7 ms·

Suicide is completely a personal choice. MIT had no reason to try and defend an outsider who hijacked part of their network, and trying to make them seem like t

by vex 13y ago

Suicide is completely a personal choice. MIT had no reason to try and defend an outsider who hijacked part of their network, and trying to make them seem like they caused him to hang himself smacks of tunnel vision. It's a natural response to a suicide; we try and search for something to blame. But unless you argue that MIT should have known Aaron was mentally unstable, saying MIT "caused" him to kill himself is illogical. People who commit suicide may desire to because of what they feel about their lives, but the final decision is one's own. It's sad that it takes a death to bring attention to the IP issues that Aaron's trial had raised.

mentalhealth 13y ago
A desire to kill oneself is a diagnosis of mental instability.
- bradleydwyer 13y ago
  I'm genuinely curious, is that a widely accepted position on suicide and mental stability? I can think of a number of situations where suicide might be preferable to continued existence.
  - cjbprime 13y ago
    I think it may be widely accepted, but I also think it's nonsense. As you allude to, someone with a terminal and painful disease could have an entirely rational desire to commit suicide based on a sensible projection of the future as containing a persistent unacceptable level of suffering. I think we should only invoke "mental instability" when someone's projection of their future level of suffering is clearly mistaken.
    - mentalhealth 13y ago
      I think it's theoretically possible for someone to arrive at the decision to end their own life via careful evaluation, but it's quite unlikely (and at this point, the only real acknowledgement of it in the psychiatric field is in the case of terminally ill patients, when the calculus is pretty clear). Regardless, the vast majority of suicides are the result of a combination of depression and loss of inhibition, both of which are psychiatric symptoms that can be brought on or exacerbated by severe stress. The assumption can and should be that this is the case, not that an individual who was self-admittedly under huge amounts of personal stress performed a rational evaluation of their own future prospects in life and determined that it wasn't worth living.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    Suicidal thinking is almost always a mental health problem or the result of a mental health problem. You say that there are some situations where suicide is a rational choice. But even in these cases it's not that clear. While I respect the right to chose death, and support changing of law to allow people to seek medically assisted suicide, I am worried that people with undiagnosed depression who would respond to treatment are allowed to die.
- PhasmaFelis 13y ago
  user: mentalhealth created: 17 minutes ago You're really not a very good troll.
  - mentalhealth 13y ago
    I learned quite a long time ago that realistic discussion of mental health as it actually affects real people generally results in a lot of negative votes here on HN. But please, continue to dismiss my argument by attacking me and not the statement I made. More par for the course hereabouts.
    - crag 13y ago
      "...it actually affects real people generally results in a lot of negative votes here on HN." Then don't comment if you're so afraid of your rep. I mean, what's the point of this site? To me, it's to exchange various thoughts/ideas related to tech and otherwise. Creating a new account to comment cause your afraid of being down-voted is cowardly. And insulting, frankly.
      - mentalhealth 13y ago
        It's not about the rep score, it's about people looking through my post history, determining where I work, and trolling me via my employer (this happened). Let's get back on topic, shall we?
    - Moocat87 13y ago
      I think you'll find that almost everywhere on the Internet, and most places in meatspace too... :(
    - BlackDeath3 13y ago
      I think the problem here is that you didn't really make an argument. You made an unsubstantiated claim (and misused "diagnosis" while at it) and just sort of left it there.
      - 13y ago
- chmike 13y ago
