22 ms·

Compare this slap on the wrist to Aaron Swartz: Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud

by ipqk 6y ago

Compare this slap on the wrist to Aaron Swartz: Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,[15] carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

nathanyz 6y ago
It is one of the great imbalances in the justice system where technically corporations are people, but criminally don't face anywhere near the same levels of punishment.
- spoonjim 6y ago
  Individuals are frequently given “life without parole,” which effectively erases them, but corporations almost never get this.
- ljm 6y ago
  They get all of the benefits of personhood but literally none of the drawbacks.
  - NegativeLatency 6y ago
    And other benefits too: Disney trying to shirk its royalty paying responsibilities https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25143926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25143926
- marricks 6y ago
  That's one way to look at it, but I think the deeper truth is just systems are pretty much always controlled by the powerful and benefit only them. Any new rules will be enforced as such. The HN thread discussing blue state concealed carry laws was very revealing; turns out those laws just lead to pay offs to police departments when some org needs permits. [1] Senators make millions on insider relief package info? Who cares. You challenge the powerful by revealing embarrassing secrets? Enemy of the state, you're gonna lose everything or at the very least many years of your life in legal limbo. The power balance in many cases could be the real issue, everyday people just need to (somehow) get way more empowered. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25193861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25193861
  - wolverine876 6y ago
    > the deeper truth is just systems are pretty much always controlled by the powerful The power of individuals with the right idea to change the world (often running circles around the 'powerful') is the foundation of the technology behind most people's jobs here. How do some people can work in the IT industry and promulgate the parent's fatalistic outlook? Internet Explorer would be the dominant browser, Windows the only operating system, and we'd be discussing it in an MSN forum. If people believed in this outlook, there was would be no democracy, human rights, and rule of law (in countries around the world), everything would be corrupt and would be the same everywhere, women and minorities would have made no progress, etc. To say it has no effect and nobody cares is edgy and cool these days, but obviously wrong. If your predecessors believed that, I can't imagine how our lives would be now. The fact is that individuals and groups of individuals, if they act, can and do change the world - and change their communities. Ask any leader; the problem is not lack of power but lack of action. Corruption will fall or not based on you, personally, on what you do. Look at what prior generations did for us; what are you doing for the people who follow us?
    - marricks 6y ago
      I don't think we actually disagree on a ton, my original comment was extremely vague on which "systems", I meant mainly western governments and mega corps. I don't think this unbalance is baked into humanity, I 100% agree people collectively taking a stand (unions, mass actually effective protests, etc) would lead to far better systems.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
  IMO everyone related to a corporate crime should be responsible. If a company dumps toxic waste in to a river, the person who pressed the dump button, the person who told them to and any management that signed off on the idea should all be personally as responsible as if I just took a bucket and walked down to the local river. Perhaps some exceptions for people who could not be expected to understand the law, for example an untrained retail staff being tricked in to violating laws usually only understood by management or legal teams.
  - Escapado 6y ago
    And with (financial) protection for those who refuse to partake and report the crime. I guess the person pressing the dump button would usually make just above minimum wage and would be considered unimportant enough to fire if he stood up for what's right so there is no incentive except for a moral one which I would argue is not enough for most people.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      As much as the liberal-libertarian crowd on HN likes to be vocal against most forms of government licensure, protection from ethical breaches like this is one of the best things about them. You can tell your employer to pound sand because neither you nor anyone they could replace you with will be willing to risk their license to do something unethical. And even if they could find someone sketch to try and push it through you’re protected by your professional review board.
      - hurt_and_afraid 6y ago
        I really love this term you've used: 'liberal-libertarian'. It succintly sums up the odd attitudes held by so many posters who barrack so strongly for near-radical left-wing views, and then balk at the idea of holding corporations even remotely responsible for their actions.
      - bitcharmer 6y ago
        I'm not leftist and I haven't observed any strong bias here. HN crowd is leftist only by US standards but then US is a country where most people think public health care is communism.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  It is all about resources.... a person who has the resources to defend themselves like a corporation will probably get the same punishment.
- bdowling 6y ago
  > ... but criminally don't face anywhere near the same levels of punishment. We generally do not punish corporations harshly for criminal wrongdoing because (1) punishing the corporation mostly harms the shareholders, who aren't responsible because they only have indirect control over the corporation, and (2) the individual employees who commit crimes face criminal prosecution and punishment. [Edit] I regret that my comment was taken as one endorsing corporations or their shareholders profiting from crimes. That was not my intent.
  - gowld 6y ago
    > punishing the corporation mostly harms the shareholders, who aren't responsible because they only have indirect control over the corporation Then why should shareholders get the profits from the work they don't comtrol? > the individual employees who commit crimes face criminal prosecution and punishment. Do they?
    - bdowling 6y ago
      > Then why should shareholders get the profits from the work they don't comtrol? Because they invested money into the corporation when the corporation issued stock.
      - postnihilism 6y ago
        And when that company commits a crime, it should be punished and its stock should lose value. It seems like you're arguing that shareholders should reap rewards for actions that a company takes but be shielded from negative financial repercussions that result from criminal actions it takes. This creates a moral hazard similar to to the "too big to fail" situation of banks. It incentivizes risky and potentially criminal behavior because ownership is able to capture the value of any upside and is shielded from the downsides of the behavior.
