. And stealing bread if you are starving is almost universally recognized as not a crime.
"Prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz didn't dispute that Aaron was allowed to access the articles he retrieved. Rather, they said that the WAY he accessed them (using a script instead of clicking on links) was a terms-of-service violation and hence a crime."
I'm a bit ambivalent about this part of Swartz's case, but it is certainly not mustache-twirling evil on the part of the prosecutors. I'm sure Doctrow, like the prosecutors, isn't going to dispute some of the facts in the case: Swartz intended to make those articles free. He was going to take those articles from the system that allowed him to access them and re-publish them in violation of their owner's wishes. Now, I don't like the information property system we have any more than anyone else, but it is the system we have and we get to live with it until we can change it. Swartz was not using a script to download the articles so he could read them later, he was using a script to make copies so he could redistribute them.
And the prosecutors weren't saying, "oh, ho, using a script is bad, you just can't do that." They were arguing that using the script was evidence of Swartz's intentions regarding the copies he was making. Doctrow is here violating one of Hacker News' guidelines, "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Security researchers who audit systems and warn their users about defects in them are silenced with CFAA threats, giving companies a veto over who can criticize them and how."
Yes, "security researchers" who have not bothered to clear their activities with their targets beforehand have faced legal problems. Some who have have also faced those, but the legal system is supposed to tell the difference and generally does a fair job. What would you prefer as the alternative?
"Nevertheless, prosecutors charged him under the CFAA, saying that while he was allowed to access the database, doing so for an improper purpose was a hacking crime, because he "exceeded his authorization."
"This may sound sensible – or just expedient – to you. But if the prosecutors were right – if accessing a computer you were authorized to use, but in an unauthorized way – is a felony, then almost everyone is a felon."
Yes, I would argue, that is a hacking crime. (Insider threats are one of the biggest problems with computer systems because they're impossible to secure against---can anyone explain to me the authorization logic that would allow Van Buren to do his job, which apparently includes looking up "personal information", while preventing him from doing anything illegal with that information?) What else do you think you can charge him with, illegally accepting a gift in the process of doing his job?
But mostly, this article is almost entirely scare mongering. "This correct interpretation (far narrower than the DoJ's) safeguards security researchers, competitors, and other researchers ...
At the same time, I don’t see why we should consider it a crime if I ssh into an insecure server and steal a persons credit card information, but if someone at the bank has an old password and go into the same server to get the same information then suddenly it’s ok? I mean the crime in a breaking and entering isn’t that you manage to break the lock, it’s the entering that’s the problem.
...adding, its not just that we failed. It seems like we didn't even try. At least, nowhere near the level that would seem commensurate with outrage years ago.