  This is a blunt claim I can't agree with. You totally ignore the context. I know a man who suicide himeself because he was about to lose a trial and it would mean he would have lost his house to pay the huge fine. He was old and to save his wife and child of this misery he commited suicide. From his perspective it was a rational decision because he didn't see any better one. There is absolutely not mental instability in play here. My feeling is that most people who commit suicide do it because they decided it on a rational basis. Some people commit suicide because they want to stop a pain they feel and in their view will apparently last forever or will get worse. I.e cancer, someone has to spend the rest of his life in a bed after an accident ... People can also commit suicide as a sacrifice to save others. But I guess you were not talking of these types of suicide. Suicide due to mental instability is probably just a small fraction of all suicide. Your claim is typical from someone who didn't took the time and made the effort to understand what can lead someone fully rational to suicide. A rational thinking compares the cost and benefit of dying or living. According to some context a perfectly sain person may rationnaly conclude that commiting suicide is the best choice. The rational thinking they had from their perspective and knowledge may have been wrong, but this is not to be confused with mental instability.
  - Moocat87 13y ago
    >My feeling is that most people who commit suicide do it because they decided it on a rational basis. Some people commit suicide because they want to stop a pain they feel and in their view will apparently last forever or will get worse. I.e cancer, someone has to spend the rest of his life in a bed after an accident ... People can also commit suicide as a sacrifice to save others. But I guess you were not talking of these types of suicide. You think that more people commit suicide for others than for themselves? Care to explain why or cite anything? >Suicide due to mental instability is probably just a small fraction of all suicide. Cite?
    - chmike 13y ago
      No. I don't think that and I didn't said that. Cite? Just found this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide. From the graphic shown on the page, not all suicide are caused by mental illness. That was my main point. I have some doubts about the mental illness importance shown in this graph. Anyway, the mental illness could be the source of pain leading to the rational decision to end it by suicide.
- andreasvc 13y ago
  You may want to look up the difference between a symptom and a diagnosis. I am also curious about the argument you want to make, because your comment is just a proposition without motivation.
herbig 13y ago
I think it's much more complicated than that. I wouldn't say it "caused" him to commit suicide, so much as greatly contributed. If the punishment vastly outweighs the crime, to the extent that one's mental health is impacted, can he be completely to blame for that?
betterunix 13y ago
MIT did not on its own "cause" Aaron to commit suicide, but MIT certainly did play a role in the events that led up to the suicide. Perhaps MIT had no reason to defend Aaron, but what reason did they have to help the prosecution -- why did MIT turn over information without being subpoenaed for it? MIT deserves its share of the blame.
- ericcumbee 13y ago
  if someone broke into my Network Closet, I would not need a subpoena.
  - betterunix 13y ago
    OK, then you would receive your share of the blame if that person killed themselves after being hounded by the prosecutors you aided.
    - res0nat0r 13y ago
      So the US should stop prosecuting crimes if there is a worry that person might be mentally unstable?
      - dllthomas 13y ago
        If you are the aggrieved party, and the punishment the law is meting out is ridiculously out of proportion to the harm done to you, you have some responsibility to speak up.
      - betterunix 13y ago
        No, but the US absolutely should stop using plea-bargaining as a way to bully people into not going to trial, and then retaliating against people who dare to exercise their right to a trial by adding additional charges against them after plea bargaining. While we are at it, we should reign in the cost of actually exercising the right to a trial -- Aaron lost his fortune defending himself from the government, which is more than most Americans could hope to do. See, the problem here is that we are talking about giving aid to overly aggressive prosecutors, whose entire careers are devoted to undermining civil rights and destroying their targets. If that is the sort of prosecution you are aiding, yes, you should share in the blame for what happens to the prosecutor's victims.
afatc 13y ago
Well, they certainly did not help to prevent the ridiculous prosecution being made
- git-pull 13y ago
  I am curious, what was wrong with the criminal charges against Swartz? Can someone clarify how the prosecutor handled things wrong?
