In Commonwealth countries, it's possible to initiate a private prosecution. These don't usually get very far, but I honestly wish these could be used to prosecute people who are treated differently for the same crime because of their status.
In Australia at least, the Director of Public Prosecutions has the power to take over the matter, and they often do.
They can then do one of two things. They can either continue running it if it’s in the interests of justice to do so (public interest, reasonable prospects of success etc), or they can shut it down, as they tend to do for sovereign citizen bullshit.
> In Commonwealth countries, it's possible to initiate a private prosecution (by a person who hasn't received criminal justice). These don't usually get very far
> Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 subpostmasters were wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on faulty Horizon data, with about 700 of these prosecutions carried out by the Post Office. Other subpostmasters were prosecuted but not convicted, forced to cover illusory shortfalls caused by Horizon with their own money, or had their contracts terminated. The court cases, criminal convictions, imprisonments, loss of livelihoods and homes, debts, and bankruptcies led to stress, illness and family breakdowns, and were linked to at least thirteen suicides.
Hundreds of innocent people went to prison, were financially ruined, thirteen took their own life, because a well-funded entity found it easier to privately prosecute its contractors than to question its software vendor. And the court system let them do it.
For some insane reason I am unable to comprehend, the UK government still allows Fujitsu to bid on government software contracts, despite being responsible for all of the false imprisonments, trauma, and tragedy you laid you in your post.
I have a feeling Fujitsu took the blame for mistakes done by the Post Office in order to get future contracts. The contracts are padded to pay fines and damages.
I understand the government would have difficulty excluding Fujitsu under its own procurement regulations at the time (Public Contracts Regulations 2015). Fujitsu voluntarily withdrew its bids in 2024. The goverment passed the Procurement Act 2023 which came into force in February 2025 and there is now a national debarment list, though I note Fujitsu isn't on it.
Also, it's important to note that Fujitsu didn't prosecute anyone, they just lied to the Post Office, lied to subpostmasters, remotely altered evidence, gave false testimony in court, etc. It was the Post Office itself that prosecuted its subpostmasters.
Some US states still have private criminal prosecutions.
> Second, this Article demonstrates that the government monopoly on
prosecution is an ideology rather than a rule. As it turns out, the government has never had total control over criminal law enforcement—not even exclusive authority to charge someone with a crime. While some courts prohibited private prosecution in the nineteenth century, others refused to abolish the practice. Public prosecutions of felonies and federal offenses became the norm in the progressive era, but private prosecution persisted in various forms. Particularly in “lowly” municipal courts, private individuals retained the ability to file and litigate criminal cases.
The part that still bothers me so much about the US vs Swartz case is that JSTOR didn't pursue civil litigation against Aaron. It was the US government that pursued him.
There was little for the government to lose in the case. In a case vs Meta, at the scale it has reached, it could have wide ranging economic implications limiting the investment in AI, which the US is absolutely not willing to pursue at this point in time (or possibly ever).
Basically, being a rich public company provides legal advantages when the US government has similar goals.
The whole thing is incredibly sad and exposes the hypocrisy of the US court system and government as a whole.
"look at me, I'm serving the interests of the incumbent education and medical industries by prosecuting the shit out of someone who dared give them the bird, now donate to my campaign".
Maybe the real issue is selective outrage about legal injustice. I totally agree that this was wrong and he should not have been prosecuted but a large part of the effort that dealt this injustice to him was facilitated by the fact that the vast majority of people willfully turn a blind eye when the same thing or worse happens to people are not of their ilk. If we were to finally stand up and say that justice for all means justice for ALL; we might be able to prevent the next Aaron Swartz.
It absolutely is. Youth services is one such thing that people just refuse to get upset about. Not when they attack kids for flimsy reasons. And, conversely, people also utterly refuse to react when kids eventually figure out that their way out is to attack people, other kids, social workers and anyone else in institutions, which is one factor that makes them such horrible places to be.
> large part of the effort that dealt this injustice to him was facilitated by the fact that the vast majority of people willfully turn a blind eye when the same thing or worse happens to people are not of their ilk
Reminds me of Marx's 1870 letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt:
Every industrial & commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps ... The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life ... regards himself as a member of the ruling nation & consequently becomes a tool of the English [ruling class] against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination [over his own self]. He cherishes religious, social, & national prejudices against the Irish worker ...
The Irishman ... sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland.
This antagonism is artificially kept alive & intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power.
... The antagonism between Englishmen & Irishmen ... enables the governments of [the US & England], whenever they think fit, to break the edge off the social conflict by their mutual bullying, and, in case of need, by war between the two countries.
The exact same mechanism is used to keep poor white Americans voting Republican: even if they're poor, they see themselves as the white ruling class over black and Hispanic people.
The con is largely directed at the religious right, of which, poorer whites make up the largest cohort. That's how they convinced people directly targeted by the bigotry to still vote for them.
You're missing the symmetry. The two party system is a false dichotomy. The enemy is not the other party, it's the system that causes there to be only two alternatives that are both captured by mostly the same interests. Each party convinces half the population that the other is trying to destroy them so that their votes cancel out.
The two party system is absolutely part of the problem, but there's also definitely the culture war being waged to distract people from the class war that's being waged against them. But the two-party system definitely enables that, making it easier to win by discrediting the other, because there only is one other.
What do you mean "by definition"? They do nothing else. Against transgenders, against gay people, against foreigners, against hippies against black people; it goes back a long time, and always to recruit the support of poor white people by giving them a sense of superiority over an even more oppressed group. Culture war is their primary weapon to distract from the class war they're also waging.
Continually inventing new categories of "opressed" people and then demanding that others grant them special protections is exactly how you start a culture war.
Perfectly equal enforcement really isn't possible, but it should be the policy to enforce in proportion to active harm. The bigger the ongoing active harm, the quicker to react we should be. Some individual torrents a single movie? NBD. No matter the side of the argument you are on this should be ignored. A company intentionally throws content strikes causing legitimate harm to large numbers of content creators? That should addressed.
Finland links speeding fines to income. I'd like to see something that get far broader application. That prevents the wealthy or huge corporations from seeing lawbreaking as a business cost, without destroying a small business or individual who commits the same crime.
Again, this is a wealth tax. Rich get driven around and don't loose their jobs for loosing their license. Try being poor though and having this happen.
Quick question, without looking it up, can you list the number of laws you can break which will result in your license revocation?
The law is sufficiently complex and broad that there is essentially zero chance that you are not breaking a single one each day. The rich have gotten so powerful that can literally evade the consequences forever in most cases. For the rest of us, all we can hope is to avoid the scrutiny of the law.
That's a straw man though. The argument isn't that poor people should get to break traffic laws but that those who can afford to loose their license shouldn't get to break them either.
> If it applied equally to everyone, then more people would be outraged as it affected them.
In order to do this you need to have laws that are designed to be reasonable for people to actually follow instead of laws that are designed to allow prosecutors to find a violation whenever they want to.
Actually enforcing them would create pressure to do that, but it would also create pressure to go back to selective enforcement when powerful people object to being subjected to the unreasonableness of existing laws.
A better solution might be to make a showing of selective enforcement a means to strike down a law. If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged then the prosecution either has to charge them too or that law is struck down and no one can be charged with it anymore.
Then instead of the incentive not to charge powerful people creating pressure for selective enforcement, the same incentive creates pressure to strike down the laws that can't reasonably be uniformly enforced.
The prosecution can say whatever they want, but the worst of the existing laws are the one that are pretty easy to prove, and it's the court rather than the prosecution who makes the decision.
You'll also get some nice incentives where the government will be arguing that a particular behavior is not a violation of the law so they don't have to charge someone they don't want to, which in turn leaves you with that precedent if the judge agrees with them and then they want to charge someone else for doing that later.
That's pretty reductive. Or do you not see a difference for example between someone speeding to get to the hospital vs speeding to elude police after a bank robbery?
In fact most people are okay with selectively stretching time limits and elevating a low class misdemeanor into a felony in order to prosecute someone where the party who would be the injured party said there was no injury.
And lest people think this is a one way street, each side thinks the other deserves interpreting the law to “get the real baddies.”
Our system has that built in. You can only be punished as to the norm and standards, findings can create precedent for other cases, etc. The workaround is they just use an 'as applied standard' so that it only can 'apply' to the one case due to that case's unique 'circumstances'. They do it all the time to prevent precedents from being set. 'As applied' rules are excluded from setting precedent.
As applied needs to be changed so that it can be included in setting precedent and when considering the norms given out for punishment because right now it's highly abused to allow outcomes for just select special people different than the 'blind justice' outcome for everyone else.
