It played a significant role in shaping my understanding of humanity, charity and what impact as a single human being can have. It was a big factor in why I joined the Effective Altruism movement and donate 10+% of my income yearly. I highly recommend reading it.
It saddens me greatly that person who was so forward thinking and was only looking out for the future of humanity was taken away so young.
I actually donated all of my income this year, all the money I earned after paying for food and rent. That amounted to about 300k. Saved my ass during taxes yesterday. Owed the government around 80k, but then after I put my charitable donations it looks like I may actually get some money back from the government (which again, I would be donating).
I realize my dependence on comforts made me mentally weak. I become easily irritable and feel exposed and vulnerable when I'm not around my comforts.
Ultimately, it started feeling like I'm paying to become mentally weaker so now I opt to live a life with nothing to lose.
After I no longer care about my income, I can now fearlessly call people out on their bullshit at work and challenge their decisions. It helped me focus more at work and make the right decisions instead of the easy ones.
Health insurance is standard high deductible provided by my company. I don't care about retirement and emergency funds. 3 years ago I cleaned out my 401 and donated it and it actually wasn't so bad. I'm doing the max for tax deductible so that I get some company matching and no taxes but after I quit my job I plan to clean it out again and donate them like I did 3 years ago.
Imo, if you are truly happy, you can find happiness no matter how bad your situation is. So I don't care about the distant future. I optimize for the impact I can make today.
The story is very good and I would recommend everyone to read it because it is eye opening. However, I don't agree with the example given.
* Spoilers *
It is not defnitely the same to say "Kill 10 people so I can keep my earnings" than "I will kill 10 people so I can steal theirs". It is definitely not. I am not saying capitalism is fair, but in the first case I (or whoever is that person) earn their stuff working, while in the second case the outcome may be the same but the path isn't.
> You can justify anything by claiming you are "looking out for the future of humanity."
You're right, you can.
That being said, in context I dispute your low effort implication that what he did was wrong. As far as I'm concerned his actions were unquestionably the right ones from the perspective of the greater good.
It is with pure glee that I watch SciHub's continued success and Elsevier's impotent attempts to stop them. The academic literature is rightfully a commons.
Everytime I am reminded of this event, I remember the rage... and it cuts just like it did when it happened 7 and a half years ago. It actually makes my stomach wrench and my eyes swell with tears... this is what injustice looks like. this is what a failing society and culture looks like. this is tragedy. this is heartlessness. this is evil.
His death was incredibly touching to me, and I’m not a sentimental guy.
I asked myself why that was the case and the answer I came up with is that he was a true idealist, what I longed to be but did not have the ____ to
It's disgusting that we've allowed violation of copyright to be a criminal offense. It should be a civil offense at most, with no possibility of jail time. No wasting money extraditing Kim Dotcom from NZ, no ruining kids' lives for downloading music from the internet.
I'm appalled at Disney, Comcast, and any other media giant that has successfully lobbied for the expansion of the monstrous copyright regime in the USA.
Did you know the FBI wastes time looking into this kind of stuff? Shameful.
It's a very efficient mechanism for a handful of very powerful companies to slurp a limitless amount of money up without doing any work. Once a work is created, people will pay for it over and over again forever. And where there's a money-making scheme, there's legislation to back it up.
And it's due to copying academic journals, which are mostly funded by public grants money and should really be free to distribute. I feel really sad every time I remember this case.
While I completely agree with the sentiment, the horrifying truth is that bureaucrats aside, even common people are perfectly willing to ruin someone's life over a technicality. You and I are surrounded by such people.
Based on this story with Aaron and experiences in the 1990s with hacker friends, my opinion of federal prosecutors is very low. I see them as highly educated people who excel in relativism and twist ethics and law to achieve narrow goals without regard to principles.
Compounding this, I also got into a dispute with two former federal prosecutors, both of whom did wildly unethical things. One represents the Police Chief and the Sheriff of a major city. I can't even believe that former US Attorneys would act this way, but then I'm reminded by Alexander Acosta who protected Epstein.
That's great for lawyers, it's part of their job description. Lawyers are not about morals and truth, they're about defending their client, guilty or not.