  - dreamdu5t 13y ago
    Nothing. It's exactly how the US works and our legal system is constructed. Until pleas and plea bargaining are (rightfully) considered duress/forced confessions, piling on charges to force a plea is commonplace, and will continue to be commonplace.
  - betterunix 13y ago
    The prosecutor had to dig around to even find a crime with which to charge Aaron. JSTOR, the so-called victim, did not even want to see the prosecution move forward and had to be subpoenaed for evidence against Aaron, with whom they had already settled matters. The prosecutor's case was based on an extremely expansive interpretation of the law, and additional charges were added in retaliation for Aaron's decision to actually exercise his right to a trial. Basically, this case embodied almost everything that is wrong with the criminal justice system in America.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    The charges themselves are based on law that is rather too harsh in many people's opinion, given the scope and effect of the "crime" itself. E.g. there's no reason that this should have been a felony, but the option of pleading to something that was a misdemeanor wasn't even available to Aaron here because of the way the law is constructed. However given the law and the way the legal system works the prosecutor was certainly treating this just like any other CFAA case.
PhasmaFelis 13y ago
Oh, poor MIT, all they did was actively help the guy who wanted Aaron thrown in prison for three and half decades* while pretending to be neutral. Any of us might have done the same, right? Totally innocent! Like "a rape victim," to use Heymann's own words. If you punch a stranger in the face, you probably don't expect him to fall, crack his head on the corner of a table, and die; but you don't get to claim you're blameless if that happens, either. * This is the bit where someone says that Heymann didn't really want to lock Aaron up 'til 2045, he just said that to scare him. Where I come from, "but I was lying" isn't considered much of a defense either.
- tomphoolery 13y ago
  It was Aaron's choice to kill himself. He wasn't a victim of anything but his own mind.
  - marincounty 13y ago
    I can guarantee by your quip; you have never dealt with our legal system.
    - benologist 13y ago
      If it wasn't the legal system it would have been literally any other reason, big or small, that Aaron felt was terminally wrong with his life.
      - icelancer 13y ago
        This is incredibly insulting. How could you possibly know this?
        benologist 13y ago
        Because depressed, suicidal people kill themselves, usually when they're not facing prison? In 2007 Schwartz posted what was believed to be a suicide note after being fired from reddit: http://digitaljournal.com/article/341150 http://digitaljournal.com/article/341150
Zigurd 13y ago
MIT leadership had a duty to act reasonably, and they didn't. MIT's position should have been that, at most, this amounted to trespassing and matter for the Cambridge PD. Aaron Swartz was no threat to MIT's network. They might not have prevented subsequent events, but they failed, horribly, by not speaking up for a reasonable outcome. MIT's IS&T office had a knee jerk security-oriented reaction, and was over impressed with interacting with Steven Heymann, who is a fixture at the sort of conferences where Swartz's "crime" is inflated out of proportion. It's not OK that Heymann, Ortiz, and MIT's personnel who overcooked this case contributed to the death of Aaron Swartz. And it's not OK they got away with it so far.
- arabellatv 13y ago
  Yes. I agree. What were MIT's and Heymann's true motivations for blowing it up to a security issue? Did they act out of fear or out of ego? Regardless, they exacerbated the issue (just as media sensationalizes stories). It's upsetting that such intelligent people would fail to think through the situation. Or even worse...they did think it through and planned to blow this up as big as possible to prove a point or make an example out of Swartz?
  - danielweber 13y ago
    It was a security issue because some guy kept on breaking into their network and had escalated to physical intrusion to achieve his goals. They didn't know the guy was Aaron Swartz and that they ought to have been privileged to have him on their network, invited or not.
    - sigzero 13y ago
      I am taking the second sentence as sarcasm.
      - walid 13y ago
        Why are you taking it as sarcasm? MIT didn't know it was him until they installed a camera and guest logins are the norm and apparently/reportedly have high privileges.
