The fact that something Aaron wrote "played a role" in the prosecution does not mean it was politically motivated.
It's a fundamental principal in our legal system that intent matters. Of course if you are charged with a crime the prosecutors will use whatever evidence they can to try and back their claims of what your intent was.
The HuffPo article explicitly states that this is what is being discussed:
> The "Manifesto," Justice Department representatives told congressional staffers, demonstrated Swartz's malicious intent in downloading documents on a massive scale.
So we're not talking about anything "political" here, they planned to use it as evidence. One can make a strong argument that it's lousy as evidence...but the fact that they planned to use it as evidence does not suggest any sort of political motivations (on it's own)...only that they are bad at selecting evidence for their case.
My comment should absolutely NOT be construed to say it wasn't politically motivated or that it was handled well....I'm strictly speaking about that one little line...you can't use that one line to support an assertion that it was politically motivated, because it's just not valid. Use other information to bolster the case instead.
Context error.
If Bob dies by falling off a bridge while I am grabbing at him, my intent matters a lot. Was it completely an accident, Bob slipped and fell and I tried to pull him back? Or did I hate Bob and plot for months to kill him and was pushing him? From a distance the two things may look the same - it's important to figure out what I was thinking.
But let's say I dislike Bob and even once wrote a blog post about him and his annoying toenail clipping habits several years ago. Some people might even speculate I would not be unhappy if annoying old "Toenail Bob" was dead. I haven't actually done anything to Bob though. Charging me with murder at this point because it is speculated I am thinking about killing Bob and might do so in the future on account of my having complained years ago about his toenail clipping habits would be prosecuting a thought crime. Even if I happen to have bought an axe and rope recently. Or maybe I even stole the axe. What about that? So I could be prosecuted for stealing the axe, that's fair. But prosecute me for killing Toenail Bob because I once disliked his clipping protocols? Claiming that is reasonable to charge people with things they may or may not be thinking of doing but have not actually done because "It's a fundamental principal in our legal system that intent matters." just doesn't make sense. Especially when there's plenty of evidence the axe and rope were for some other purpose, such as I buy a new axe every winter, I need the rope for my spelunking hobby, or I have an established and documented history of downloading large datasets as a professional academic researcher in order to do statistical analysis on them.
It would be more akin to attacking, but not killing, Bob after having publicly declared that "It is a moral imperative that we should kill Bob." You might then be charged with attempted murder. The law[1] recognizes attempt and conspiracy to attempt as crimes, just as it would if you had attempted to or conspired to kill Bob.
This is not "thoughtcrime", either: it still requires you to take a swing at him with your axe.
I have an established and documented history of downloading large datasets as a professional academic researcher in order to do statistical analysis on them.
Consider (again, because I mentioned this in reply to you once before) that Aaron did not make use of his status as an academic researcher when he did what he did. It might have made a good defense had he gone to trial, but it isn't a magic bullet that absolved him of scrutiny for what he was observed doing.
You seem to be rather severely misunderstanding my post - please read it again.
Edit: Sorry, not against you personally jsjunky, it's just that my mind is getting stretch marks from being twisted around. The all caps were it snapping back.
You're talking about something completely unrelated to what I am talking about.
4/5ths of Hacker News believed the day the news about Swartz came out, when we learned about the prison time demand, that this was what was happening. There has been no revelation, unless Taren or one of her peers was at the hearing and learned something different than the Huffington Post.
In short: to keep themselves from looking bad.
I wasn't sure, before I read this, that I actually wanted to see Ortiz and Heymann fired. Now I'm starting to think I do. Putting someone in prison just so you don't have to publicly admit that you shouldn't have been prosecuting them in the first place... I can hardly think of a worse reason.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5264200
Unlike Mashable or Techdirt, WBUR did actual reporting, talking to multiple defense attorneys that handled Ortiz-managed prosecutions, tracking down judges admonishing Ortiz, even finding people who had recommended Ortiz for the post who have since backed away. The WBUR investigation is packed full of details.