Exactly. How can you have a fair trial if the defence lawyer won't give his best? Just look at the sham justice served if a person can't afford counsel and has to use a public defender. In the US being rich or poor can make the difference in whether or not a person goes to jail for a crime.
I understand people get upset when they help a very likely guilty person get off (OJ Simpson anyone? see the point about being rich above.)
But defence lawyers have an important job, irrespective of who they're representing or what they're alleged to have done.
The justice is sham there because the other side mostly brought forth lawyers. If both sides were being defended by vaguely similar public defenders, the result might be different.
This only shows that using lawyers is a classic game theory problem. Both people using lawyers prolly makes the system worse off overall, but neither side can defect in isolation.
Think of divorce lawyers for example so that you don't feel this is about criminals on one side and innocent people on the other. In a divorce settlement, neither side is usually the criminal, and yet they spent thousands of dollars lawyering up in a bizarre game of mutually assured destruction. cf. The Marriage Story.
The main issue with going without trial lawyers is that even if they were somehow banned for both sides in all cases it would bias it just towards those who would be good pro se (relatively speaking as it is always a disadvantage) .
Really defense attorneys are a prerequisite to actually convict the guilty and have it mean anything. An unopposed trial could convict a ham sandwich and thus can and should be thrown out on appeal.
Yea, it always tickles me when people discover that every group with adverse incentives ends up corrupt. Almost _everyone_ is corrupt. It's rare to find a person holding a single damn principle, which is why incentive design is so important.
Does the prosecutor get to choose which cases to prosecute? If so if you're optimizing for a high conviction rate you should drop all cases except your absolutely most solid case. Then just ride that 100% conviction rate for the rest of your career while dropping all future cases.
Conviction rates don't exist in a vacuum though. If you have a 100% conviction rating but have only prosecuted one case, no one is going to care. The real key is to bring extreme charges against large numbers of people and then offer them palatable plea deals. You get a large number of convictions with little effort and the few people who risk going to court aren't going to hurt your conviction rate much even if they win.
These type of people require networks of equally misguided people to survive. And those networks and their methods grow over time. So you are never fighting a person.
Its a network that is surrounding the fool teaching, reinforcing and promoting the behavior. You will notice they have a high level of confidence no matter what outcomes are produced. That's because the network behind is patting them on the back and saying you got what it takes.
The only counter balance is developing your own network. When I was younger it was just about people I got along with. People who had the same personality, interests, needs etc. But thats a network with only certain strengths. It took a while and lot of blundering about to realize there are lot of people very different from me, who share the same values. And putting in the effort of connecting/nurturing connections over those values, pays off big time in dealing with douchebags esp above you in the food chain.
Reminds me of what happens with the DoJ and their war on encryptiom - the top people often change their views and condemn it only after they left it. This isn't a case of falling in line like the lower totem pole members, it hints of a cultural bubble.
There's obviously cases where prosecutors or bureaucrats in general go way beyond what they need to do in which case individual responsiblity or morality matters, but in general lawyers and federal employees apply the law, they don't make it. What you identified as relativism I think is actually impartiality, which is a good thing. The problem with principles, like empathy is that they tend to be unevenly applied, often in activist manner. Which is why we demand of officials that they follow procedures, rather than inherently subjective judgement.
I think at the end of the day when it comes to stories such as Aaron's the buck stops with everyone of us, because we're responsible for keeping these people employed and the rules in place.
Not from the US and I lack personal experiences, but reading anecdotes like this[1] it seems to me that the problems extend beyond just federal prosecutors.
Whether we're comfortable calling it as such or not, this should be considered a culpable murder. Suicide is the reasonably foreseeable outcome of being capriciously targeted by the overwhelming violence of the government. I am so sorry for the loss. Aaron was clearly a hugely valuable human being.
I agree that the prosecutors were unnecessarily aggressive in the way they want after Aaron in this case. However it is a dangerous precedent to set that anyone who does something that might be seen as a catalyst for suicide can be found culpable in a murder. If someone gets fired for their job and commits suicide, is their boss liable? If someone is dumped by their significant other and commits suicide, is their former partner liable? This also isn't getting into the problem this presents for the legal system. Does someone fabricating suicidal thoughts force the government's hand into a lighter sentence?
