Aaron Swartz Case: Deja Vu All Over Again For MIT 175
theodp writes "On Saturday, questions for MIT's Aaron Swartz investigation were posted on Slashdot with the hope that MIT'ers might repost some to the MIT Swartz Review site. So it's good to see that MIT's Hal Abelson, who is leading the analysis of MIT's involvement in the matter, is apparently open to this workaround to the ban on questions from outsiders. In fact, on Sunday Abelson himself reposted an interesting question posed by Boston College Law School Prof. Sharon Beckman: 'What, if anything, did MIT learn from its involvement in the federal prosecution of its student David LaMacchia back in 1994?' Not much, it would appear. LaMacchia, an apparent student of Abelson's whose defense team included Beckman, was indicted in 1994 and charged with the 'piracy of an estimated million dollars' in business and entertainment computer software after MIT gave LaMacchia up to the FBI. LaMacchia eventually walked from the charges, thanks to what became known as the LaMacchia Loophole, which lawmakers took pains to close. 'MIT collaborated with the FBI to wreck LaMacchia's life,' defense attorney Harvey Silverglate charged in 1995 after a judge dismissed the case. 'I hope that this case causes a lot of introspection on the part of MIT's administration. Unfortunately, I doubt it will.'"
LaMacchia Loophole (Score:5, Interesting)
Is that a loophole?
Surely a copyright violation SHOULD be charged under copyright acts, not interstate wire fraud.
WIRE FRAUD?? Really? Intentional deception of others to personally gain from them? Where? How? Who? did that happen.
Wallstreet junk assets, dressed as prime sold to banks under deception = criminal fraud, yes I can see that. And I was happy to see the heavy criminal sentences handed down to the Wallstreet bankers who lied about assets to sell them onto to their clients. Hold on, I've got confused, I meant the heavy wads of cash handed down to Wallstreet bankers who lied about assets....
At least could you charge those bankers with copyright infringement? Maybe a parking fine?
Re:LaMacchia Loophole (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks to them closing the "LaMacchia Loophole" you can now be charged with theft and wire fraud for downloading copyright material even if you never had any intention or likelihood of making money from it ...
So now doing something that could *potentially* make you large amounts of money from (but in reality could not) is prosecuted as if you were a crime boss with vast assets from your criminal activity even though you are in reality a poor student ....
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At least they put a bar up. The bar is low, but it's there. $1000 worth of copyrighted material in a 180 day period. Joe Schmuck who downloads a movie or two is safe, but if his wife ALSO downloads a couple hundred songs, then they might be in trouble.
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Essentially he got charged with wire fraud for breaking an EULA.
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The material he downloaded was all public domain, meaning he is 100% free to share anything he downloaded. What he did that was wrong was he violated the EULA which stated that the end user couldn't mass-download or use scripts to download.
Essentially he got charged with wire fraud for breaking an EULA he never agreed to in the first place.
FTFY
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this!
I thought they were inflating the dollar amount because they were jerks. But it was more than just that: they had to inflate it so it met the dollar amount where the feds could get involved.
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"Them" being the elected representatives. They decided that even if you don't profit from copyright violation, you should still have the book thrown at you. I believe the NET Act passed the house and senate unanimously and was signed into law by Bill Clinton.
Did you take your senator and representative to task when it passed? I bet you didn't. You don't like it? Become politically active.
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At the risk of condoning prosecutor's reach, I believe the wire fraud charge resulted from the trespass, wiretap, and using MIT's credentials to gain access to JSTOR.
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There is no such concept as "fraudulent access" that applies to wire-fraud charges. Wire-fraud is a crime which formerly required money gain to the perpetrator, and now requires any gain or "potential" gain, as long as the property acquired can generate at least U$ 1000,00 in six months. It doesn't matter any more if it will.
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So, in other news, legislators applied a 'hotfix' to the law that not only didn't fix the original problem, but also created a new one?