nilved 13y ago
MIT killed Aaron. I don't even use their public key database anymore.
sitkack 13y ago
You say so many words Hiding behind that fact that you are a
meritt 13y ago
He was facing 35+ years of prison. Suicide -- while I agree is a personal choice -- it's not exactly an unreasonable decision given the outlandish sentence.
- fastball 13y ago
  Suicide is always an unreasonable decision, unless you face something which is literally worse than death. A lifetime in prison is not worse than death. At least you can still talk to your family. You can acquire new skills. There is the chance you get paroled early. Etc, etc.
  - meritt 13y ago
    I disagree. That's your opinion. Why is it that people can come to the conclusion of "I'd rather see him rot to death in a jail cell than the benefit of a quick death". This line of thinking views death as a lighter punishment when contrasted against a lifetime in prison. Yet when the tables are turned suddenly suicide is viewed with such disdain? I'm not advocating suicide or anything, I'm just arguing that when faced with an immensely harsh sentence, it's not a surprising decision to reach.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - PhasmaFelis 13y ago
    > A lifetime in prison is not worse than death. The fuck it isn't. Or, more civilly, that is definitely a statement on which reasonable people may disagree. I'm not particularly depressed, but if I were actually sentenced to life in prison, I would check out in a hot second. There's no point. My opportunities to create joy in the world and to experience unalloyed happiness are done. The rest of my life would be nothing but marking the days and the years until death. It's a waste of good consciousness. I'm opposed to capital punishment because it's irreversible, but I do believe that death is more merciful than life in prison.
    - fastball 13y ago
thaumaturgy 13y ago
I think I can speak a little bit on the subject of suicide, since both of my parents have made suicide attempts recently, and since I also struggle with depression and, although I'm currently too stubborn to seriously consider something like suicide, I can tell you it does seem to be an attractive option some days. Suicide is not completely a personal choice. Part of it is a problem with mental wiring, yes, but a significant part of it is also environmental. Suicide is far more prevalent among people who view themselves to be in hopeless situations, whether financial or otherwise. I hate to resort to analogy, since everyone always then argues the analogy instead of the subject it's trying to describe, but if you have an engine that redlines at 5,000 rpm and you redline it for a while and it self-destructs, you don't turn around then and say, "well, that wasn't the driver's fault, that was completely the engine's fault." Aaron made the sad decision to take his own life. Ultimately, yes, he made that decision and nobody else did. But that doesn't mean that there isn't some responsibility to go 'round. He made that decision because of the future he believed he was facing, because of the situation he believed he was in. Also, the entire point of this article was that MIT did have at least one good reason to defend Aaron: self-interest. He was as much a symbol of what people believed was a hacker ethos at MIT as anyone else of his generation. The message now is clear: hackers are not safe at MIT. "Just following the rules" has never been a socially acceptable defense for bad behavior. Sometimes the rules are wrong, and the wonderful thing about humans -- when they choose to be human -- is that we have the ability to judge a situation and decide when to bend or even break the rules.
- watty 13y ago
  The "MIT defenders" in this thread aren't trying to say MIT played no part, because they did. So did the justice system, so did the computer cabinet owner, the person responsible for locking it, his close friends to urged him to continue, etc. The problem is that people are placing BLAME on MIT. MIT is not to blame for his suicide. Aaron took a risk and got caught. Aaron is the only person to blame.
coldtea 13y ago
>Suicide is completely a personal choice. There's no such thing as a "completely personal choice". In fact the whole notion of a "completely personal choice" is ludicrous, bordering on the metaphysical. There is an outside world, a reality, and things that happen there influce our actions, including any decision to commit suicide.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
jezfromfuture 13y ago
Agreed , finally a post not blaming others for the individual choice of one man.

