The bastards MURDERED him. They tortured a frail young man to suicide - they murdered him as surely as if they had stuck a knife in his chest with their own hands.
I DARE M.I.T. (Murdering Intelligent Technologists!) to sue me. I DOUBLE DOG DARE THEM. I will continue to tell everyone that MIT murdered Aaron Swartz with the assistance of Federal prosecutors until the end of time BECAUSE ITâS TRUE.
Donât expect MIT to hold itself accountable. The only thing that will make the institution change its behavior is the threat of lost tuition money and lost alumni contributions. Grads and current students need to make it clear to the administration that this is unacceptable, and potential students need to make it clear that they wonât attend an institution that betrays its own ideals. Snitches get stitches.
Caltech is better anyway
You are correct. Money talks more to them that ethical considerations. If they did this one time, they will do it again.
Hounding someone into causing their suicide is nearly as bad as willfully setting a trap to kill them.
Yeah⌠eat some shitsnax MIT. You guys are fucking tools. It is every MIT graduateâs responsibility to steal everything that isnât bolted down. Iâm personally going to be as humanly unpleasant to any MIT employee or graduate I meet as revenge.
@AnonKopimi donât get mad dude: get even. MIT assholes are going to pay.
And of course MITâs belief that Aaronâs access might be unauthorized (as in violation of MITâs policies or maybe JSTORâs) is why they called the police
These guys might know tech but they SURE donât have a very good grasp of the English language. Aaron was entirely authorised to access JSTOR the way he did. âUnauthorised Accessâ would be if he didnât have legitimate access to the database. Even if you breach the rules of a network, that does not automatically make your access unauthorised. Your access or authorisation to a database MAY be revoked for breaches of network rules, but to assert his access was unauthorised is bone-headed and plain wrong. Authorisation does not and can not automatically revoke itself - especially when the act in question is not caught in real time and also in cases where the access in question is in a legal grey area.
Furthermore, and this has been argued by many, sine JSTOR has no rules on the volume of data which authorised users are permitted to access, they were basically inviting Aaron to rip the db. If he was to have sat there for a year, painstakingly clicking each individual link and storing each report then they would have had NO leg to stand on legally. Their argument was basically that an office worker should be imprisoned for using spell check instead of manually spell-checking each word. Anyway, as stated above: go fuck yourself MIT and MIT graduates. You guys are the wreaking butthole of the tech world at the moment.
Stop being a dick. I agree that Anon is exhibiting a bit of hyperbole there, but itâs not a long stretch to suggest that the government was complicit in his suicide, considering the prosecutor was trying to put him up for as much as possible to build her career, on charges that were completely inappropriate for his actions (which resulted in a precisely $0 loss for MIT or anyone else).
Like I said: I wouldnât label it murder, but I would hold them partially responsible. If the government hadnât pushed for far worse punishment than his alleged actions deserved then itâs a good chance heâd still be with us. Iâd criticise you for trivialising Aaronâs suicide. Murder happens, but it usually not comitted by the state. Thatâs the awful thing here: In this case the state (and, by extension, every tax-paying American) is partially responsible for Aaronâs death.
BB is the only place Iâve been following this story, so if this has happened without being reported here then please say so, but why has the student body not retaliated in any way? I mean, if any student body could retaliate in an epic yet nonviolent fashion, wouldnât MIT be a top contender considering electronic attacks? Schwartz was one of their own, arenât they pissed? Is this truly a case of the current generation being useless? Or does the high tuition attract a student body that leans towards being complacent and conservative? I was hoping to see robot and drone attacks on unoccupied administration buildings, EMPs, the whole nine.
And itâs in the interests of students to do so, since this kind of thing is part of a behaviour pattern. (Compare to the treatment of Star Simpson, whom MIT threw under a bus in public within minutes of her arrest, long before having any idea what was actually going on.)
The EFF statement regarding this case is fairly disgusting. Far from acknowledging that Swartz had a lifelong and complicated battle with mental illness, which was fundamentally the root cause of his suicide, it jettisons that whole discussion and absorbs the whole of Swartzâs death into its cause. The EFF is quite literally profiting off Swartzâs death, eliciting donation after donation in its noble quest to âavengeâ.
If you care for the person that was Aaron Swartz, why not donate to mental health organizations, depression hotlines, funding for therapy and communications programs, for outreach programs. The EFF has made it clear what it cares about, and that should leave a bitter taste in your mouth.
I was sure you were being facetious, and I thought you were making a good point through it. But now youâre just making those who support Aaronâs cause look like lunatics.
The narrative trend from those who are vilifying MIT seems clear to me. First MIT âcalled in the Fedsâ in a heavy-handed move to take down this freedom fighter. Well, OK, they just brought in the Cambridge police to investigate a suspicious character creeping in the network closets and guarding his face from the security cameras. But they DEFINITELY pushed the prosecution to hound Aaron to his death! Well, OK, technically they didnât request prosecution and actively told the prosecutor that they sought no punishment. But, they REALLY gave the prosecution preferential treatment!
