10 ms·

I've been thinking about the family today, and what might have caused Aaron to make such a terrible decision. One thing that caught my attention, was Lessig's

I've been thinking about the family today, and what might have caused Aaron to make such a terrible decision. One thing that caught my attention, was Lessig's comment in his post: " ... Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge." So - MIT brings in the Feds, the Government threaten him with 30+ years of Prison, somehow there is no way for him to appeal to the public for support for his lawsuit (which would have been very popular, I'm certain). Does he try and look to his family to liquidate everything they have to help support his defense? Does he plead out to something that he truly believed was not wrong? I can't even imagine how horrible this situation must have been for him, and why he couldn't see how he was going to get out of it...

genwin 14y ago
Not everyone wants to solicit support to fight their battles. I can see why Aaron chose suicide. I wish he had fled to one of the few places in the world where American depravity couldn't effectively kill him, but I can see why he didn't.
- rdl 14y ago
  Realistically, he could have just gone ~anywhere outside the US and probably wouldn't have been pursued too aggressively.
  - genwin 14y ago
    Accused of a crime thought so horrific it warrants 30 years in prison, I doubt that. The US has grabbed people on the other side of the world for lesser charges.
    - rdl 14y ago
      This was prosecutorial overreach. It was probably not in their short list of major issues, and thus I don't think they would have devoted huge resources to it. Which makes this whole thing even sadder. It's entirely possible his (great) IP law firm could have gotten him off, or at least ended up with a brief or suspended sentence. Even though worst case he was facing 50 years, it would have almost certainly been far less. But I am sure he was depressed and so involved in it that he wasn't thinking about it rationally.
      - genwin 14y ago
        > It's entirely possible his (great) IP law firm could have gotten him off, or at least ended up with a brief or suspended sentence. That is possible. But what life would he have then, with $1.5 million of debt? If not for my kids I'd probably jump off a cliff myself than work a lifetime paying that off.
        rdl 14y ago
        I think he had some assets from Reddit, as well as some of the work being pro bono, and contributions. Killing yourself over $1.5mm in debt is not rational. You can default on it and go bankrupt and be back to normal in 7-10 years. You can get most of it written off. You can do consulting for 5-10 years and live slightly frugally and probably pay enough of it off to have the rest written off. You can start 1/1000th of a kind-of-shitty photo sharing site. You can flee to China, start over, and no one will pursue you. They basically don't expect you to put 100% of your income toward fines, back taxes, etc. even if it's to the Government (and hence can't be discharged in bankruptcy). In that case, you just live on 25-50k post-tax and either hide a bunch of cash income while making small payments, or find benefactors who cover most of your costs and work on free software or something. We essentially ended debtors prisons a long time ago. 35 years in federal prison might actually be a case for killing yourself (although I'd just read a lot of books and be the hacker Mumia Abu-Jamal, and hopefully get out on appeal).
        ericd 14y ago
  - tobiasu 14y ago
    Are we talking about the same US that tried to extradite Richard O'Dwyer over some copyright bs or nutcase Gary McKinnon? Both of them are not even US citizens, it only gets worse when you "belong" to the country that wants to put you on trial. There are few countries that are not in bed with the US. Usually they don't feel like getting into even more diplomatic difficulties unless there is some gain for them. Assange, for example, could've made a deal with the Kremlin - in exchange for keeping silent about Russia and friends... But he's a different category.
    - sandGorgon 14y ago
      India would have been one possibility. We have hosted the Dalai Lama long enough.... and I would say ever since the U. S. started denying extradition of the 26/11 suspects, they wouldn't have had a lot of friends in the establishment here.
rdl 14y ago
I want to know who specifically at MIT was involved in this. It seems antithetical to the MIT IT people I know (Jeff Schiller, etc.). There's no hope, really, of replacing the US Attorney Ortiz. MIT, however, actually has some indirect accountability to the tech community.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  What would cause an MIT IT executive (and this would have to be an executive decision) to bring in the Secret Service for someone running curl against academic journal website. I have done precisely that type of thing dozens of times in the last 10 years, and it would have never occurred to me that I was doing anything wrong. And yes, I always had to login first through a browser, figure out how the hell the cookie was stored, export it into a format that curl liked, figure out the URLs for all the docs, etc, etc... And yes - when I was younger and more energetic, sticking my laptop in unlocked cabinet with an open ethernet port is exactly the sort of thing I would have done, without for a second believing I was doing anything "criminal". I have to believe that MIT has hundreds (thousands?) of these types of webscraping events occurring all the time. What made this one different from their perspective?
  - rdl 14y ago
    He wasn't a member of the MIT Community, and was in a wiring closet. If they'd charged him with trespassing, I would have contributed to his legal defense fund and bought him a drink when he finished his ~30 days of community service or whatever. Minimal harm, minimal foul. I did way worse stuff from my machines at MIT when I was an undergrad. I actually was called to testify in a federal case over it, but told them to eat a bowl of dicks (well, more politely, and through the awesome attorney Jennifer Granick -- I was out of the country and didn't return until the trial was over, because you NEVER win if you set foot in a federal court, even as a witness). MIT sold out Drink or Die, too, so fuck them in general.
    - ghshephard 14y ago
      Secret Service was involved prior to MIT knowing who was web-scraping JSTOR. Does MIT normally call the Secret Service when they find Laptops w/Hard Drives in wiring closets, particularly unlocked wiring closets that Homeless people were known to store their stuff in? This is all very strange. From: http://chronicle.com/article/Rogue-Downloaders-Arrest/128439/ http://chronicle.com/article/Rogue-Downloaders-Arrest/128439... "On January 4, MIT police officers were notified that a member of the university's technical-security staff had discovered a laptop in the wiring closet. That morning, a team including a Secret Service agent and police officers from Cambridge and Boston visited the site and installed a Webcam....JSTOR never contacted any law-enforcement authorities about the matter. The decision to pursue criminal charges, she says, was not JSTOR's."
doktrin 14y ago
Yes. With all the information and POV accounts that have surfaced today, I can't help but wonder if I truly would have acted differently in his shoes. The prospect of ruining your own family in a protracted legal battle with the DOJ is nothing short of a nightmare. There but for the grace of God, as they say. This country can be a terrifying place, although I myself occasionally forget it.
- anoncow 14y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if they made a law making the family responsible for the crimes. This might not occur in this case, but I see lobbyists wanting money for all those movies your children watched for free.
jcrites 14y ago
> yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense Was this a court limitation? Why couldn't he appeal openly for his own defense?