> If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged then the prosecution either has to charge them too or that law is struck down
I’ve often thought this about laws involving speed limits. When 95% of the people driving in a major downtown area are technically breaking the law, what is the purpose of the law but to target whoever you like then? Either enforce it unilaterally or come up with new laws.
Going after every possible case would be staggeringly expensive for marginal gain, the cost society would massively exceed the benefits. Yes the system as it is that relies on discretion, but there’s always discretion involved, and we rely on separation of powers, public pressure, etc to act to try and correct excesses. Of course that is not guaranteed to work, and won’t work perfectly, but no system will. That’s a fantasy.
How would it help the world for Aaron Swartz to download 3.5 million research and primary source PDFs, and illegally sneak into off-limits areas during night time, PDFs that presumably could have been downloaded by anyone legally by paying for access? If the goal was gratis access for all citizens, why not instead campaign lawfully for a change in research and information sharing practices generally, or for the state or federation to subsidize gratis access to the articles for the public? Why was theft a moral imperative, especially when the public could access material for a fee? If the goal was for the public good, why not figure out a legal way to do it? If it requires money to make something like JSTOR work, why not have the state fund it, or have the state run a competing service? Or make a competing private company?
The previous motivation for the stuff with PACER arguably made way more sense, though that was peculiar to begin with.
Did Aaron Swartz not at least try to think about or ask about why JSTOR costs money, and why competitors seemingly had not gotten as popular? Did he not care, including how JSTOR can be argued to have benefits to scientific research? Was his conscience just an act?
Aaron Swartz was part of Reddit, and Reddit in the early days lured people in with free articles, but that would not require 3.5 million PDFs to do, only a few, so I do not consider theories about that kind of motive credible.
The book and more being thrown at him was way too harsh, but there was a plea deal at the very least.
Meta should of course be prosecuted as well, but the LLM/AI craze is rather insane and manipulative to start with, and also promoted by Ycombinator and bots here. And there are presumably no people hired by Meta sneaking into places during the night, apart from what CIA and other agency connections that Meta has and agencies that Meta is officially owned and controlled by, like how Ycombinator is likely owned and controlled by them.
I find it hard to care about Aaron Swartz relative to caring about stopping WW3 and nuclear war, the latter might result in many millions of deaths, or even more than that, and might bode very poorly for the chances for the human species to avoid extinction.
What I still do not understand is his suicide. But the whole thing was utterly strange to begin with, him sneaking around during the night, rejecting plea deals, having a whole lawyer team, etc. Was he harassed by CIA's/Five Eyes'/Mossad's thugs or other agencies or private companies for other reasons unrelated to the JSTOR strangeness? Wikileaks mentioned Aaron Swartz as a possible leaker after his death.
The point here is that as you stated: "you still do not understand". For those of us that have been under the thumb of the judicial system it can feel like the world is on you. We have no idea of his mental state, we have no idea of the nuance or motivation but what I do think we know is that the actions of the state here far exceeded any interpretation of what would be deemed an appropriate punishment for the said "crime" committed. What we do understand is that if he hand not been attacked by an over-zealous prosecutor there is a far greater probability he would have been able to handle the situation in a logical manner and maybe even still be here today to defend himself.
We are not asserting that any specific outcome is empirically superior to another just that given the facts of the case, it was not adjudicated fairy given what we know of similar cases.
From what I can gather from your whining, demented, selfish and mentally ill reply, you are fine with him breaking the law for apparently immoral and stupid reasons. And possibly distracting on purpose from what may have been CIA/Mossad harassment of Aaron Swartz, not for JSTOR stuff, but Wikileaks stuff.
Are you one of the thugs that harassed Aaron Swartz, or employed by the same organization as those thugs, assuming Aaron Swartz was harassed by thugs?
You are a coward; which is why you cannot use your name or identity and only feel comfortable insulting people online because it makes you feel like a big bad keyboard warrior.
I feel bad for you because not only is your argument irrational and baseless its not even entertaining. I am not one of the "thugs" that harassed him. I never met him; but I was a huge fan. I am also not employed by anyone that would participate in such things. If you had even a modicum of intelligence you would just look at my other post and easily infer as such.
I suggest you drink some water, check-in with a loved one and get some rest.
Commiserations on the abuse from that sockpuppet. Please don't let it dent your enthusiasm for the community: you are welcome, and i wish you long life and health.
Yes. 100%, the idea that we are all equal under the law is a joke.
And the worst part is that it looks that way from the perspective of the people at the top. You only understand that it's not the case if you are not among the privileged few.
So your point about "We have no idea of his mental state" is highly pertinent. I also would emphasize that he was a highly rational guy and his mental state was likely a rational consequence of his environment.
How would it help the world for Aaron Swartz to download 3.5 million research and primary source PDFs?
Example 1: antibiotic and antiviral production technology for developing countries. Even if we limit ourselves to out-of-patent molecules, the primary literature describing the discovery, production, modification and testing of life-saving antibiotics was, at the time of Aaron Swartz, largely hidden behind strict paywalls that typically were accessed through a university library subscription. Access to all that information allows countries and institutions with very limited resources to set up generic medical production pipelines for life-saving medications they couldn’t afford to import - or to become international market competitors to established interests.
Again, that’s just restricting the argument to out-of-patent products that can be generically manufactured with no legal issues. What about life-saving but patented products that are too expensive for poor countries and regions to buy on the open market? Does that added-value IP charge justify unnecessary deaths in such cases?
And about that IP - the vast majority of paywalled research literature was produced with taxpayer funds delivered via government funding agencies, and there’s a very good legal argument that this alone puts it into the public domain. If private companies want to set up Bell Labs 2.0 with no government funding and patent everything they discover, that’s their own capex risk, but just hovering around and scooping up publicly funded discoveries via exclusive licensing deals with universities and researchers makes no sense - instead, patents should be available to any citizen of the government that put up the funds, and research papers should be available to anyone.
As far as the argument that widespread distribution of the knowledge to produce antibiotic, antiviral, and other complex biomolecular products represents a biological weapons risk? Notably that’s why no LLM provider service will help develop technical protocols for antibiotics production, or insulin, or anything similar - claimed dual-use risk fears. This conveniently slows the rise of legitimate independent competition in the pharmaceutical sector, which helps if the goal is maximizing profit margins via monopoly power. Bioweapons production realistically requires nation-state or large-corporation scale resources, and the solution is not obfuscation of basic knowledge but rather international treaties, select agent rules, laboratory operation and equipment purchase licensing requirements, etc.
That’s just one sector - there are at least a dozen other examples besides biomolecular drugs of ‘how it would help the world’ to make all published research literature available to anyone with a network connection, ask any LLM to enumerate them.
"It would help the world if we force candy makers to give out candy for free!"
"Give them money in return for the candy such that they can sustain the work? No way, easier to enslave them and work them to death without compensation."
"What do you mean that there is no one interested in candy making????? Time to enslave some randos and force them to figure out how to make candy. And then repeat enslavement once they have been worked to death."
Hi @dang, the reason I've flagged this account is not this comment itself, but the extremely suspicious account with the same creation date that posted vile abuse to arionhardison.
It all started going downhill once they started calling corporations "legal persons" and gave them all the same right as people, but without all of the constraints associated with having a body.
A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't go to jail, doesn't need a visa to work in a foreign country.
Imagine if the legal system took jail off the table and people could move to any country without a visa; only fines... We'd be overrun by criminals. They'd be able to monetize these two facts easily; they'd make more than enough money from criminal activity to cover all the fines.
One could rob a bank then pay 50% of proceeds as a fine...
>It all started going downhill once they started calling corporations "legal persons" and gave them all the same right as people, but
The 1860s?
Or do you meant he royal charter companies from centuries prior?
This goes back so far that you can't even understand it.
>A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't
Corporations only exist because your government (especially if you live in Delaware) blesses them into existence. The moment that courts and government offices stopped recognizing their existence, they'd wither away like a bad dream on a sunny morning. You get that right? And yet you've never once questioned what allows them to exist. You've never challenged the government's power to create them in this manner. It'd be one thing if you decided that they should exist, and you explicitly granted your government the power to create them...
But everyone here behaves as if they were some inevitable law of physics and there's nothing to be done. Or maybe, secretly, you love corporations, and just hope that your political faction will somehow manage to wrest control and use them to your own ends. Sometimes that's what it feels like.
The root problem here is that I have no voice and have no real friends to join forces with.
At my level as a software engineer, it's impossible to make friends because everyone is trying to back-stab each other constantly. It's extremely low trust.
You can't change the laws of your country when you're so alone that you can't even trust colleagues you see every day.
I had a co-founder/friend (past tense) whose background was in HR and he wanted to build a tool to help software devs find jobs and he was telling me that referrals is the best way to get a job... I had to explain to him how cut-throat the competition is with engineers... They're not going to give referrals for people they only met online. I mean, inside the company, some colleagues are trying to sabotage or slander each other over a promotion.