Also suicide is never a "reasonably foreseeable outcome" when someone is faced with a 6 month jail sentence. There are literally millions of people in jail in this country for longer sentences that never consider suicide. Anyone who thinks throwing away the 50 years post jail sentence is worth not having to endure a rough few months is not in a good mental state. This country does a horrible job helping people with mental health issues. That is generally what kills people who die by suicide. It isn't whatever event is ultimately the impetus for the action.
> However it is a dangerous precedent to set that anyone who does something that might be seen as a catalyst for suicide can be found culpable in a murder.
Not "anyone"; a public official who (I assume) willing swore a oath not to abuse the authority they were unwisely trusted with.
> However it is a dangerous precedent to set that anyone who does something that might be seen as a catalyst for suicide can be found culpable in a murder.
Most people don't have such inescapable power underlying their threats. The government is a good deal more fearsome than most individuals who aren't directly threatening murder in the traditional sense.
> Also suicide is never a "reasonably foreseeable outcome" when someone is faced with a 6 month jail sentence.
It's a bit disingenuous to call it a threat of 6 months in jail. That was a plea bargain offer with other strings attached, that came after Swartz was threatened with up to 35 years and then more charges were added bringing the potential up to 50 years. By the time the 6 month offer was made, Swartz had already been subject to more abuse and harassment than his actions could have ever justified. He was deep into a Kafkaesque nightmare before the prosecution offered the first shreds of mercy.
It was never really 35 years (or 50 years). Those kind of numbers come from just taking everything someone is charged with one by one, figuring the maximum sentence that is possible to come from an instance of that crime in isolation, and then adding those all up.
That almost always massively overstates the sentence for a couple reasons.
1. Federal crimes are divided into groups. If you are convicted of more than one crime in the same group, you are effectively only sentenced for one of them.
When you see an indictment with a lot of charges there usually is a lot of grouping going on and so it looks a lot more scary than it actually is.
2. Most federal crimes have a range of possible sentences, ranging up to 10 or 20 years. Most of the time the judge will determine where your sentence falls in that range by following the federal sentencing guidelines. Those basically start at the low end and then various modifiers can push it up.
The modifiers include things like how much monetary loss you caused, whether you used a weapon, whether you recruited or directed other people to help in your crime, whether you involved minors in your crime, and the seriousness of recent past crimes of yours. That's just some, there are more, and there are some that can lower the sentence.
In Swartz's case, first offense, no weapon, not part of a criminal enterprise, etc., it would really come down to the monetary loss. According to Swartz's lawyers, the prosecutors thought a sentence of up to 7 years was possible which suggests they were going to try to prove millions of dollars in damages. Swartz's lawyers thought there was a good chance he'd just get probation which suggests that they thought they could show that damages were under $10k.
There were actually two plea bargain offers. One was plead guilty to the felonies and they all agree on a 4 month sentence. The other was plead guilty and the government will argue for 6 months with the judge, and Swartz can argue for less (or probabtion).
Here's a good entertaining article on how federal sentencing works and how the numbers are greatly exaggerated in press releases [1].
Here's a two part article on the Swartz charges [2] [3]. The first looks at whether the charges individually fit the alleged facts. The second looks at, among other things, potential sentencing (and was my source for what Swartz's lawyers thought might happen).
There are copious news reports from the time that state the charges filed against him carried those maximum penalties. It happened.
The prosecutors did eventually state that they would not seek maximum penalties, but that's not a guarantee, and it's not something that was communicated at the time the charges were initially brought against him.
> At the time the prosecutors claimed that Swartz could’ve faced at most 7 years.
From what I can find, "at the time" here means at the time of the plea bargain offer, not at the time he was charged, or at the time they added more charges.
A defendant with competent legal counsel (as Aaron Swartz had) would have been informed by them of the likely actual range of the sentence if found guilty.
