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Maybe the real issue is selective outrage about legal injustice. I totally agree that this was wrong and he should not have been prosecuted but a large part of

Maybe the real issue is selective outrage about legal injustice. I totally agree that this was wrong and he should not have been prosecuted but a large part of the effort that dealt this injustice to him was facilitated by the fact that the vast majority of people willfully turn a blind eye when the same thing or worse happens to people are not of their ilk. If we were to finally stand up and say that justice for all means justice for ALL; we might be able to prevent the next Aaron Swartz. Edit: As someone that has done both state and fed time, the thing that makes me the saddest here is that the charges would have been drastically reduced if not dismissed and his appeals would have had a high probability of success. They use this "scare tatic" so much and I understand why it works; the possibility of facing those years is terrifying. I don't mean that in any demeaning manner, 25/26 and never having done time I cannot imagine how terrified he must have been. Edit: I would also like to bring attention to the fact that M. Zuckerberg aggressively pursues these types of cases against people for doing far less than he has done.

spwa4 2mo ago
It absolutely is. Youth services is one such thing that people just refuse to get upset about. Not when they attack kids for flimsy reasons. And, conversely, people also utterly refuse to react when kids eventually figure out that their way out is to attack people, other kids, social workers and anyone else in institutions, which is one factor that makes youth services facilities such horrible places to be.
ignoramous 2mo ago
> large part of the effort that dealt this injustice to him was facilitated by the fact that the vast majority of people willfully turn a blind eye when the same thing or worse happens to people are not of their ilk Reminds me of Marx's 1870 letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt: Every industrial & commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps ... The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life ... regards himself as a member of the ruling nation & consequently becomes a tool of the English [ruling class] against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination [over his own self]. He cherishes religious, social, & national prejudices against the Irish worker ... The Irishman ... sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive & intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. ... The antagonism between Englishmen & Irishmen ... enables the governments of [the US & England], whenever they think fit, to break the edge off the social conflict by their mutual bullying, and, in case of need, by war between the two countries. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_04_09.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_...
- mcv 2mo ago
  The exact same mechanism is used to keep poor white Americans voting Republican: even if they're poor, they see themselves as the white ruling class over black and Hispanic people, despite the fact that they themselves are kept poor by the real ruling class.
  - kevin_thibedeau 2mo ago
    The con is largely directed at the religious right, of which, poorer whites make up the largest cohort. That's how they convinced people directly targeted by the bigotry to still vote for them.
  - AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
    You're missing the symmetry. The two party system is a false dichotomy. The enemy is not the other party, it's the system that causes there to be only two alternatives that are both captured by mostly the same interests. Each party convinces half the population that the other is trying to destroy them so that their votes cancel out. And then Marx calls this a criticism of "capitalism" even though it's fundamentally a generic criticism of what happens when you centralize political power and then allow special interests to divide people into camps.
    - mcv 2mo ago
      The two party system is absolutely part of the problem, but there's also definitely the culture war being waged to distract people from the class war that's being waged against them. But the two-party system definitely enables that, making it easier to win by discrediting the other, because there only is one other.
      - account42 2mo ago
        And which party started the culture war? By definition it's not the conservatives.
        2mo ago
giantg2 2mo ago
"Maybe the real issue is selective outrage about legal injustice." The real issue is selective enforcement of the law. If it applied equally to everyone, then more people would be outraged as it affected them.
- jmward01 2mo ago
  Perfectly equal enforcement really isn't possible, but it should be the policy to enforce in proportion to active harm. The bigger the ongoing active harm, the quicker to react we should be. Some individual torrents a single movie? NBD. No matter the side of the argument you are on this should be ignored. A company intentionally throws content strikes causing legitimate harm to large numbers of content creators? That should addressed. Reality should always have a place in the law.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - GolfPopper 2mo ago
    Finland links speeding fines to income. I'd like to see something that get far broader application. That prevents the wealthy or huge corporations from seeing lawbreaking as a business cost, without destroying a small business or individual who commits the same crime.
    - AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
      Proposals like this are how you get the billionaire paying their chauffeur's $50 fines so they can get everywhere faster while sticking some small business owner in an industry with feast or famine years with a $50,000 ticket for having a slightly miscalibrated speedometer. Creating new arbitrage opportunities benefits the powerful, not the weak.
      - collingreen 2mo ago
        It is a common complaint that fixed penalties are just the fee the rich get to pay to break the law. Doubly so for big corporations especially when the penalties are less than the gain they got doing the harm. It sounds like you're implying that it is impossible to create a system that makes penalties scale instead of just being a fee because the system will always be gamed. Do you believe that or did I misunderstand you?
cortesoft 2mo ago
I can't believe his lawyer didn't explain all of that to him? An important role for an attorney in this situation is as a counselor, to explain the actual reality and the possibilities.
- irishcoffee 2mo ago
  I have had the misfortune of hiring many attorneys for a variety of different legal issues. They’re almost always fucking useless.
  - AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
    The trouble with lawyers is that their quality varies tremendously but the client has very little ability to tell the difference until after it's too late. In theory this is why they have to be licensed but in practice that consistently leads to the profession capturing the licensing board and using it for protecting the providers rather than the customers.
    - qingcharles 2mo ago
      Whoever can create an objective way to determine the quality of legal representation is onto a real winner. I find it near impossible, even as someone with a lot of legal knowledge, to tell whether a lawyer I hire is going to advocate zealously and correctly and comprehensively on my part once I hand over my retainer. They all talk a great game.
    - marysol5 2mo ago
      Here in the UK we have "Duty Solicitors", who are on-call in the police station should you need them. Problem is, the pay out from the government for their services is atrocious, so not many are willing to go onto the list. And the ones who are, aren't the good ones.
  - account42 2mo ago
    And that's another advantage corporations have over individuals. If you break the law at scale you can afford to retain lawyers and evaluate them based on past performance.
Quarrelsome 2mo ago
the sentences that US courts dream up around digital offences are absolutely obscene and seem to only exist as a means of coercion. However because they're still technically real and it feels disgusting.
- 9x39 2mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._... The prosecution offered 6 months in low security in a plea deal. He had been mass downloading and evading them at MIT for months until he had MIT and FBI involved and was finally caught on camera. I bring this up because A. maximum exposure to charges are rarely applied but makes great headlines for outrage and B. the plea deal seems reasonable to someone who was unreasonably persistent in the details of the case.
  - Quarrelsome 2mo ago
    > maximum exposure to charges are rarely applied and if you pay up to the mafia then they generally don't kill your relatives, but they still threaten to kill your relatives. I feel like they're only on the book as a means of intimidation. It doesn't feel like a healthy justice system, especially given its a non-violent crime in this case. If he was performing digital crimes to pay for human trafficking then I'd get it, but that's far from the case.
    - gertop 2mo ago
      You keep shifting the goal posts... He did something illegal, repeatedly, he got caught, he got offered a lenient plea deal of a few months. Those are the facts. Yet somehow y'all turn it into: he was harassed, his family's life was threatened, he was going to get life in prison.
      - pdonis 2mo ago
        > He did something illegal Read the book Three Felonies A Day. The law is so bloated now that we all do illegal things all the time, we can't help it. What Swartz actually did was to download copies of scientific papers that should be in the public domain to begin with, because we paid for the research already with our tax money. The fact that such information is considered "proprietary" and JSTOR and other companies are able to keep it locked behind paywalls is an outrage. Further, after Swartz returned all the material he had downloaded and agreed not to do it again, both JSTOR and MIT said they were satisfied and no further action was needed (though JSTOR was more emphatic about it than MIT was). Which, combined with the above, should have ended the case then and there.
mmorriso 2mo ago
The real issue is that in the US, everything is for sale.
- s1artibartfast 2mo ago
  Humans have incentives everywhere. Its not quite the same. I dont think anyone bought the judge or prosecutor for Aaron
  - mmorriso 2mo ago
    My implication wasn't that there'd be "low level" corruption of that nature, but that there's "high level" corruption in both instances; The direction to prosecute Aaron Swartz, and not investigate Meta, are both driven by an interest of the State to protect large enterprises, rather than citizens. If we consider campaign financing and lobbying, I don't think it's a stretch to believe that almost any outcome can be bought in the US if there's enough money involved.

