Still More About The Death Of Aaron Swartz
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We tend to trust in our legal system, one way or another. Even if that way is by ignoring it and assuming everything will sort itself out. Events like Aaron's suicide put it on your radar in a way that makes some of the public sit up and reexamine whether or not the power we have entrusted in others, to carry out our buisness, is being exercised as we would like it to be.
Something smells like bullshit about the case, and just because a prosecutor with political ambition can issue a cover-your-ass statement isn't entirely comforting when faced with the convoluted web that extends beyond her to the entire nature of justice in the country.
Welcome to being a citizen in a democracy, please stay engaged beyond this single case.
edited: speeling
I'd understand the indignation if we were talking about an actual sentence, but these were just charges. The maximum possible sentence for those charges might be dizzying, but realistically, Aaeron was never going to be handed the maximum.
This happened to me a few years ago in Maryland. As a new resident, I didn't realize I needed to fill out a form called FR-19. My registration was flagged, and an Anne Arundel cop pulled me over one evening.
As luck would have it, my insurance paperwork was a few months out of date. Strike two. I was given several charges adding up to a year in jail, my car was towed, and I walked home.
After buying new license plates to replace the ones he took, I picked my car up from the lot ($250+). Everything inside was strewn haphazardly; even the ash trays were turned up. You know what they were looking for.
The good news? A few months later, the court dropped all charges when they realized I had insurance the whole time. No harm done!
He also attacks the obviously political motivation behind the prosecution:
I guarantee you, if Aaron Swartz hadn't killed himself, he'd have been in an Ortiz For Governor campaign commercial one day.That's easily the sort of thing that could be in a political ad. It says not only that she was a good prosecutor, but that she is probably technologically savy as well. I doubt they would bother referring to that particular incident by name (it is often best to be somewhat vague, to keep yourself a hard target to attack).
(This said, I also suspect the politics aspect is more about favors and less about advertising).
It's worth reading over old HN threads on the criminal case. The consensus was pretty close to my position now, which is that prosecutorial discretion worked pretty well in determining the charges. That doesn't make the outcome any less sad; nor does raging at the wrong people.
The original charges or the pile of wire fraud charges added at a later time to make for good press? She used her discretion to add piles of charges on him and then claims she didn't want a long prison sentence. At the very least what she said is inconsistent.
We don't have all the information. In life you never have the information you need to make perfect decisions. But we can ask ourselves if we're OK with the status quo, and if not, try to change it.
To reduce the whole affair to simply "Aaron killed himself." is crude and far from reasonable.
When more information is available, we then adjust (Bayesian interference).
"Blame" is an interesting concept though. In almost any complicated scenario, there is plenty of "blame" to be spread around and you can reasonably argue that multiple different entities are to "blame" for $WHATEVER.
To use a somewhat tangential example... when Ron Paul talked a lot about "blowback" vis-a-vis US policy in the Middle East a few years ago, people said "Ron Paul is blaming America for 9/11". Well, yes... and no. What Ron was saying, in essence, is that there is culpability in multiple places, which is a more nuanced position than "America is good, terrorists are bad, Team America, Fuck Yeah!" OR "We were responsible for 9/11".
So with that in mind... I don't exactly "blame" the prosecutors for Aaron's suicide either. But that doesn't mean I don't think they hold some degree of responsibility, and it doesn't mean I support the status quo, or that I don't want changes made in the law, the sentencing guidelines and the behaviour of prosecutors.
IOW, it's not necessarily the case that either "side" bears 100% of the responsibility for what happened.
Both should be considered fully responsible for anything that happens. I would would not consider "Well he turned his key too!" to reduce blame in any way, they would both be to blame just as much as if the system only required one operator.
Wether this principle of non-zero-sum blame can be applied to situations less obviously engineered is something I can't really support, but it is a point of view that I hold.
It is not about taking perfect decisions, it is about taking the best decision with the information at hand, and if there is not enough information, then I personally would not take a side most of the time (I am only human).
And I say all this while myself taking what you would define as "Aaron's side". I am only debating the philosophical and practical implications of what you said.