>Most people don't have such inescapable power underlying their threats. The government is a good deal more fearsome than most individuals who aren't directly threatening murder in the traditional sense.
The government isn't a singular person. A prosecutor does not have "inescapable power underlying their threats". They are a single person in a system. There are numerous other people involved in the system that have roles that serve to rein in prosecutors if Aaron allowed the process to fully play out.
>It's a bit disingenuous to call it a threat of 6 months in jail. That was a plea bargain offer with other strings attached, that came after Swartz was threatened with up to 35 years and then more charges were added bringing the potential up to 50 years. By the time the 6 month offer was made, Swartz had already been subject to more abuse and harassment than his actions could have ever justified. He was deep into a Kafkaesque nightmare before the prosecution offered the first shreds of mercy.
No one reasonably expected him to spend 35-50 years in jail so citing that as a potential outcome is much more disingenuous than saying he might serve 6 months. Sure, there are strings attached to plea deals, but it is a simple fact that he had the option to serve that 6 months and end any further threat of jail. He instead chose death. That decision was caused by his mental illness and not any person who might have wronged him.
> There are numerous other people involved in the system that have roles that serve to rein in prosecutors if Aaron allowed the process to fully play out.
That "fully playing out" you refer to is a process that would have most likely involved appeals carried out while Swartz served prison time—probably longer than 6 months.
I think you're following the prosecutor's playbook in trying to make 6 months and assorted other harassment sound more reasonable by comparison to decades of prison time, when it's still an unreasonable proposition. The consequences of a guilty plea were certainly not going to disappear from Swartz's life after six months.
He didn't have to wait for appeals that might take years, but he didn't even wait for a jury or judge to weigh in on the situation. That could have let him off without spending any time in jail.
The first sentence of my first comment said the prosecutor was too aggressive. I'm not trying to make 6 months of jail sound reasonable for his crime. I am trying to point out that suicide is not a reasonable response to the situation Aaron was in.
> I am trying to point out that suicide is not a reasonable response to the situation Aaron was in.
No, you're not. Nobody is claiming that suicide was a reasonable response to the situation he was in; that's not what you're trying to rebut. What you're arguing against is the suggestion that the overzealous prosecution should bear some degree of culpability for his suicide. Whether his suicide was a reasonable decision doesn't really matter to that question. People do "unreasonable" things all the time, and it is quite ordinary in many circumstances to expect other people to account for that possibility.
>No, you're not. Nobody is claiming that suicide was a reasonable response to the situation he was in;
They claimed suicide was a "reasonably foreseeable outcome". My point is that the decision was not reasonable and therefore the outcome isn't to be expected.
>People do "unreasonable" things all the time, and it is quite ordinary in many circumstances to expect other people to account for that possibility.
Ok, if we are going to hold people legally liable for the most extreme response to their actions, let's build a similar hypothetical. Imagine a similar situation in which a prosecutor is unjustly but legally railroading a person (reminder Aaron was guilty of a crime and no one argues against that, we just argue that the law he broke is unjust). If the person being prosecuted murders the person who pressed charges, does the prosecutor have culpability?
> I am trying to point out that suicide is not a reasonable response to the situation Aaron was in
Suicide is almost never a "reasonable" response to the situation a person is in, yet it's a very common cause of death.
People who work in suicide prevention talk about "rapid onset despair". They also talk about help seeking behaviour, especially of people who are men; young; autistic; and a few other characteristics.
Rapid onset despair is very important when talking about the criminal justice system. People feel overwhelmed by CJS, and death by suicide is very common in people who've been arrested for serious crime or who have been imprisoned.
Deaths by suicide of people who've been accused of, or convicted of, offences is not hidden information. It's a well known phenomena.
Would anyone in that suicide prevention community suggest that whoever's actions inadvertently triggered the rapid onset despair should be held legally liable if the person succumbs to suicide?
Aaron committed suicide because he was suicidal, not because of the prosecution. He admitted to thinking about suicide and being depressed multiple times in the past even before the prosecution. At the very least, no reasonable person would commit suicide before the outcome of the trial was even decided(e.g. Slobodan Praljak)
The prosecution against him was unwarranted from an ethical perspective, but that doesn't mean it alone drove him to suicide. Laying the blame solely on external factors for a suicide does an extreme disservice to the understanding of depression and mental illness.
