Aaron Swartz's Estate Seeks Release of Documents 131
theodp writes "The Boston Globe reports that the estate of Aaron Swartz filed a motion in federal court in Boston Friday to allow the release of documents in the case that has generated national controversy over the U.S. attorney's aggressive pursuit of a stiff sentence. The Court filing (PDF) suggests that the U.S. attorney's office is still up for jerking Aaron around a little posthumously, seeking what his lawyers termed overbroad redactions, including names and titles that are already publicly known. Swartz's family also seeks the return of his seized property (PDF). Last week, Swartz's girlfriend accused MIT of dragging its feet on investigating his suicide. Meanwhile, Slate's Justin Peters asks if the Justice Department learned anything from the Aaron Swartz case, noting that Matthew Keys, who faces 25 years in prison for crimes that include aiding-and-abetting the display of humorously false content, could replace Swartz as the poster boy for prosecutorial overreach."
Keys will take a plea deal (Score:1)
Just like Aaron would have. The suicide means there were other, deeper problems.
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Re:Keys will take a plea deal (Score:5, Interesting)
If so, it's an unethical show. Consider:
I walk in to a liquor store with a loaded AK-47 and say "please give me all of your money". Naturally, the shop owner complies. Later, in court if I say the AK was 'just for show' and I thought the guy was just generous, do we all have a laugh and go home or am I still on trial for armed robbery?
In other words, if they're threatening him with 30 years to induce him to plead guilty and take a deal, it is NOT just for show, it is a very real threat.
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Exactly. If a government did not sufficiently convince its subjects that it was willing to steal from, torture, and kill them if they stepped out of line, it would not last long. Threats must be backed by actual violence. If a slave owner withholds punishment when a slave refuses to cooperate, slaves would not stick around. To gain compliance, slaves must be convinced they will be worse off if they do not obey.
It is an interesting game theory discussion; the aggressor would prefer not to harm his victim but
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What "plea deal" was the government offering to Aaron Swartz? It's my understanding that they would not accept anything less than a lengthy prison term.
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They offered 3 months but took it off the table.
Political attack (Score:5, Interesting)
As I said in the previous story [slashdot.org] about CISPA, the relationship between you and your government is not what you were brought up to believe it is.
Aaron Swartz wasn't attacked because of that nonsense copyright infringement charge, he was attacked because he was very instrumental in the fight against SOPA.
Bradley Manning was not attacked just because of the leaks of some documents, governments leak selective documents all the time. He was attacked because he showed part of the true face, part of the true cost to the military invasion - the US government is involved in destroying individuals, freedoms of individuals around the world.
These people are political dissidents in USA, the system is set to destroy them because they attacked the system.
Re:Political attack (Score:5, Interesting)
That's also why the authorities don't really mind when decorated war veterans are killed by police at political protests (as happened in Oakland a couple of years ago). They tend to be cheering when cops beat and pepper-spray and arrest people who's sole crime is standing on a sidewalk holding a sign.
You should also mention Julian Assange, who has never stepped foot in the United States and has never been subject to its laws. The reason that Assange isn't going to Sweden to face the "sex-by-surprise" charges is that he could not get a guarantee that the Swedes would not immediately turn him over to the US, and he also couldn't get a guarantee from the US that he would receive anything remotely similar to a fair trial.
And I should mention that roman_mir and I have very different political leanings. But we can both agree that this kind of thing is wrong and illegal.
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So exactly why is re-extradition an issue? After all the US could just go after extradition from Britain.
Not only that but the European Convention on Extradition places rather strict limits on what it permitted on re-extradition to 3rd parties.
Article 15 â" Re-extradition to a third state
Except as provided for in Article 14, paragraph 1.b, the requesting Party shall not, without the consent of the requested Party, surrender to another Party or to a third State a person surrendered to the requesting Par
Re:Political attack (Score:4, Informative)
You should also mention Julian Assange, who has never stepped foot in the United States and has never been subject to its laws.
FWIW, he was on the Colbert Report (filmed in NYC) in 2010.
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What trial? Assange hasn't even been indicted or charged in the US.
