3 ms·
Well if you read through the post, especially Linus's follow-up comments, you'll find that his very point is this distinction between the truth of these technic
by Niten 14y ago
Well if you read through the post, especially Linus's follow-up comments, you'll find that his very point is this distinction between the truth of these technically correct, weasel-worded statements and the bigger picture.
Sentencing is ultimately up to the judge, and the truth is that Ortiz used the threat of "up to 35 years" to try to force a plea bargain. When Swartz refused a bargain which would have branded him a felon, as is his right, Ortiz's office drummed up additional charges.
Ortiz is likely technically correct when she says she never explicitly sought the maximum penalty for these extra charges she piled on. She is also deliberately evading the point by saying so, which is that her office absolutely threw the book at a kid for downloading some PDFs.
Imagine your kid comes home reeking of smoke. You ask him, anger in your voice, whether he was smoking with his buddies in the woods out back again. Kid cooly replies, "I wasn't smoking cigarettes."
Then you find a joint in his pocket. Kid was technically correct when he said he wasn't smoking cigarettes, but he was also "lying" in the sense that he sought to obfuscate and create a diversion from his wrongdoing by making such a statement.
- mpyne 14y ago> her office absolutely threw the book at a kid for downloading some PDFs. And repeatedly going around network blocks in order to obtain those PDFs...
- zaphar 14y agoThat's a statement about intent. We do not know whether changing his mac address was in order to get around network blocks or for some other reason. The court would have tried to establish intent in the case but the case didn't get to court and we in the internet really don't have enough information do make a finding regarding intent ourselves.
- mpyne 14y agoWe have Aaron's own manifestos and his own actions besides the MAC spoofing to establish intent. Trying to seriously claim otherwise requires a special brand of word-wrangling and doublespeak, a brand that might entitle you to a job at the Boston U.S. Attorney's office, if the other comments here are any indication.
- danielweber 14y agoWe do not know whether changing his mac address was in order to get around network blocks Yes we do, because we aren't stupid, and neither is Aaron. I could accept, for the sake of argument, that the very first time he changed his MAC it was because he was innocently trying to diagnose a network issue. By the time JSTOR has cut off all of MIT and he is plugging into a physical port to work around the restrictions on the wireless network, it's no longer acceptable to honest people that he just thinks there was something wrong with the MIT network. MIT didn't want him on their network. He thought his cause was worth bypassing their controls.