In principle, I agree with your comment, but there is a significant difference in the contributory factor and in your responsibility and duty of care when your job is to participate in the direction of threats, imprisonment and violence towards individuals.
Aaron had been helping Assange and Wikileaks very early on. In 2009, Wikileaks released files from the Congressional Research Service, apparently obtained by scraping their website using a trivial by-pass to access non-public files.
Aaron had worked on the staff of Congressman Grayson during the same time period.
What if it was Aaron poking around the CRS website as part of his job duties who found that bug and then gave it to Assange?
That would make Aaron the "source" for that 2009 leak--one of the first things published by then young Wikileaks.
what if the reason DOJ so harshly persecuted Aaron was because of his involvement with Wikileaks? This is speculation, as there is no explicit evidence supporting this. Aaron's connection to Wikileaks seems like an important enough coincidence that I cannot rule it out.
But I have always wondered: just how far does the US govt go to suppress and permanently silence people who are Enemies of the State? Especially talented programmers who are digitial natives well equipped to challenge systems of power which are more and more based on technical and information supremacy?
There have been rumors that people are being permanently held in Corecivic prisons, where all their communications are monitored via Securus Technologies. Of course the guards don't know, they're good people...they are just told so-and-so "is crazy and thinks he discovered a conspiracy".
No comment on this, although I posted to show what the farthest extent postulated is for the question you asked. But Corecivic.com is not a good company certainly and likes to pretend it is the Bureau of Prisons (which has real authority from a legal sovereign state), and lol has previous hosted on Huawei Cloud of all places.
MIT pushes for charges, not JSTOR, according to the following accounts.
> After his arrest, JSTOR released a statement saying that though it considered Swartz's access to be a "significant misuse" committed in an "unauthorized fashion," it would not pursue civil litigation against him;[16][38] MIT did not comment on the proceedings.[39]
> Marty Weinberg, who took the case over from Good, said he nearly negotiated a plea bargain in which Swartz would not serve any time. "JSTOR signed off on it," he said, "but MIT would not."[50]
A little off-topic but the idea that a private party can request (or not) to “press charges” is kind of a TV/Hollywood trope, isn’t it? It’s not some button that a victim of a crime can go and “press” to activate a trial. Prosecutors decide whether or not to pursue criminal cases.
I think the idea is that the victim's testimony is often central to the case. So if they refuse to testify, or say in court that everything is fine, then it's likely the case falls apart. So whether or not they can technically prevent the case, they can often effectively prevent it.
No, it's correct. I've been involved in several incidents where the police asked if I wanted to "press charges" against the offender. For minor incidents this greatly reduces caseload while giving me the opportunity to ensure I get justice.
Prosecutors have the option of pressing charges on behalf of their jurisdiction for criminal cases and can sometimes do so even if the violated party declines to press charges themselves.
Assuming you're talking about the US, you're slightly mistaken. The police just use the phrase in the colloquial sense, as a way of asking if you'd co-operate with a prosecution. The actual report gets written up then goes to the DA's office. The DA's office ultimately makes the call. Your cooperation is a big factor, but it won't force their decision. A private citizen doesn't have the authority to force the DA to bring charges if the DA decides it's not worthwhile.
Interesting, this seems in principle to be similar to a (hypothetical) concept of "prosecutable torts" in English Law, indeed some of the examples (trespass to land, defamation) are torts in English Law.
You’re correct. Charging decisions are made by the DA/US Attorney and not the victim.
Colloquially, the phrase usually means that the victim will not participate or cooperate willingly. It makes a case harder to prosecute in many cases, and is a big issue for domestic violence cases in particular.
Using a throwaway in effort to avoid being arbitrarily harassed, but: of course not, almost as a matter of course, the state does not bring justice against itself, especially when you can defer or abstract away the fundamentals as "law enforcement" or "investigations."
A reminder that even with the wave of media attention, approximately zero of the cops involved in the recent unambiguous murder of black people have been brought to justice.