They don't paint a pretty picture! There is good reason to be concerned about Ortiz. There are concerns about the way she manages her office, sets up incentives for AUSAs, oversees cases, and handles transparency. The story they build is of a US Attorney appointment that is simply not working out. It's damning enough that I actually started to reconsider whether Heymann was really the root of the problem; if he'd been reporting to a different US Attorney, things might have worked out differently.
The most disquieting thing Ortiz says in the WBUR show is an offhand comment. "It's an adversarial system" she says, defending her aggressive handling of prosecutions. But while that's true at one level (prosecutors are technically & mechanically adversaries of defense attorneys), it's deeply untrue at the level she seems to mean it on. She comes off as believing that her job is to present the most aggressive possible case for conviction and let the judge & jury sort out the truth. But that's not the prosecutor's role in the US! Prosecutors have discretion over what cases they bring and are required to use it. It's very worrying when a US Attorney implies that it's not their job to deploy that discretion.
The DOJ's actions were heavy-handed in a way that has freaked out a lot of people who evidently never realized that the government was like this.
Anyone who has ever gotten a letter from the IRS or has been pulled over by a surly police officer knows well that even though there are laws which apply to everyone fairly, the way those laws are enforced is mostly left up to the discretion of whoever is enforcing them.
Try being an immigrant and dealing with INS officers or a traveler dealing with TSA. Our government has created all kinds of thugs whose job it is to put on a big show of force to intimidate people.
Why are government buildings so big and grand? To create a show of force and make our government seem formidable. Why are there so many ceremonies involving soldiers, government officials, marching, etc. Simply to put on a show and create the impression of solemnity, gravity, and importance.
Governments must continually act to keep the power they have achieved. They do this mostly through propaganda and PR efforts. Every white gloved soldier in a ceremony is a PR stunt. Every wood paneled room, dramatic monument, motorcade, marble building, podium, flag and seal are part of the PR show.
The world is full of greedy people who seek power over others. Whether it's an ambitious Carmen Ortiz or an up-and-coming young congressman or a mild mannered traffic cop. Each seeks to control others as a very significant portion of his/her motivation and life's goal.
Most people who do startups just want to build something and work with interesting technology and so we often forget just what government is. We must wake up and realize that it's about control and force, and now and then the victim of this control and excess is a fellow hacker and we start to take it seriously for a few minutes before we forget about it again. Don't assume that you won't be the target, don't adopt that conservative worldview.
I'm not sure why you've chosen to attack his comment on these spurious grounds. It'd be more interesting to discuss why it engendered an emotional response from you, or perhaps if you disagree with it then make a coherent criticism of his main point: that there exists a formidable power structure in our society and many of us chose to remain unaware of it.
And which of those things was Carmen Ortiz doing?
One of government's very effective dodges is to point at the truly good things it is doing and playing the hell out of them like they are the bulk of the work. But go look at a budget; how much of the budget of the federal government is actually spent on those things? Even just the discretionary budget? And when you see umpty billion dollars going to the "Justice Department", don't forget that nowhere near all of those umpty billion dollars are actually going to things like that. Only a fraction.
Yes, I acknowledge that I want a police force that adequately protects me. But after decades and decades of bloated growth, that is now no more than a mere sideline of government, not its core task.
One could easily argue that none of the "reputable" news sources you mentioned would report on this because it would be damaging to the administration that they feverishly backed and helped get elected. Regardless of your political views, if mainstream media reported a factual account of what happened to Aaron Swartz, the "warm and fuzzy" image of the Obama administration would go right out the window.
This case is truly disturbing, and it shows prima facie evidence of an extremely dark and hypocritical underbelly to the current administration that I don't think most people believe could possibly exist. Some of the what has gone on in this particular case can only be described as evil, and I'm not sure that even the best PR spinners would be able to spin this in any other way.
