My heart goes out to his family. I'm a big fan of his work, particularly web.py. He made a huge impact on the web by anyone's standards and his contributions have personally touched my life in many ways. Rest in peace, man.
He was being charged with the felony of downloading/distributing research done using public funding so that it could be made freely available to the taxpayers who funded it. JSTOR had no interest in prosecuting him, but the US Attorney's Office decided to go ahead anyway.
Is that the case in the US? My impression is that Ford gave Nixon a blanket pardon even though Nixon had not (yet, probably) been found guilty of anything.
A promise of a pardon would have done just as well, especially for federal prosecutors. The DOJ isn't going to make a big case out something their boss has promised to throw out. That said, the president being superinvolved in an ongoing case like that would be very strange.
Because he was a brilliant and loved computer programmer who was facing 35 years in prison. Can you imagine the US Attorneys office treating you in the same manner they treat rapists because you wrote a downloader script? I'd say it's a very reasonable assumption.
You pull the trigger and all your problems disappear, just like that.
But what about your family, friends? They are devastated for the rest of their lives.
As a stranger who's never known Aaron and who's only just read about what he's done in this world, I can say I'm somewhat devastated as well.
You're blaming Aaron for taking the supposedly cowardly approach and hurting his friends and family in the process, but what about the people who put him in this position? Are they beyond reproach? What about the people who affected those people? Clearly something fucked up along the way because I don't think Aaron deserved to be in a position where he had to do this because he downloaded bytes from a website.
I've always found that position extremely selfish. If it wasn't for families and friends being devastated killing yourself would probably not seem like a big deal to many. The fact that it affects the ones you love so much is the very reason for why many that contemplates suicide goes through unimaginable suffering just to save it from others - it is a huge sacrifice, one that a typical person would never, ever, in their entire life even come close to experiencing. And if it just doesn't work out people have the stomach to call it selfish.
Someone described the process in which a depressed person takes his/her life with a person standing in the window of a burning building choosing between burning to death and jumping to death. It can basically be the very same thing.
And to a certain degree, jumping just makes your problems disappear - just like that. But saying that the person jumping is selfish because he/she didn't contemplate the consequences? Do you honestly believe that killing yourself is something that people take lightly? That it didn't occur to them that they would be missed? Think. That point of view makes me sick and expressing it makes you extremely selfish in my eyes.
Holy crap, stop being such an asshole. On the off chance you're "just playing the devil's advocate": it's time to quit, now. You can't possibly believe that Aaron deserved in any way what was coming to him. It also stretches the imagination that you actually think lawyers are in any way protecting the innocent. Your opinion on depression is likewise both immature and disgusting in its callousness. You should really be challenged for these beliefs if they are indeed your own.
As a society we do agree to follow the law and punish those who break them. But remember that the law of the land is not some God given set of laws. Several people broke segregation laws during the civil rights movement and in my view they should not have paid up (I think you may also agree with this). Turing paid up because he broke the law but now I guess there is almost unanimous consent that him paying up was not the right outcome. So paying up for breaking the law is not as black and white as it sometimes seems. Lets reserve our judgements for some time.
Edit : Also as Udo points out lets stop this line of argument for a bit. Some members of the community either knew Aaron or were affected by his work, lets not subject them to this argument right now.
Even if you're innocent, and even if you ultimately win, a federal prosecution can utterly wreck your life.
I don't think anyone disputes that Aaron was probably not in the best of mental health to be facing this kind of thing in the first place, but even for a paragon of stability, a multi-year witchhunt and prosecution by the feds will push you to the limit. I know of a few people who have been in the eye AUSA doom (and some ongoing, like Harborside Health Center), and especially for an individual defendant vs. a group, it's very hard.
Someone who could have contributed very positively to the society just killed himself. We can't reverse that, the best we can do now is to learn from this incidence and try to minimize it in the future. Explaining it away in the name of insanity will not help.
Even if you're right, there are many things that can turn the sanest of people "insane" (or at least depressed). See post traumatic stress disorder or postpartum depression for starters.
I imagine if I were suddenly facing a potential 35 years in prison, I'd be at a pretty high risk of becoming depressed.
Can you imagine the US Attorneys office treating you in the same manner they treat rapists because you wrote a downloader script?
Minor nitpick: The "justice" system treats rapists far better. Typical sentencing for rapists is 112 months, of which the typical rapist will serve half, from a system( rape is usually a state-level crime )with conviction rates hovering around 65%. Aaron was facing 3-4 times that, in a system( the federal courts )with a conviction rate over 90%.
A Federal charge is a terrible thing, even before the gavel falls.
You'll note that he was indicted in June 2011, more than a year and a half ago. Throughout this time he must have been under tremendous stress: not knowing whether he'd be spending the next few decades behind bars, and not even knowing when he would find this information out. Months drag on into years and nothing seems to get any better. Your life is on hold until someone else decides what your life will be looking like.
This sort of stress tends to eat away at your insides. You can't make long-term plans of any kind; meet a nice person at the bar and you're reminded that you can't start anything serious since you might be going away for a long time. A thousand tiny reminders every day that you are already a prisoner and will be for an indefinite period while the lawyers are lawyering. All the defendant has is time to think about what prison would be like, how the course of their life is not in their hands. It is a feeling of abject powerlessness.
It's not unfathomable that a person in this situation might look at suicide as the only way to regain control of their life, even if it means ending it prematurely.
Suicide for a defendant can, therefore, seem almost enticing. A siren who sings of a quick and easy escape from seemingly insurmountable troubles. I do not know why he did it, but I have been where he might have gone to in his mind. It is a dark place, and much evil can be wrought there.
Understandable emotion, but the country did not kill him. He did that.