Just to give an idea of my experience with referrals as a software engineer; I only provided a referral for a 'ex-colleague/friend' twice in my career; first time they literally lied and backstabbed me to my boss and didn't even join... I didn't do any referrals after that... For years... But eventually I met another engineer who was very good and a nice guy and I thought "this guy is smart and friendly and he explicitly asked me for a referral" so I gave his details to my employer... But he got cold feet and it made me look bad. So that's it, I don't do referrals anymore.
The violation of the law as practiced is that a Little Person did this and threatened a Player's profits. A Player can do what they like to another and form some kind of mutually beneficial arrangement afterward... but Schwartz did not have enough commas in his bank account to be allowed to dabble, not a single investor behind him. Nor was his goal the overriding morally correct goal of maximizing social stratification through profit seeking. He had to go. He had to be made an example of. For the system, this was personal.
I can't believe his lawyer didn't explain all of that to him? An important role for an attorney in this situation is as a counselor, to explain the actual reality and the possibilities.
The trouble with lawyers is that their quality varies tremendously but the client has very little ability to tell the difference until after it's too late.
In theory this is why they have to be licensed but in practice that consistently leads to the profession capturing the licensing board and using it for protecting the providers rather than the customers.
Here in the UK we have "Duty Solicitors", who are on-call in the police station should you need them.
Problem is, the pay out from the government for their services is atrocious, so not many are willing to go onto the list. And the ones who are, aren't the good ones.
And that's another advantage corporations have over individuals. If you break the law at scale you can afford to retain lawyers and evaluate them based on past performance.
My duty solicitor on the day of my arrest kept making comment that he believed I committed the accused offence (I didn't). Mostly because he didn't understand it it, so that's proof enough it seems.
He then sent me a letter outlining what he understood, which outright stated he believed I did it (again, I didn't). Dropped him like a hot stone when I got charged, and paid for my own. Who after some research was actually half-good.
Then the barrister I had at trial said "You'll likely go down, the judge you have is a bastard, and has sent a lot down", great..
And now when I'm trying to get some reconciliation for all this nonsense. The legal firm I hired to sue, are ignoring my instructions and went for something entirely different and offering a whopping £1000 compensation.
the sentences that US courts dream up around digital offences are absolutely obscene and seem to only exist as a means of coercion. However because they're still technically real and it feels disgusting.
The prosecution offered 6 months in low security in a plea deal.
He had been mass downloading and evading them at MIT for months until he had MIT and FBI involved and was finally caught on camera.
I bring this up because A. maximum exposure to charges are rarely applied but makes great headlines for outrage and B. the plea deal seems reasonable to someone who was unreasonably persistent in the details of the case.
> The prosecution offered 6 months in low security in a plea deal.
That's the racket. Getting any jailtime for "mass downloading" is a severe penalty, but that gets turned into the carrot because the stick is so unreasonably disproportionate.
> turned into the carrot because the stick is so unreasonably disproportionate.
John Kiriakou talks often about his own lawyers showing up at his house to convince him to take the deal. And then ending up in a higher security prison.
I think it is the criminal record. Other places in the world, once you've served your time you can often go right back to living. Not that it is easy but it doesn't hang over you.
In the US, once you have a criminal record - any criminal record - there are flow on effects that keep fucking with you for life.
>Basically, being a rich public company provides legal advantages when the US government has similar goals.
This has always been the case. It's why lots of us who came up in the 80s and 90s embraced the "fuck corporations" and "information wants to be free" zeitgeist of the times.
It's also why the corporate bootlicking on this site is so grating at times. IDK, maybe I'm the only one but it seems like the veneer has worn off and over the last couple years I've realized HN is "special", not because of the reasons its proponents will recite but because it's where you come to post about the interesting technical challenges you solved while designing a system that goes down to the corner store and buys Hitler a pack of his favorite smokes and everyone laps that up.
While this sounds good in theory, I suspect the actual result would be much worse for justice in most cases. With the corporation acting as its own legal entity, if you are wronged, you sue and obtain justice from the corporation. If instead you needed to sue each and every shareholder to obtain their share of the liabilities, you'd likely spend many more years in court as each individual owner argues why they aren't personally liable for the given act because they didn't have knowledge, or control over the specific chain of events that caused you harm, and the courts have to sort out each individual case.
I think you missed the point: you can still take damages from the corporation, but if corporation cannot provide them (bankrupcy), owners are held liable for them instead. This is how non-LLC companies are treated.
The instrument of Limited Liability exists to encourage business formation and risk taking for small businesses to kick off.
The way large corporations and rich individuals would structure their projects into a number of corporation-owned LLCs is an obvious gap being addressed in law systems throughout the world.
That would make everyone who has a 401K, IRA, mutual fund, ETF or stocks liable for every action made by the companies invested in. That would be insane.
I am not making a judgement call, merely describing what the GP meant.
I do believe it is not as clear cut though — taking it to an extreme, imagine you directly invested in Epstein's sexual abuse business but only as minority owner. Should you be held liable or not? Now let's extend that to a pyramid scheme lending business. Or a company using child labour? When can we claim immunity and when not?
the question is why should a legal fiction defy the natural liability. It is perhaps an example of 'common law' versus 'civil law'. A judge may find there is no personal responsibility of the shareholders for some crime, but the CEO is, but the shareholders, being partial owners of the business of course need to drum up the dollars to make a situation right be it a lemonade stand of a billion dollar corporation. As for claiming immunity, I don't see why you should not be responsible for the actions of a company that you own and use to make profit.
Who was it ? The ^US government^ .. or for that matter, any government or corporation doesn't pursue litigation. It is humans who make this decision (at least for now ...).
Who in the government bureaucracy made the decision and followed through? It's sad that we've become accustomed to accept governments/corporations as entities by themselves when they clearly aren't.
> There was little for the government to lose in the case. In a case vs Meta, at the scale it has reached, it could have wide ranging economic implications limiting the investment in AI, which the US is absolutely not willing to pursue at this point in time (or possibly ever).
"...there's no way a group of billionaires can control the Politburo, as billionaires control American policy making. So in China, you have a vibrant market economy but capital does not rise above political authority. Capital does not have enshrined rights. In America, the interest of capital and capital itself has risen above the American nation. Political authority cannot check the power of capital. That's why America is capitalist country, but China is not." [1]
I mean he was arrested initially not for the material downloaded but the fact that he, not an MIT student, was found hiding in a facilities closet with his laptop hooked into the network.
I get that MIT's police were meant to join him in a chorus of "Information wants to be free", but let's not act like it's unreasonable to want someone arrested or prosecuted who was not authorized to be in an equipment closet with their computer wired into a switch.
In many cases it's "all about the money" (and the lawyers). Take the case of Billionaire hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen of SAC Capital Advisors who was famously pursued by federal prosecutors as their ultimate "white whale" in a massive insider trading probe. Though his firm pleaded guilty and paid a record $1.8 billion fine, Cohen himself was never criminally charged or convicted. Yet two lower underlings were convicted and served time (the 2 fall guys).
An "Army of lawyers", no less than 6 top lawyers appeared in the courtroom that day representing Cohen (he did not appear), as a "shot across the bow" message to the US Government that Cohen was prepared to spend a vast sum of his wealth to defend himself and make it a huge undertaking for the government if they wished to proceed.
Lawyers present for Cohen:
Peter Nussbaum: SAC Capital's General Counsel, who entered the plea.
Martin Klotz: Partner at Willkie Farr & Gallagher and Cohen's personal attorney.
Michael Schachter, Daniel Kramer, and Michael Gertzman: Senior litigation partners assisting the defense.
Because the defense consisted of prominent partners from multiple top-tier firms simultaneously, analysts famously calculated that the collective group was costing SAC Capital roughly $10,000 an hour (mere pocket change for a successful hedge fund guy).
Owner of the New York Mets now, by the way, which maybe non-sports following readers will be happy to hear remain a boondoggle. He tried very hard to spend his way to glory, leading the league in payroll at the beginning of the 2025 season, only to crash and burn and end up in last place this season.
the government is made up of the people. the people are mostly greedy because our culture worships wealth. broken people, broken culture, broken government.
Meta's bots are spectatularly awful, and if your organisation needs to use facebook advertising, they're also unblockable. There are ways around it that doesn't exactly block them but does clearly communicate they should GTFO, but it just shows you what an awful company Meta is.
This is the (John Perkin's coined term) "Corporatocracy" at work.
If you want to know how and why it is like this, read Perkin's books (atm I'm reading "The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man"). It's why Meta will not get sued but Aaron was, and it is why ships are now lining up in front of the Panama canal paying as much as 400k for a crossing with little of that wealth making it to the people of Panama.
