5 ms·

> It amazes me what our justice system can do to people and not be held responsible. Just to play devil's advocate here (and I understand this goes against pr

> It amazes me what our justice system can do to people and not be held responsible. Just to play devil's advocate here (and I understand this goes against prevailing opinion), but he did break the law. That much isn't in dispute, they had a video of him entering the MIT network closet. And he didn't commit misdemeanors, he committed a half dozen felonies (actually more, but the prosecution dropped a few of them). The prosecution was offering a meager 6 months in a low-security prison (for multiple felonies, that's peanuts) for his crimes but he rejected the offer (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosecution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosec...). I understand what he was fighting for and agree with him and his ideology. I support Open Access, but let's not kid ourselves or delude ourselves - he wasn't innocent. He did commit crimes. I don't think this is the justice's systems fault. They were going to go extremely light on him but it was he who chose to fight.

wolfgke 11y ago
> Just to play devil's advocate here (and I understand this goes against prevailing opinion), but he did break the law. Aaron himself said "There is no justice in following unjust laws." > https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj... I even go further and say that you can't be good and lawful at the same time - at least not in any currently existing system of laws.
- an_account 11y ago
  Is the right course of action to break "unjust" laws, or to just fight to change them? This is an opinion, but I argue that every person has a different definition of what is "just", and if everyone followed their definition of "just", than our legal system would break down. Society functions on a set of laws, but those laws can change for the better.
  - wolfgke 11y ago
    I mean "good" in the sense of the values that you honor - and here indeed you can't be good and lawful at the same time (except "being lawful" is your exact definition of good). I personally believe that the way to go is to turn ethics from a humanity into an empirical science, so that any "false" (in a sense that future people will have to define formally) can indeed be falsified. This would at least solve many problems. But at the moment this all is rather science-fiction, since we don't even understand how our brains works (which such theories will probably have to incorporate as special case).
  - andrei_says_ 11y ago
    Unfortunately studies show that lawmaking in the U.S. does not reflect public opinion and interests except for the top % of richest people. In the face of this reality, direct action exposing publicly funded papers to the public kind of makes sense. http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 "A proposed policy change with low support among economically elite Americans (one-out-of-five in favour) is adopted only about 18% of the time," they write, "while a proposed change with high support (four-out-of-five in favour) is adopted about 45% of the time." On the other hand: When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it. They conclude: Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organisations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    The US was founded after war. That is going far above and beyond merely breaking unjust laws. Working within the system is preferable as long as it remains an option, but for many it has closed off. So they switch to breaking unjust laws instead. Be wary of what follows if that option is removed.
  - ionised 11y ago
    Fighting to change the system from within that system is much, much less effective than massie civil disobedience of that system. In fact it seems completely ineffectual to me most of the time. I'm on the 'break unjust laws' side of the argument, as have been many of the greatest civil rights figures in history. Break the unjust laws and convince as many people as you can to break them as well.
- seiji 11y ago
  you can't be good and lawful at the same time It's so early in the evening to have reached Peak HN already.
- cobaltblue 11y ago
  Unfortunately he picked the wrong unjust laws to break, the wrong targets to go after. The problem with being a true believer... http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/01/noam-chomsky-killed-aaron-swartz.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/01/noam-ch...
quanticle 11y ago
>Just to play devil's advocate here (and I understand this goes against prevailing opinion), but he did break the law. He absolutely did break the law. I, personally don't dispute that, nor do I think that that's a controversial fact here. The trouble that I and many other commenters here have with what happened to Aaron Swartz is the gross disproportionality of the punishment he was facing. For downloading academic papers, he was facing a punishment that could have gone to literally millions of dollars in fines and up to 35 years in prison. That is the sort of punishment that I would expect for ending a life (i.e. negligent homicide), not downloading a few thousand academic papers and publishing them on the Internet. Should Aaron have gone to jail? Should he have been forced to pay some restitution? Probably. But I don't think that holding the spectre of millions of dollars in fines and the rest of his adult life in jail over his head was the right thing for the prosecutor to do. Its very rare for a crime to break just one law. Prosecutors almost always have a choice of laws to prosecute under. In this case, the prosecutor chose the heaviest, most punishing law, when she could have chosen a lesser charge.
- raldi 11y ago
  > For downloading academic papers, he was facing [...] You left out the part where he snuck into a server closet and tampered with the network equipment. Among other things, that's burglary.
  - wolfgke 11y ago
    > Among other things, that's burglary. And locking away scientific papers of research that was funded with public money behind paywalls is burglary of the public.
    - raldi 11y ago
      I can't imagine a way that's even figuratively true. The crime of burglary is about being somewhere that you're not supposed to; perhaps you meant to say it's like larceny of the public. But even then, it's a very tenuous connection you're trying to draw. These companies were not taking anything away from the public; they made the effort to digitize, process, and catalog documents, which is no small task. And they set up servers to host these documents and make them searchable. If you feel they're asking too much money for these efforts, you're welcome to simply pretend they don't exist, and replicate their work yourself. They did nothing to make that task harder. Now, if the companies destroyed the original public records or otherwise placed new locks around them that hadn't existed beforehand, then yes, your metaphor, while still hand-wavy, would at least hold water. But of course nothing like that actually happened here.
id 11y ago
Yes, he did commit crimes. > a meager 6 months in a low-security prison > They were going to go extremely light on him 6 months in any prison and having a criminal record for the rest of your life is extremely harsh and cruel - and unnecessarily so. Going light on him would have meant dropping all charges.
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
>but he did break the law Those here are well enough in the know to realize that the law is often twisted to serve corrupt ends and thus any question of law breaking should also be met with a consideration of the morality and ethics of the law and of the enforcement of the law. >The prosecution was offering a meager 6 months in a low-security prison (for multiple felonies, that's peanuts) for his crimes but he rejected the offer (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosec... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosec...). Or isomorphically, they were willing to add decades to his sentence for insisting to his right to a trial. >They were going to go extremely light on him but it was he who chose to fight. How dare he exercise his rights!