You can disagree with the laws of the land, protest them, even violate them in protest assuming you are willing to pay the consequences.
You can blame the country, its politicians, or its voters for having bad laws. You can't blame those entities for this suicide. That was his choice, and it's unfortunate he will not be around to make his case.
We have no problem directing our attention at bullying when we consider elevated teenage suicide statistics, but if those bullies happen to be in government they are suddenly off limits and deserve no blame?
You're right, this isn't really comparable to bullying, the imbalance of power is much more extreme. It is comparable to an adult beating a child for using a profane word. A completely mindbogglingly disproportionate response; convicted rapists get less time on average than what he was looking at.
JSTOR didn't want him pursued like he was, but the justice department was trying to nail him to the wall anyway. They wanted blood, and unfortunately they got it.
I agree with you.
The parallel to bullying is a good fit and the only reason it is not _really_ comparable is because of the imbalance of power.
I would not be surprised to find myself and most others taking the same sort of action in a similar, unjust, situation.
Would you rather die today or suffer more than you lived so far in prison for something like that ?
Isn't just a matter of the law being unjust, I think this is pure evil and wrong interpretation of a wrong law.
The law needs changing and the people pursing this case need changing too.
I don't understand the people saying the DOJ was just doing their jobs either. Are none of the people involved in that process given any sort of power of discretion at all? Any person in this case who was in a position to use some discretion but chose not to should be doing some serious reflection and consideration right now.
Of course they have that discretion -- prosecutors decline cases or seek reduced sentences all the time. Given the overbearing nature of our legal system, it would be impractical to do otherwise. This was just pointlessly maximalist DOJ behavior. On the other hand, shame on us for allowing these laws to exist at all, and creating opportunities for selective enforcement and massively unreasonable sentences.
I'd also like to add here that while maybe the DOJ had no way to know that Aaron would kill himself, their general pattern of ruining people's lives over minor offenses will, it seems obvious to me, result in some number of suicides. Heat up a pot of water and some percentage of the molecules evaporate. So while we can't hold the DOJ responsible for Aaron's actions, we can certainly hold them accountable for the aggregate misery they've created for so many people. And we should.
This is so absurd. While you may disagree with the punishment sought and the law, the government is enforcing the law, as written at the time the crime was committed.
They guy actively broke many laws over a long period of time. The government is neither acting without reason nor intimidating someone for lawful behavior.
Bullies don't enforce proscribed consequences based on written law. Bullies don't use courts with impartial judges, juries, and defense advocacy. Comparing this to bullying is insulting to anyone actually bullied.
> They guy actively broke many laws over a long period of time. The government is neither acting without reason nor intimidating someone for lawful behavior.
I am arguing a massively disproportionate response occurred. Not that he was innocent, or that he deserved no punishment at all.
> Comparing this to beating a child? Seriously?
Decades of prison and 13 felony charges were in play. A man is dead. All for what? A little trespassing, a fake email, and a bunch of downloads? It is going to take more than your mock shock to convince me the comparison is anything other than generous. I am holding back here.
It's always a shame when someone commits suicide in a situation like this. There's always a better option. Everyone makes mistakes.
I've seen this happen in my own life. I had a family friend that committed suicide after being indicted of a felony DUI charge because he swore he never would go to prison.
I think it's tragic that we all, with our laws and courts and systems of 'justice', can ruin a brilliant kid's life to the point where he decides it's not worth living anymore.
Last fall and winter, JSTOR experienced a significant misuse of our database. A substantial portion of our publisher partners’ content was downloaded in an unauthorized fashion using the network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of our participating institutions. The content taken was systematically downloaded using an approach designed to avoid detection by our monitoring systems.
The downloaded content included more than 4 million articles, book reviews, and other content from our publisher partners' academic journals and other publications; it did not include any personally identifying information about JSTOR users.
We stopped this downloading activity, and the individual responsible, Mr. Swartz, was identified. We secured from Mr. Swartz the content that was taken, and received confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed.
The criminal investigation and today’s indictment of Mr. Swartz has been directed by the United States Attorney’s Office. It was the government’s decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR’s. As noted previously, our interest was in securing the content. Once this was achieved, we had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter.
Can we not know who exactly (their faces/names etc.) were the people working in the "US Attorney Office" bent to indict him? It's easy for people to term it was not JSTOR, it was the Attorney Office but ultimately these things happen only because people forget how to treat other people properly.
Presumably DOJ doesn't flip coins to decide which cases to handle as there is considerable time, money and other resources involved in each case.
It would be interesting to know how much political and lobbying interests influence those prosecutions. I could not find anything of substance on this topic.
JSTOR can of course officially deny everything, but other publishers, along with MPAA would probably have a vested interest in turning him into an example.
Presumably, from what I had just read here, Aaron's political views wouldn't exactly been too popular with the US govt -- maybe this is just enough to put his case at the top of the stack.
Knowing the faces and names deciding to spend our tax money on trying to shove in jail for decades someone who downloaded scientific papers, should be in the interest of every citizen, shouldn't it?
Congress decides the range of punishments for breaking laws, not the Department of Justice. Congress is elected by the people. Instead of trying to identify individuals to indict, consider the role of 300 million Americans who implicitly backed those decisions.
Or you could just take a step back to pause and lament the toll of depression.
The Department of Justice decides which people get pursued through the courts and which just get ignored. Its decisions have always been aimed at protecting the wealthy and influential no matter what.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. While I'll agree it was overzealous to make a federal case out of this, you can't blame federal prosecutors for doing their fucking jobs just because someone kills themselves. Many people have survived federal prosecution without dying or killing themselves.
I'm shocked and horrified by this news too. It's awful that Aaron died. But it's foolish to blame anybody but him for his actions in this.