spwa4 2mo ago

It absolutely is. Youth services is one such thing that people just refuse to get upset about. Not when they attack kids for flimsy reasons. And, conversely, people also utterly refuse to react when kids eventually figure out that their way out is to attack people, other kids, social workers and anyone else in institutions, which is one factor that makes youth services facilities such horrible places to be.

ignoramous 2mo ago

> large part of the effort that dealt this injustice to him was facilitated by the fact that the vast majority of people willfully turn a blind eye when the same thing or worse happens to people are not of their ilk Reminds me of Marx's 1870 letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt: Every industrial & commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps ... The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life ... regards himself as a member of the ruling nation & consequently becomes a tool of the English [ruling class] against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination [over his own self]. He cherishes religious, social, & national prejudices against the Irish worker ... The Irishman ... sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive & intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. ... The antagonism between Englishmen & Irishmen ... enables the governments of [the US & England], whenever they think fit, to break the edge off the social conflict by their mutual bullying, and, in case of need, by war between the two countries. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_04_09.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_...

mcv 2mo ago
The exact same mechanism is used to keep poor white Americans voting Republican: even if they're poor, they see themselves as the white ruling class over black and Hispanic people, despite the fact that they themselves are kept poor by the real ruling class.
- kevin_thibedeau 2mo ago
  The con is largely directed at the religious right, of which, poorer whites make up the largest cohort. That's how they convinced people directly targeted by the bigotry to still vote for them.
- AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
  You're missing the symmetry. The two party system is a false dichotomy. The enemy is not the other party, it's the system that causes there to be only two alternatives that are both captured by mostly the same interests. Each party convinces half the population that the other is trying to destroy them so that their votes cancel out. And then Marx calls this a criticism of "capitalism" even though it's fundamentally a generic criticism of what happens when you centralize political power and then allow special interests to divide people into camps.
  - mcv 2mo ago
    The two party system is absolutely part of the problem, but there's also definitely the culture war being waged to distract people from the class war that's being waged against them. But the two-party system definitely enables that, making it easier to win by discrediting the other, because there only is one other.
    - account42 2mo ago
      And which party started the culture war? By definition it's not the conservatives.
      - 2mo ago

giantg2 2mo ago

"Maybe the real issue is selective outrage about legal injustice." The real issue is selective enforcement of the law. If it applied equally to everyone, then more people would be outraged as it affected them.

jmward01 2mo ago
Perfectly equal enforcement really isn't possible, but it should be the policy to enforce in proportion to active harm. The bigger the ongoing active harm, the quicker to react we should be. Some individual torrents a single movie? NBD. No matter the side of the argument you are on this should be ignored. A company intentionally throws content strikes causing legitimate harm to large numbers of content creators? That should addressed. Reality should always have a place in the law.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- GolfPopper 2mo ago
  Finland links speeding fines to income. I'd like to see something that get far broader application. That prevents the wealthy or huge corporations from seeing lawbreaking as a business cost, without destroying a small business or individual who commits the same crime.
  - AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
    Proposals like this are how you get the billionaire paying their chauffeur's $50 fines so they can get everywhere faster while sticking some small business owner in an industry with feast or famine years with a $50,000 ticket for having a slightly miscalibrated speedometer. Creating new arbitrage opportunities benefits the powerful, not the weak.
    - collingreen 2mo ago
      It is a common complaint that fixed penalties are just the fee the rich get to pay to break the law. Doubly so for big corporations especially when the penalties are less than the gain they got doing the harm. It sounds like you're implying that it is impossible to create a system that makes penalties scale instead of just being a fee because the system will always be gamed. Do you believe that or did I misunderstand you?