But indeed: in princ
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Nor was Al Alwaki, accused of exercising his free speech rights in ways the Feds didn't like. Or his son, accused of being his son. They're dead at the hands of the Feds.
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What does any of that have to do with Swartz?
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There is no evidence Al Alwaki gave aid or comfort. None at all. There is conjecture and accusation, but only a total idiot would consider that to be "evidence". Here's an example:
I accuse you of being a child molester.
There. You are a child molester because I accused you of it. QED.
As for the son, the Obama administration's position was that he should have had a better dad. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/24/robert-gibbs-anwar-al-awlaki_n_2012438.html [huffingtonpost.com]
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You're right, it is. And the Constitution lays out exactly what you're supposed to do with someone like that: Indict, arrest, and give them a jury trial, with free access to a lawyer to advise them on the best possible defense. And the only evidence allowed in that jury trial is stuff legally obtained, and the presumed traitor has the right to confront all the evidence against him.
What actually happened was a combination of a propaganda campaign, secret evidence, and an illegal kill order. The propaganda ca
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you can in fact violate the laws of a country you have never set foot in. Many countries have such laws, not just the US.
Yeah. About that, Kim Dotcom [wikipedia.org] would like a word with you.
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You should also mention Julian Assange, who has never stepped foot in the United States and has never been subject to its laws. The reason that Assange isn't going to Sweden to face the "sex-by-surprise" charges is that he could not get a guarantee that the Swedes would not immediately turn him over to the US, and he also couldn't get a guarantee from the US that he would receive anything remotely similar to a fair trial.
That's certainly his claim. Maybe he even believes it. But if he does, hiding out in the UK was a pretty odd strategy. It's not like the UK has some history of refusing to extradite suspects on request by the US; he's no safer there than in Sweden.
Of course Sweden doesn't want to promise they won't extradite him to the US. He's asking for an unconditional, perpetual guarantee that he won't be extradited. There's no way they're going to make that kind of guarantee, because the US could request extradition so
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But if he does, hiding out in the UK was a pretty odd strategy.
He's not hiding out in the UK, he's hiding out in the sovereign territory of Ecuador, namely their embassy. The reason that he's still there is that the UK has made it clear that if he tries to leave the embassy and go to Ecuador they will violate whatever diplomatic rights Ecuador's embassy vehicles have in order to capture Assange.
So you're right, hiding in the UK was a bad strategy.
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But if he does, hiding out in the UK was a pretty odd strategy.
He's not hiding out in the UK, he's hiding out in the sovereign territory of Ecuador, namely their embassy. The reason that he's still there is that the UK has made it clear that if he tries to leave the embassy and go to Ecuador they will violate whatever diplomatic rights Ecuador's embassy vehicles have in order to capture Assange.
So you're right, hiding in the UK was a bad strategy.
I said "was" for a reason. He was remaining in the UK, without hiding in an embassy, and trying to avoid extradition to Sweden. His claim was that he didn't want Sweden to turn around and extradite him to the US. That's a very strange claim, since the UK will extradite him to the US just as readily as Sweden.
Now it's a different situation, as the UK courts decided that would extradite him to Sweden anyway, so he's hiding out in an embassy. That would have been a very reasonable strategy from the beginning i
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Put down the crack pipe, Manning and Swartz couldn't be more different.
Manning wanted to embarrass the United States and he made that very clear in his statement in his court martial. He didn't care about bystanders, international relationships or innocents that could be hurt in his wide spread dump of well over 100,000 documents. Swartz wanted to free information that was otherwise publicly available, had no bystanders to worry about, wasn't going to hurt international relationships and wasn't trying to em
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Put down the crack pipe
- never.
Manning wanted to embarrass the United States and he made that very clear in his statement in his court martial.
- wrong, either you are misinformed or lying on purpose.
full transcript [guardian.co.uk]
excerpts:
Up to this point,during the deployment, I had issues I struggled with and difficulty at work. Of the documents release, the cables were the only one I was not absolutely certain couldn't harm the United States. I conducted research on the cables published on the Net Centric Diplomacy, as well as how Department of State cables worked in general.