I mostly agree. But a potential 35 year prison sentence hanging over people for a white collar crime is sure to send a percentage of them over the edge.
With a more realistic and efficient judicial system, people would be under a lot less unnecessary stress and there'd be fewer straws to break the proverbial camels' backs. Being threatened with 35 years in prison for what he did is indicative of a sick judicial system.
I wouldn't even call it a 'white collar crime'. It was downloading some scientific papers, which the site didn't really care about. White collar crime is like Bernie Madoff.
Well, white collar just means generally "conducted using computers, paper, etc." vs. guns or sticks or fists. So defrauding people via the mail is white collar, or ponzi schemes, etc. There is usually a financial component, but the FBI 30k foot overview is "lying, cheating, or stealing". What aaronsw is alleged to have done was a white collar activity (except that he did sneaky wiring closet stuff), but not what people immediately think of as "white collar crime".
I mostly don't believe what Aaron did was a crime at all. If it was wrong, it was a civil tort against JSTOR or JSTOR's authors, who declined to give a shit (and I suspect most authors in JSTOR would support him). If it was a crime, it was a very minor crime -- not a 35 year federal felony.
I'm sad Aaron is gone, and angry he didn't fight this to the end. He probably could have won, or at least ended up with a suspended sentence or something like that, and this could have been a catalyst for reform of copyright laws (if not general laws, the scientific-papers-created-with-government-funding laws).
There's probably some copyright/ip crime which does have victims, but it's usually civil victims, and in this case, I don't think even that.
(If you hacked in or bribed an employee and a trade secret and started making something in competition after someone spent 30 years researching, there's probably a civil case there)
I would say that it was about as serious as parking in a loading zone. We need to stop this nonsense where we expect people with no legal background to pay attention to copyrights. We don't tell people they will go to jail for 35 years if they park in a loading zone, nor do we threaten them with prison if they routinely park in loading zones; we give them a small but annoying fine and send them on their way.
Prosecutors could focus on trying to imprison some real criminals rather than bullying someone who is making positive contributions to society for doing something relatively harmless.
It's an essential part of the rule of law that prosecutors prosecute the law as it is, not as they, or we, wish it should be. They aren't the ones to blame for this. To whatever extent they are, we all are.
True, anyone who pays taxes has a hand in this. The issue is that deciding not to pay your taxes means that the dogs are set on you. This is not a free society, unfortunately. Perhaps bitcoin will change all of this. I've been contemplating the idea of a shadow economy where people work remotely and anonymously, getting paid in an anonymous currency and completely circumventing the current economic and political systems. Anyone hiring developers for bitcoins?
The issue is that deciding not to pay your taxes means that the dogs are set on you. This is not a free society, unfortunately. Perhaps bitcoin will change all of this. I've been contemplating the idea of a shadow economy where people work remotely and anonymously, getting paid in an anonymous currency and completely circumventing the current economic and political systems.
A fundamental misconception of Bitcoin is that using Bitcoin as a currency will magically obliterate the Government's ability to determine income taxes. The government never has tracked currency for the purposes of determining income. They track transactions in whatever currency or assets the transactions are denominated. Thus, governments have been able to determine taxes since the days of barter, and they will continue to be able to determine taxes until long after Bitcoin is digital dust.
Although bitcoin transactions are public, if you cannot correlate a hash to a human then they are essentially anonymous. The 'leaks' can only happen when exchanging bitcoin for traditional currency. Fortunately, there are ways to do this anonymously too. With some care, it is possible to stay hidden in the true sense, even though the currency is exchanging hands in public.
It's not an issue of paying taxes. We have a responsibility and a duty to control our government and our political systems and to direct them to the ends of justice. Whether or not we pay our taxes, we still have this duty.
That's what makes this so tragic. Aaron Swartz was one of the few people willing to actually do this, even when it meant poking at a sleeping bear, one that, in the end, he couldn't face.
I believe that there are at least three stances on this issue. One is, as you mentioned, involvement in the current system in a positive sense (steering in the right direction). Another is involvement in the system in a negative sense (destruction of it). The third is abandoning the system and using something else altogether.
The last option has the side effect of bleeding the existing one dry through inaction (within the boundary of the current system). It is similar to a software fork. We have seen many a project where the ones in charge have become rigid enough in their ways that, for all intents and purposes, the cost and probability of convincing them outweighs the cost of detaching from the infrastructure and moving in a new direction. For example, XFree86 and X.Org.
An issue that we face with activism is that the structure in place is supported by individuals with orders of magnitude more wealth and influence than what the activists have access to. This is evident in the case of Mr. Swartz where he was rapidly running out of money to fight his battle in court. We are at a disadvantaged position in that sense.
As such, every [insert your unit of currency] we pay in taxes go towards feeding the policies we so emphatically disagree with. With a nod to The Art Of War, a valid tactic in such a case is to starve your enemy and wage a war of attrition - in other words, reduce their material wealth while increasing our own. The end result is that nobody gets hurt yet they slowly lose their influence and the new guard have the opportunity and resources to build theirs.
Also, notice that it was not "We're giving you 35 years in jail" it is "The absolute most that you could possibly receive for this crime is 35 years". I somehow suspect that number is far higher for rape cases but, as your comment demonstrates, that number is not necessarily indicative that that's how long you would serve.
> "You can't blame federal prosecutors for doing their job?"
Since when was it their "job" to tactfully subject a civilian under stress of facing criminal law with potential 35 years of imprisonment?
Apart from above, the intent to know the people and faces behind such a bench (read DOJ) is not the same as blaming them for the part called suicide in this entire story.
We should definitely know who said what in the case, just to estimate how much weight one added into the sinking of the ship. Blaming justice system "DOJ" is like letting the real criminals getting away with it, however you may want to put it.