Honestly, I look at all my childhood friends who became cops and such and I do see a correlation to their social statuses.
The activist does not strive to get 100% of the vote, only the requisite majority to pass a law, thus forcing the minority to abide by a law it does not support. Consider pre-Brown-v-Board black students who had to follow the law and attend segregated schools. They were in the minority subjected to the will of the majority. The same goes for poor students today who are unable to obtain a school voucher b/c they are in the political minority and so must attend vastly inferior schools.
So my statement is trivially true for all efforts to create legislation that is not unanimously supported, regardless if history decides the majority view is enlightened or backward.
Some people want to start a business so that they can positively change the world. Many people who work for corporations and the govt may have similar aims in life. After all, this may be the only chance at life that you get.
My family comes from a country where the government has little authority (Bangladesh). It's not a good thing. People don't respect the law, and it's a deep moral failing of the country. It's a contemptible characteristic of the people. It's a hindrance to collective prosperity. I note with some amusement that tons of people like my father got the hell out of Bangladesh and moved to a country where he paid much more taxes, where there was much more regulation, much more oversight of society by government. Yet, not very many people seem to want to do the opposite.
In my view, the government is just the gang that drove out all the rival gangs and got rich enough to start laundering its reputation, rewriting history, etc.
Even in 2013, the atrocities committed by the US government are worse than those of nearly any criminal gang in the world. Consider rendition. Consider drone attacks on children.
But notice
http://www.businessinsider.com/a-third-of-people-manipulate-...
with
About A Third Of People Have A Fundamental Desire To Manipulate Others Max Nisen | Dec. 4, 2012, 7:07 PM
So if there is 1/3rd in the general population, the fraction in 'fitting' parts of gumment might be much higher, still not 100% but high enough to underline the grandalf theme.
http://www.wbur.org/2013/02/20/carmen-ortiz-investigation
(Seriously worth a read; even if you skim, be sure to read the case descriptions in full. They're pretty shocking.)
They play the thug, always threatening their own constituents with less services, longer lines, less safety, and if all that doesn't work they go after your freedoms. The insinuate, they investigate, they intimidate.
To use a favorite term of the political class but in a different way, we have a government too big to fail.
| The same law that says that anyone using a fake
| middle name on Facebook is committing a federal
| felony.
Also:
>interpreting breach of ToS as a Federal crime effectively allows companies to set the bar for what is a Federal crime
Reminds me of something Larry Lessig said during his speech last Tuesday: The alternative interpretation is that it's a violation when someone violates code-based restrictions, right? So you're still allowing companies to set the bar for what is a Federal crime, they just have to do it in code instead of in contract. Write some nominal piece of code whose stated purpose is to prevent the thing you want to prohibit, even if it's facile and trivially bypassed, and now bypassing it is apparently back to being a federal crime again. Is this really something we want to allow? Shouldn't the law require prosecutors to prove there was some actual harm before we go throwing people in federal prison?
Sorry to pedant, but a case will typically not get to the Supreme Court at all unless two circuits come to different conclusions.
But, wait, isn't that unworkably fuzzy? Who gets to decide what is reasonable? Ultimately the answer would be a judge or jury of your peers.
I'm not sure what I think about this, but here's a real-world analogy to consider. Suppose I have a storefront, and I keep the doors unlocked, but I put a small sign on the door saying you can't enter unless I've issued you a membership card. Should it be a crime to enter without one? Probably not. Now let's say I get a card reader-based lock, so you can't enter without a card. Even if the lock is easily bypassed (let's say I've left a window open), isn't it reasonable to consider it a crime to do so?
As somebody that took time out of his evening to address your prior comment with what I felt was sincerity and (I hoped) clarity, I'm sorry it came across to you as "snivelly equivocating".
that is just invalid here
It may help you to understand the relevance of intent better if you look at what Taren writes in the footnote: "His lawyers instructed him very strictly that he should never talk about motive with anyone before the trial, as it could play a key role in the defense and they didn’t want the prosecution to get any hint of what line of argument might be used."