...
The more I read the cables, the more I came to the conclusion that this was the type of information that should become public. I once read a and used a quote on open diplomacy written after the First World War and how the world would be a better place if states would avoid making secret pacts and deals with and against each other.
I thought these cables were a prime example of a need for a more open diplomacy. Given all of the Department of State cables that I read, the fact that most of the cables were unclassified, and that all the cables have a SIPDIS caption.
...
I did not see anything in the 15-6 report or its annexes that gave away sensitive information. Rather, the investigation and its conclusions were and what those involved should have done, and how to avoid an event like this from occurring again.
...
The only place that you could possibly be referring to would be this part:
I believe that the public release of these cables would not damage the United States, however, I did believe that the cables might be embarrassing, since they represented very honest opinions and statements behind the backs of other nations and organizations.
In many ways these cables are a catalogue of cliques and gossip. I believed exposing this information might make some within the Department of State and other government entities unhappy. On 22 March 2010, I began downloading a copy of the SIPDIS cables using the program Wget, described above.
Yes, releasing very honest opinions behind the backs might be embarrassing to some organisations, you are however implying that it was his motive, which is false or a lie. It was not his motive, his motive was to ensure that the public knew what was done in its name:
The more I read, the more I was fascinated with the way that we dealt with other nations and organizations. I also began to think the documented backdoor deals and seemingly criminal activity that didn't seem characteristic of the de facto leader of the free world.
...
It detailed corruption within the cabinet of al-Maliki's government and the financial impact of his corruption on the Iraqi people. After discovering this discrepancy between the Federal Police's report and the interpreter's transcript, I forwarded this discovery to the top OIC and the battle NCOIC. The top OIC and the overhearing battle captain informed me that they didn't need or want to know this information anymore. They told me to quote "drop it" unquote and to just assist them and the Federal Police in finding out, where more of these print shops creating quote "anti-Iraqi literature" unquote.
I couldn't believe what I heard and I returned to the T-SCIF and complained to the other analysts and my section NCOIC about what happened. Some were sympathetic, but no one wanted to do anything about it.
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"If you want to see real government destruction of dissidents that I invite you to look at country's like Venezuela, Tibet, Russia, Iran or North Korea."
That's the standard by which we should judge the behavior of the USA government? As long as they are better than those other countries, it's OK to engage in crackdowns on peaceful political dissidents?
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Perhaps you should read up on U.S. history. We have a long history of doing just that. Look as far back as Reconstruction, the civil rights movements in the 1960s, and other figures such as Malcolm X. I think our government has learned from these and are far more subtle now, though.
Governments have been corrupt for thousands of years, as long as we have had governments. Many other governments in this wo
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Perhaps you should read up on U.S. history.
You might start here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_sedition_act [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_goldman#.22Inciting_to_riot.22 [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_v._United_States#The_court.27s_decision [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Democratic_National_Convention [wikipedia.org]
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Swartz wasn't charged with copyright infringement, he was charged with computer tampering, and he fulfilled the criteria.
Swartz pretty clearly broke a number of laws, and it was proper to charge him when this became known to the prosecutor. It would have been corrupt if he hadn't been charged because of his politi
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I'm pretty liberal, voted for Jill Stein and all that. I would love to see a constitutional amendment that authorizes unilateral secession by the states because the Federal government is corrupt beyond repair and evil beyond reckoning. Yeah -- some states in the South would go Christian Taliban or whatever. Let 'em. They just suck up my tax dollars anyway.
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There's nothing wrong with the original construct of the United States: a group of largely independent states with free trade, limited inter-state enforcement of laws, and free movement of people. The enumerated powers in the Constitution are a reasonable framework for that. If the US broke up, the different parts would simply want to re-form a free trade area similar to what the Constitution originally envisioned. Instead of going through the pain of secession and building a free trade pact, it would make
Re:Political attack (Score:4, Insightful)
I most certainly can and do blame the prosecutor. Are you claiming the law put a gun to his head and removed all prosecutorial discretion? It is the prosecutor's responsibility to show such discretion at all times in service of justice.