You don't get to make up the law as you go along. If its possible to serve 35 years in prison for what Aaron Swartz did, that's absurd and needs to change, but the prosecutors aren't the ones who made that law.
I agree. That prosecutors aren't the ones who made the law, but aren't they responsible for their actions?
I think it's important to bring up names and faces of people (state agents) who make/made laws as well. As someone pointed out somewhere on HN today - "killing in the name of duty is an absurd bug in human psyche. The Lucifer effect? [1]. Those in public duty should probably be publicly visible along with their actions."
They are responsible for their actions. Not Aaron's. I think the conscientious thing to do would have been to drop the charges, but then again I thought that when Aaron was alive, too.
You're attacking a bit of a straw man there. Clearly the prosecutors are guilty of overzealous prosecution, and the law itself is overzealous. It simply doesn't follow, however, that these people are responsible for Aaron Swartz's decision to commit suicide. Only Aaron Swartz is responsible for that.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I'd just like to place on the record that if I die under similar circumstances, my wish is that nobody will start an ugly witch hunt in my name.
The federal prosecutors? The division head? The attorney general?
How do you plan to identify the parties bent on indicting him? You certainly can't assume the prosecutors took this on as some sort of personal crusade.
Assuming you can identify the individuals most responsible, what do you plan to do to punish them for their actions? The implication of getting "names and faces" out in the public domain is potentially serious.
I've seen this sentiment echoed variously up and down this thread, and it is scary. Inaction is not the appropriate response here, but neither is the public stoning you appear to be proposing.
How is knowing their names and faces the same as public stoning, sir? I just don't understand what emotion led you to conclude that?
We should always know who said what in the case. It's important to know who led the indictment, who pushed a criminal case instead of a civil suit and so on...
We can only discourage the over-zealousness of prosecutors by making sure that it becomes a career limiting move instead of a career advancing one.
Lessig was kind enough in his writeup to not name names: http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bull... but this kindness is both undeserved and unwise. Carmen thinks big convictions will get her a federal judgeship or other appointment. The public needs to make sure this isn't the case.
I have no words. I've been sitting with my phone's cursor blinking in this box and, for the first time in a long time, my stomach has turned so much from this news that I have nothing to write.
What an absolutely dreadful shame. My heart is wrenched for his family and all of us, who lost a brilliant young man. I'm a month older than he was, and to imagine someone my age thinking there was no way out... with all of the possibilities of his life, a life just beginning.
A lot of prisoners have no access to the outside world, including the internet. Many prisons lack even a basic library. Inmates working with The Last Mile (http://thelastmile.org/) tweet by passing their tweets written on paper to volunteers who actually enter them.
Wow. Shocking news! I've been reading Aaron's stuff online and following him on twitter for years. Only last week I re-read his amazing "Raw Nerve" blog post series http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve
To be honest if I had to imagine the people at the attorney's office who decided to prosecute this I'd imagine vaguely malevolent bureaucratic dullards who derive validation from enforcing the rules in a heavy handed fashion.
You're being a bit unfair. It's equally inappropriate for me to speculate about his motives, but I recall there being an undercurrent of melancholia in Aaron's writings even pre-indictment.
I'm being quite restrained. I'm calling for a feeling of guilt, not their public lynching. If I'd been involved in the prosecution I'd be feeling guilty for proceeding in too heavy-handed a fashion and I'm sure most of the people on this forum would too[1].
Frankly if someone is incapable of self-recrimination when something like this arises I don't want them in this kind of role.
[1] Of course this presupposes a motivation of "doing what's best for the country/society" and not "showing this uppity young guy who's boss".
How would prosecutors go about that? Going through all his blog posts to look for depression? And that would be standard procedure for everyone they prosecute?
So you're saying that in the UK they don't prosecute people who are depressed? As a Brit, that's news to me.
Come on. This prosecution may be unjust for other reasons, but it's just daft to claim that they should not have prosecuted him because he was depressed.
You think Aaron would have let the DA put him on some kind of suicide watch when he wasn't even in custody?
I don't think you're thinking this through. It's natural to be angry, but the DA didn't do anything wrong in relation to his depression, even if the prosecution was unjust for other reasons.
2) All of that requires the consent of the person involved. Do you think AS would have suddenly decided to accept support because the DA prosecuting his case offered it? If his family and friends couldn't stop his suicide, you think the DA could have done so?
3) Are you sure it is typically the responsibility of the DA to sort that stuff out in the US?
I still remember a comment he posted on an "Ask PG & other rich folks: how has your life changed since getting FU money?" thread a few years ago (pre-indictment):
"In the short-term, my life was much worse. I spent a lot of really painful time struggling to come to grips with my situation.
"After that was over, things went pretty much back to normal. There's now a low-level fear all the time of losing all the money (something PG's written about recently) and I'm constantly worried I've invested it badly. I didn't make any dramatic life changes so people don't really treat me differently.
"The biggest thing is that it provides a sort of mental backup -- when I'm feeling bad about myself or about to do something risky, I can tell myself not to worry.
"My sense is that it bears out what the happiness research says: dispositional factors are much more important than situational ones. PG was an abnormally happy person before he got rich and he's still abnormally happy. I was pretty miserable before and I'm still miserable. (The reasons are more complicated but the result is I prefer my misery.)"
Every single person employed by the US Attorney Office involved in this tragedy should be sued to hell by the family. Have some goddamn responsibility for once.
This is utterly disgraceful, I feel for his family.
Did any of the employees of US Attorney Office forced him (like putting a gun to a head of one of his loved ones) to do it? It was his own choice to end his life.