genwin 14y ago

Not everyone wants to solicit support to fight their battles. I can see why Aaron chose suicide. I wish he had fled to one of the few places in the world where American depravity couldn't effectively kill him, but I can see why he didn't.

rdl 14y ago
Realistically, he could have just gone ~anywhere outside the US and probably wouldn't have been pursued too aggressively.
- genwin 14y ago
  Accused of a crime thought so horrific it warrants 30 years in prison, I doubt that. The US has grabbed people on the other side of the world for lesser charges.
  - rdl 14y ago
    This was prosecutorial overreach. It was probably not in their short list of major issues, and thus I don't think they would have devoted huge resources to it. Which makes this whole thing even sadder. It's entirely possible his (great) IP law firm could have gotten him off, or at least ended up with a brief or suspended sentence. Even though worst case he was facing 50 years, it would have almost certainly been far less. But I am sure he was depressed and so involved in it that he wasn't thinking about it rationally.
    - genwin 14y ago
      > It's entirely possible his (great) IP law firm could have gotten him off, or at least ended up with a brief or suspended sentence. That is possible. But what life would he have then, with $1.5 million of debt? If not for my kids I'd probably jump off a cliff myself than work a lifetime paying that off.
      - rdl 14y ago
        I think he had some assets from Reddit, as well as some of the work being pro bono, and contributions. Killing yourself over $1.5mm in debt is not rational. You can default on it and go bankrupt and be back to normal in 7-10 years. You can get most of it written off. You can do consulting for 5-10 years and live slightly frugally and probably pay enough of it off to have the rest written off. You can start 1/1000th of a kind-of-shitty photo sharing site. You can flee to China, start over, and no one will pursue you. They basically don't expect you to put 100% of your income toward fines, back taxes, etc. even if it's to the Government (and hence can't be discharged in bankruptcy). In that case, you just live on 25-50k post-tax and either hide a bunch of cash income while making small payments, or find benefactors who cover most of your costs and work on free software or something. We essentially ended debtors prisons a long time ago. 35 years in federal prison might actually be a case for killing yourself (although I'd just read a lot of books and be the hacker Mumia Abu-Jamal, and hopefully get out on appeal).
        ericd 14y ago
- tobiasu 14y ago
  Are we talking about the same US that tried to extradite Richard O'Dwyer over some copyright bs or nutcase Gary McKinnon? Both of them are not even US citizens, it only gets worse when you "belong" to the country that wants to put you on trial. There are few countries that are not in bed with the US. Usually they don't feel like getting into even more diplomatic difficulties unless there is some gain for them. Assange, for example, could've made a deal with the Kremlin - in exchange for keeping silent about Russia and friends... But he's a different category.
  - sandGorgon 14y ago
    India would have been one possibility. We have hosted the Dalai Lama long enough.... and I would say ever since the U. S. started denying extradition of the 26/11 suspects, they wouldn't have had a lot of friends in the establishment here.

