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Sure, but the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the particular charges isn't the issue. Anyone who focuses on 'computer crime' or any of Aaron's pet cause

Sure, but the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the particular charges isn't the issue. Anyone who focuses on 'computer crime' or any of Aaron's pet causes is missing the point. The issue is abuse of power, and why the federal government has so much power in the first place. Criminals should be a tiny group of antisocial people who deserve serious consequences for their serious actions, with law enforcement enforcing a limited set of laws (rape, murder, etc.) universally - going after every criminal that comes to their attention. Fair and understandable. Back in reality, most of us have probably innocuously violated some federal law already (Silverstein's Three Felonies a Day has been mentioned a bunch - it's a great book.) Even in cases like Swartz's where his violations were arguably intentional rather than accidental, the penalties are completely disproportionate to the action. In this system, where we're practically all lawbreakers, the government has the discretion to decide exactly whose lives they want to ruin. In the best case they're enforcing the law selectively in line with their best moral judgement - for example, Al Capone. He was generally suspected to be a bad guy, but no one could prove that he committed any sort of real crime - so out of the millions of people that cheat on their taxes every year, the government singled him out to prosecute for tax evasion, and then threw the book at him. Maybe jailing him was a good result, but by selecting one man out of a pool of millions of lawbreakers to go after, the government crossed the line from the rule of law to the rule of man. And think of the result when the government's initial instinct about a person's "good guy" vs. "bad guy" status is wrong! In this system, the nightmare is the malicious prosecutor, one that's not even attempting to "do what's right" but instead is selecting cases to prosecute for personal motivations - political advancement, personal causes, etc. People who are initially targeted for federal prosecution but somehow 'escape' are frequently recharged for something else - for example, the hapless fuel-cell entrepreneur Krister Evertson. That's what it sounds like happened to Aaron Swartz - thanks to the previous federal investigation into PACER, when he popped up again the federal government was delighted to go after him with both barrels, for reasons having nothing to do with MIT or JSTOR. Even if PACER wasn't an influence, going after Swartz instead of modern Al Capones shows that the arbitrary rule of man we've got in place of a real legal system is working pretty damn poorly. The way to solve this problem, ultimately, would be to dramatically shrink the size of criminal federal law - ideally by limiting what can be declared criminal in the constitution, since we certainly can't rely on the legislative branch's sense of justice. This will never happen, at least not until this system is torn down and another is constructed (yeah, you scoff, but historically this does happen from time to time). In the meantime, we might as well find legal ways to make being a prosecutor politically unrewarding, and look for incremental reform where we can find it.

rayiner 14y ago
The whole "we each innocuously violate several federal laws ever day!" angle is a total red herring. This isn't an instance of someone being charged for actions which nobody thinks should constitute a serious crime. Go up to your mother and tell her a story that involves someone breaking into restricted closet at MIT, plugging into their network, evading electronic attempts to stop him, and downloading millions of scientific articles that normally are sold for a fee. If your mother is anything like mine, she won't be able to fathom why anyone would do something like this unless he were up to no good. Swartz did not innocuously do anything. He willfully violated laws designed to proscribe exactly the conduct he was engaged in, conduct that to your average person smacks of criminal activity. Legislators, who think more like my mother than they think like you or me, intended to prohibit Swartz's exact conduct. The prosecutor here was doing exactly what my mother or my Congressman would consider the right course of action in such a situation. At the end of the day you have to tackle the real problem, which is this: my mother understands the difference between joy riding and grand theft auto. That's within the wheel house of her experience. People interested in "information freedom" or even just proportionate punishment in these situations need to be able to make a case to my mom about why downloading JSTOR articles on MIT's network isn't the same thing as hacking into Bank of America's servers to steal credit card numbers.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  > Go up to your mother and tell her a story that involves someone breaking into restricted closet at MIT, plugging into their network, evading electronic attempts to stop him, and downloading millions of scientific articles that normally are sold for a fee. If your mother is anything like mine, she won't be able to fathom why anyone would do something like this unless he were up to no good. You mean you can describe "crimes" in such a way that a technically naive outsider draws the knee-jerk reaction that you want? Stunning! You should be a lawyer or something.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    He is a lawyer.

rayiner 14y ago

The whole "we each innocuously violate several federal laws ever day!" angle is a total red herring. This isn't an instance of someone being charged for actions which nobody thinks should constitute a serious crime. Go up to your mother and tell her a story that involves someone breaking into restricted closet at MIT, plugging into their network, evading electronic attempts to stop him, and downloading millions of scientific articles that normally are sold for a fee. If your mother is anything like mine, she won't be able to fathom why anyone would do something like this unless he were up to no good. Swartz did not innocuously do anything. He willfully violated laws designed to proscribe exactly the conduct he was engaged in, conduct that to your average person smacks of criminal activity. Legislators, who think more like my mother than they think like you or me, intended to prohibit Swartz's exact conduct. The prosecutor here was doing exactly what my mother or my Congressman would consider the right course of action in such a situation. At the end of the day you have to tackle the real problem, which is this: my mother understands the difference between joy riding and grand theft auto. That's within the wheel house of her experience. People interested in "information freedom" or even just proportionate punishment in these situations need to be able to make a case to my mom about why downloading JSTOR articles on MIT's network isn't the same thing as hacking into Bank of America's servers to steal credit card numbers.

jlgreco 14y ago
> Go up to your mother and tell her a story that involves someone breaking into restricted closet at MIT, plugging into their network, evading electronic attempts to stop him, and downloading millions of scientific articles that normally are sold for a fee. If your mother is anything like mine, she won't be able to fathom why anyone would do something like this unless he were up to no good. You mean you can describe "crimes" in such a way that a technically naive outsider draws the knee-jerk reaction that you want? Stunning! You should be a lawyer or something.
- tptacek 14y ago
  He is a lawyer.