If it is a depressed person's "choice" to kill themselves, then perhaps we should simply treat depression by telling people "Hey, have you tried not being sad?".
Oh, do you think that it's better to walk on your toes when you are walking pass anyone, just because they might have depression and you might trigger them to commit suicide?
How anyone can know that if you accuse someone of committing a crime, that someone will get so depressed that he will kill himself?
Do you propose to just get rid of courts?
> Did any of the employees of US Attorney Office forced him
No, but they absolutely chose to prosecute him to the fullest. They also I am guessing didn't do it randomly. Some decision went into it. If you look at a post above, even the original journal (at least "officially") lost interest, someone, a cog in the DOJ, for whatever reason (I assume, political) must have said "pedal to the metal with this one".
Here is DOJ, spending tax dollars, trying to shove this person in prison for 30 years or so, for downloading scientific papers. There is really no other more dangerous or more pressing cases?
There are people out their who through their own greed destroyed the economy. They will not be prosecuted. Hell, no one will even give them a talking to.
Threaten someone's profit model, and you go to prison though.
I agree, the DOJ, they selectively enforce those crimes that render political gain rather than for public benefit.
Example, Wall Street Securitized Mortgages whereas tens-of-thousands of mortgage deeds were scanned into a database, then destroyed despite state laws stating otherwise so the loans on people's homes could be traded on Wall Street like they were pork bellies. Did the DOJ do anything? NOPE!!!
did he have a history of depression? perhaps it was simply due to stress or pressure? The thought of spending the next 35 years in prison for downloading documents can be pretty painful... probably as bad as someone who was wrongfully tried for murder.
I'm one of the fortunate people for whom first-line SSRIs (in my case, sertraline) are very effective. I no longer rely on the meds, but I have additional comfort knowing that they're there if I need them.
I still have bad patches. And it's weird, being inside yourself, intellectually cognisant that this emotion of pointlessness and worthlessness is an illusion, that it doesn't exist -- yet being, sometimes, unable to beat it.
I know that, left to build gravity, the black spiral is stronger than me because it is me.
But I also know that the treatment is stronger. And that is there, if I ever need it again. If I ever get too many of those days in a row, I won't hesitate to seek help.
And neither should anybody else. The suffering is entirely unnecessary.
There is a mental illness here and the mental illness is thinking that his suicide is unrelated to the massive witch hunt against him by the US Federal Government hellbent on his personal destruction at any cost.
Those who deny that that had anything to do with this, and it was only a "brain disorder" or other such claptrap are truly insane.
I've had students who for years were systematically abused and tortured by adults. This abuse caused them pain, distress, depression, and suicide ideation, not a chemical imbalance. Despite this, counselors they saw diagnosed them as having a chemical imbalance and pumped them full of pills that have psychosis and suicide as known and documented side effects.
Who is insane in this situation? Who is responsible for the damage it causes when a young person is targeted for destruction by sociopaths and it causes them to crack? A chemical imbalance? Not the things that are being done to them by others intentionally trying to harm them?
This attitude justifies the abuse of people. This attitude leads to suicide. This attitude needs to stop.
Seems like they do, though, because you only mentioned "depression" and how "it's treatable", in describing this particular case, and not one line about his prosecution.
Many a totally non-depressed people have committed suicide under prosecution. Heck, many non-depressed people even became depressed under prosecution.
Better eulogies will follow, to be sure, but in the mean time, much of what can be said about him is captured in a touching talk he gave called "How to Get a Job Like Mine" [1]. What I think is especially touching about this is how he gently deconstructs his success, demystifying his own legend by pulling back the curtain on what would have otherwise appeared to be a string of miraculous accomplishments. In the process, he reveals himself to be a sensitive, seemingly grateful, and thoughtful person.
May he be remembered well; he seems to deserve it.
This. I first saw a raw_nerve post here on HN, and that's how i got to know of Aaron. Such writing requires an ability for introspection, among many other things. I find it hard to contemplate how someone with such a mind could possibly commit suicide. Sad day, indeed :(.
Shocking and saddening. I've been working with Python lately and feel a particular loss because of web.py and all the other good work he did. My prayers go out to his family.
I wonder why some people here are assuming this tragedy is because of the JSTOR incident. It seems to me that everyone should just meditate on what's been lost, and defer judgement about why he would do this until there is evidence.
> I wonder why some people here are assuming this tragedy is because of the JSTOR incident. It seems to me that everyone should just meditate on what's been lost, and defer judgement about why he would do this until there is evidence.
Thank you so much. It's awful to see people in here blaming the trial when suicide is much more complex than a single incident pushing someone to the edge like that.
"This sort of stress tends to eat away at your insides. You can't make long-term plans of any kind; meet a nice person at the bar and you're reminded that you can't start anything serious since you might be going away for a long time. A thousand tiny reminders every day that you are already a prisoner and will be for an indefinite period while the lawyers are lawyering. All the defendant has is time to think about is what prison would be like, how the course of their life is not in their hands. It is a feeling of abject powerlessness."
582 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 317 ms ] threadOr, which would be worse? To live as a monster, or to die as a good man?
I love the DEATH .
Or, which would be worse? To live as a monster, or to die as a good man?
I love the DEATH .
He had his troubles and he made some bad decisions, but it didn't have to be like this.
I wish his family peace and clarity in this dark hour. I'm just so sorry.
If you're looking anywhere its probably towards the US Attorney's office, not JSTOR.
EDIT: The guy was facing 13 felony counts for downloading academic articles.
RIP Aaron
You're blaming Aaron for taking the supposedly cowardly approach and hurting his friends and family in the process, but what about the people who put him in this position? Are they beyond reproach? What about the people who affected those people? Clearly something fucked up along the way because I don't think Aaron deserved to be in a position where he had to do this because he downloaded bytes from a website.