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What should that "discretion" have consisted of according to you? She was already aiming for only six months in prison. What possible justification would she have had to aim for even less or not charge him at all? Swartz physically broke into a wired network on private property, with the intent to commit massive copyright violations. That's a serious offense, and she already proposed a light punishment compared to what o
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Considering that the 'victim' wanted to just drop the whole thing, that's exactly what she should have done.
That just leaves MITs complaint of trespassing which would be a matter for the state to pursue or not. Given that no damage was done or intended to MIT, that would come out to time served.
Meanwhile, you're ignoring that it would be a confession to a felony (and so he would be a convicted felon), the trial would bankrupt him, and she would 'recommend' 6 months but the judge would still be free to say "
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Victims don't get to decide whether criminal charges are dropped. There are multiple victims involved here, including MIT, JSTOR, US and European publishers, and the public. Prosecutors represent all of them, and their job isn't just to punish the individual, but also to make clear what kind of behavior the public does not tolerate (and that is defined by Congress through laws).
quit dramatizing (Score:1)
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What would happen if I did the same thing with my keys to my office building, would I spend even a day in prison? People get so blind to this, it doesn't matter if we are talking about 10 years or 30, even days in prison is too much for this. How did we get to talking about years?
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What would happen if I did the same thing with my keys to my office building, would I spend even a day in prison? People get so blind to this, it doesn't matter if we are talking about 10 years or 30, even days in prison is too much for this. How did we get to talking about years?
It is not the same thing at all. Providing access to a physical location is not the same as providing access to the server infrastructure for a corporation. You don't know what keys he gave away, do you? Other than the fact that the LA TImes website was defaced, he may have given away far greater access than either he or the hacker knew. And if you gave away the keys of your office building so that your friend could rob the corporate safe of $250,000 then I am willing to bet that they would quite happil
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Actually, it sounds a lot more like a job for a civil suit.
Justice is not responsible for Swartz's suicide (Score:2, Interesting)
If it were, then it would be responsible for any suicide for someone with an impending prosecution.
Justice is not responsible for Swartz illegally downloading millions of documents in the JSTOR case, nor for his similar behavior two years prior in the PACER case. His reaction in the former case is still posted: [aaronsw.com]
Wanted by the FBI
I got my FBI file today. (Request yours!) As I hoped, it’s truly delightful.
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The law is generally based on the idea that multiple parties can be at fault. We frequently try the guy who drove the getaway car for murder when his buddy is the one who actually pulled the trigger on the bank guard. There are whole categories of crime where someone only did whatever they did after the original crime and we call it such things as conspiracy after the fact, yet we still find people guilty. In civil law, it's frequent to see a party declared 55% responsible, or 10%, or many variations on
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Every University I've ever had the priveledge to encounter, there have been people, usually grad students to arrogant to know that their research was not the most important on campus, and would find creative ways to get computer resources. Not onewas ever prosecuted for the abuse.
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MIT's network is for students, faculty, and guests which Swartz was none of.
Proof?
I can buy that MIT has a policy that says the network is for students, faculty and guests-- if guests means "other authorized users".
I can also buy that Swartz was not faculty or a student ( even though I remember something about his having faculty privileges ) but can you show he was not a "guest" given that MIT literally gives access to everyone.
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He also fraudulently identified himself as MIT student/faculty in order to get download access in the first place.
Ok. Of all the posts which made stupid claims this seems to be the dumbest. From every report I have ever read Swartz never identified himself as faculty or student..
Yoiu want to provide a link claiming otherwise?
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How can a person type with so few working brain cells?
That's why he went to MIT, so he would appear to JSTOR to be an MIT student/faculty and use MIT's account to access JSTOR.
When he went down to MIT, he might have fraudulently identified himself as MIT student/faculty if MIT limited access of JSTOR to students/faculty.
However, in every report or description of MIT's access policy it is indicated that MIT deliberately gave any person off the street JSTOR access there is no indication that he had fraudulently identified himself as MIT student/faculty , nor have I seen any credible reports that he did so.