Under capitalism money and power are inextricably linked. Your influence in a democracy is tied directly to your access to capital.
This is why expensive elections are are desire of those funding Super-pacs. The more elections cost, the fewer people decide them.
Aaron didn’t matter because he was poor. Had he been named Musk, or Zuckerberg, he would suffer the consequences they do when they break the law which is zero.
This is how capitalism is supposed to work and does.
You can’t have capitalism is being rich doesn’t confer privilege in every area including the legal system. It’s why American oligarch can safely “ask forgiveness not permission”. The risk to them personally is nil.
If you cut down a couple acres of forest you own because you want to have a hay field or whatever you're <screech> violating federal environmental law <screech>
But BigCo can grease a few palms and do 10x more and the useful idiots will screech about how responsible they're being by installing those stupid stream spreader things o their parking lot culverts and putting up a few birdhouses to please the local comissioer.
B2B crime ought to be handled in a gentlemanly way through litigation. C2B crime deserves the full weight of the law and prison consequences. United Health killing people by denying coverage for care is OK. Luigi killing one of the executives is not.
This country's lack of death panels is one of the biggest contributors to our heinously overpriced healthcare system. Insurers stopping doctors from prescribing shit that doesnt work is literally the only thing keeping costs down in the entire system.
Ah yes. Those health insurance companies are doing God’s working protecting us all. They have no part in why our system is heinously overpriced as you put it.
Of course there are plenty of complaints to be made about insurers. The death panels aren’t one of them though. Mangione had a horrible, incurable back issue, and wanted an expensive experimental treatment that wouldn’t work. It was good that he was told no, if only to stop him from getting his hopes up. The rest of us not getting scammed is nice too.
No complaints from me about for profit insurance companies withholding treatment. They are doing the Lord’s work. We need them. Stephen Helmsley deserves more than $61 million a year.
Everyone is under the illusion that the US is still a democracy. It is not. It is a plutocracy. The rich control everything and the rest are modern day serfs.
USA never was a democracy, same as many other countries, including UK.
These are two party states, the people are given two polarising choices and can only choose one. Party 1 gets in and does what the deep-state says, then people get angry and vote Part 2. Party 1 changes leader and says we are better now.
Party 2 does what the deep-state wants, and people run back to Party 1.
It's an illusion of choice. There is no democracy.
The US has normalized so much moral rot and legal breaches in the past few years, all in the interest of making more money... Rarely does a country degrade so much, so fast, and I'm afraid this isn't even the low mark.
The real shame is that the next "best" countries are.. China? and the European countries pushing for age verification and sweeping surveillance and apparently bent on destroying the freedoms that made them better than China & Russia..
Age verification isn’t moral rot even if you disagree with it. The rot is the obvious corruption and legal system that only applies to average people which billionaires constantly violate.
I do not think we need that. With Climate Change a huge reckoning and leveling is coming. The way things look now, in 50 to 100 years there is a very good chance this civilization will probably come to an end.
As for Aaron, I hope the people who went after him can be sued for wrongful death. With meta doing the exact same thing, even to the same MIT Sites, I think a case exist.
> They did 100,000,000 forced abortions, killed tens of thousands of their own people and covered it up.
lmao have you realized how absurd such numbers are (even though I'd assume the 100,000,000 can only be a hyperbole, or are you actually serious with it? Having a single child policy for a long while is not the same as "forced abortion" if that's what you're referring to. The thing called "contraceptives" exists) if you use your common sense for just a second?
Seems that it's you who got fed a lot of propaganda unfortunately.
And yes there have been a lot of disasters throughout the history, even not so long ago (e.g. Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution etc.), but if you're suggesting that's what the current regime is doing in 2026, you have no clue.
It hasn't degraded in such a short time, this rot has been there for 30 odd years. Infrasture, systemic corruption to an unprecedented level (it's always there, but the scale is different), etc.
What happened 'so fast' was how fast they pulled off the mask. 10 years and it's practically off in its entirety...
As someone who was around during Reagan, you are correct. The turn happened in the 80s, and then rapidly accelerated in the 90s and 2000s, then rapidly accelerated again in the past 10 years.
I think a lot of folks are stuck on the idea that it's been a singular bad actor -- a Trump, or a McConnell or something. This "Great Man Theory" is almost certainly a very naive read of the systems that are leading to this moment.
Ok and so what? We have been informed of an injustice, we are now angry. Now what? What do we want? Do we agree that the prosecution was unjust and wrong, celebrate that Meta is not being criminally prosecuted, lash out at the publishers filing the lawsuit and advocate for an official apology from the prosecutors and government that went after Aaron?
Or do we think that the prosecution was correct, apologize ourselves for any protests we might have voiced against the prosecution and demand similar prosecution of Meta and everyone who continues to torrent “Linux ISOs”?
Personally I agree that the prosecution was unjust, and so I find it to be a good thing that the stranglehold of excessive copyright is being weakened by the new AI moment. But that also why I find the sudden turn to copyright maximalism that seems to have taken over large parts of the tech industry so baffling. Why are we wasting our time pretending we want Meta prosecuted rather than spending our efforts ensuring that all these products that come out of this massive blending of human creative outputs are owned collectively by us all with no such recourse to the same copyright laws that they so valiantly shattered?
I think the point is to make corporate decision-makers bear some personal responsibility for the consequences of decisions made in pursuit of profit, growth or dominance. If all the upside is personal or corporate while the legal and social costs are simply externalised, there is very little incentive for restraint, no?
As to the latter, I think a mixture of commodification and the almost Pavlovian conditioning produced by corporate social media explains both its attraction and its resilience in the face of more democratic and emancipatory alternatives.
> I think the point is to make corporate decision-makers bear some personal responsibility for the consequences of decisions made in pursuit of profit, growth or dominance. If all the upside is personal or corporate while the legal and social costs are simply externalised, there is very little incentive for restraint, no?
But what is the actual actionable result we want? That's what I'm asking. There's a lot of anger around all of this, and this isn't the first time we've seen this comparison to Aaron Swartz in all the discourse around that. But these sorts of angry "look at the hypocrisy" rants all seem very muddled in what they're asking for. Because on the one hand they're saying that this prosecution was an injustice and should never have happened, but on the other hand they seem to be asking for similar prosecutions and consequences in different cases where the defendant isn't as popular or likable. When we say we want Zuckerberg to "bear some personal responsibility for the consequences" in respect to meta potentially violating copyright, are we asking for him to be prosecuted like Swartz was? Are we asking for him to be personally sued by publishers instead of them suing Meta? And what is the outcome from this "personal responsibility" that we want? If we're asking for him to be prosecuted, are we asking for that because we actually think he should be convicted, and thus also saying we think Swartz' prosecution was justified? Or are we wanting prosecution for something we don't actually think is a crime, because we want to inflict some form of indirect and symbolic revenge on Zuckerberg for the multitude of other reasons we don't like him?
We should absolutely invoke the injustice that was the Swartz prosecution. What I don't think we should be doing is invoking it as some sort of vague demand for more prosecutions of that type against "the right people".
Aaron Swartz's most famous book recommendation, in a now 20 years old blogpost (
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany ), Chomsky's Understanding Power, contains many examples of such cases of those in power, big corporations and the government getting away with crimes. I should probably reread it, even though it can be depressing - but not quite as depressing as Manufacturing Consent.
Calling him "effectively assassinated" is ridiculous.
He was offered a plea deal of 6 months in jail. Which he turned down. And then he killed himself - something which he attempted multiple times in the past when he wasn't being prosecuted for anything
I don't think it matters much for the argument, which is valid (or not) regardless of whether you get the precise facts about the Swartz prosecution right, but Swartz was not facing 35 years. That's the statutory maximum sentence you'd get if you ignored the sentencing guidelines and grouped none of the charges, which is not how anything works. The prosecutors threatening Swartz and his attorneys claimed they'd pursue something like 7 years. But Swartz's own (well regarded, well qualified) attorney, writing after his death, when there was ample reason to take shots at the prosecution, believed that even had Swartz lost the case, he'd be unlikely to receive a custodial sentence.
I bristle as well when essays like this state that he "was effectively assassinated by our legal system"
While I think there are a lot of good arguments that the prosecution was excessive and meant to create a chilling effect, it is a huge leap to say they assassinated him. He was clearly already vulnerable when this happened, or he would have never resorted to taking his own life when there were still so many avenues before him to try to get out of the situation. While this does not make it any less tragic, it does make it a lot less of an 'assassination'.
I don't find it rhetorically useful to use language like that in these situations. It distracts from the real issues at hand.
It's completely illegitimate to say he was "assassinated". Words mean things, and unless the government sent someone who personally killed Aaron, it wasn't an assassination. That doesn't mean what happened to him was right. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't care about the situation. But one doesn't get to misuse a word where it doesn't apply just to make a rhetorical flourish.