rdl 14y ago

I want to know who specifically at MIT was involved in this. It seems antithetical to the MIT IT people I know (Jeff Schiller, etc.). There's no hope, really, of replacing the US Attorney Ortiz. MIT, however, actually has some indirect accountability to the tech community.

ghshephard 14y ago
What would cause an MIT IT executive (and this would have to be an executive decision) to bring in the Secret Service for someone running curl against academic journal website. I have done precisely that type of thing dozens of times in the last 10 years, and it would have never occurred to me that I was doing anything wrong. And yes, I always had to login first through a browser, figure out how the hell the cookie was stored, export it into a format that curl liked, figure out the URLs for all the docs, etc, etc... And yes - when I was younger and more energetic, sticking my laptop in unlocked cabinet with an open ethernet port is exactly the sort of thing I would have done, without for a second believing I was doing anything "criminal". I have to believe that MIT has hundreds (thousands?) of these types of webscraping events occurring all the time. What made this one different from their perspective?
- rdl 14y ago
  He wasn't a member of the MIT Community, and was in a wiring closet. If they'd charged him with trespassing, I would have contributed to his legal defense fund and bought him a drink when he finished his ~30 days of community service or whatever. Minimal harm, minimal foul. I did way worse stuff from my machines at MIT when I was an undergrad. I actually was called to testify in a federal case over it, but told them to eat a bowl of dicks (well, more politely, and through the awesome attorney Jennifer Granick -- I was out of the country and didn't return until the trial was over, because you NEVER win if you set foot in a federal court, even as a witness). MIT sold out Drink or Die, too, so fuck them in general.
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    Secret Service was involved prior to MIT knowing who was web-scraping JSTOR. Does MIT normally call the Secret Service when they find Laptops w/Hard Drives in wiring closets, particularly unlocked wiring closets that Homeless people were known to store their stuff in? This is all very strange. From: http://chronicle.com/article/Rogue-Downloaders-Arrest/128439/ http://chronicle.com/article/Rogue-Downloaders-Arrest/128439... "On January 4, MIT police officers were notified that a member of the university's technical-security staff had discovered a laptop in the wiring closet. That morning, a team including a Secret Service agent and police officers from Cambridge and Boston visited the site and installed a Webcam....JSTOR never contacted any law-enforcement authorities about the matter. The decision to pursue criminal charges, she says, was not JSTOR's."

doktrin 14y ago

Yes. With all the information and POV accounts that have surfaced today, I can't help but wonder if I truly would have acted differently in his shoes. The prospect of ruining your own family in a protracted legal battle with the DOJ is nothing short of a nightmare. There but for the grace of God, as they say. This country can be a terrifying place, although I myself occasionally forget it.

anoncow 14y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if they made a law making the family responsible for the crimes. This might not occur in this case, but I see lobbyists wanting money for all those movies your children watched for free.

jcrites 14y ago

> yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense Was this a court limitation? Why couldn't he appeal openly for his own defense?