So I ask again wh
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Swartz knew what he was doing, consulting expert legal counsel in advance who advised him not to do it,
Link?
the rich don't like that (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly the only lesson that the DOJ seems to want to teach anyone is "don't fuck with the rich"
Documents (Score:2)
still a tempest in a teapot (Score:2)
Swartz committed suicide because he had depression. If it wasn't this, something else would have triggered it. If people had known he was suicidal, the correct response would have been to commit him and place him under suicide watch, not to drop charges; suicidal people are still adults.
And except for grandiose press releases, he actually faced a few months in prison, if he had been found guilty at all. Granted, the circus of a large public trial is something to be unhappy about, but Swartz was an Internet
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And except for grandiose press releases, he actually faced a few months in prison, if he had been found guilty at all. Granted, the circus of a large public trial is something to be unhappy about, but Swartz was an Internet activist who had deliberately broken laws, not some bystander who accidentally got sucked into the justice system.
Let's see, he copied documents that he actually had legal access to and the original prosecutor was going to,
According to attorney Harvey Silverglate, lawyers familiar with the case told him the Middlesex County District Attorney had planned to resolve Swartz’s trespassing case with a “stern warning” and “continuance without a finding.”[67][68] As he explained to CNET’s Declan McCullagh
Your right that does sound pretty spot on, what was I thinking.... oh wait,
“Tragedy intervened,” Silverglate wrote in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, “when [United States Attorney Carmen] Ortiz’s office took over the case to send a message.’”
cough,
“[I]f convicted on these charges,” said Ortiz, “Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million.”
Math must not be your strong suite, either that or 420 months = a few..., (i.e. Also know as ~1.3 Aaron-Swartz lifetimes) And apparently, one million dollars!, isn't even worth mentioning except perhaps to Dr Evil (and me). Admittedly, he probably would not have gotten the max penalty if he was found guilty at trial, b
Defund DOJ (Score:2)
Defund DOJ until Eric Holder resigns for both Fast & Furious and Aaron Swartz incident. This lawless administration only understands money & force, because that is how they do things.
Prosecutor was just padding her political resume (Score:1)
She was going after him tooth and nail because it would look good on her if she won. The so-called "victim" wasn't pressing charges.
Read "The Hacker Crackdown" In there they charged a bunch of kids with "Hacking" to obtain "Secret" information that could destroy the nation's telecommunications grid. After coercing several into a plea deal to plead guilty and take 18months to testify against the remaining defendant who faced something like 30Years, it became known that AT&T actually SOLD the "Stolen"
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Oh yeah sure. Don't even mention the possibility of those consequences being completely over the top.
You know many people contemplate suicide when they're being tortured, and I would consider what they did to Aaron torture and not due punishment.
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Can't tell from the news that anyone works there. It looks more like a private club, with a bunch of bozos sitting around, hoping for their big opportunity. Justice? Who has time for justice?
Re:Investigation....? (Score:5, Interesting)
Comments that draw attention to the political angle of this story (and it's all political) are moded as "overrated [slashdot.org]", there are people who don't like this simple truth: the government is attacking dissidents, Aaron Swartz, Bradley Manning are dissidents. There are many others as well.
Here is an excerpt FTFA
The estate of Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who was charged with hacking by the federal government and later committed suicide
- see, the very first sentence. What is the tone of TFA?
1. Aaron was an Internet hacker.
2. He committed suicide.
That's the first sentence. That's the tone. That's the soundbite.
Here is what is not the tone and it should be:
1. Aaron was standing up against illegal grab of power by Congress.
2. Aaron was attacked by the government, lost all of his money that he made from his businesses in that legal battle and was facing what could amount to life in prison (really, 30 years is life AFAIC) and that's what gave him this depression. He was not paranoid, they were after him, he became the enemy of the state.
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I get that the government abused their role here, but was Swartz not an 'Internet activist who was charged with hacking by the federal government and later committed suicide'?
Also, being attacked by the government did NOT 'give him depression'.
So your tone is disingenuous as well.
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Also, being attacked by the government did NOT 'give him depression'.