cortesoft 2mo ago

I can't believe his lawyer didn't explain all of that to him? An important role for an attorney in this situation is as a counselor, to explain the actual reality and the possibilities.

irishcoffee 2mo ago
I have had the misfortune of hiring many attorneys for a variety of different legal issues. They’re almost always fucking useless.
- AnthonyMouse 2mo ago
  The trouble with lawyers is that their quality varies tremendously but the client has very little ability to tell the difference until after it's too late. In theory this is why they have to be licensed but in practice that consistently leads to the profession capturing the licensing board and using it for protecting the providers rather than the customers.
  - qingcharles 2mo ago
    Whoever can create an objective way to determine the quality of legal representation is onto a real winner. I find it near impossible, even as someone with a lot of legal knowledge, to tell whether a lawyer I hire is going to advocate zealously and correctly and comprehensively on my part once I hand over my retainer. They all talk a great game.
  - marysol5 2mo ago
    Here in the UK we have "Duty Solicitors", who are on-call in the police station should you need them. Problem is, the pay out from the government for their services is atrocious, so not many are willing to go onto the list. And the ones who are, aren't the good ones.
- account42 2mo ago
  And that's another advantage corporations have over individuals. If you break the law at scale you can afford to retain lawyers and evaluate them based on past performance.

Quarrelsome 2mo ago

the sentences that US courts dream up around digital offences are absolutely obscene and seem to only exist as a means of coercion. However because they're still technically real and it feels disgusting.

9x39 2mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._... The prosecution offered 6 months in low security in a plea deal. He had been mass downloading and evading them at MIT for months until he had MIT and FBI involved and was finally caught on camera. I bring this up because A. maximum exposure to charges are rarely applied but makes great headlines for outrage and B. the plea deal seems reasonable to someone who was unreasonably persistent in the details of the case.
- Quarrelsome 2mo ago
  > maximum exposure to charges are rarely applied and if you pay up to the mafia then they generally don't kill your relatives, but they still threaten to kill your relatives. I feel like they're only on the book as a means of intimidation. It doesn't feel like a healthy justice system, especially given its a non-violent crime in this case. If he was performing digital crimes to pay for human trafficking then I'd get it, but that's far from the case.
  - gertop 2mo ago
    You keep shifting the goal posts... He did something illegal, repeatedly, he got caught, he got offered a lenient plea deal of a few months. Those are the facts. Yet somehow y'all turn it into: he was harassed, his family's life was threatened, he was going to get life in prison.
    - pdonis 2mo ago
      > He did something illegal Read the book Three Felonies A Day. The law is so bloated now that we all do illegal things all the time, we can't help it. What Swartz actually did was to download copies of scientific papers that should be in the public domain to begin with, because we paid for the research already with our tax money. The fact that such information is considered "proprietary" and JSTOR and other companies are able to keep it locked behind paywalls is an outrage. Further, after Swartz returned all the material he had downloaded and agreed not to do it again, both JSTOR and MIT said they were satisfied and no further action was needed (though JSTOR was more emphatic about it than MIT was). Which, combined with the above, should have ended the case then and there.

mmorriso 2mo ago

The real issue is that in the US, everything is for sale.

s1artibartfast 2mo ago
Humans have incentives everywhere. Its not quite the same. I dont think anyone bought the judge or prosecutor for Aaron
- mmorriso 2mo ago
  My implication wasn't that there'd be "low level" corruption of that nature, but that there's "high level" corruption in both instances; The direction to prosecute Aaron Swartz, and not investigate Meta, are both driven by an interest of the State to protect large enterprises, rather than citizens. If we consider campaign financing and lobbying, I don't think it's a stretch to believe that almost any outcome can be bought in the US if there's enough money involved.