        bdowling 6y ago
        > And when that company commits a crime, it should be punished and its stock should lose value. I agree. That is part of the risk investors take.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- meigwilym 6y ago
  Punish the shareholders too. Companies would soon find themselves ethical.
f430 6y ago
and then 10 years later web scraping is fully legal and CFAA cannot be abused to go after them.
akudha 6y ago
It is news like this that makes me want to go back to puppy videos on YouTube. In what universe 35 years in prison can be justified for Aaron’s alleged crime?
- backtoyoujim 6y ago
  It was a Stephen Heymann, Scott Garland, and Carmen Ortiz universe.
- ryanlol 6y ago
  Not in this universe anyway, nothing close to 35 years was ever on the table. To suggest otherwise is deliberate disinformation. The prosecutors had offered Aaron 6 months, he could’ve got less.
  - modo_mario 6y ago
    >Not in this universe anyway, nothing close to 35 years was ever on the table. To suggest otherwise is deliberate disinformation. The prosecutors office was working to pile on even more charges for a theoretical max of 50 years. The offer was a plea deal which the prosecutor thought was an appropriate sentence yet she hounded him with as many charges as possible anyway guaranteeing him years in jail if he did not accept and waive the constitutional rights he'd have during a trial. He declined and his counter offer was rejected. This illustrates how it is a legal fiction that plea bargaining is a voluntary negotiation between the prosecutor and defendant
    - ryanlol 6y ago
      > The prosecutors office was working to pile on even more charges for a theoretical max of 50 years The theoretical maximum is utterly irrelevant. > guaranteeing him years in jail if he did not accept So you acknowledge that he definitely did violate the law, no? Sounds like the prosecutor was very generous with their plea deal offers. “According to Swartz’s lawyers, the prosecutors in the case offered two different pleas. First, they would agree to a sentence of four months if Swartz agreed to plead guilty to the felonies. And second, they could agree to a deal in which Swartz agreed to plead guilty, the government would argue for a 6 month sentence, and Swartz could argue for a lesser sentence (presumably including probation). In all likelihood, the judge would have then sentenced Swartz to 4 months under the 1st plea and whatever the judge thought appropriate, up to 6 months, under the second plea.”
originalvichy 6y ago
”If the punishment for a crime is a fine, the law was written against the lower classes.”
- learnstats2 6y ago
  I find this principle useful - that a fine is just permission slip for people who can afford it. But, in terms of environmental crimes as discussed in these comments, the reason corporation dump toxic waste in the river is to avoid the clean-up cost - it's an economic crime. So in that case, it's an appropriate solution to fine a large multiple of the total clean-up cost plus damages. The point is to not make it an affordable option, no matter how rich you are. Separately, fines which rise in proportional to wealth can work in a progressive way, e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8446545.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8446545.stm
  - eropple 6y ago
    > The point is to not make it an affordable option, no matter how rich you are. The only thing the sufficiently rich can't call-and-raise you on is time. Fictional sums of money, sums that may be less than likely to ever really be paid, are more easily reckoned with than jail time.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      Still not a great system unfortunately. Time based punishments still disproportionately punish the poor who have less of it. Suffering based punishments hurt everyone equally, they don’t waste a person’s time they could be contributing something positive to the world and can be scaled to fit the crime. One hell of a deterrent too.
      - eropple 6y ago
        Entirely true. There are crimes, particularly ones against the body politic, where it a reasonable disincentive on top of the reparative justice of paying for cleanup, though. Reparations are still important--but those reparations will just not raise enough of a threat to prevent it from being done again. Adding some blood is really the only option. Because, candidly, the poor aren't dumping toxic waste in factory quantities.
bdowling 6y ago
At least one of the individuals involved in this TicketMaster hacking pleaded guilty to the hacking. "The charges against Ticketmaster come 26 months after Zeeshan Zaidi, the former head of Ticketmaster’s artist services division, pled guilty in a related case to conspiring to hack the rival company and engage in wired fraud."
- 0goel0 6y ago
  Unless some high-level execs are convicted and put in jail, and the company is given a high-enough file[1], this is the cost of doing business. [1] 2 years of net profits? 50% of gross revenue? IDK. It has to be meaningful amount to truly deter criminal acts.
  - roywiggins 6y ago
    Zaidi has been convicted. He's awaiting sentencing.
    - kevingadd 6y ago
      Arguably a single conviction won't achieve anything. If it's just one sucker who gets taken out (years later) as a result of an incredibly profitable scam, it's easy to convince your employees that they won't be the one to take the fall. If you have a significant portion of the executive team or other leadership getting punished it sets a clearer example.
ransom1538 6y ago
"Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,[15]" You could walk into a liquor store - pistol whip a clerk then rob the joint and do less time. AND at least if you pistol whip a clerk you get parole. You wont get federal parole if you try to guess a computer password [1]. https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/is-federal-parole-system.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/is-federal-parole-sy...
- xxpor 6y ago
  There's absolutely 0 chance he ever would have done anywhere near the statutory maximum. Statutory maximum != sentencing guidelines.
  - ransom1538 6y ago
    Yes. If you pistol whip a clerk you would get 10. If you get caught hacking you will get 5 in federal (35ish year max). The guy pistol whipping will get parole in 5. Same same.
    - ryanlol 6y ago
      Most federal CFAA penalties have been far lower than 5 years.
  - INTPenis 6y ago
    Probably not but if you have a possibility of 35 years in a US prison, or even 5 years, looming over you that is a heavy burden. And we all know how it turned out.
533474 6y ago
Nice reminder of how unbalanced and corrupt our system really is. I am not saying that our system doesn't work. It just feels that there is so much left to do.
jdc 6y ago
It's a bloody miscarriage of justice.
ryanlol 6y ago
Aaron never received any penalty at all. The government offered him 6 months in jail, with the opportunity to argue for further leniency. There’s a very good chance that he would’ve walked away with essentially nothing.
- wiml 6y ago
  The government threatened him with 35 years in prison and a lifetime of debt in order to extract a forced confession. That's what a plea deal often amounts to, a confession under duress.