The idea of "checks and balances" is that the state absolutely can and should bring justice "against itself". Or rather that there are multiple branches in the state, and whenever one commits an abuse some of the other branches will pursue justice on behalf of the victims.
> approximately zero of the cops... have been brought to justice.
Is that true though? At least in the recent George Floyd case the 4 cops involved were all fired the next day from their jobs and have all been charged and are awaiting trial.
The 1992 LA riots were more than a year after the Rodney King beating. The event that precipitated the riots was the acquittal of the officers who were caught on tape.
Being fired and charged is not being "brought to justice". It's just the first step, and there's a history of the system failing to follow through with trial, conviction, and fair sentencing.
The officers involved in the Rodney King beating were later convicted in federal court. The riots just happened too soon to let the case fully work through the justice system.
After weeks of protests, they were charged. I have no doubt if it weren't for the protests the officers would have had desk duty for a few months and put back out on the street.
The officers would have faced no consequences if it weren't captured on video. The Minneapolis PD initially gave the classic "resisting arrest" excuse:
"After Floyd got out [of his car], he physically resisted officers. Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress."
After the murder. They were fired the very next day after murdering a man. When we call it an "incident" our sanitized language steals all of the context and meaning of the event.
When a person drinks too much at a Christmas party it is an incident. When someone has a nervous breakdown in public, it is an incident. When someone kneels on a person's neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, as they beg for mercy, say they can't breath, and then cry out for their mother it is a murder.
They were fired after murdering a man. Can you imagine that standard being applied to literally any single other field than police officers?
I have never seen the video and I don't know enough about it to declare it a murder, sorry. The main point of my reply was to assuage the fears of the parent that they would have gotten desk duty and been put back on the street without weeks of protest.
I started out asking an honest question, and afterward offered factual information, not my personal opinion.
Even if I had seen the video i'd be very leery of making a legal judgement about murder. I'm very sure those guys shouldn't be police, and at the very least they made a mistake that cost a person his life.
I was trying not to get embroiled in a discussion about how the legal case will turn out while still offering some factual information. It simply did not take weeks of protest to ensure that these cops would not be back on the street after some desk work.
Feel free to let my five downvoters know; I'm sure that that "not hostile" will change their minds.
HN is hostile to people like Swartz who actively work to tear down information silos, shine light on government and corporate secrets, and advocate for intellectual property reform.
It's not an accident that shit_hn_says, n-gate, /r/SneerClub, and other critics of HN, can make most of their commentary simply by quoting HN discussion and juxtaposing it next to basic paraphrases of what was said; so much of what's said here is rude towards the rest of the world that merely quoting the discussion is sufficient to highlight its farcical and close-minded nature.
Sorry, you are making things up. At the time of Aaron's demise, the entire first page at HN was full of articles about him. We'd all discussed quite a bit here as well as elsewhere.
As for "shit hn says", we are all not even from the same part of the world and have very diverse cultures and divergent viewpoints as well. There's no single "hn" that you allude to.
Oh, shit_hn_says [0] is a Twitter account which mocks the serious-yet-rude attitude of folks on this site. Their posts are curated selections from normal HN discourse; the entirety of the criticism is that some person genuinely believed what they wrote.
I'm not trying to paint some picture of folks unsympathetic or uncaring. I'm saying that no amount of thoughts nor prayers are going to be equivalent to doing the hard work of changing the world to be less horrible. If we are going to spend a thread remembering the sacrifice of such a person, martyred for not just their beliefs but their works, then we ought to at least acknowledge the mismatch between what Swartz did with his life, and what commenters here are doing with their life while they're sending in thoughts and prayers.
He was a much loved and frequent [1] user here too... the popularity of him and his impact, before and after his death shows that this site is not hostile to him or his fans...
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/handwritingwall
It played a significant role in shaping my understanding of humanity, charity and what impact as a single human being can have. It was a big factor in why I joined the Effective Altruism movement and donate 10+% of my income yearly. I highly recommend reading it.
It saddens me greatly that person who was so forward thinking and was only looking out for the future of humanity was taken away so young.