Someone described the process in which a depressed person takes his/her life with a person standing in the window of a burning building choosing between burning to death and jumping to death. It can basically be the very same thing.
And to a certain degree, jumping just makes your problems disappear - just like that. But saying that the person jumping is selfish because he/she didn't contemplate the consequences? Do you honestly believe that killing yourself is something that people take lightly? That it didn't occur to them that they would be missed? Think. That point of view makes me sick and expressing it makes you extremely selfish in my eyes.
Edit : Also as Udo points out lets stop this line of argument for a bit. Some members of the community either knew Aaron or were affected by his work, lets not subject them to this argument right now.
I don't think anyone disputes that Aaron was probably not in the best of mental health to be facing this kind of thing in the first place, but even for a paragon of stability, a multi-year witchhunt and prosecution by the feds will push you to the limit. I know of a few people who have been in the eye AUSA doom (and some ongoing, like Harborside Health Center), and especially for an individual defendant vs. a group, it's very hard.
I imagine if I were suddenly facing a potential 35 years in prison, I'd be at a pretty high risk of becoming depressed.
Minor nitpick: The "justice" system treats rapists far better. Typical sentencing for rapists is 112 months, of which the typical rapist will serve half, from a system( rape is usually a state-level crime )with conviction rates hovering around 65%. Aaron was facing 3-4 times that, in a system( the federal courts )with a conviction rate over 90%.
You'll note that he was indicted in June 2011, more than a year and a half ago. Throughout this time he must have been under tremendous stress: not knowing whether he'd be spending the next few decades behind bars, and not even knowing when he would find this information out. Months drag on into years and nothing seems to get any better. Your life is on hold until someone else decides what your life will be looking like.
This sort of stress tends to eat away at your insides. You can't make long-term plans of any kind; meet a nice person at the bar and you're reminded that you can't start anything serious since you might be going away for a long time. A thousand tiny reminders every day that you are already a prisoner and will be for an indefinite period while the lawyers are lawyering. All the defendant has is time to think about what prison would be like, how the course of their life is not in their hands. It is a feeling of abject powerlessness.
It's not unfathomable that a person in this situation might look at suicide as the only way to regain control of their life, even if it means ending it prematurely.
Suicide for a defendant can, therefore, seem almost enticing. A siren who sings of a quick and easy escape from seemingly insurmountable troubles. I do not know why he did it, but I have been where he might have gone to in his mind. It is a dark place, and much evil can be wrought there.
You can disagree with the laws of the land, protest them, even violate them in protest assuming you are willing to pay the consequences.
You can blame the country, its politicians, or its voters for having bad laws. You can't blame those entities for this suicide. That was his choice, and it's unfortunate he will not be around to make his case.
There's a difference between a child who is victimized while growing socially and emotionally and an adult man who allegedly broke the law knowingly.
JSTOR didn't want him pursued like he was, but the justice department was trying to nail him to the wall anyway. They wanted blood, and unfortunately they got it.
I don't understand the people saying the DOJ was just doing their jobs either. Are none of the people involved in that process given any sort of power of discretion at all? Any person in this case who was in a position to use some discretion but chose not to should be doing some serious reflection and consideration right now.
I'd also like to add here that while maybe the DOJ had no way to know that Aaron would kill himself, their general pattern of ruining people's lives over minor offenses will, it seems obvious to me, result in some number of suicides. Heat up a pot of water and some percentage of the molecules evaporate. So while we can't hold the DOJ responsible for Aaron's actions, we can certainly hold them accountable for the aggregate misery they've created for so many people. And we should.
They guy actively broke many laws over a long period of time. The government is neither acting without reason nor intimidating someone for lawful behavior.
Bullies don't enforce proscribed consequences based on written law. Bullies don't use courts with impartial judges, juries, and defense advocacy. Comparing this to bullying is insulting to anyone actually bullied.
Comparing this to beating a child? Seriously?
I am arguing a massively disproportionate response occurred. Not that he was innocent, or that he deserved no punishment at all.
> Comparing this to beating a child? Seriously?
Decades of prison and 13 felony charges were in play. A man is dead. All for what? A little trespassing, a fake email, and a bunch of downloads? It is going to take more than your mock shock to convince me the comparison is anything other than generous. I am holding back here.
This idea is quite an easy cop out, isn't it?
I've seen this happen in my own life. I had a family friend that committed suicide after being indicted of a felony DUI charge because he swore he never would go to prison.
Tragic. My thoughts are with his family.
All over 'stealing' some ideas.
What Happened
Last fall and winter, JSTOR experienced a significant misuse of our database. A substantial portion of our publisher partners’ content was downloaded in an unauthorized fashion using the network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of our participating institutions. The content taken was systematically downloaded using an approach designed to avoid detection by our monitoring systems.
The downloaded content included more than 4 million articles, book reviews, and other content from our publisher partners' academic journals and other publications; it did not include any personally identifying information about JSTOR users.
We stopped this downloading activity, and the individual responsible, Mr. Swartz, was identified. We secured from Mr. Swartz the content that was taken, and received confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed.
The criminal investigation and today’s indictment of Mr. Swartz has been directed by the United States Attorney’s Office. It was the government’s decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR’s. As noted previously, our interest was in securing the content. Once this was achieved, we had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter.
It would be interesting to know how much political and lobbying interests influence those prosecutions. I could not find anything of substance on this topic.
JSTOR can of course officially deny everything, but other publishers, along with MPAA would probably have a vested interest in turning him into an example.
Presumably, from what I had just read here, Aaron's political views wouldn't exactly been too popular with the US govt -- maybe this is just enough to put his case at the top of the stack.
