8 ms·

Well oftentimes colleges can and will exercise discretion when it comes to having a student arrested and they will perform their own internal inquiry to determi

by dlandis 11y ago

Well oftentimes colleges can and will exercise discretion when it comes to having a student arrested and they will perform their own internal inquiry to determine whether an offense warrants arrest and prosecution. That's just the way it goes. Colleges should do the right thing for their students and protect them when appropriate because all kids do stupid things. MIT would have known pretty well what type of prosecution he would face. Do you think all students who do something illegal on campus get arrested for it?

gnaritas 11y ago
He didn't just do some silly illegal thing; he illegally hacked a network from a closet he should not have been in and hit it with so much traffic that he caused legitimate users of the network to suffer loss of access for multiple days and he did this multiple times after being kicked out. Legitimate users were harmed, regardless of what what anyone feels, Aaron committed a felony and was rightfully arrested. Beyond that, you seem to be overlooking the fact that it wasn't MIT that was after Aaron, but JSTOR, who constantly pushed MIT to help them locate the hacker who was taking their data from the MIT network. MIT didn't have the option to just handle the matter internally, a third party was involved who was being hacked through the MIT network. You know what happens when you're a hacktivist; you go to jail. Aaron knew he was guilty, he knew he was breaking the law when he did it, it was willful civil disobedience by his own admission. His suicide was likely the result of his knowing jail was coming even if the prosecutor hadn't been overzealous because he committed a felony and knew it and he couldn't deal with facing the consequences of his actions. He wanted to change the system, he went about it the wrong way and figured that out too late.
- igravious 11y ago
  You can't say that it was wilful civil disobedience and then say that he went about it the wrong way, you contradict yourself as that's kind of the definition of civil disobedience. If you're saying that he ought not to been civilly disobedient then that's a different matter but what he did makes him a sort of modern-day hero. That he took his own life makes him a martyr in a weird kind of way. I know that hero and martyr are emotive words but I think I nearly feel that way about all this. And it's not theft, it's copyright infringement. Repeat after me: you can't steal bits and bytes, only copy them, and copying is infringement, not theft.
  - gnaritas 11y ago
    > You can't say that it was wilful civil disobedience and then say that he went about it the wrong way, you contradict yourself as that's kind of the definition of civil disobedience. I didn't mean "morally" wrong, I mean wrong approach. That's not contradictory at all; civil disobedience is not always the correct way to go about change. Sometimes it is, like when its done en-masse; going it alone, wrong approach. > And it's not theft Fine, infringing their data, irrelevant to the conversation; a crime no matter what label you want to apply. The right approach is to lobby to get the law changed, not break it by yourself and hope you don't get hammered.
    - ddingus 11y ago
      You are very seriously misinformed. For there to be a defensible claim of theft, the property owner must lose their property. Someone experiences something missing. Infringement exists as a concept and an element of law because it is not theft, specifically.
      - gnaritas 11y ago
        Already corrected that, not germane to the point; he wasn't charged with theft.
    - igravious 11y ago
      > Sometimes it is, like when its done en-masse; going it alone, wrong approach. Perhaps, perhaps not. There's certainly safety in numbers. But this issue is not a huge social issue like, say, nationalist causes or other political issues. This is a kind of geeky issue that only a small fraction of the population gets but that everybody should care about. Also the law-breaking is doing no-one any physical harm. Nobody is going to go hungry because they are deprived of food. Some argue that mp3 downloads have not affected the music industry's revenues and profits, or at least not by the vast amounts they claim. Similarly I imagine the out of pocket hit to JSTOR to be pretty small, but couple that with the fact that a lot of academic papers were funded by public money then people start seeing things differently. Hence the open-access journal movement and Arxiv and so on. And what about the benefits to society brought about by giving wider access to knowledge? One could start to take a pretty dim view of the ridiculous prices the JSTORs and Elseviers charge. > it's irrelevant to the conversation. It's not totally irrelevant. Stealing/theft sounds worse than infringement. Look, I'm not having a go at you. I just think that Aaron was justified in what he did and I admire him for what he did. There are times for emailing and times for plugging in a network cable, Aaron chose the cable and I don't think that was the wrong approach even though it ended tragically.
Chathamization 11y ago
That's a very good point. It's pretty common when a sexual assault happens for the school to handle it internally rather than notify the authorities. Apparently, this is the case at MIT, and 1 in 6 female students have reported being sexually assaulted[1]. When a school sends police after someone for downloading academic files, and yet decides to not send the police after sex offenders (dealing with them internally and not even expelling them), they have pretty screwed up priorities. [1] http://tech.mit.edu/V134/N50/surveyresults.html http://tech.mit.edu/V134/N50/surveyresults.html
- briandear 11y ago
  Swartz wasn't a MIT student and thus 'dealing with it internally' was not an available option. What would they do, put him in detention?
  - Chathamization 11y ago
    Ask Harvard to take away his JSTOR access? It doesn't seem like it would have been difficult to have found some punitive measures that didn't involve the police.
    - gnaritas 11y ago
      You misunderstand what happened, Harvard wasn't involved, he went onto the MIT campus where he was not a student, to take advantage of their on campus anonymous access to JSTOR, he was abusing MIT's open anonymous policy to get the data and he kept moving around to different terminals whenever they'd kill his access to the one he was at; he finally ended up sneaking into a network closet and plugging directly into the network to get access because the public terminals he'd be using had all been shut down to lock him out. He didn't have access, he was't logged in, he was taking advantage of MIT's anonymous policy.
nerfhammer 11y ago
Handling it internally was precluded by the fact that Swartz had no association with MIT. He was never a student there. There was no way for them to handle it internally. He was also caught by the MIT Police which has full state-vested arrest power, so I'm not sure if there's any turning back from the legal system at that point.