Also, Aaron was pals with some of the brightest people in tech and law. I have a hard time imagining that they didn't try to ease his stress by pointing out that 35 was just the typical bluster.
Swartz was federally charged with wire fraud and violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act based on allegedly unauthorized access, not simply prosecuted for copyright infringement or “downloading articles.” Also, he was offered a plea deal of 6 months and his own attorneys did not expect him to serve any time even if rejecting the plea deal and convicted.
As someone, who was wrongly accused of a crime, and had to go to court over it. I can relate, I was massively suicidal, made a whole plan and stockpiled what was required to do it. I was having vivid dreams of even more extreme ways I could go about it.
As you can tell that never happened, but at the same time I always argue in comment sections over his case, as people so wildly misrepresent what happened to their own gains. Especially the fact he willingly and continuingly went around blockers put in place to stop the activity from happening, even after being caught.
The best state of affairs is that neither Aaron nor Meta nor anyone else should be targeted for scraping. It shouldn't be a crime. I understand the ire about the injustice, but I don't think the right situation is that because Aaron's case was wrongly pursued, we should somehow enforce that error in the name of consistency.
He wasn’t prosecuted for scraping. He trespassed into a room with a router, plugged his laptop into it, downloaded papers as quickly as possible, and then rotated his MAC address to dodge the bans that the admin was trying to place on him. That’s very different from downloading a webpage on the open internet.
I’m not saying he should or shouldn’t have been prosecuted, but there’s some kind of rose tinted glasses filter around what happened with Aaron, like he just was browsing the web and was suddenly prosecuted. He repeatedly broke in to a physical room and kept changing his MAC address to dodge bans. At least report it with its full context.
Trespassing into a closet and changing MAC addresses is barely grounds for any prosecution. Does it make you feel less powerless to throw Aaron further under the bus? Sort of like a Roko’s basilisk for billionaires. They won’t spare you if you shill for them, you know.
Maybe, but the prosecution that most people would say lead to his decision to end his life was from abuse of the MIT network over months until they had him on video.
The rate of JSTOR content retrieved from MIT was a separate contract issue.
Yeah, intent matters. Evading security matters. It's a big point that his actions were intentional and not passive or accidental - not that IP infringement by corporations isn't its own discussion.
Torrents are openly accessible, even if .gov might enable infringement claims by the rights-holder. They're not hacking into networks.
Changing your IP isn't a crime, even if it has the effect of making attribution to Meta more difficult.
The thing with Aaron was that it went on for months to the point JSTOR's complaints had activated MIT's organizational antibodies, let's say, and the IS department was turned loose to investigate repeatedly. They went to the trouble of upgrading their load balancers and traffic analysis to narrow it down and installed a camera. At that point, the hook was firmly set and with digital and video evidence, the Secret Service had him red-handed abusing MIT.
Keep in mind the thing that spiraled out of control was how Aaron (mis)used MIT resources persistently and with overwhelming evidence - in the end, the civil part with JSTOR was largely irrelevant. MIT called in the big guns with the FBI and Secret Service, and they ate it up. I'm not arguing in favor of it, I'm just familiar with the zeal they bring once they get on a trail.
No, but they do drastically change how people should judge his actions vs someone who simply downloaded some documents that were served on an open web server. OP didn't say "it's ok if a corporation does that", he said that Aaron's actions were more serious than people commonly make them out to be.
So what's the maximum penalty for trespassing? The prosecution was looking for a disproportionate sentence
About technical countermeasures to evade blocking.. you realize that everybody that does scraping at a large scale employs those, right? Including Meta
Specially nowadays where large swaths of the web is behind captchas
If it was charged as trespassing, not something higher like burglary, then the level of his trespass was probably the lowest misdemeanor. Usually trespass is a sliding scale starting with a warning not to return.
Being that it was on a campus, they can sometimes use that as an aggravating factor. I remember one case where a homeless person had a key for a vending machine and took out $30 in quarters, but since the land the vending machine was on was owned by a university he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. One of the few cases that got reversed for a constitutionally exceptional sentence.
Amusing, but a long string of rogue cyber intrusions coupled with Jstor blocking MIT altogether a few times isn’t something to ignore. Hard to imagine just ignoring the risks and potential of that unknown.
MIT and Jstor had a bunch of incident response going on, and it isn’t a leap to consider Jstor would cut them off for good if the situation went unresolved.
Why do you seem so desperate to characterize Aaron as some amoral super-spy hacker? His ethics are well known. He took issue with Jstor's business model of gatekeeping tax-payer-funded research behind another pay wall, stole some articles, got caught, settled with jstor and MIT. Life could have gone on.
The OP's blog post is about how the law isn't applied equally in the United States. Aaron was an individual and an easy target for the overzealous prosecutor. Meta's a faceless corporation, guilty in the court of public opinion, and they don't even get a timely investigation because they have the money to tie up the broken legal system indefinitely.
Aaron was an example - if you're small enough, you will be caught, tried, and punished in whatever way we see fit to prove that the justice system "works". If you're a billionaire, do whatever you want winkwink.
> and then rotated his MAC address to dodge the bans that the admin was trying to place on him
And corporate scrapers never ever use proxy pools to rotate IPs to evade throttling and blacklisting. Meta is also scraping illegal content, such as pirated books. So I'm not sure what your argument is.
The difference here is that the scientific papers he downloaded weren't freely available to the public, like those scraped webpages would be. Corporate scrapers have been sued[0] in the past for scraping pages from behind a login page / paywall.
A room with an unlocked and unmarked door, off of a hallway that was open to the general public. An INCREDIBLY tame act compared to other unprosecuted trespasses normalized and celebrated at https://hacks.mit.edu/.
> rotated his MAC address
Not a crime; in fact now a widespread and default practice for consumer Wi-Fi/Bluetooth devices.
I'm not sure if this is meant as some kind of "gotcha," but the legal system doesn't work that way. He wasn't rotating his MAC address as a default practice. He changed the last byte of his MAC only when he noticed he was banned from the network.
Intent matters. Plugging your laptop into a router you normally don't have access to, with intent to download a large number of private articles, means something. And it means more than "I downloaded a lot of public files off the public internet," which is what Meta did.
Personally I think it's a shame that digital crimes can result in prison time at all, except for e.g. crypto theft. But under US law, Aaron committed a crime back then, and it would still classify as a crime today.
> JSTOR,founded in 1995, was and continued to be a United States-based, not-for-profit organization that provides an online system for archiving and providing access to academic journal.
If it was online, could any one have access to it? So why him downloading them was breaking the law?
You are greatly underestimating what was going on.
Over the course of months they tried all kinds of blocking methods that would stop most people, but he kept evading them. It is impossible that he did not know his use of the free access was no longer authorized.
Then he put his equipment on their wired network, which he had no permission to do so and had to trespass to do that. It is irrelevant that the door was unlocked and in a hallway the public could get to. It being unmarked just makes it worse, since doors the public is supposed to use generally are marked.
He also repeatedly came back to that room to check his equipment.
He was now grabbing data at such a high rate that JSTOR cut off all MIT JSTOR access for a few days while they tried to figure out what do next.
At that point MIT research is being disrupted. MIT does a lot of government research and what was going on was indistinguishable at that point from a hostile attack, and police were called.
Thank you. It's absurd that we are comparing breaking into MIT and (physically) breaking into a network with scraping the web and scanning physical books.
To me his crime is the equivalent of sneaking into a public library with a photocopier and copying down books without having a library card. It is not and should not be that serious. Is it annoying? Yes. Should he have gotten in a bit of trouble? Sure. But nothing like what he was charged with or dealt with. They hammered down serious law on this guy for what should of at worse been a petty crime.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 87.7 ms ] threadThey can then do one of two things. They can either continue running it if it’s in the interests of justice to do so (public interest, reasonable prospects of success etc), or they can shut it down, as they tend to do for sovereign citizen bullshit.
This is what happens when they do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
> Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 subpostmasters were wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on faulty Horizon data, with about 700 of these prosecutions carried out by the Post Office. Other subpostmasters were prosecuted but not convicted, forced to cover illusory shortfalls caused by Horizon with their own money, or had their contracts terminated. The court cases, criminal convictions, imprisonments, loss of livelihoods and homes, debts, and bankruptcies led to stress, illness and family breakdowns, and were linked to at least thirteen suicides.
Hundreds of innocent people went to prison, were financially ruined, thirteen took their own life, because a well-funded entity found it easier to privately prosecute its contractors than to question its software vendor. And the court system let them do it.
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/fujitsu-allowed-bid-govern...
Also, it's important to note that Fujitsu didn't prosecute anyone, they just lied to the Post Office, lied to subpostmasters, remotely altered evidence, gave false testimony in court, etc. It was the Post Office itself that prosecuted its subpostmasters.