by ipqk 6y ago

nathanyz 6y ago

It is one of the great imbalances in the justice system where technically corporations are people, but criminally don't face anywhere near the same levels of punishment.

spoonjim 6y ago
Individuals are frequently given “life without parole,” which effectively erases them, but corporations almost never get this.
ljm 6y ago
They get all of the benefits of personhood but literally none of the drawbacks.
- NegativeLatency 6y ago
  And other benefits too: Disney trying to shirk its royalty paying responsibilities https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25143926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25143926
marricks 6y ago
That's one way to look at it, but I think the deeper truth is just systems are pretty much always controlled by the powerful and benefit only them. Any new rules will be enforced as such. The HN thread discussing blue state concealed carry laws was very revealing; turns out those laws just lead to pay offs to police departments when some org needs permits. [1] Senators make millions on insider relief package info? Who cares. You challenge the powerful by revealing embarrassing secrets? Enemy of the state, you're gonna lose everything or at the very least many years of your life in legal limbo. The power balance in many cases could be the real issue, everyday people just need to (somehow) get way more empowered. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25193861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25193861
- wolverine876 6y ago
  > the deeper truth is just systems are pretty much always controlled by the powerful The power of individuals with the right idea to change the world (often running circles around the 'powerful') is the foundation of the technology behind most people's jobs here. How do some people can work in the IT industry and promulgate the parent's fatalistic outlook? Internet Explorer would be the dominant browser, Windows the only operating system, and we'd be discussing it in an MSN forum. If people believed in this outlook, there was would be no democracy, human rights, and rule of law (in countries around the world), everything would be corrupt and would be the same everywhere, women and minorities would have made no progress, etc. To say it has no effect and nobody cares is edgy and cool these days, but obviously wrong. If your predecessors believed that, I can't imagine how our lives would be now. The fact is that individuals and groups of individuals, if they act, can and do change the world - and change their communities. Ask any leader; the problem is not lack of power but lack of action. Corruption will fall or not based on you, personally, on what you do. Look at what prior generations did for us; what are you doing for the people who follow us?
  - marricks 6y ago
    I don't think we actually disagree on a ton, my original comment was extremely vague on which "systems", I meant mainly western governments and mega corps. I don't think this unbalance is baked into humanity, I 100% agree people collectively taking a stand (unions, mass actually effective protests, etc) would lead to far better systems.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
IMO everyone related to a corporate crime should be responsible. If a company dumps toxic waste in to a river, the person who pressed the dump button, the person who told them to and any management that signed off on the idea should all be personally as responsible as if I just took a bucket and walked down to the local river. Perhaps some exceptions for people who could not be expected to understand the law, for example an untrained retail staff being tricked in to violating laws usually only understood by management or legal teams.
- Escapado 6y ago
  And with (financial) protection for those who refuse to partake and report the crime. I guess the person pressing the dump button would usually make just above minimum wage and would be considered unimportant enough to fire if he stood up for what's right so there is no incentive except for a moral one which I would argue is not enough for most people.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    As much as the liberal-libertarian crowd on HN likes to be vocal against most forms of government licensure, protection from ethical breaches like this is one of the best things about them. You can tell your employer to pound sand because neither you nor anyone they could replace you with will be willing to risk their license to do something unethical. And even if they could find someone sketch to try and push it through you’re protected by your professional review board.
    - hurt_and_afraid 6y ago