As I said in my prior comment: In law, intent (if it can be proven) can make an enormous difference in what you get charged with or convicted of. Far from being invalid here, the importance of someone's intentions in a case like this is exactly why prosecutors would look at Swartz's prior writings and why his lawyers would instruct him not to discuss it.
If I, as a prosecutor, decide to charge you with felony assualt because I don't like the color of your shirt, it simply does not matter that you either A) Slapped someone in the face last year or B) Wrote on your blog that you intended to do it. My case is prima facie invalid - I am not allowed to charge you with felonies because I don't like the color of your shirt or because I don't like your philosopy on government transparency.
Aaron was an idealist that had some idealistic misconceptions about reality. Being an intelligent and nationally famous activist, which he was well on his way to becoming, is not something you can do without ruffling the feathers of some very powerful people. He knew it [1], but his idealism stopped him from understanding what it meant for him, personally. I'll admit I don't know much about "how Washington really works", but I wouldn't be surprised if those with such power over senators have some sway with prosecutors, as well.
1. "You don't just introduce a bill on Monday and pass it unanimously a couple of days later [...] but this time, it was going to happene [...] somehow, and the kind of thing you never see in Washington, the senators had all managed to put their personal differences aside, and come together to support one bill they were persuaded they could all live with, a bill that would censor the internet, and when I saw this, I realized, whoever behind this was good [i.e. powerful]". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg#t=411s
I increased the text size of this post because it started uncomfortably small (for me). Curiosity made me keep increasing the text size until it hit both ends of my browser, then I increased it some more and the text disappeared off the ends. The text did reflow as the size increased, within some internal margin set by the site's style, so it's clearly possible to reflow within the bounds of the window.
Why doesn't it reflow to stay inside the window, and why is this considered good? I vaguely recall that it used to be normal to reflow and keep everything visible.
I checked with FF and Chromium on linux, same behavior.
Developers can turn zooming off on mobile devices by specifying a fixed viewport which obviously upsets a large subset of people. (But then you potentially have the pinch gesture to yourself and it isn't intercepted by the system, but I digress..)
Alternatively percentage based and max-width css can be used on containers and then you can probably start to get the behaviour you're looking for. I'm not 100% sure if browsers will scale max-width. You can probably set pixel widths on containers and use percentage based sizes for fonts, but then a) you're assuming the default font size is 16px forever and b) the results are still going to depend on whether the browser scales text or zooms the entire page.
In this website's case it probably wouldn't be very helpful if the text scaled up without the design going wider, though. Maybe one or two steps but at a point the main column width gets ridiculously narrow.
Oh and obviously you can just never give containers widths, but then you probably get that html 1.0 look where text just goes all the way from one edge of the screen to the other.
I don't think it really is a solvable problem in a way that will make everyone happy all the time.
A lot of people think the Democrats are lot more socially and politically liberal than they really are. Look no further than their repeated reiteration of punitive "War on Drugs" policy. The Democrats play that tune during elections, but it's a scam... as much as the Republicans and their Jesus babble. (Karl Rove is an atheist.) Both parties are absolutely status quo parties. Since the Reagan era, their stances have differed significantly only on hot-button "culture war" issues-- because these issues are really just tools to segment the electorate. On issues that matter to money and power they differ little if at all.
Your comment might be warranted in five to ten years if she does indeed define herself that way.
After a decade, it will be a far fainter association, current trajectories of life being held equal. Beyond that...say after 3 decades? There will be a new generation of whipper snappers saying all sorts of stuff that barely intersect with today's actors. (They will intersect with the issues and choices we make today)
She will not be defined by it unless she chooses to pursue that path.
Do blame them for bringing down the sledge-hammer though.
Specifically, in this case, I do not understand how the shills are hoping to keep justifying the use of the manifesto as proof of intent to distribute the articles, when he has NOT actually distributed them? How can that be possibly relevant?