> Second, this Article demonstrates that the government monopoly on prosecution is an ideology rather than a rule. As it turns out, the government has never had total control over criminal law enforcement—not even exclusive authority to charge someone with a crime. While some courts prohibited private prosecution in the nineteenth century, others refused to abolish the practice. Public prosecutions of felonies and federal offenses became the norm in the progressive era, but private prosecution persisted in various forms. Particularly in “lowly” municipal courts, private individuals retained the ability to file and litigate criminal cases.
-- The Past and Persistence of Private Prosecution, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5210126
It was less bizarre when they were all private companies, but now many are owned by the government!
Some of them have successfully prosecuted people over a £0 difference in fare
There was little for the government to lose in the case. In a case vs Meta, at the scale it has reached, it could have wide ranging economic implications limiting the investment in AI, which the US is absolutely not willing to pursue at this point in time (or possibly ever).
Basically, being a rich public company provides legal advantages when the US government has similar goals.
The whole thing is incredibly sad and exposes the hypocrisy of the US court system and government as a whole.
RIP Aaron.
The case ultimately did not help her in her run for governor of MA.
Reminds me of Marx's 1870 letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_...The real issue is selective enforcement of the law. If it applied equally to everyone, then more people would be outraged as it affected them.
Reality should always have a place in the law.
Edit: should have said 'poor tax'
The law is sufficiently complex and broad that there is essentially zero chance that you are not breaking a single one each day. The rich have gotten so powerful that can literally evade the consequences forever in most cases. For the rest of us, all we can hope is to avoid the scrutiny of the law.
Can’t remember where I read that but it has stuck with me.
The credo of the corrupt, courtesy of General Benavides
In order to do this you need to have laws that are designed to be reasonable for people to actually follow instead of laws that are designed to allow prosecutors to find a violation whenever they want to.
Actually enforcing them would create pressure to do that, but it would also create pressure to go back to selective enforcement when powerful people object to being subjected to the unreasonableness of existing laws.
A better solution might be to make a showing of selective enforcement a means to strike down a law. If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged then the prosecution either has to charge them too or that law is struck down and no one can be charged with it anymore.
Then instead of the incentive not to charge powerful people creating pressure for selective enforcement, the same incentive creates pressure to strike down the laws that can't reasonably be uniformly enforced.
It's unlikely people would have enough evidence of high enough quality to make that case. The prosecution will just say the evidence isn't enough.
You'll also get some nice incentives where the government will be arguing that a particular behavior is not a violation of the law so they don't have to charge someone they don't want to, which in turn leaves you with that precedent if the judge agrees with them and then they want to charge someone else for doing that later.
And lest people think this is a one way street, each side thinks the other deserves interpreting the law to “get the real baddies.”
As applied needs to be changed so that it can be included in setting precedent and when considering the norms given out for punishment because right now it's highly abused to allow outcomes for just select special people different than the 'blind justice' outcome for everyone else.
I’ve often thought this about laws involving speed limits. When 95% of the people driving in a major downtown area are technically breaking the law, what is the purpose of the law but to target whoever you like then? Either enforce it unilaterally or come up with new laws.
How would it help the world for Aaron Swartz to download 3.5 million research and primary source PDFs, and illegally sneak into off-limits areas during night time, PDFs that presumably could have been downloaded by anyone legally by paying for access? If the goal was gratis access for all citizens, why not instead campaign lawfully for a change in research and information sharing practices generally, or for the state or federation to subsidize gratis access to the articles for the public? Why was theft a moral imperative, especially when the public could access material for a fee? If the goal was for the public good, why not figure out a legal way to do it? If it requires money to make something like JSTOR work, why not have the state fund it, or have the state run a competing service? Or make a competing private company?
The previous motivation for the stuff with PACER arguably made way more sense, though that was peculiar to begin with.
Did Aaron Swartz not at least try to think about or ask about why JSTOR costs money, and why competitors seemingly had not gotten as popular? Did he not care, including how JSTOR can be argued to have benefits to scientific research? Was his conscience just an act?
Aaron Swartz was part of Reddit, and Reddit in the early days lured people in with free articles, but that would not require 3.5 million PDFs to do, only a few, so I do not consider theories about that kind of motive credible.
The book and more being thrown at him was way too harsh, but there was a plea deal at the very least.
Meta should of course be prosecuted as well, but the LLM/AI craze is rather insane and manipulative to start with, and also promoted by Ycombinator and bots here. And there are presumably no people hired by Meta sneaking into places during the night, apart from what CIA and other agency connections that Meta has and agencies that Meta is officially owned and controlled by, like how Ycombinator is likely owned and controlled by them.
I find it hard to care about Aaron Swartz relative to caring about stopping WW3 and nuclear war, the latter might result in many millions of deaths, or even more than that, and might bode very poorly for the chances for the human species to avoid extinction.
What I still do not understand is his suicide. But the whole thing was utterly strange to begin with, him sneaking around during the night, rejecting plea deals, having a whole lawyer team, etc. Was he harassed by CIA's/Five Eyes'/Mossad's thugs or other agencies or private companies for other reasons unrelated to the JSTOR strangeness? Wikileaks mentioned Aaron Swartz as a possible leaker after his death.
We are not asserting that any specific outcome is empirically superior to another just that given the facts of the case, it was not adjudicated fairy given what we know of similar cases.
Are you one of the thugs that harassed Aaron Swartz, or employed by the same organization as those thugs, assuming Aaron Swartz was harassed by thugs?
I feel bad for you because not only is your argument irrational and baseless its not even entertaining. I am not one of the "thugs" that harassed him. I never met him; but I was a huge fan. I am also not employed by anyone that would participate in such things. If you had even a modicum of intelligence you would just look at my other post and easily infer as such.
I suggest you drink some water, check-in with a loved one and get some rest.
Be well.
And the worst part is that it looks that way from the perspective of the people at the top. You only understand that it's not the case if you are not among the privileged few.
So your point about "We have no idea of his mental state" is highly pertinent. I also would emphasize that he was a highly rational guy and his mental state was likely a rational consequence of his environment.
Example 1: antibiotic and antiviral production technology for developing countries. Even if we limit ourselves to out-of-patent molecules, the primary literature describing the discovery, production, modification and testing of life-saving antibiotics was, at the time of Aaron Swartz, largely hidden behind strict paywalls that typically were accessed through a university library subscription. Access to all that information allows countries and institutions with very limited resources to set up generic medical production pipelines for life-saving medications they couldn’t afford to import - or to become international market competitors to established interests.
Again, that’s just restricting the argument to out-of-patent products that can be generically manufactured with no legal issues. What about life-saving but patented products that are too expensive for poor countries and regions to buy on the open market? Does that added-value IP charge justify unnecessary deaths in such cases?
And about that IP - the vast majority of paywalled research literature was produced with taxpayer funds delivered via government funding agencies, and there’s a very good legal argument that this alone puts it into the public domain. If private companies want to set up Bell Labs 2.0 with no government funding and patent everything they discover, that’s their own capex risk, but just hovering around and scooping up publicly funded discoveries via exclusive licensing deals with universities and researchers makes no sense - instead, patents should be available to any citizen of the government that put up the funds, and research papers should be available to anyone.
As far as the argument that widespread distribution of the knowledge to produce antibiotic, antiviral, and other complex biomolecular products represents a biological weapons risk? Notably that’s why no LLM provider service will help develop technical protocols for antibiotics production, or insulin, or anything similar - claimed dual-use risk fears. This conveniently slows the rise of legitimate independent competition in the pharmaceutical sector, which helps if the goal is maximizing profit margins via monopoly power. Bioweapons production realistically requires nation-state or large-corporation scale resources, and the solution is not obfuscation of basic knowledge but rather international treaties, select agent rules, laboratory operation and equipment purchase licensing requirements, etc.
That’s just one sector - there are at least a dozen other examples besides biomolecular drugs of ‘how it would help the world’ to make all published research literature available to anyone with a network connection, ask any LLM to enumerate them.
"Give them money in return for the candy such that they can sustain the work? No way, easier to enslave them and work them to death without compensation."
"What do you mean that there is no one interested in candy making????? Time to enslave some randos and force them to figure out how to make candy. And then repeat enslavement once they have been worked to death."
A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't go to jail, doesn't need a visa to work in a foreign country.
Imagine if the legal system took jail off the table and people could move to any country without a visa; only fines... We'd be overrun by criminals. They'd be able to monetize these two facts easily; they'd make more than enough money from criminal activity to cover all the fines.
One could rob a bank then pay 50% of proceeds as a fine...
The 1860s?
Or do you meant he royal charter companies from centuries prior?