With that said, if this event is something that causes society to carefully evaluate things like outdated computer crime laws and the prosecutorial tactics used in this country than that may be a good thing both for the country as a whole and for his memory.
Once in a while something happens, like someone getting hurt or taking their own life. Then it's no longer about trust, but about accountability and therefore the burden of proof has been reversed. The person with the privileges now needs to convince everyone else that the trust put in them wasn't misplaced. That doesn't mean people involved were responsible for what happened, but it does mean they should be held accountable for whatever shortcut they took.
In this case we need to ask ourselves: Was the pressure and tactics used by the prosecution in line with the alleged crime committed and did the prosecution show enough judgement in regards to the defendants previous mental health issues or even just as a human being?
It's amazing the number of people (myself included) that when talking about this issue have to package what they say in a way to prevent getting pilloried (or downvoted) for their opinions.
But the radical loss of perspective here is just jarring, and the case is big enough now that it's hard to refrain from trying to put things into perspective. I am aware of the full history, having been a programmer with significant open-source and other contributions through the 90s and early 2000s. Aaron is being totally misremembered.
Of those who knew of him before his death - and he was not a "celebrity" or "famous" or considered "brilliant" or a "genius" by technologists - most knew him as a blogger. He was actually a very good writer, even from a young age. He wrote with clarity and purpose, and he had many interests. His technical output was not major. To pull a random name out of a hat, his contributions were less than someone like Craig McClanahan and far less than someone like Brian Behlendorf. Basically, Aaron got a chance with Y Combinator, which he parlayed into a merger with Reddit's parent company, mostly through personal connections. Aaron didn't get end up getting along with Alexis or Steve, who considered him immature, dramatic, and unreliable. Reddit was shortly rewritten entirely, and web.py was too buggy to make any further contribution to Reddit. Aaron was fired from Reddit's acquirer because he didn't bother doing anything after the payout. He then floated around, wrote a few minor libraries and some more interesting blog posts, and then became a very good activist worthy of deeper respect on that front. He wasn't actually a tech celebrity before his death. He didn't "invent RSS." He didn't singlehandedly "defeat SOPA." His work on RSS 1.0, a version of RSS that was never significant itself, was mostly of interest to the semantic-web people, who have themselves have never made much of an impact, although the work is interesting to some.
I didn't know Aaron personally, but I do think his volatile relationships with others and his desire to be famous within this community were a source of extreme anxiety for him, though probably more so in the past than recently. But his professional life was, perhaps understandably, extremely frustrating for reasons that had nothing to do with his criminal case.
That's not an attack. Most people don't make major technical contributions. But I wish people would see this case for what it is - a volatile activist who pulled a stunt that spiraled out of control.
It's significant, in my view, that Swartz "came to fame" right as the first "dot com" bubble was cresting. Hype was ridiculously excessive, back then. Looking back at what his celebrity "friends" were saying about him back then, it's painfully obvious that even back then his achievements (which were quite respectable) were greatly exaggerated and that the story he was a new prodigy was a myth self-servingly spread by a few powerful people trading in on the caché of having access to him. To the young boy.
It's horrifying to me, at least, to contemplate what that roller coaster ride did to his sense of self and his own understanding of his identity.
http://www.basiscraft.com/misc/2013/01/using-aaron-swartz.ht...
Isn't that what VC-istan and acq-hire welfare checks are for, though? To make phony celebrities then tear them down? With a few notable and impressive exceptions, that whole machine stopped doing technology some time ago. Most of these "startups" (at least in NYC, which may be a different scene) are hare-brained marketing experiments and treat engineers poorly.
I mean, people are right that all of this is separate from calls for plea-bargaining reform. I'm all for that. I'm not sure this kind of offense is the worst example of the lot, but I'm all for it. (Decades for drug possession is worse. Life imprisonment, [in facilities that are not at all, shall we say, minimum-security] for child-porn traded on IRC is probably worse, at least when it doesn't make child abuse more likely.) But it should all be reformed. That's a big task, of course, but that doesn't mean people shouldn't try.