This âpreferential treatmentâ is the last tenuous thread in the idea that MIT meant Aaron special harm, and it just doesnât have the punch of the earlier allegations. Even if the preferential treatment is true, Iâm not even sure they should be embarrassed about it. While years in prison is a ridiculous, you might think that MIT would want SOME sort of deterrent for someone breaking into network closets and getting them kicked off JSTOR.
The bottom line for me is that even Aaron knew what he was doing was illegal, and that if he were caught he would have to face some kind of repercussions. He hid from the security cameras, he snuck around in network closets after hours and camouflaged his planted laptops. When caught, he actually ran from the MIT police. This whole case is terribly sad, and itâs made sadder by the fact that Aaron never actually had a day in court. The mental illness side of this story has been buried by people with agendas, and that doesnât do Aaronâs memory any good.
For me , MIT has a history of âhacksâ and âpranksâ and being cool.
This prosecutor has a history of being an asshole and being cruel and vindictive with their prosecutions.
Having known people who were victims of prosecutors wanting to âmake a career out of a caseâ, even when the person wronged has asked them not to, the power to prosecute doesnât lie with the victims of the crimes. The power to prosecute ALWAYS lies with the prosecutor. Even if the victim said âweâre withdrawing anything we can withdrawâ, the prosecutor can turn around and say âYouâve already submitted evidence of a crime, Iâve got an indictment, and Iâll call you and put you under oath and treat you as a hostile witness on the stand. If you donât comply, you get to go to jail for obstruction of justice.â
Iâve seen this happen personally, this particular prosecutor has a history of doing it.
It doesnât even matter what MIT said or didnât say. The moment this prosecutor got the case, and saw a future career with it, MITâs involvement and stance was irrelevant.
Yes and no. MIT is a well-respected, major institution, with ample access to media. And it is an institution, not an individual human being. It isnât subject to the same kind of pressures an individual person would be, and if it chose it would have been able to make the case less attractive to a prosecutor looking for âgloryâ or whatever. That said, agreed that the prosecutor seemingly has a lot to answer for.
Oh, Iâm not exonerating MIT. Iâm just saying that their involvement in the prosecution (and persecution) of Aaron Swartz is irrelevant in the long run. They could have shouted out from the rooftops that he was an innocent man, and that prosecutor whose assistant compared him to a ârapistâ would still be pushing for 50+ years.
Maybe MIT could have or should have said more to defend him. I donât think it would have made a difference considering the railroading that prosecutor has done in the past.
Everyone has a breaking point, a point at which they would rather die than continue to live under some set of conditions. For some the threshold is higher than for others, but everyone has a breaking point.
If you obtain a position of power over someone, a relationship from which they cannot escape, and then you abuse that power and torment them (and make no mistake, having decades of prison time hanging over your head for a trivial transgression is torture), you are responsible if they cross reach their breaking point before you expected it.
Suicide is a personal choice, but to hold tormentors blameless when their victim comes to see suicide as the the only possible escape is an egregious example of blaming the victim.
An important point here: Aaron Swartz was not actually a member of the MIT community, as MIT (and as most of the community) defines that phrase. Related community? Sure. But MIT had no inherent responsibility to protect him from the prosecution or from himself.
If heâd been a student or staff or otherwise connected more directly to MIT, I do think theyâd have taken more action on his behalf.
Even MITâs history of protecting its own has weakened somewhat in recent years. And MIT distinguishes pretty clearly between prank and theft; Aaronâs activity was more than prank.
A college, too, is a company. You canât automatically expect them to react any differently than if heâd tried the same thing in a network closet at any other company, unless they have a good reason for cutting some slack. Generalized âinformation wants to be freeâ is not a sufficiently good reason from their point of view â and in fact you also have to remember that as a company theyâre going to default to being on the side of defending intellectual property since theyâve got lots of their own which they donât want compromised.
Is it a tragedy? Sure. But the suicide was his decision, and the data theft was his decision, and while I think he should have gotten some help to prevent the outcomes of both I donât particularly see MIT as having done anything dishonorable here. The worst I can say of them is that they didnât do anything especially noble either. They decided this particular copyfight wasnât an issue they wanted to get involved in either way, and given that I wasnât out there protesting either I canât blame them.
So you think he should have been taken into protective custody so they could maintain a suicide watch? Be careful what you ask for.
I canât imagine why the âElectronic Frontier Foundationâ my have a specific set of priorities in this caseâŚ
I didnât say that, or think that at all, thank you very much.
But it would be interesting if prosecutors had to weigh the risk of driving a suspect to suicide against the merits of the case.
I wonder how the request to a judge would goâŚ
âYour Honor, we have a piss poor case against this guy, but we think there is a lot of political traction to be gained by appearing to be tough on cyber-crime. The punishment we are threatening is wildly disproportionate to the alleged crime, but thatâs just a technique to put pressure on the poor SOB. We donât want him to do anything rash in response to our trumped up charges, so weâd like to place him in pre-trial confinement on suicide watch. Would you just put your signature here?â
It makes for an interesting thought experiment to wonder how many judges would actually retch when presented with such a request.