This goes back so far that you can't even understand it.
>A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't
Corporations only exist because your government (especially if you live in Delaware) blesses them into existence. The moment that courts and government offices stopped recognizing their existence, they'd wither away like a bad dream on a sunny morning. You get that right? And yet you've never once questioned what allows them to exist. You've never challenged the government's power to create them in this manner. It'd be one thing if you decided that they should exist, and you explicitly granted your government the power to create them...
But everyone here behaves as if they were some inevitable law of physics and there's nothing to be done. Or maybe, secretly, you love corporations, and just hope that your political faction will somehow manage to wrest control and use them to your own ends. Sometimes that's what it feels like.
At my level as a software engineer, it's impossible to make friends because everyone is trying to back-stab each other constantly. It's extremely low trust.
You can't change the laws of your country when you're so alone that you can't even trust colleagues you see every day.
I had a co-founder/friend (past tense) whose background was in HR and he wanted to build a tool to help software devs find jobs and he was telling me that referrals is the best way to get a job... I had to explain to him how cut-throat the competition is with engineers... They're not going to give referrals for people they only met online. I mean, inside the company, some colleagues are trying to sabotage or slander each other over a promotion.
Just to give an idea of my experience with referrals as a software engineer; I only provided a referral for a 'ex-colleague/friend' twice in my career; first time they literally lied and backstabbed me to my boss and didn't even join... I didn't do any referrals after that... For years... But eventually I met another engineer who was very good and a nice guy and I thought "this guy is smart and friendly and he explicitly asked me for a referral" so I gave his details to my employer... But he got cold feet and it made me look bad. So that's it, I don't do referrals anymore.
In theory this is why they have to be licensed but in practice that consistently leads to the profession capturing the licensing board and using it for protecting the providers rather than the customers.
Problem is, the pay out from the government for their services is atrocious, so not many are willing to go onto the list. And the ones who are, aren't the good ones.
My duty solicitor on the day of my arrest kept making comment that he believed I committed the accused offence (I didn't). Mostly because he didn't understand it it, so that's proof enough it seems.
He then sent me a letter outlining what he understood, which outright stated he believed I did it (again, I didn't). Dropped him like a hot stone when I got charged, and paid for my own. Who after some research was actually half-good.
Then the barrister I had at trial said "You'll likely go down, the judge you have is a bastard, and has sent a lot down", great..
And now when I'm trying to get some reconciliation for all this nonsense. The legal firm I hired to sue, are ignoring my instructions and went for something entirely different and offering a whopping £1000 compensation.
My legal costs alone were many times that
The prosecution offered 6 months in low security in a plea deal.
He had been mass downloading and evading them at MIT for months until he had MIT and FBI involved and was finally caught on camera.
I bring this up because A. maximum exposure to charges are rarely applied but makes great headlines for outrage and B. the plea deal seems reasonable to someone who was unreasonably persistent in the details of the case.
That's the racket. Getting any jailtime for "mass downloading" is a severe penalty, but that gets turned into the carrot because the stick is so unreasonably disproportionate.
John Kiriakou talks often about his own lawyers showing up at his house to convince him to take the deal. And then ending up in a higher security prison.
https://youtu.be/b-wc8tRNoJk?t=980 Has some context around what went down with him going to jail in case one is unaware.
I think it is the criminal record. Other places in the world, once you've served your time you can often go right back to living. Not that it is easy but it doesn't hang over you.
In the US, once you have a criminal record - any criminal record - there are flow on effects that keep fucking with you for life.
SWATing is "digital" but leads to very real death
This has always been the case. It's why lots of us who came up in the 80s and 90s embraced the "fuck corporations" and "information wants to be free" zeitgeist of the times.
It's also why the corporate bootlicking on this site is so grating at times. IDK, maybe I'm the only one but it seems like the veneer has worn off and over the last couple years I've realized HN is "special", not because of the reasons its proponents will recite but because it's where you come to post about the interesting technical challenges you solved while designing a system that goes down to the corner store and buys Hitler a pack of his favorite smokes and everyone laps that up.
An alternative would be the CEO to be the “legal person” of each Corp. and be the one against all legal actions should be targeted.
In that case it would Zack himself the one facing any legal action.
A Corp’s actions result to the death of a person. CEO should be trialed as if they were the one driving the car.
The instrument of Limited Liability exists to encourage business formation and risk taking for small businesses to kick off.
The way large corporations and rich individuals would structure their projects into a number of corporation-owned LLCs is an obvious gap being addressed in law systems throughout the world.
I do believe it is not as clear cut though — taking it to an extreme, imagine you directly invested in Epstein's sexual abuse business but only as minority owner. Should you be held liable or not? Now let's extend that to a pyramid scheme lending business. Or a company using child labour? When can we claim immunity and when not?
Who in the government bureaucracy made the decision and followed through? It's sad that we've become accustomed to accept governments/corporations as entities by themselves when they clearly aren't.
"...there's no way a group of billionaires can control the Politburo, as billionaires control American policy making. So in China, you have a vibrant market economy but capital does not rise above political authority. Capital does not have enshrined rights. In America, the interest of capital and capital itself has risen above the American nation. Political authority cannot check the power of capital. That's why America is capitalist country, but China is not." [1]
[1] https://xcancel.com/thouse_opinions/status/15380991993586851...
MIT then helped the criminal prosecution even after JSTOR settled with him.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/mit-aarons-swartz-case...
I get that MIT's police were meant to join him in a chorus of "Information wants to be free", but let's not act like it's unreasonable to want someone arrested or prosecuted who was not authorized to be in an equipment closet with their computer wired into a switch.
https://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.p...
An "Army of lawyers", no less than 6 top lawyers appeared in the courtroom that day representing Cohen (he did not appear), as a "shot across the bow" message to the US Government that Cohen was prepared to spend a vast sum of his wealth to defend himself and make it a huge undertaking for the government if they wished to proceed.
Lawyers present for Cohen:
Peter Nussbaum: SAC Capital's General Counsel, who entered the plea.
Theodore "Ted" Wells Jr.: Renowned partner from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
Martin Klotz: Partner at Willkie Farr & Gallagher and Cohen's personal attorney.
Michael Schachter, Daniel Kramer, and Michael Gertzman: Senior litigation partners assisting the defense.
Because the defense consisted of prominent partners from multiple top-tier firms simultaneously, analysts famously calculated that the collective group was costing SAC Capital roughly $10,000 an hour (mere pocket change for a successful hedge fund guy).
Owner of the New York Mets now, by the way, which maybe non-sports following readers will be happy to hear remain a boondoggle. He tried very hard to spend his way to glory, leading the league in payroll at the beginning of the 2025 season, only to crash and burn and end up in last place this season.
If you want to know how and why it is like this, read Perkin's books (atm I'm reading "The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man"). It's why Meta will not get sued but Aaron was, and it is why ships are now lining up in front of the Panama canal paying as much as 400k for a crossing with little of that wealth making it to the people of Panama.
Under capitalism money and power are inextricably linked. Your influence in a democracy is tied directly to your access to capital.
This is why expensive elections are are desire of those funding Super-pacs. The more elections cost, the fewer people decide them.
Aaron didn’t matter because he was poor. Had he been named Musk, or Zuckerberg, he would suffer the consequences they do when they break the law which is zero.
This is how capitalism is supposed to work and does.
You can’t have capitalism is being rich doesn’t confer privilege in every area including the legal system. It’s why American oligarch can safely “ask forgiveness not permission”. The risk to them personally is nil.
It does, but it's not like that's new information to minority communities.
But BigCo can grease a few palms and do 10x more and the useful idiots will screech about how responsible they're being by installing those stupid stream spreader things o their parking lot culverts and putting up a few birdhouses to please the local comissioer.
This really is no differennt.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6pprpd3x96o
https://amazonwatch.org/news/2024/0214-chevrons-environmenta...
where the orange infant calls datacenters "beautiful" and now is arranging to give them federal land to build on to get around all the protests
while at the same time calling solar and wind turbines ugly and loud and giving billions to companies already contracted to NOT build them
it's all the irony of wild greed and infinite corruption, if only Aaron could have seen this future
These are two party states, the people are given two polarising choices and can only choose one. Party 1 gets in and does what the deep-state says, then people get angry and vote Part 2. Party 1 changes leader and says we are better now.
Party 2 does what the deep-state wants, and people run back to Party 1.
It's an illusion of choice. There is no democracy.
God can we have an alien invasion already please
I do not think we need that. With Climate Change a huge reckoning and leveling is coming. The way things look now, in 50 to 100 years there is a very good chance this civilization will probably come to an end.
As for Aaron, I hope the people who went after him can be sued for wrongful death. With meta doing the exact same thing, even to the same MIT Sites, I think a case exist.