I don't even mind if people use this case to help with that. But it's easy to grow weary of all the manipulation and distortion and hypocrisy by the people that your link discusses.
Aaron Swartz may not have been a technological heavyweight. Nor am I. Nor are 99.x percent of the people reading this. That's not so bad. What is bad is that there's so much complete nonsense in our so-called "scene" that no one seems to give a rat's ass about actual technology anymore. It's poorly understood, not rewarded, and the arena is so full of bike-shedding narcissists it's impossible not to get enraged.
Also, -1 for mentioning Brian Behlendorf. I looked him up on Wikipedia and he works for the World Economic Forum, which is more commonly known for Davos Fascism.
In the same post you complain that no one seems to give a rat's ass about actual technology anymore and then you downvote someone for bringing up Brian Behlendorf as someone who has contributed to actual technology.
In fact Brian definitely has made a lot of technical contributions to open source, and the fact that you don't like one organization that Brian Behlendorf's is associated with does not change that. Perhaps if YOU "gave a rat's ass about actual technology", you could understand respecting Brian for that EVEN THOUGH you disagree with him on other topics.
(If you really want to stretch yourself, you might consider that when the same person is important in organizations as diverse as Apache, Mozilla, Burning Man and the World Economic Forum, that perhaps the last organization has goals you are unaware of that might in critical ways differ from the actions of the world leaders who they have to engage in order to have any change of achieving their real goals. That might be a stretch for you. It doesn't fit nicely on a propaganda placard. But it is worth thinking about regardless.)
That being said, your comments seem to me to pooh-pooh the impact of what the prosecutors/system did in this case as (a) standard practice and (b) not that big a deal. Most people here (well, I anyway) did not know much about this and, having learned it, feel that it is a big deal. This makes me wonder whether your senses have been dulled by taking too much of that standard practice for granted. Maybe the people here to whom this is new and disturbing are not the only ones experiencing "radical loss of perspective".
It's straightforward to explain why Aaron's story has had such an impact on this and similar communities: he is easy for many of us to identify with, so the shock has a personal effect. This isn't hypocritical, it's human nature: one takes in this kind of information through the emotional medium of a story one can identify with. There's no contradiction between that and learning that a great many less-advantaged people get treated far more abusively still – quite the opposite.
Setting aside the obviously dumb comments as a cost of doing business on a public forum such as this, I am also pretty sure that people here are not nearly as naive about Aaron's personal history as your critique and the GP's suggest. Taste enters into this.
I agree about "taste" too. I'd never have said anything, but there comes a point in the popularization of a case where truth starts to be important.
Granick writes in a well-read post about how Swartz didn't really break any laws -- everyone on MIT's network was legally entitled to download JSTOR as fast as they wanted to and apparently MIT had no right to keep anyone off its network.
There's a pervasive social norm that says 'if you can use tech to get something, then doing so is legal'; lots of people find the CFAA normatively absurd, in the same way that we might find a law against eating asparagus on sundays absurd. You see that in all the defenses that start from the premise that not only is Swartz innocent but that there's no conceivable crime he could have committed.
What? How could some institution not have a right to keep somebody else off its own network? That makes no sense at all. Don't forget both JSTOR and MIT (after JSTOR contacted them) tried to block Swartz's massive downloads.
It seems to me he was driven by the need to score a coup, and move fast. To be the hero who liberated an entire database, instead of a contributor to a slower process that would have slipped past their defenses - which as I've said elsewhere, really would have gotten us something, instead of the nothing we have now.
I think that need was due to his need to recapitulate his early acclaim when he was 14. And in retrospect, that really sucks.
He wouldn't have been caught, at all.
When I was 14, I assumed that I was going to program computers and get rich, much like Gates or Jobs. Aaron got a hell of a lot further down that adolescent trajectory than I did - I had all kinds of intermediate small failures along the way to soften the blow when it turned out I wasn't good at business. Now, ten years later, I've learned to be better at business.
Aaron bounced off, apparently really hard. He longed for those days when - just by talking and thinking and coding - he was taken as a surprising genius by people he'd never met. He wanted to walk in and surprise people with the fait accompli, cut right to the chase of being admired.