by vex 13y ago

mentalhealth 13y ago

A desire to kill oneself is a diagnosis of mental instability.

bradleydwyer 13y ago
I'm genuinely curious, is that a widely accepted position on suicide and mental stability? I can think of a number of situations where suicide might be preferable to continued existence.
- cjbprime 13y ago
  I think it may be widely accepted, but I also think it's nonsense. As you allude to, someone with a terminal and painful disease could have an entirely rational desire to commit suicide based on a sensible projection of the future as containing a persistent unacceptable level of suffering. I think we should only invoke "mental instability" when someone's projection of their future level of suffering is clearly mistaken.
  - mentalhealth 13y ago
    I think it's theoretically possible for someone to arrive at the decision to end their own life via careful evaluation, but it's quite unlikely (and at this point, the only real acknowledgement of it in the psychiatric field is in the case of terminally ill patients, when the calculus is pretty clear). Regardless, the vast majority of suicides are the result of a combination of depression and loss of inhibition, both of which are psychiatric symptoms that can be brought on or exacerbated by severe stress. The assumption can and should be that this is the case, not that an individual who was self-admittedly under huge amounts of personal stress performed a rational evaluation of their own future prospects in life and determined that it wasn't worth living.
- DanBC 13y ago
  Suicidal thinking is almost always a mental health problem or the result of a mental health problem. You say that there are some situations where suicide is a rational choice. But even in these cases it's not that clear. While I respect the right to chose death, and support changing of law to allow people to seek medically assisted suicide, I am worried that people with undiagnosed depression who would respond to treatment are allowed to die.
PhasmaFelis 13y ago
user: mentalhealth created: 17 minutes ago You're really not a very good troll.
- mentalhealth 13y ago
  I learned quite a long time ago that realistic discussion of mental health as it actually affects real people generally results in a lot of negative votes here on HN. But please, continue to dismiss my argument by attacking me and not the statement I made. More par for the course hereabouts.
  - crag 13y ago
    "...it actually affects real people generally results in a lot of negative votes here on HN." Then don't comment if you're so afraid of your rep. I mean, what's the point of this site? To me, it's to exchange various thoughts/ideas related to tech and otherwise. Creating a new account to comment cause your afraid of being down-voted is cowardly. And insulting, frankly.
    - mentalhealth 13y ago
      It's not about the rep score, it's about people looking through my post history, determining where I work, and trolling me via my employer (this happened). Let's get back on topic, shall we?
  - Moocat87 13y ago
    I think you'll find that almost everywhere on the Internet, and most places in meatspace too... :(
  - BlackDeath3 13y ago
    I think the problem here is that you didn't really make an argument. You made an unsubstantiated claim (and misused "diagnosis" while at it) and just sort of left it there.
    - 13y ago
chmike 13y ago
This is a blunt claim I can't agree with. You totally ignore the context. I know a man who suicide himeself because he was about to lose a trial and it would mean he would have lost his house to pay the huge fine. He was old and to save his wife and child of this misery he commited suicide. From his perspective it was a rational decision because he didn't see any better one. There is absolutely not mental instability in play here. My feeling is that most people who commit suicide do it because they decided it on a rational basis. Some people commit suicide because they want to stop a pain they feel and in their view will apparently last forever or will get worse. I.e cancer, someone has to spend the rest of his life in a bed after an accident ... People can also commit suicide as a sacrifice to save others. But I guess you were not talking of these types of suicide. Suicide due to mental instability is probably just a small fraction of all suicide. Your claim is typical from someone who didn't took the time and made the effort to understand what can lead someone fully rational to suicide. A rational thinking compares the cost and benefit of dying or living. According to some context a perfectly sain person may rationnaly conclude that commiting suicide is the best choice. The rational thinking they had from their perspective and knowledge may have been wrong, but this is not to be confused with mental instability.
- Moocat87 13y ago
  >My feeling is that most people who commit suicide do it because they decided it on a rational basis. Some people commit suicide because they want to stop a pain they feel and in their view will apparently last forever or will get worse. I.e cancer, someone has to spend the rest of his life in a bed after an accident ... People can also commit suicide as a sacrifice to save others. But I guess you were not talking of these types of suicide. You think that more people commit suicide for others than for themselves? Care to explain why or cite anything? >Suicide due to mental instability is probably just a small fraction of all suicide. Cite?
  - chmike 13y ago
    No. I don't think that and I didn't said that. Cite? Just found this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide. From the graphic shown on the page, not all suicide are caused by mental illness. That was my main point. I have some doubts about the mental illness importance shown in this graph. Anyway, the mental illness could be the source of pain leading to the rational decision to end it by suicide.
andreasvc 13y ago
You may want to look up the difference between a symptom and a diagnosis. I am also curious about the argument you want to make, because your comment is just a proposition without motivation.

herbig 13y ago

I think it's much more complicated than that. I wouldn't say it "caused" him to commit suicide, so much as greatly contributed. If the punishment vastly outweighs the crime, to the extent that one's mental health is impacted, can he be completely to blame for that?

betterunix 13y ago

MIT did not on its own "cause" Aaron to commit suicide, but MIT certainly did play a role in the events that led up to the suicide. Perhaps MIT had no reason to defend Aaron, but what reason did they have to help the prosecution -- why did MIT turn over information without being subpoenaed for it? MIT deserves its share of the blame.

ericcumbee 13y ago
if someone broke into my Network Closet, I would not need a subpoena.
- betterunix 13y ago
  OK, then you would receive your share of the blame if that person killed themselves after being hounded by the prosecutors you aided.
  - res0nat0r 13y ago
    So the US should stop prosecuting crimes if there is a worry that person might be mentally unstable?
    - dllthomas 13y ago
      If you are the aggrieved party, and the punishment the law is meting out is ridiculously out of proportion to the harm done to you, you have some responsibility to speak up.
    - betterunix 13y ago
      No, but the US absolutely should stop using plea-bargaining as a way to bully people into not going to trial, and then retaliating against people who dare to exercise their right to a trial by adding additional charges against them after plea bargaining. While we are at it, we should reign in the cost of actually exercising the right to a trial -- Aaron lost his fortune defending himself from the government, which is more than most Americans could hope to do. See, the problem here is that we are talking about giving aid to overly aggressive prosecutors, whose entire careers are devoted to undermining civil rights and destroying their targets. If that is the sort of prosecution you are aiding, yes, you should share in the blame for what happens to the prosecutor's victims.