OK doomer
Not sure if Chinese propaganda got you or what.
They did 100,000,000 forced abortions, killed tens of thousands of their own people and covered it up.
The United States kills 4 of their own people and the news outlets go wild.
lmao have you realized how absurd such numbers are (even though I'd assume the 100,000,000 can only be a hyperbole, or are you actually serious with it? Having a single child policy for a long while is not the same as "forced abortion" if that's what you're referring to. The thing called "contraceptives" exists) if you use your common sense for just a second?
Seems that it's you who got fed a lot of propaganda unfortunately.
And yes there have been a lot of disasters throughout the history, even not so long ago (e.g. Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution etc.), but if you're suggesting that's what the current regime is doing in 2026, you have no clue.
What happened 'so fast' was how fast they pulled off the mask. 10 years and it's practically off in its entirety...
I think a lot of folks are stuck on the idea that it's been a singular bad actor -- a Trump, or a McConnell or something. This "Great Man Theory" is almost certainly a very naive read of the systems that are leading to this moment.
> 'Two ways', Mike said. 'Gradually and then suddenly'.
In this case it looks like there would not be enough material even for a thin paperback.
Basically if you are sufficiently big, you can get away with any crime (by making it legally non-crime).
Or do we think that the prosecution was correct, apologize ourselves for any protests we might have voiced against the prosecution and demand similar prosecution of Meta and everyone who continues to torrent “Linux ISOs”?
Personally I agree that the prosecution was unjust, and so I find it to be a good thing that the stranglehold of excessive copyright is being weakened by the new AI moment. But that also why I find the sudden turn to copyright maximalism that seems to have taken over large parts of the tech industry so baffling. Why are we wasting our time pretending we want Meta prosecuted rather than spending our efforts ensuring that all these products that come out of this massive blending of human creative outputs are owned collectively by us all with no such recourse to the same copyright laws that they so valiantly shattered?
As to the latter, I think a mixture of commodification and the almost Pavlovian conditioning produced by corporate social media explains both its attraction and its resilience in the face of more democratic and emancipatory alternatives.
But what is the actual actionable result we want? That's what I'm asking. There's a lot of anger around all of this, and this isn't the first time we've seen this comparison to Aaron Swartz in all the discourse around that. But these sorts of angry "look at the hypocrisy" rants all seem very muddled in what they're asking for. Because on the one hand they're saying that this prosecution was an injustice and should never have happened, but on the other hand they seem to be asking for similar prosecutions and consequences in different cases where the defendant isn't as popular or likable. When we say we want Zuckerberg to "bear some personal responsibility for the consequences" in respect to meta potentially violating copyright, are we asking for him to be prosecuted like Swartz was? Are we asking for him to be personally sued by publishers instead of them suing Meta? And what is the outcome from this "personal responsibility" that we want? If we're asking for him to be prosecuted, are we asking for that because we actually think he should be convicted, and thus also saying we think Swartz' prosecution was justified? Or are we wanting prosecution for something we don't actually think is a crime, because we want to inflict some form of indirect and symbolic revenge on Zuckerberg for the multitude of other reasons we don't like him?
We should absolutely invoke the injustice that was the Swartz prosecution. What I don't think we should be doing is invoking it as some sort of vague demand for more prosecutions of that type against "the right people".
RIP Aaron.
He was offered a plea deal of 6 months in jail. Which he turned down. And then he killed himself - something which he attempted multiple times in the past when he wasn't being prosecuted for anything
While I think there are a lot of good arguments that the prosecution was excessive and meant to create a chilling effect, it is a huge leap to say they assassinated him. He was clearly already vulnerable when this happened, or he would have never resorted to taking his own life when there were still so many avenues before him to try to get out of the situation. While this does not make it any less tragic, it does make it a lot less of an 'assassination'.
I don't find it rhetorically useful to use language like that in these situations. It distracts from the real issues at hand.
Because they smell really nice?
Meta is accused of civil copyright infringement.
Very different things.
Also: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/01/noam-chomsk...
As you can tell that never happened, but at the same time I always argue in comment sections over his case, as people so wildly misrepresent what happened to their own gains. Especially the fact he willingly and continuingly went around blockers put in place to stop the activity from happening, even after being caught.
And furthermore their trackers have always been the most malignant. Stories of "Facebook basically ddosed my site to train their LLMs"
In some countries the excuse is lamer than in others. But, in the end, everywhere in the world money always speaks louder.
I’m not saying he should or shouldn’t have been prosecuted, but there’s some kind of rose tinted glasses filter around what happened with Aaron, like he just was browsing the web and was suddenly prosecuted. He repeatedly broke in to a physical room and kept changing his MAC address to dodge bans. At least report it with its full context.
The rate of JSTOR content retrieved from MIT was a separate contract issue.
> rotated his MAC address
Do you really think these details drastically change how people should judge his actions vs those of a corporation?
Changing your IP isn't a crime, even if it has the effect of making attribution to Meta more difficult.
The thing with Aaron was that it went on for months to the point JSTOR's complaints had activated MIT's organizational antibodies, let's say, and the IS department was turned loose to investigate repeatedly. They went to the trouble of upgrading their load balancers and traffic analysis to narrow it down and installed a camera. At that point, the hook was firmly set and with digital and video evidence, the Secret Service had him red-handed abusing MIT.
Keep in mind the thing that spiraled out of control was how Aaron (mis)used MIT resources persistently and with overwhelming evidence - in the end, the civil part with JSTOR was largely irrelevant. MIT called in the big guns with the FBI and Secret Service, and they ate it up. I'm not arguing in favor of it, I'm just familiar with the zeal they bring once they get on a trail.
To borrow your words, intent matters.
About technical countermeasures to evade blocking.. you realize that everybody that does scraping at a large scale employs those, right? Including Meta
Specially nowadays where large swaths of the web is behind captchas
Being that it was on a campus, they can sometimes use that as an aggravating factor. I remember one case where a homeless person had a key for a vending machine and took out $30 in quarters, but since the land the vending machine was on was owned by a university he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. One of the few cases that got reversed for a constitutionally exceptional sentence.
This was overzealous prosecution after the affected party got their remedy.
MIT and Jstor had a bunch of incident response going on, and it isn’t a leap to consider Jstor would cut them off for good if the situation went unresolved.
The OP's blog post is about how the law isn't applied equally in the United States. Aaron was an individual and an easy target for the overzealous prosecutor. Meta's a faceless corporation, guilty in the court of public opinion, and they don't even get a timely investigation because they have the money to tie up the broken legal system indefinitely.
Aaron was an example - if you're small enough, you will be caught, tried, and punished in whatever way we see fit to prove that the justice system "works". If you're a billionaire, do whatever you want wink wink.
1. Is the law aligned with moral and ethical expectations? Probably not.
2. Is the process reliable? At least since the Derek Chauvin trials, I'm having doubts, but it doesn't seem it had failed in this case.
Sure, cases of the former need urgent fixing (and we're not getting that), but the latter scenario falls into the "The end is nigh" category.
And corporate scrapers never ever use proxy pools to rotate IPs to evade throttling and blacklisting. Meta is also scraping illegal content, such as pirated books. So I'm not sure what your argument is.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
A room with an unlocked and unmarked door, off of a hallway that was open to the general public. An INCREDIBLY tame act compared to other unprosecuted trespasses normalized and celebrated at https://hacks.mit.edu/.
> rotated his MAC address
Not a crime; in fact now a widespread and default practice for consumer Wi-Fi/Bluetooth devices.
Intent matters. Plugging your laptop into a router you normally don't have access to, with intent to download a large number of private articles, means something. And it means more than "I downloaded a lot of public files off the public internet," which is what Meta did.
All of this is in the indictment, which is worth reading: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/217117-united-states...
Personally I think it's a shame that digital crimes can result in prison time at all, except for e.g. crypto theft. But under US law, Aaron committed a crime back then, and it would still classify as a crime today.
> JSTOR,founded in 1995, was and continued to be a United States-based, not-for-profit organization that provides an online system for archiving and providing access to academic journal.
If it was online, could any one have access to it? So why him downloading them was breaking the law?
Over the course of months they tried all kinds of blocking methods that would stop most people, but he kept evading them. It is impossible that he did not know his use of the free access was no longer authorized.
Then he put his equipment on their wired network, which he had no permission to do so and had to trespass to do that. It is irrelevant that the door was unlocked and in a hallway the public could get to. It being unmarked just makes it worse, since doors the public is supposed to use generally are marked.
He also repeatedly came back to that room to check his equipment.
He was now grabbing data at such a high rate that JSTOR cut off all MIT JSTOR access for a few days while they tried to figure out what do next.
At that point MIT research is being disrupted. MIT does a lot of government research and what was going on was indistinguishable at that point from a hostile attack, and police were called.