Or is it the case that we are not only not allowed to read research that we paid for but now are potentially all guilty of thought crimes as well?
Yes, intent only matters if you've committed a crime, but it's not at all difficult to argue that Swartz probably did commit a felony under the CFAA. If you can't see that, imagine he had downloaded loosely protected private emails or credit card account lists.
You are not saying much here. The CFAA is so broad that one could argue that any Internet user has violated it at one time or another. We might as well pass a law that says, "You are a criminal if the government does not like you."
"If you can't see that, imagine he had downloaded loosely protected private emails or credit card account lists."
Hm, I see where you are going. You are saying that if a business posts a bunch of credit numbers on its website, and says to everyone, "Please only download these numbers one at a time by manually clicking on the links on our website," it should be a felony for someone to write a script that automatically downloads all the numbers.
That said, I agree that since the prosecution was taking the position that it was a crime, it's not surprising or particularly concerning that they were looking at his past statements as evidence for establishing intent. That is a normal and expected thing for prosecutors to do.
However, we now know that he was a target for a political trial, so it was clearly imperative that some 'bad intent' be found to boost the charges to 14 counts with the total of 50 years in prison that had driven him to suicide. Having laws that make an intent alone (to make publicly funded work available to the public) into a crime has made this possible, of course.
Anyone trying to justify this, while making a living off the technological revolution made possible by free exchange of scientific knowledge which Aaron was trying to defend, is a shill in my book.
Respectfully I don't think that's a great argument. That what he did is in the public interest (imo) is central to the issue. You can't just ignore that.
Which it very clearly has, or more precisely in this case it can be described as "Abetment to suicide"
There are a million and one worse things perpetrated and supported by this government that they actually do happily admit to and which are actually /really bad/ - i.e. resulting in the murder of tens of thousands innocent children.
I refuse to pity self entitled pricks who should have known what they were doing and taken some responsibility for the relatively tiny consequences of their actions instead of topping themselves.
Disrespectful tone fully intended.
First world problems, in the extreme.
Citation needed
> relatively tiny consequences of their actions
So we can send you to jail for 30 years? It would only be a minor inconvenience if we did so?
The one thing learned from the Vietnam war being made so public seems to be 'control the media better' rather than 'war crimes are wrong'...
Any source of figures I quote is going to be suspect so I invite you to find your own an make your own judgement. I prefer Wikipedia to demonstrate how easily uncovered this information, or at least the suggestion of it is. Some official statements on the matter downplay the issues even by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude...
A quick browse of wikipedia on these matters gives a good overview of how confused the situation is... In particular even US allies do not agree with various statements from inside the US that the number of innocent deaths is as low as 'double figures'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_attacks_in_Pakistan
For Iraq I believe the consensus is that civilian Iraqi deaths outweighed US military deaths somewhere between 15 and 250 times. There is a nice table with cited sources again on Wikipedia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
The cleanest cut case is perhaps Israel, where many Israeli organisations themselves keep track of figures. I think nobody disagrees that the IDF have killed more Palestinian children, than Israelis in total have ever been killed by Palestinian terror attacks. This is an organisation which is funded in part by US aid at a time when the money could be better spent back home helping the economy...
e.g. http://www.btselem.org/statistics/fatalities/any/by-date-of-...
... and yes, going to prison in the US for 30 years would be an improvement in quality of life for most of the world's population.
There is a reason why the US is so often loathed by Arabs and its nothing to do with Islam, fanaticism or oil...
So stop being a chump. Stop voting in the same career politicians from one of two sides of the same political coin. A coin that's entirely beholden to corporate interests and only nominally beholden to the people.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results
I think insanity has to do with how one perceives reality, rather than one's aptitude for inferring future results based on past ones. Wouldn't this more aptly be characterized as naivety?
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http://www.justice.gov/usao/reading_room/reports/asr2011/11s...