afatc 13y ago

Well, they certainly did not help to prevent the ridiculous prosecution being made

git-pull 13y ago
I am curious, what was wrong with the criminal charges against Swartz? Can someone clarify how the prosecutor handled things wrong?
- dreamdu5t 13y ago
  Nothing. It's exactly how the US works and our legal system is constructed. Until pleas and plea bargaining are (rightfully) considered duress/forced confessions, piling on charges to force a plea is commonplace, and will continue to be commonplace.
- betterunix 13y ago
  The prosecutor had to dig around to even find a crime with which to charge Aaron. JSTOR, the so-called victim, did not even want to see the prosecution move forward and had to be subpoenaed for evidence against Aaron, with whom they had already settled matters. The prosecutor's case was based on an extremely expansive interpretation of the law, and additional charges were added in retaliation for Aaron's decision to actually exercise his right to a trial. Basically, this case embodied almost everything that is wrong with the criminal justice system in America.
- mpyne 13y ago
  The charges themselves are based on law that is rather too harsh in many people's opinion, given the scope and effect of the "crime" itself. E.g. there's no reason that this should have been a felony, but the option of pleading to something that was a misdemeanor wasn't even available to Aaron here because of the way the law is constructed. However given the law and the way the legal system works the prosecutor was certainly treating this just like any other CFAA case.

PhasmaFelis 13y ago

Oh, poor MIT, all they did was actively help the guy who wanted Aaron thrown in prison for three and half decades* while pretending to be neutral. Any of us might have done the same, right? Totally innocent! Like "a rape victim," to use Heymann's own words. If you punch a stranger in the face, you probably don't expect him to fall, crack his head on the corner of a table, and die; but you don't get to claim you're blameless if that happens, either. * This is the bit where someone says that Heymann didn't really want to lock Aaron up 'til 2045, he just said that to scare him. Where I come from, "but I was lying" isn't considered much of a defense either.

tomphoolery 13y ago
It was Aaron's choice to kill himself. He wasn't a victim of anything but his own mind.
- marincounty 13y ago
  I can guarantee by your quip; you have never dealt with our legal system.
  - benologist 13y ago
    If it wasn't the legal system it would have been literally any other reason, big or small, that Aaron felt was terminally wrong with his life.
    - icelancer 13y ago
      This is incredibly insulting. How could you possibly know this?
      - benologist 13y ago
        Because depressed, suicidal people kill themselves, usually when they're not facing prison? In 2007 Schwartz posted what was believed to be a suicide note after being fired from reddit: http://digitaljournal.com/article/341150 http://digitaljournal.com/article/341150

Zigurd 13y ago

MIT leadership had a duty to act reasonably, and they didn't. MIT's position should have been that, at most, this amounted to trespassing and matter for the Cambridge PD. Aaron Swartz was no threat to MIT's network. They might not have prevented subsequent events, but they failed, horribly, by not speaking up for a reasonable outcome. MIT's IS&T office had a knee jerk security-oriented reaction, and was over impressed with interacting with Steven Heymann, who is a fixture at the sort of conferences where Swartz's "crime" is inflated out of proportion. It's not OK that Heymann, Ortiz, and MIT's personnel who overcooked this case contributed to the death of Aaron Swartz. And it's not OK they got away with it so far.