by dlandis 11y ago

gnaritas 11y ago

He didn't just do some silly illegal thing; he illegally hacked a network from a closet he should not have been in and hit it with so much traffic that he caused legitimate users of the network to suffer loss of access for multiple days and he did this multiple times after being kicked out. Legitimate users were harmed, regardless of what what anyone feels, Aaron committed a felony and was rightfully arrested. Beyond that, you seem to be overlooking the fact that it wasn't MIT that was after Aaron, but JSTOR, who constantly pushed MIT to help them locate the hacker who was taking their data from the MIT network. MIT didn't have the option to just handle the matter internally, a third party was involved who was being hacked through the MIT network. You know what happens when you're a hacktivist; you go to jail. Aaron knew he was guilty, he knew he was breaking the law when he did it, it was willful civil disobedience by his own admission. His suicide was likely the result of his knowing jail was coming even if the prosecutor hadn't been overzealous because he committed a felony and knew it and he couldn't deal with facing the consequences of his actions. He wanted to change the system, he went about it the wrong way and figured that out too late.

igravious 11y ago
You can't say that it was wilful civil disobedience and then say that he went about it the wrong way, you contradict yourself as that's kind of the definition of civil disobedience. If you're saying that he ought not to been civilly disobedient then that's a different matter but what he did makes him a sort of modern-day hero. That he took his own life makes him a martyr in a weird kind of way. I know that hero and martyr are emotive words but I think I nearly feel that way about all this. And it's not theft, it's copyright infringement. Repeat after me: you can't steal bits and bytes, only copy them, and copying is infringement, not theft.
- gnaritas 11y ago
  > You can't say that it was wilful civil disobedience and then say that he went about it the wrong way, you contradict yourself as that's kind of the definition of civil disobedience. I didn't mean "morally" wrong, I mean wrong approach. That's not contradictory at all; civil disobedience is not always the correct way to go about change. Sometimes it is, like when its done en-masse; going it alone, wrong approach. > And it's not theft Fine, infringing their data, irrelevant to the conversation; a crime no matter what label you want to apply. The right approach is to lobby to get the law changed, not break it by yourself and hope you don't get hammered.
  - ddingus 11y ago
    You are very seriously misinformed. For there to be a defensible claim of theft, the property owner must lose their property. Someone experiences something missing. Infringement exists as a concept and an element of law because it is not theft, specifically.
    - gnaritas 11y ago
      Already corrected that, not germane to the point; he wasn't charged with theft.
  - igravious 11y ago
    > Sometimes it is, like when its done en-masse; going it alone, wrong approach. Perhaps, perhaps not. There's certainly safety in numbers. But this issue is not a huge social issue like, say, nationalist causes or other political issues. This is a kind of geeky issue that only a small fraction of the population gets but that everybody should care about. Also the law-breaking is doing no-one any physical harm. Nobody is going to go hungry because they are deprived of food. Some argue that mp3 downloads have not affected the music industry's revenues and profits, or at least not by the vast amounts they claim. Similarly I imagine the out of pocket hit to JSTOR to be pretty small, but couple that with the fact that a lot of academic papers were funded by public money then people start seeing things differently. Hence the open-access journal movement and Arxiv and so on. And what about the benefits to society brought about by giving wider access to knowledge? One could start to take a pretty dim view of the ridiculous prices the JSTORs and Elseviers charge. > it's irrelevant to the conversation. It's not totally irrelevant. Stealing/theft sounds worse than infringement. Look, I'm not having a go at you. I just think that Aaron was justified in what he did and I admire him for what he did. There are times for emailing and times for plugging in a network cable, Aaron chose the cable and I don't think that was the wrong approach even though it ended tragically.

Chathamization 11y ago

That's a very good point. It's pretty common when a sexual assault happens for the school to handle it internally rather than notify the authorities. Apparently, this is the case at MIT, and 1 in 6 female students have reported being sexually assaulted[1]. When a school sends police after someone for downloading academic files, and yet decides to not send the police after sex offenders (dealing with them internally and not even expelling them), they have pretty screwed up priorities. [1] http://tech.mit.edu/V134/N50/surveyresults.html http://tech.mit.edu/V134/N50/surveyresults.html

briandear 11y ago
Swartz wasn't a MIT student and thus 'dealing with it internally' was not an available option. What would they do, put him in detention?
- Chathamization 11y ago
  Ask Harvard to take away his JSTOR access? It doesn't seem like it would have been difficult to have found some punitive measures that didn't involve the police.
  - gnaritas 11y ago
    You misunderstand what happened, Harvard wasn't involved, he went onto the MIT campus where he was not a student, to take advantage of their on campus anonymous access to JSTOR, he was abusing MIT's open anonymous policy to get the data and he kept moving around to different terminals whenever they'd kill his access to the one he was at; he finally ended up sneaking into a network closet and plugging directly into the network to get access because the public terminals he'd be using had all been shut down to lock him out. He didn't have access, he was't logged in, he was taking advantage of MIT's anonymous policy.

nerfhammer 11y ago

Handling it internally was precluded by the fact that Swartz had no association with MIT. He was never a student there. There was no way for them to handle it internally. He was also caught by the MIT Police which has full state-vested arrest power, so I'm not sure if there's any turning back from the legal system at that point.