Or so I imagine. Because I know that at his age I thought exactly that way. I even have depressive tendencies - never been bothered by suicidal ideation, but then I never failed so badly as he did after the Reddit sale, and I could certainly see that happening to me in that case.
I may very well be projecting. But essentially, when I look at this, I just think, there but for the grace of early failure and family commitments go I.
I review his life, and it appears to me he started to find his true passions after reddit, and it wasn't about making $, or finding the next big .com, but rather achieving reforms in the areas where his passion(s) took him.
Sadly his final action ends his life but doubtful it ends his legacy. Because of his fame (regardless of any controversy surrounding it), so many are now more aware of needing to step up and "demand progress".
Edit: to fix hanging sentence
Why was it necessary for Aaron to plead guilty to 13 felonies in order to get a short sentence? If it were me, I'd be more concerned by the 13 felonies than the time, and I get the impression he was too.
How does it work? Do the prosecutors get to count it as 13 kills, which buffs up their own record as badass prosecutors? Can you explain the logic that pleading guilty to _more_ felonies than would be convicted at trial should lead to a shorter sentence?
You're really just changing the subject here. The issue isn't whether or not Aaron was a superman. We're shocked and offended by the plea bargaining process (even more surprised that its commonplace, forgive our naiveté) and the draconian vagueness of the CFAA (for example, what does "unauthorized" mean?)
Whenever we have shootings like the one in Newtown, we talk about gun control and mental health care. There is always that talk about mental health care. But when someone commits suicide, regardless of cause, those same mental health advocates are nowhere to be found. Why?
There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of people who have it worse than Aaron Swartz did, but they don't go killing themselves. Some people lose their spouses and children in house fires, along with all of their belongings. They spiral into depression, lose their jobs, go back to living with friends or family, see nothing but bleak prospects and they ultimately pull out of it. Others lose their fortunes and things they've spent their lives working for, a few of them do commit suicide, like the ones after the 2008 financial collapse, but some don't. There are people who commit crimes and know they face stiff prison sentences, like life sentences or death penalties, but they don't kill themselves.
I could go on and on about how much worse it is for people in third-world countries, for those who don't know where their food and clean water are going to come from day in and day out. I could go on about the people who are brutally bullied, day in and day out.
Many of these people, some in arguably worse condition than Aaron Swartz was in prior to his death, don't kill themselves. So when we're faced with a case like Swartz's, why are we so quick to find someone to blame?
Yes, prosecutors were overreaching and giving him hell, but they didn't kill him. He killed himself. Hell, there are people who are currently serving long or life sentences in prison who are innocent of the crimes brought against them, but they're fighting and hoping from within their cells. Many of them are not committing suicide.
All I'm trying to say is it takes a lot more than a prison sentence, 6 months or 50 years, to get most people to kill themselves. And yet hardly anyone is talking about mental health care.
"So when we're faced with a case like Swartz's, why are we so quick to find someone to blame?"
Let me answer that for you by quoting Rahm Emanuel:
"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
My point is that while crisis creates opportunity, it does not justify all responses. It does not exempt us from the need to soberly and (as much as possible) objectively consider the merits of what people propose to do.
At the same time, the current top comment, by 'cbs, is an excellent explanation of why we are looking for someone to blame.
Also, many details on the case against Aaron and his legal situation have now been revealed, but unless I missed it, it's not apparent whether, and how, Aaron's depression had been treated. We don't know whether he was on meds, whether he was seeing a therapist, and so on. And if he wasn't, we don't know why not.
Some claim there are stigmas associated with being mentally ill, or with seeking help, and we can certainly talk about that. We have been — a few days ago I participated in a thread on HN where that was discussed.
But, first, with Aaron we really don't know a lot of the specifics, nor is it any of our business.
And second, you may feel differently, but many, including me, are deeply uncomfortable with what we're beginning to see as a clear pattern of prosecutorial overreach. The conversation about mental health should not substitute for asking these very important questions about justice in the United States.