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Comment by eck | Hacker News Reader

The Swartz/MIT debacle reminds me of a chapter in Starship Troopers. A mobile infantry recruit punches his drill instructor. The recruit is publicly lashed and discharged.

Later in private, the commander reprimands the drill instructor: there were standing orders to never let a recruit hit you. They obviously have to punish recruits who strike instructors, but they do not want to. The drill instructors are supposed to be elite soldiers, and this one let a recruit get the drop on him, and that mistake cost the infantry a recruit.

MIT had sufficient opportunity to stop Swartz with technical countermeasures -- but they failed to do so. They allowed the situation to escalate until official punishment became unavoidable. MIT may claim that they did not want to punish Swartz; few people will argue that they did. It was not their intent but rather their incompetence that lead to his punishment.

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Right, because if the US attorney didn't threaten Swartz with felonies and 50 years in prison, then what would stop other people from downloading lots of academic PDFs?

First, I agree with Swartz that data should have been public. It's ridiculous that it isn't - and policymakers (now) agree. And yes, that matters. Kind of like when Rosa Parks broke the law sitting in the front of a bus. Second, the harshness of the prosecution was totally out-of-proportion to the act, even if you totally buy that it was really wrong. This was a clear cut case of a mindless, inhuman US Attorney (Cameron Ortiz and her lackys, Scott Garland and Stephen Heymann) angling for a plea-bargain that involved prison time and a felony.

The system is like a machine that grinds people up, like with that Oak Ridge incident[1], and we can't let it continue like this. Our government, for better or worse, has life and death power over us, and I for one cannot abide a government whose agents show not the slightest decency or respect for the value of self-restraint. Self-restraint, not loyalty to each other or anything else, should be our guiding light for determining goodness in our representatives.

[1] http://www.wagingpeace.org/tag/peace-protesters/

The policymakers agree that there shouldn't be pay-to-access journals?

No, but thank you for an opportunity to light a straw-man argument on fire:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/01/newly-passed-appropria...

Then I'm not clear what you were referring to when you said that the "policymakers" agreed with Swartz. Can you clarify a bit? Which policymakers? About what, in particular?

You call it incompetence; I call it dashed optimism.

MIT had faith that its community would behave responsibly in an open environment without a lot of rules and barriers. Aaron abused that trust, and as a result the MIT community had to become a bit more locked-down, a bit less freewheeling than it was before. The phrase "this is why we can't have nice things" comes to mind.

If you entrust your friend with a key to your apartment, and they steal your iPad and read your diary, is the problem that you were incompetent? Or that they betrayed your trust?

Incompetence was perhaps too harsh. The outcome was unforeseeable.

> Like when a burglar hits a small countryside town, and suddenly everyone has to start locking their doors.

I think your analogy just proves my point. They caught the burglar, but he turned out to be the local kid that everyone kind of liked. He was punished as everyone agreed the law required, but nobody was happy about it. And it would have all never happened had they just locked their doors to begin with.

The small countryside town with no crime and the open MIT environment were always illusions. It was inevitable that sooner or later someone would try to steal. You can either prevent it from happening or punish it after it does. [edit] But you can't choose not to prevent it then claim you didn't want to punish it.

> They caught the burglar, but he turned out to be the local kid that everyone kind of liked. He was punished as everyone agreed the law required, but nobody was happy about it.

Not one of the downvoters, but I want to add that criminals remain likeable when humans have no visceral reaction to the crime.

When an explanation (as opposed to an opinion) gets downvotes, it warrants a reply...

Except in this case, the burglar is 'Robin Hood'-like or at least operating with the same intentions, the burgled houses are the 'Ivory tower' of the local clergy and the 'Rent collecting' landlord's castle. And, most importantly, the 'Valuables' that were burgled actually belong to the people of the village in first place. Assuming digital goods could even ever be burgled in the conventional sense.

The MIT network was not and is not "anything goes." There are rules.

MIT kept on gradually increasing their attempts to kick him off the network and then things escalated to physical trespassing.

> everyone agreed the law required, but nobody was happy about it

That's cognitive dissonance. Aaron was simply the voice of reason for one of the arguments being held in consideration - open and free information. Nobody is happy about following the law when they realize the laws in place are the less important piece of a greater discussion.

If you had a home subscription to an online scholarly journal archive, and I snuck in through an open window, found your LAN equipment, and tampered with it until I was able to use your credentials, would you chalk that up to me being the voice of reason and a proponent of open and free information, or would you call it burglary?

The law is the law, so it's burglary. Not sure why I'm answering an obvious question for you - feels a bit ad hominem-ish as it's not the same situation Aaron was in. There would be circumstances where I'd be ok with it, like if you were a neighbor and I knew you and you apologized for it. My choice to prosecute.

Sometimes laws need to be broken or bent when there is no other way to bring awareness of a newly forged wrong to light. Whether or not Aaron approached the freedom of information issue correctly here is not the issue, but how the school reasoned through 'handling' it is. They were the ones with the power to make a hard decision regarding the interpretation of the law. As for me, I'm simply trying to clarify how to spot cognitive dissonance in the wild - you look for statements that are conflicting and then try to understand why both sides of the 'argument' were weighed in making a decision. In this case the school would appear to hold some value in Aaron's actions, even though what he did was clearly wrong. It's worth wondering if they did the right thing when considering the validity of some portion of his actions.

Frankly, I'm not sure how to feel about it other than what has become the norm. We (the US) tends to over-react to things a fair amount. It's getting a little old and needs to stop.

> And it would have all never happened had they just locked their doors to begin with.

This is an attitude that ruins communities. As a nonscholarly example, I like to run ~5 in the morning. Sometimes, something is off in my pre-run snack and I have to go to the bathroom. For a long time, public bathrooms along the esplanade in Boston would be unlocked at all hours. In modern times, due to attitudes like yours, they get locked at 8 PM and unlocked around 8 AM. So, there are no longer public bathrooms available for me to use, just because I like to run before work. (On a side note, I've talked to other runners who have the same issue. Some of them have been put in situations where physical necessity resulted in taking a dump right outside the door of a closed public bathroom. I'm quite sure this was not the intention of locking these doors)

Another case is the Harvard library. You are required to have a Harvard id to enter the library. This is in stark contrast to what makes libraries hugely valuable to other communities. I've regularly had collaborations with Harvard that didn't rise to the point where I obtained a Harvard id, so I would need to drag my host along to the library to quickly look up some material in a book. It is incredibly frustrating.

Tightened security spends a vast majority of its time quelling desired behavior while spending very little time actually disrupting undesired behavior.

You have a bit of a negative history with the subject prior to the incident in question, correct?

Actually I got the same impression from the article. I'm not American, but I know MIT is one of the finest unis in the world, and if they allowed anonymous PC logins and the journal site itself just took email registrations, those are conscious choices.

That's way overcooking the situation. Many participants at MIT had the opportunity to stop it at the point of a trespassing charge, which would have been sufficient.

What Swartz did says nothing about MIT's security operations, which are always under much more threat by malicious hackers.

Now it has evolved to where, instead of resigning, L. Rafael Reif used up Hal Abelsons credibility to save his own career. Disgusting!

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