Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Until Aarons' lawyer speaks up with evidence to the contrary Carmen Ortiz statement stands unchallenged. Much as I would like her to carry (or at least acknowledge) some actual responsibility for what she has helped causing there is a lot of room for interpretation here and saying 'she lied' in a legal sense is premature and may end up to be simply untrue.

Linus is a very clever guy but he's dead wrong about this.

I'm happy Linus is speaking out about this because he's a high profile person but it would be nice if he did his homework first, his words would then carry far more weight.

Ortiz has made several easily falsifiable statements, the fact that this has not happened - yet - means that at least in a technical sense she is possibly 'in the clear'. In a moral sense she has a ton of explaining to do and quite possibly some real culpability but law and lawyers deal in technicalities all the time.

She's attempting to weasel through a very narrow crack here but that's precisely what her profession and the eco-system she's operating in deal with.

We aren't lawyers, we can call her a liar if she appears to be one, especially if "there's a lot of room for interpretation." It's a huge joke that we're debating whether "the lawyer says they're not lying" is a good argument. What's problematic for her is that "the ecosystem she's operating in" aren't the only forces at work. Maybe she thought the age-old mechanism of press releases and who-gives-a-shit-what-lawyers-say would work the same as it always has, but that doesn't mean it has to be that way. Lawyers can't force us to operate in their ecosystem, and I have a feeling that they're exceedingly poor at existing in any other ecosystem, as best exemplified by the words of her husband, former IBM Websphere QA Stud Tom Dolan (i.e. one of us).

An additional complication is that her bosses simply might not care what she said and will keep her on the job with no changes, regardless. Deaf ears are still an option.

> Lawyers can't force us to operate in their ecosystem

Unfortunately we are doing exactly that. All of us are operating in an ecosystem crafted by lawyers. And so when we run into the boundaries set we will find lawyers or legally schooled people on all three sides of the table, the prosecution, our defense counsel and the judge.

They use our language but in a way that appears twisted and dishonest to laypeople. We pay - with huge sums of money and with time served - for the privilege.

Ortiz is using her position as a stepping stone to further her career. Aaron was to her a conveniently placed cobblestone that she could put her spiked heel on to make it to the next level. I'm pretty sure she regrets this, but only because it damaged her career chances.

I certainly wished that justice would be more about what's really best for society instead of about protecting special interest and selective prosecution but this is something that I did not need the Aaron Swartz case for to become aware of.

Ortiz is using her position as a stepping stone to further her career. Aaron was to her a conveniently placed cobblestone that she could put her spiked heel on to make it to the next level. I'm pretty sure she regrets this, but only because it damaged her career chances.

"Spiked heel"? Regret over a dead defendant "only because it damaged her career choices"?

You've been fairly rational in most of these discussions, but you're just egging on the mob here.

> You've been fairly rational in most of these discussions, but you're just egging on the mob here.

Feel free to disagree, I call them as I see them. I think her statement is cynical in the extreme, quite possibly to head off any claims by the family and I think that her whole 'tough' stance is just to further her own career goals.

If you have evidence to the contrary I'll be more than happy to adjust my position. Crocodile tears after the fact are not persuasive, not accepting any responsibility at all is very telling.

Well if you read through the post, especially Linus's follow-up comments, you'll find that his very point is this distinction between the truth of these technically correct, weasel-worded statements and the bigger picture.

Sentencing is ultimately up to the judge, and the truth is that Ortiz used the threat of "up to 35 years" to try to force a plea bargain. When Swartz refused a bargain which would have branded him a felon, as is his right, Ortiz's office drummed up additional charges.

Ortiz is likely technically correct when she says she never explicitly sought the maximum penalty for these extra charges she piled on. She is also deliberately evading the point by saying so, which is that her office absolutely threw the book at a kid for downloading some PDFs.

Imagine your kid comes home reeking of smoke. You ask him, anger in your voice, whether he was smoking with his buddies in the woods out back again. Kid cooly replies, "I wasn't smoking cigarettes."

Then you find a joint in his pocket. Kid was technically correct when he said he wasn't smoking cigarettes, but he was also "lying" in the sense that he sought to obfuscate and create a diversion from his wrongdoing by making such a statement.

> her office absolutely threw the book at a kid for downloading some PDFs.

And repeatedly going around network blocks in order to obtain those PDFs...

That's a statement about intent. We do not know whether changing his mac address was in order to get around network blocks or for some other reason. The court would have tried to establish intent in the case but the case didn't get to court and we in the internet really don't have enough information do make a finding regarding intent ourselves.

We have Aaron's own manifestos and his own actions besides the MAC spoofing to establish intent.

Trying to seriously claim otherwise requires a special brand of word-wrangling and doublespeak, a brand that might entitle you to a job at the Boston U.S. Attorney's office, if the other comments here are any indication.

We do not know whether changing his mac address was in order to get around network blocks

Yes we do, because we aren't stupid, and neither is Aaron.

I could accept, for the sake of argument, that the very first time he changed his MAC it was because he was innocently trying to diagnose a network issue.

By the time JSTOR has cut off all of MIT and he is plugging into a physical port to work around the restrictions on the wireless network, it's no longer acceptable to honest people that he just thinks there was something wrong with the MIT network.

MIT didn't want him on their network. He thought his cause was worth bypassing their controls.

She's a political appointee who chose to pursue a full-court press on something that should never have been a federal case, in the first place.

She's now politically damaged, and a liability to the Obama administration that appointed her. She should resign.

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