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Redundancy FTW (Score:2)
Re:Redundancy FTW (Score:5, Funny)
Petty (Score:4, Insightful)
MIT sure seems like a petty and vengeful institution. I hope this makes some potential students think about their decision of school.
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No, they weren't vengeful at all. LaMacchia graduated and no internal disciplinary charges were filed. They should have reviewed his case internally and expelled him. LaMacchia was running a warez site, on machines in an MIT cluster, and much like Swartz got the access revoked repeatedly and kept putting his illegal and resource consuming services back into MIT's networks. The amount of warez downloaded through his site for which he was charged was only a few days' traffic, he'd been running that thing for
Re: Petty (Score:2, Insightful)
Swartz screwed up JSTOR access for everyone at MIT and repeatedly took down JSTOR servers, interfering with other labs and schools.
...by downloading files that he had permission to access.
They both belonged in jail. Too bad they were both too privileged, pretty white boys to serve even a day.
So the Slashdot effect is a crime now? Does that mean anyone who actually RTFAs is guilty of conspiracy?
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...by downloading files that he had permission to access.
So a DDOS attack is perfectly fine because it's merely accessing a sever that you've already had permission to access?
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Yes; it's the digital equivalent to a sit-in; the fact that it is considered to be illegal is absurd.
But even if you disagree, the entire reason a DDOS is illegal is because the intent is to shut down the site. If my site is so poorly coded that a single visitor crashes the server, you think I'd have any luck going to the FBI asking them to investigate the "criminal" responsible? Of course not. It was not a coordinated attack; it was not an intentional attempt to shut down the site; it was one guy downloadi
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Whether they belonged in jail or not, twisting the law into a pretzel to ensure that they could potentially have been jailed if those laws had been in effect at the time they commited the offense, with no regards for the future consequences of those new laws, is completely insane.
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To me, not filing internal disciplinary charges, but instead working with the FBI to prosecute him, has it exactly backwards. If indeed he did something wrong and damaged the MIT network, why not discipline him internally rather than calling in the FBI? Not everything needs to be a federal criminal case, especially when the institution is large and wealthy enough, as MIT is, to handle its own problems.
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Because he didn't work for MIT, so the school had no jurisdiction over him and no ability to punish him.
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That's true for Swartz; I was responding to the comment about LaMacchia, who was an MIT student, so could've been handled internally.
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Why would you expel someone for warez? That just shows that a school has no actual values/isn't with the times. Please show me a school that would expel a student for torrenting, and that would be a school which should be torn down for a lack of a backbone on sensible policies.
Please remind me of where the harm is for LaMacchia, since he was found not guilty. Please, play more bullshit there, buddy. Swartz's access to Jstor meant nothing as it was public. If he took it down, then what? That means it's nothi
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They both belonged in jail. Too bad they were both too privileged, pretty white boys to serve even a day.
The absurdity of this sentence is astounding.
LaMacchia "got off" because he didn't break the law. Do you understand what that means? He did not violate the established law... so why does he belong in jail? But don't worry -- his innocence resulted in the creation of additional tighter, more draconian laws which have been slowly removing from copyright any semblance of its original meaning. Oh, and at the same time bankrupting and making felons of your average American families (you know, your neighbors)
MIT is business (Score:3)
MIT is all about producing people for business. The connection between business and MIT are obvious. MIT is not publicly funded according to what I've read, though there are arguments against or limiting that notion.
I think attendees at MIT need to do some soul searching of their own. MIT could be forced to close up if enough students decided to not enroll the next go-around. It's a tough choice because having MIT papers backing you makes one's future look brighter. But what about the larger picture? I hope they are considering it. Student protests should happen.
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MIT is not publicly funded according to what I've read
Isn't most of MIT's total operating budget supported by federal research grants? Back when Kerry/Gore/O'Leary lead the effort to kill the Integral Fast Reactor, it was said that Kerry's motivation was to protect the hot fusion money coming into MIT (tens of millions per year).