- so are you saying that a guy, who spent his savings (a million or so) in court because government wouldn't stop with false claims, which by the way had no reason to be brought up even. JSTOR didn't want to press charges, the company that the documents were lifted off.
He was forced into poverty and he was facing something that would amount to life in prison (30 years) in the eyes of a 26 year old.
Yes, I am not a doctor, but I would have been depressed under such circumstances as well.
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Apparently, you don't know the facts of the case.
He was diagnosed with depression before any of this ever happened.
Thus, it was NOT the government who caused his depression.
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So? Everybody has problems, again, are you telling me that having government go after you, cause you to lose all of your savings and promise to jail you for your entire foreseeable future does not cause depression? Sure, the guy might have been depressed before as well, so what? He didn't kill himself previously.
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Hey Mr. Not-A-Doctor,
'having problems' != clinical depression.
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So? Again, he didn't kill himself before the government bankrupted him and actively worked to throw him to jail for most of the rest of his life.
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he was going to get raped by a terrorist
- and he would be right to be worried about it, people do get raped in US prisons, which are nowhere near being "correctional" facilities. The only thing those facilities correct is the trust in the justice system.
Of-course the supposed 'terrorists' in US prisons also do get raped [wikipedia.org] and the people doing the rape are the government representatives, sometimes [washingtonpost.com] proxy government representatives [commondreams.org].
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Sorry, I know that you, Americans have 20 words for prison, sort of like the Eskimo have for snow, because there are so many nuances in its usage due to the highest incarceration rate in the world.
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Re:Investigation....? (Score:4, Interesting)
According to the egg shell skull doctrine, you are responsible even if your victim was unusually vulnerable.
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"He could have saved all his money and spent little to no time in jail"
Wrong. The government would not accept a plea deal that didn't carry a lengthy jail sentence.
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Come on. Think of the poor federal prosecutors. Doesn't anyone think of their feelings?
Unable (or unwilling) to take down the big, obvious crooks on wall street they're forced to take out their frustration on young, mentally unstable activists!
Those poor, poor federal prosecutors.
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Oh good grief. Why do you hold Manning up beside Swartz? I'm sympathetic toward Swartz. The man was guilty of little, if anything. Manning is guilty of a whole list of crimes, that in another age would have meant his execution. Probably a very painful and lingering execution. Swartz was a civilian, Manning a soldier. Vastly different worlds. Swartz acted honorably. Manning dishonored himself and his uniform.
The article is about Swartz. Don't drag Manning into discussions about Swartz, please.
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Manning a soldier. Vastly different worlds. Swartz acted honorably. Manning dishonored himself and his uniform.
- no, the uniform that he wore was already dishonored by the actions of the organization that issued it and the organization that controlled the organization that issued it. Manning finally returned some semblance of honor to his uniform by doing what he swore to do: protect and defend the Constitution. Not the organization that issued his uniform. Not the organization that controls the organization that issued his uniform. Both of those have violated the conditions and the oath that they were supposed to
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Supposing that your first statement is more or less true - one doesn't redeem a dishonored uniform by heaping more dishonor on it.
Manning dishonored himself, and his uniform.
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No he did not, he finally returned some honor to his uniform by showing that there are still people that actually take the oath to defend and protect the Constitution seriously as opposed to those, who only pretend that they are there to do it.
Re:Investigation....? (Score:4, Insightful)
You think he leaked those documents for the sake of personal fame?
The government and military SHOULD be embarrassed for their egregious war crimes and blatant misrepresentation of facts to the American people. I think this leak was hugely significant.
We should give Manning a medal and prosecute the war criminals, starting with Cheney and Bush.
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I agree with you, but I would start much earlier than Bush and Cheney. At the minimum all of the living ex-potus figure heads and their cabinets. I know people like Clinton, but I can't stand him on the Yugoslavia bombings alone.
Amen! (Score:2)
You're much too soft on the DOJ though. They're the ones asking for laws like the CFAA.
We need a detailed list of every federal prosecutor that has ever brought a CFAA indictment so that we can make sure none get judgeships or political gigs.