arabellatv 13y ago
Yes. I agree. What were MIT's and Heymann's true motivations for blowing it up to a security issue? Did they act out of fear or out of ego? Regardless, they exacerbated the issue (just as media sensationalizes stories). It's upsetting that such intelligent people would fail to think through the situation. Or even worse...they did think it through and planned to blow this up as big as possible to prove a point or make an example out of Swartz?
- danielweber 13y ago
  It was a security issue because some guy kept on breaking into their network and had escalated to physical intrusion to achieve his goals. They didn't know the guy was Aaron Swartz and that they ought to have been privileged to have him on their network, invited or not.
  - sigzero 13y ago
    I am taking the second sentence as sarcasm.
    - walid 13y ago
      Why are you taking it as sarcasm? MIT didn't know it was him until they installed a camera and guest logins are the norm and apparently/reportedly have high privileges.

nilved 13y ago

MIT killed Aaron. I don't even use their public key database anymore.

sitkack 13y ago

You say so many words Hiding behind that fact that you are a

meritt 13y ago

He was facing 35+ years of prison. Suicide -- while I agree is a personal choice -- it's not exactly an unreasonable decision given the outlandish sentence.

fastball 13y ago
Suicide is always an unreasonable decision, unless you face something which is literally worse than death. A lifetime in prison is not worse than death. At least you can still talk to your family. You can acquire new skills. There is the chance you get paroled early. Etc, etc.
- meritt 13y ago
  I disagree. That's your opinion. Why is it that people can come to the conclusion of "I'd rather see him rot to death in a jail cell than the benefit of a quick death". This line of thinking views death as a lighter punishment when contrasted against a lifetime in prison. Yet when the tables are turned suddenly suicide is viewed with such disdain? I'm not advocating suicide or anything, I'm just arguing that when faced with an immensely harsh sentence, it's not a surprising decision to reach.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- PhasmaFelis 13y ago
  > A lifetime in prison is not worse than death. The fuck it isn't. Or, more civilly, that is definitely a statement on which reasonable people may disagree. I'm not particularly depressed, but if I were actually sentenced to life in prison, I would check out in a hot second. There's no point. My opportunities to create joy in the world and to experience unalloyed happiness are done. The rest of my life would be nothing but marking the days and the years until death. It's a waste of good consciousness. I'm opposed to capital punishment because it's irreversible, but I do believe that death is more merciful than life in prison.
  - fastball 13y ago

thaumaturgy 13y ago

I think I can speak a little bit on the subject of suicide, since both of my parents have made suicide attempts recently, and since I also struggle with depression and, although I'm currently too stubborn to seriously consider something like suicide, I can tell you it does seem to be an attractive option some days. Suicide is not completely a personal choice. Part of it is a problem with mental wiring, yes, but a significant part of it is also environmental. Suicide is far more prevalent among people who view themselves to be in hopeless situations, whether financial or otherwise. I hate to resort to analogy, since everyone always then argues the analogy instead of the subject it's trying to describe, but if you have an engine that redlines at 5,000 rpm and you redline it for a while and it self-destructs, you don't turn around then and say, "well, that wasn't the driver's fault, that was completely the engine's fault." Aaron made the sad decision to take his own life. Ultimately, yes, he made that decision and nobody else did. But that doesn't mean that there isn't some responsibility to go 'round. He made that decision because of the future he believed he was facing, because of the situation he believed he was in. Also, the entire point of this article was that MIT did have at least one good reason to defend Aaron: self-interest. He was as much a symbol of what people believed was a hacker ethos at MIT as anyone else of his generation. The message now is clear: hackers are not safe at MIT. "Just following the rules" has never been a socially acceptable defense for bad behavior. Sometimes the rules are wrong, and the wonderful thing about humans -- when they choose to be human -- is that we have the ability to judge a situation and decide when to bend or even break the rules.

watty 13y ago
The "MIT defenders" in this thread aren't trying to say MIT played no part, because they did. So did the justice system, so did the computer cabinet owner, the person responsible for locking it, his close friends to urged him to continue, etc. The problem is that people are placing BLAME on MIT. MIT is not to blame for his suicide. Aaron took a risk and got caught. Aaron is the only person to blame.

coldtea 13y ago

>Suicide is completely a personal choice. There's no such thing as a "completely personal choice". In fact the whole notion of a "completely personal choice" is ludicrous, bordering on the metaphysical. There is an outside world, a reality, and things that happen there influce our actions, including any decision to commit suicide.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

jezfromfuture 13y ago

Agreed , finally a post not blaming others for the individual choice of one man.