Yes, it would be interesting to learn more about whatever behind the scenes machinations may have taken place here.
Clearly, he was made an example of. I suspect, however, that the "who, why, how" will only much later - if ever - come to light.
Or you could just take a step back to pause and lament the toll of depression.
Could you elaborate on that?
I'm shocked and horrified by this news too. It's awful that Aaron died. But it's foolish to blame anybody but him for his actions in this.
With a more realistic and efficient judicial system, people would be under a lot less unnecessary stress and there'd be fewer straws to break the proverbial camels' backs. Being threatened with 35 years in prison for what he did is indicative of a sick judicial system.
I mostly don't believe what Aaron did was a crime at all. If it was wrong, it was a civil tort against JSTOR or JSTOR's authors, who declined to give a shit (and I suspect most authors in JSTOR would support him). If it was a crime, it was a very minor crime -- not a 35 year federal felony.
I'm sad Aaron is gone, and angry he didn't fight this to the end. He probably could have won, or at least ended up with a suspended sentence or something like that, and this could have been a catalyst for reform of copyright laws (if not general laws, the scientific-papers-created-with-government-funding laws).
At the end its all about some prosecutor increasing his kill count.
(If you hacked in or bribed an employee and a trade secret and started making something in competition after someone spent 30 years researching, there's probably a civil case there)
I would say that it was about as serious as parking in a loading zone. We need to stop this nonsense where we expect people with no legal background to pay attention to copyrights. We don't tell people they will go to jail for 35 years if they park in a loading zone, nor do we threaten them with prison if they routinely park in loading zones; we give them a small but annoying fine and send them on their way.
A fundamental misconception of Bitcoin is that using Bitcoin as a currency will magically obliterate the Government's ability to determine income taxes. The government never has tracked currency for the purposes of determining income. They track transactions in whatever currency or assets the transactions are denominated. Thus, governments have been able to determine taxes since the days of barter, and they will continue to be able to determine taxes until long after Bitcoin is digital dust.
That's what makes this so tragic. Aaron Swartz was one of the few people willing to actually do this, even when it meant poking at a sleeping bear, one that, in the end, he couldn't face.
The last option has the side effect of bleeding the existing one dry through inaction (within the boundary of the current system). It is similar to a software fork. We have seen many a project where the ones in charge have become rigid enough in their ways that, for all intents and purposes, the cost and probability of convincing them outweighs the cost of detaching from the infrastructure and moving in a new direction. For example, XFree86 and X.Org.
An issue that we face with activism is that the structure in place is supported by individuals with orders of magnitude more wealth and influence than what the activists have access to. This is evident in the case of Mr. Swartz where he was rapidly running out of money to fight his battle in court. We are at a disadvantaged position in that sense.
As such, every [insert your unit of currency] we pay in taxes go towards feeding the policies we so emphatically disagree with. With a nod to The Art Of War, a valid tactic in such a case is to starve your enemy and wage a war of attrition - in other words, reduce their material wealth while increasing our own. The end result is that nobody gets hurt yet they slowly lose their influence and the new guard have the opportunity and resources to build theirs.
Also, notice that it was not "We're giving you 35 years in jail" it is "The absolute most that you could possibly receive for this crime is 35 years". I somehow suspect that number is far higher for rape cases but, as your comment demonstrates, that number is not necessarily indicative that that's how long you would serve.
Since when was it their "job" to tactfully subject a civilian under stress of facing criminal law with potential 35 years of imprisonment?
Apart from above, the intent to know the people and faces behind such a bench (read DOJ) is not the same as blaming them for the part called suicide in this entire story.
We should definitely know who said what in the case, just to estimate how much weight one added into the sinking of the ship. Blaming justice system "DOJ" is like letting the real criminals getting away with it, however you may want to put it.
I think it's important to bring up names and faces of people (state agents) who make/made laws as well. As someone pointed out somewhere on HN today - "killing in the name of duty is an absurd bug in human psyche. The Lucifer effect? [1]. Those in public duty should probably be publicly visible along with their actions."
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Zimbardo#The_Lucifer_Eff...
[Edited at few places]
Many people who committed atrocities were just following orders or doing their job.
The federal prosecutors? The division head? The attorney general?
How do you plan to identify the parties bent on indicting him? You certainly can't assume the prosecutors took this on as some sort of personal crusade.
Assuming you can identify the individuals most responsible, what do you plan to do to punish them for their actions? The implication of getting "names and faces" out in the public domain is potentially serious.
I've seen this sentiment echoed variously up and down this thread, and it is scary. Inaction is not the appropriate response here, but neither is the public stoning you appear to be proposing.
We should always know who said what in the case. It's important to know who led the indictment, who pushed a criminal case instead of a civil suit and so on...
http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/meetattorney.html
Carmen Ortiz's blind ambition has caused her to run roughshod over people's freedom in the past: http://thephoenix.com/Boston/news/141253-15th-annual-muzzle-...
We can only discourage the over-zealousness of prosecutors by making sure that it becomes a career limiting move instead of a career advancing one.
Lessig was kind enough in his writeup to not name names: http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bull... but this kindness is both undeserved and unwise. Carmen thinks big convictions will get her a federal judgeship or other appointment. The public needs to make sure this isn't the case.
What an absolutely dreadful shame. My heart is wrenched for his family and all of us, who lost a brilliant young man. I'm a month older than he was, and to imagine someone my age thinking there was no way out... with all of the possibilities of his life, a life just beginning.
Christ.
Lost for words!
This feels a bit inappropriate but at the moment I hope that some members of the US Attorney's Office are wracked by guilt.
To be honest if I had to imagine the people at the attorney's office who decided to prosecute this I'd imagine vaguely malevolent bureaucratic dullards who derive validation from enforcing the rules in a heavy handed fashion.