      I really love this term you've used: 'liberal-libertarian'. It succintly sums up the odd attitudes held by so many posters who barrack so strongly for near-radical left-wing views, and then balk at the idea of holding corporations even remotely responsible for their actions.
    - bitcharmer 6y ago
      I'm not leftist and I haven't observed any strong bias here. HN crowd is leftist only by US standards but then US is a country where most people think public health care is communism.
cortesoft 6y ago
It is all about resources.... a person who has the resources to defend themselves like a corporation will probably get the same punishment.
bdowling 6y ago
> ... but criminally don't face anywhere near the same levels of punishment. We generally do not punish corporations harshly for criminal wrongdoing because (1) punishing the corporation mostly harms the shareholders, who aren't responsible because they only have indirect control over the corporation, and (2) the individual employees who commit crimes face criminal prosecution and punishment. [Edit] I regret that my comment was taken as one endorsing corporations or their shareholders profiting from crimes. That was not my intent.
- gowld 6y ago
  > punishing the corporation mostly harms the shareholders, who aren't responsible because they only have indirect control over the corporation Then why should shareholders get the profits from the work they don't comtrol? > the individual employees who commit crimes face criminal prosecution and punishment. Do they?
  - bdowling 6y ago
    > Then why should shareholders get the profits from the work they don't comtrol? Because they invested money into the corporation when the corporation issued stock.
    - postnihilism 6y ago
      And when that company commits a crime, it should be punished and its stock should lose value. It seems like you're arguing that shareholders should reap rewards for actions that a company takes but be shielded from negative financial repercussions that result from criminal actions it takes. This creates a moral hazard similar to to the "too big to fail" situation of banks. It incentivizes risky and potentially criminal behavior because ownership is able to capture the value of any upside and is shielded from the downsides of the behavior.
      - bdowling 6y ago
        > And when that company commits a crime, it should be punished and its stock should lose value. I agree. That is part of the risk investors take.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
meigwilym 6y ago
Punish the shareholders too. Companies would soon find themselves ethical.

f430 6y ago

and then 10 years later web scraping is fully legal and CFAA cannot be abused to go after them.

akudha 6y ago

It is news like this that makes me want to go back to puppy videos on YouTube. In what universe 35 years in prison can be justified for Aaron’s alleged crime?

backtoyoujim 6y ago
It was a Stephen Heymann, Scott Garland, and Carmen Ortiz universe.
ryanlol 6y ago
Not in this universe anyway, nothing close to 35 years was ever on the table. To suggest otherwise is deliberate disinformation. The prosecutors had offered Aaron 6 months, he could’ve got less.
- modo_mario 6y ago
  >Not in this universe anyway, nothing close to 35 years was ever on the table. To suggest otherwise is deliberate disinformation. The prosecutors office was working to pile on even more charges for a theoretical max of 50 years. The offer was a plea deal which the prosecutor thought was an appropriate sentence yet she hounded him with as many charges as possible anyway guaranteeing him years in jail if he did not accept and waive the constitutional rights he'd have during a trial. He declined and his counter offer was rejected. This illustrates how it is a legal fiction that plea bargaining is a voluntary negotiation between the prosecutor and defendant
  - ryanlol 6y ago
    > The prosecutors office was working to pile on even more charges for a theoretical max of 50 years The theoretical maximum is utterly irrelevant. > guaranteeing him years in jail if he did not accept So you acknowledge that he definitely did violate the law, no? Sounds like the prosecutor was very generous with their plea deal offers. “According to Swartz’s lawyers, the prosecutors in the case offered two different pleas. First, they would agree to a sentence of four months if Swartz agreed to plead guilty to the felonies. And second, they could agree to a deal in which Swartz agreed to plead guilty, the government would argue for a 6 month sentence, and Swartz could argue for a lesser sentence (presumably including probation). In all likelihood, the judge would have then sentenced Swartz to 4 months under the 1st plea and whatever the judge thought appropriate, up to 6 months, under the second plea.”

