Byrne is absolutely wrong in asserting that civil rights activists were always ready to accept their punishment readily. The weakest link in any civil rights c

Byrne is absolutely wrong in asserting that civil rights activists were always ready to accept their punishment readily. The weakest link in any civil rights case is always the defendant. Rosa Parks was not the first African-American women to refuse to give up her seat on a bus. The NAACP and the civil rights movement elevated that case to the national level precisely because she was the epitome of Middle Class Respectability that was the cornerstone of the NAACP's decades long, methodical legal battle against segregation. Parks was the right person to challenge that injustice because she was a middle class female mother figure. She was the right person precisely because the plan from the start was to fight her arrest in court. Neither Parks nor the NAACP ever intended for her to be a martyr rotting in prison. During the Chicago Seven trial Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin put the system on trial and made a mockery of the proceedings by coming to court wearing black robes. They screamed "in the halls of justice the only justice is in the halls" when Bobby Seale was tied, bound and gagged to a chair for interrupting the court repeatedly and defiantly. They made fun of the judge for having the same last name as Abbie Hoffman, and satirized the entire ordeal. Our justice system is so out of control that the difference between now and 1968 is in 1968 people were able to challenge prosecutions in court. The travesty of justice here is effectively, and I would argue unconstitutionally, denying Aaron the right to a trial by his peers by piling on obscene charges with effective life sentences. David Byrne is being far too quick to accept the bully prosecutor Ortiz's interpretation of events, and sadly "This must be the place" will never sound the same to me again. You can't just give out network wide free access to documents on public campuses and then claim that they are behind a paywall. Given a long enough lifespan Aaron could have sat in front of a computer in an MIT library and read millions of academic articles and his brain could have analyzed and processed that information, reached conclusions and shared them. There should be no discrimination against using computational power to bulk download and analyze information. Aaron wasn't even charged with disseminating the information he downloaded, because he never did. For all "The People" know he was going to analyze the JSTOR docs with machine learning. All he did was program a computer to do what a human could do, but faster. Aaron is dead, but it is society that is the biggest loser here. Any sane and rational system of government would have applied minimal judicial scrutiny to his actions and paid him large sums to make our economy and government more efficient and more fair.