wolfgke 11y ago

> Just to play devil's advocate here (and I understand this goes against prevailing opinion), but he did break the law. Aaron himself said "There is no justice in following unjust laws." > https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj... I even go further and say that you can't be good and lawful at the same time - at least not in any currently existing system of laws.

an_account 11y ago
Is the right course of action to break "unjust" laws, or to just fight to change them? This is an opinion, but I argue that every person has a different definition of what is "just", and if everyone followed their definition of "just", than our legal system would break down. Society functions on a set of laws, but those laws can change for the better.
- wolfgke 11y ago
  I mean "good" in the sense of the values that you honor - and here indeed you can't be good and lawful at the same time (except "being lawful" is your exact definition of good). I personally believe that the way to go is to turn ethics from a humanity into an empirical science, so that any "false" (in a sense that future people will have to define formally) can indeed be falsified. This would at least solve many problems. But at the moment this all is rather science-fiction, since we don't even understand how our brains works (which such theories will probably have to incorporate as special case).
- andrei_says_ 11y ago
  Unfortunately studies show that lawmaking in the U.S. does not reflect public opinion and interests except for the top % of richest people. In the face of this reality, direct action exposing publicly funded papers to the public kind of makes sense. http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746 "A proposed policy change with low support among economically elite Americans (one-out-of-five in favour) is adopted only about 18% of the time," they write, "while a proposed change with high support (four-out-of-five in favour) is adopted about 45% of the time." On the other hand: When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it. They conclude: Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organisations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  The US was founded after war. That is going far above and beyond merely breaking unjust laws. Working within the system is preferable as long as it remains an option, but for many it has closed off. So they switch to breaking unjust laws instead. Be wary of what follows if that option is removed.
- ionised 11y ago
  Fighting to change the system from within that system is much, much less effective than massie civil disobedience of that system. In fact it seems completely ineffectual to me most of the time. I'm on the 'break unjust laws' side of the argument, as have been many of the greatest civil rights figures in history. Break the unjust laws and convince as many people as you can to break them as well.
seiji 11y ago
you can't be good and lawful at the same time It's so early in the evening to have reached Peak HN already.
cobaltblue 11y ago
Unfortunately he picked the wrong unjust laws to break, the wrong targets to go after. The problem with being a true believer... http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/01/noam-chomsky-killed-aaron-swartz.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/01/noam-ch...

quanticle 11y ago

>Just to play devil's advocate here (and I understand this goes against prevailing opinion), but he did break the law. He absolutely did break the law. I, personally don't dispute that, nor do I think that that's a controversial fact here. The trouble that I and many other commenters here have with what happened to Aaron Swartz is the gross disproportionality of the punishment he was facing. For downloading academic papers, he was facing a punishment that could have gone to literally millions of dollars in fines and up to 35 years in prison. That is the sort of punishment that I would expect for ending a life (i.e. negligent homicide), not downloading a few thousand academic papers and publishing them on the Internet. Should Aaron have gone to jail? Should he have been forced to pay some restitution? Probably. But I don't think that holding the spectre of millions of dollars in fines and the rest of his adult life in jail over his head was the right thing for the prosecutor to do. Its very rare for a crime to break just one law. Prosecutors almost always have a choice of laws to prosecute under. In this case, the prosecutor chose the heaviest, most punishing law, when she could have chosen a lesser charge.

raldi 11y ago
> For downloading academic papers, he was facing [...] You left out the part where he snuck into a server closet and tampered with the network equipment. Among other things, that's burglary.
- wolfgke 11y ago
  > Among other things, that's burglary. And locking away scientific papers of research that was funded with public money behind paywalls is burglary of the public.
  - raldi 11y ago
    I can't imagine a way that's even figuratively true. The crime of burglary is about being somewhere that you're not supposed to; perhaps you meant to say it's like larceny of the public. But even then, it's a very tenuous connection you're trying to draw. These companies were not taking anything away from the public; they made the effort to digitize, process, and catalog documents, which is no small task. And they set up servers to host these documents and make them searchable. If you feel they're asking too much money for these efforts, you're welcome to simply pretend they don't exist, and replicate their work yourself. They did nothing to make that task harder. Now, if the companies destroyed the original public records or otherwise placed new locks around them that hadn't existed beforehand, then yes, your metaphor, while still hand-wavy, would at least hold water. But of course nothing like that actually happened here.

id 11y ago

Yes, he did commit crimes. > a meager 6 months in a low-security prison > They were going to go extremely light on him 6 months in any prison and having a criminal record for the rest of your life is extremely harsh and cruel - and unnecessarily so. Going light on him would have meant dropping all charges.

Lawtonfogle 11y ago

>but he did break the law Those here are well enough in the know to realize that the law is often twisted to serve corrupt ends and thus any question of law breaking should also be met with a consideration of the morality and ethics of the law and of the enforcement of the law. >The prosecution was offering a meager 6 months in a low-security prison (for multiple felonies, that's peanuts) for his crimes but he rejected the offer (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosec... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosec...). Or isomorphically, they were willing to add decades to his sentence for insisting to his right to a trial. >They were going to go extremely light on him but it was he who chose to fight. How dare he exercise his rights!