originalvichy 6y ago

”If the punishment for a crime is a fine, the law was written against the lower classes.”

learnstats2 6y ago
I find this principle useful - that a fine is just permission slip for people who can afford it. But, in terms of environmental crimes as discussed in these comments, the reason corporation dump toxic waste in the river is to avoid the clean-up cost - it's an economic crime. So in that case, it's an appropriate solution to fine a large multiple of the total clean-up cost plus damages. The point is to not make it an affordable option, no matter how rich you are. Separately, fines which rise in proportional to wealth can work in a progressive way, e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8446545.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8446545.stm
- eropple 6y ago
  > The point is to not make it an affordable option, no matter how rich you are. The only thing the sufficiently rich can't call-and-raise you on is time. Fictional sums of money, sums that may be less than likely to ever really be paid, are more easily reckoned with than jail time.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Still not a great system unfortunately. Time based punishments still disproportionately punish the poor who have less of it. Suffering based punishments hurt everyone equally, they don’t waste a person’s time they could be contributing something positive to the world and can be scaled to fit the crime. One hell of a deterrent too.
    - eropple 6y ago
      Entirely true. There are crimes, particularly ones against the body politic, where it a reasonable disincentive on top of the reparative justice of paying for cleanup, though. Reparations are still important--but those reparations will just not raise enough of a threat to prevent it from being done again. Adding some blood is really the only option. Because, candidly, the poor aren't dumping toxic waste in factory quantities.

bdowling 6y ago

At least one of the individuals involved in this TicketMaster hacking pleaded guilty to the hacking. "The charges against Ticketmaster come 26 months after Zeeshan Zaidi, the former head of Ticketmaster’s artist services division, pled guilty in a related case to conspiring to hack the rival company and engage in wired fraud."

0goel0 6y ago
Unless some high-level execs are convicted and put in jail, and the company is given a high-enough file[1], this is the cost of doing business. [1] 2 years of net profits? 50% of gross revenue? IDK. It has to be meaningful amount to truly deter criminal acts.
- roywiggins 6y ago
  Zaidi has been convicted. He's awaiting sentencing.
  - kevingadd 6y ago
    Arguably a single conviction won't achieve anything. If it's just one sucker who gets taken out (years later) as a result of an incredibly profitable scam, it's easy to convince your employees that they won't be the one to take the fall. If you have a significant portion of the executive team or other leadership getting punished it sets a clearer example.

ransom1538 6y ago

"Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,[15]" You could walk into a liquor store - pistol whip a clerk then rob the joint and do less time. AND at least if you pistol whip a clerk you get parole. You wont get federal parole if you try to guess a computer password [1]. https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/is-federal-parole-system.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/is-federal-parole-sy...

xxpor 6y ago
There's absolutely 0 chance he ever would have done anywhere near the statutory maximum. Statutory maximum != sentencing guidelines.
- ransom1538 6y ago
  Yes. If you pistol whip a clerk you would get 10. If you get caught hacking you will get 5 in federal (35ish year max). The guy pistol whipping will get parole in 5. Same same.
  - ryanlol 6y ago
    Most federal CFAA penalties have been far lower than 5 years.
- INTPenis 6y ago
  Probably not but if you have a possibility of 35 years in a US prison, or even 5 years, looming over you that is a heavy burden. And we all know how it turned out.

533474 6y ago

Nice reminder of how unbalanced and corrupt our system really is. I am not saying that our system doesn't work. It just feels that there is so much left to do.

jdc 6y ago

It's a bloody miscarriage of justice.

ryanlol 6y ago

Aaron never received any penalty at all. The government offered him 6 months in jail, with the opportunity to argue for further leniency. There’s a very good chance that he would’ve walked away with essentially nothing.

wiml 6y ago
The government threatened him with 35 years in prison and a lifetime of debt in order to extract a forced confession. That's what a plea deal often amounts to, a confession under duress.