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A touch of honesty is due here.
For every Rosa Parks, there are thousands of raped victims that no one ever pays attention to. Without those thousands of victims, Rosa would have been just an uppity old N****r broad, who didn't know her place. BECAUSE OF those victims, Ms Rosa Parks earned her place in history.
Lest anyone misunderstand - my aim is NOT to detract from what Rosa did.
Aaron did some pretty damned good things, and he was awesome in his own way, but obviously he didn't have that something specia
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Good point.
Rosa Parks was able to organize effectively because of a coordinated radical movement in the U.S., which taught her how to organize. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlander_Research_and_Education_Center [wikipedia.org]
That included a lot of socialists, Communists and union organizers. http://vault.fbi.gov/Highlander%20Folk%20School [fbi.gov] Sometimes the only newspaper that would cover their work was the Daily Worker.
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Cory Doctorow wrote about this stuff in his last book,
Something called Persona management software. also known as a turnkey astroturfing system. One person can do the entire work of a microsoft social marketing division with just a slick piece of software. That is why I honestly think half the shills and trolls on the internet are but bots, and as chatbots continue to improve, half the internet will be populated by sock puppets. And captcha is useless as OCR has improved by leaps and bounds.
Gov and busi
S/(S+N) ratio (Score:2)
making the SNR ratio way too high to be useful.
I'm picking a nit here... I admit it...
SNR = Signal / (Signal + Noise)
You want good numbers, like 30db or more.. higher SNR is better.
The spammers, sock puppets and shills are LOWERING the S(S+N) ratio asymptotically to zero.
The way to combat this is with well designed and run forums, and other computer mediated systems.
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The real crime against his memory is that the DoJ scofflaws -- who, when you get down to it, don't seem to recognize any kind of legitimate authorty -- want to convert him into some kind of mentally ill, deluded arch-criminal.
FTFY.
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I count myself among the ranks of the "scofflaws" that you refer to. Funny thing is - I'm an authoritarian. If/when I consider you to be a legitimate authority, and to actually have the authority to give me orders, there is little that I won't do for you.
Overstep your authority one iota, and I'm suddenly your worst nightmare.
And, that is the case we see with copyright and patent law. Corporations are grabbing power, using it in place of authority, and robbing the public. Government is in collusion with
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Aaron Swartz's death, and the subsequent outcry, do appear to be bringing about some of the social changes [whitehouse.gov] he hoped for. Since his cause was public access to information, he was persecuted for this cause and died as a result it seems to meet the definition of martyr [wikipedia.org].
The hero's death is commemorated. People may label the hero explicitly as a martyr. Other people may in turn be inspired to pursue the same cause.
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I would guess MIT is angry at her for dragging her feet and not noticing he had suicidal tendencies. All he wanted was a Pepsi, just one Pepsi, and she wouldn't give it to him.
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From another post.
The outrage wasn't just over "the U.S. attorney's aggressive pursuit of a stiff sentence"; it was the "aggressive pursuit of a stiff sentence" as a means to get a guilty plea. And pleading guilty and become a felon is something Aaron refused to do, eventually by taking his own life.
The Justice Department knows they went overboard on this case. The fact of the matter is, although Aaron Swartz's crime was pretty major, it was still white-collar.. stealing a bunch of documents doesn't really justify a 7-year prison sentence, which is what they were going to hit him with before he committed suicide. They were looking to make an example of him and got caught with their pants down going overboard. Serves them right. The a**hole lawyers on the case wanted to make a name for themselves. Now they're backing off.. hopefully they do learn something from this, although knowing the way the judicial system operates, maybe they did and maybe they didn't.
When Heymann first learned of the Guerrella Open Access Manifesto he got very excited and rescinded the plea offerings. Probably because he thought with the Manifesto he had Swartz dead to rights. After grand jury testimony though, I believe he realized the Manifesto did not say what he thought it did. and Shwartz was likely to walk. So to save face he decided to try and bully Swartz into a plea bargain to avoid the embarrassment that an acquittal would bring.
I believe that discretion i