It's still there, but he edited it to change the name to "Alex".
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dying
Frankly if someone is incapable of self-recrimination when something like this arises I don't want them in this kind of role.
[1] Of course this presupposes a motivation of "doing what's best for the country/society" and not "showing this uppity young guy who's boss".
Come on. This prosecution may be unjust for other reasons, but it's just daft to claim that they should not have prosecuted him because he was depressed.
If someone is a suicide risk you watch them, and typically ensure they're not left alone.
Stick your straw man where the sun don't shine.
I don't think you're thinking this through. It's natural to be angry, but the DA didn't do anything wrong in relation to his depression, even if the prosecution was unjust for other reasons.
See http://www.mind.org.uk/mental_health_a-z/8042_mental_health_... for an explanation of (in the UK, at least) the rights for those with mental health issues in prosecutorial circumstances.
2) All of that requires the consent of the person involved. Do you think AS would have suddenly decided to accept support because the DA prosecuting his case offered it? If his family and friends couldn't stop his suicide, you think the DA could have done so?
3) Are you sure it is typically the responsibility of the DA to sort that stuff out in the US?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1511204
"In the short-term, my life was much worse. I spent a lot of really painful time struggling to come to grips with my situation.
"After that was over, things went pretty much back to normal. There's now a low-level fear all the time of losing all the money (something PG's written about recently) and I'm constantly worried I've invested it badly. I didn't make any dramatic life changes so people don't really treat me differently.
"The biggest thing is that it provides a sort of mental backup -- when I'm feeling bad about myself or about to do something risky, I can tell myself not to worry.
"My sense is that it bears out what the happiness research says: dispositional factors are much more important than situational ones. PG was an abnormally happy person before he got rich and he's still abnormally happy. I was pretty miserable before and I'm still miserable. (The reasons are more complicated but the result is I prefer my misery.)"
RIP Aaron, you were too soon for this world.
This is utterly disgraceful, I feel for his family.
What a childish attitude towards a complex issue.
What's this attitude on HN to praise suiciders?
No, but they absolutely chose to prosecute him to the fullest. They also I am guessing didn't do it randomly. Some decision went into it. If you look at a post above, even the original journal (at least "officially") lost interest, someone, a cog in the DOJ, for whatever reason (I assume, political) must have said "pedal to the metal with this one".
Here is DOJ, spending tax dollars, trying to shove this person in prison for 30 years or so, for downloading scientific papers. There is really no other more dangerous or more pressing cases?
Threaten someone's profit model, and you go to prison though.
Example, Wall Street Securitized Mortgages whereas tens-of-thousands of mortgage deeds were scanned into a database, then destroyed despite state laws stating otherwise so the loans on people's homes could be traded on Wall Street like they were pork bellies. Did the DOJ do anything? NOPE!!!
But they sure went after Aaron, the bastards
Depression is treatable. If you find that you are thinking about suicide, even speculatively, seek help immediately.
You are not alone and it will get better.
It can have many causes. Sometimes it's innate to the person, sometimes it's brought on by circumstances; oftentimes multiple factors are involved.
But the bottom line is:
If you are thinking about suicide, get help. Right now.
I'm one of the fortunate people for whom first-line SSRIs (in my case, sertraline) are very effective. I no longer rely on the meds, but I have additional comfort knowing that they're there if I need them.
I still have bad patches. And it's weird, being inside yourself, intellectually cognisant that this emotion of pointlessness and worthlessness is an illusion, that it doesn't exist -- yet being, sometimes, unable to beat it.
I know that, left to build gravity, the black spiral is stronger than me because it is me.
But I also know that the treatment is stronger. And that is there, if I ever need it again. If I ever get too many of those days in a row, I won't hesitate to seek help.
And neither should anybody else. The suffering is entirely unnecessary.
Get help. You are not alone. It gets better.
Those who deny that that had anything to do with this, and it was only a "brain disorder" or other such claptrap are truly insane.
I've had students who for years were systematically abused and tortured by adults. This abuse caused them pain, distress, depression, and suicide ideation, not a chemical imbalance. Despite this, counselors they saw diagnosed them as having a chemical imbalance and pumped them full of pills that have psychosis and suicide as known and documented side effects.
Who is insane in this situation? Who is responsible for the damage it causes when a young person is targeted for destruction by sociopaths and it causes them to crack? A chemical imbalance? Not the things that are being done to them by others intentionally trying to harm them?
This attitude justifies the abuse of people. This attitude leads to suicide. This attitude needs to stop.
Many a totally non-depressed people have committed suicide under prosecution. Heck, many non-depressed people even became depressed under prosecution.
May he be remembered well; he seems to deserve it.
[1] https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget
I winced when I got to that. It's sad to think this isn't the first time he's had these thoughts and how long he must have had them. Rest in peace.
I wonder what that meant (appears just after the sentence you quote).
Definitely. He wrote a bunch of blogposts last year on improving life, called "Raw Nerve": http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve
Wonderful writing.
I wonder why some people here are assuming this tragedy is because of the JSTOR incident. It seems to me that everyone should just meditate on what's been lost, and defer judgement about why he would do this until there is evidence.
Thank you so much. It's awful to see people in here blaming the trial when suicide is much more complex than a single incident pushing someone to the edge like that.
"This sort of stress tends to eat away at your insides. You can't make long-term plans of any kind; meet a nice person at the bar and you're reminded that you can't start anything serious since you might be going away for a long time. A thousand tiny reminders every day that you are already a prisoner and will be for an indefinite period while the lawyers are lawyering. All the defendant has is time to think about is what prison would be like, how the course of their life is not in their hands. It is a feeling of abject powerlessness."