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Remember the Logan Airport "LED bomb scare", too (Score:3, Interesting)
"Approximately 30 students gathered yesterday afternoon to protest the administration’s handling of controversies involving students. While the majority of the protest was focused on the Star A. Simpson ’10 arrest, the discussion also touched on administrative reactions to the sodium fire on the Charles River and the felony charges filed against hackers found in the MIT Faculty Club.
The protest, which took place outside of Pritchett Dining in Walker Memorial, consisted of students carrying signs such as “Question the Media,” “Wait for the Facts,” and “Support Your Student.” Students also carried a protest letter that had been circulated across the campus."
http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N41/protest.html
MIT did nothing wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
BitTorrent in 1994 (Score:2)
The author of the LaMacchia Loophole seems to think BitTorrent existed in 1994. The BitTorrent protocol was designed in 2001. May be the author thinks BitTorrent is a generic term for downloading stuff.
Friends do not let friends attend MIT (Score:3)
University as Sanctuary (Score:2, Insightful)
Why do I suddenly (Score:2)
Legal and you know it, Ortiz doesn't (Score:5, Insightful)
"install a laptop, script file downloads,"
You know those two things are legal don't you?
"evade security, hide my identity"
Yep, this too, completely legal. You as Anonymous Coward should know it's legal to hide your identity! Even Ortiz can come here and spout random garbage hiding her identity.
"lie to campus police and be let go free of charge"
This too, completely legal, campus police are just security guards with no special right to be told the truth.
What he was charged with, was copyright infringement (possibly trespass), written up as hacking and wire fraud. The investigation is to whether the prosecutor was inflated the charges for her political gain. She has a history of it, the prosecutors office wasn't planning on big charges, then she took it off him.
MIT are concerned that they may be a conspirator to this inflation-for-political-gain. See they can see the charges were inflated and they want to make sure their hands are clean of it. Prosecuting a crime based on the law of the crime is one thing, prosecuting on random inflated implausible charges in order to force a plea bargain to score a nice prosecution on your CV, is something quite quite different.
The question now is if Ortiz can remain in office when her view of the law is so departed from the actual laws themselves.
At best she's malicious, at worst she's incompetent*. Either way, that's not someone who should be a prosecutor, let along a head prosecutor.
* I don't think she was incompetent, when she described copyright infringement as 'theft if theft' it showed a disregard for the law she was completely aware of.
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Actually campus police are usually sworn police officers under state statutes, just like municipal or county police.
I think MIT was morally wrong in not pursuing this, and the U.S. attorneys' office overreached, but the whole issue is not as cut-and-dried as most people here would prefer you believe. I don't think Swartz was just a passive actor caught up in forces he had no control over, a
Re:Legal and you know it, Ortiz doesn't (Score:4, Informative)
And if it was just the six months, that might have been OK. But the prosecutor was also insisting on a guilty plea to multiple felony counts. Once you are a convicted felon, many of your rights disappear forever. Do you vote? Convicted felons don't.
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No it wouldn't have been ok, not even might. I only know from hearing the stories of others, to be fair, but if I had gone to prison for 6 months on trumped up charges because of something I did to try to increase the amount of freedom in the world without profiting from it, I would not find that acceptable, fair, ok, worth living for, etc.
It is sad to realize/say this, but Swartz probably did the best thing he could have done to draw attention to his cause and try to get it fixed. I hope it makes a differe
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Re:Legal and you know it, Ortiz doesn't (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and let's not miss this gem:
Lucky thing that Aaron was just a young looking 26...
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The 6 month figure keeps getting bandied about as if that was the worst he had to fear if he took the deal. In fact, like any plea agreement, the 6 months would be a recommendation. The judge would be free to ignore it and throw the book at him anyway and in exchange he would have made a statement under oath that he was guilty of all of those felonies.
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"The days of 'Club Fed'--think golf courses and lobster bakes--are long gone." [forbes.com]
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No, that's not what Swartz was charged with. Swartz was charged with wire fraud, computer fraud, unauthorized access, and computer damage.
I seriously doubt it. You may question the political wisdom or morality of what the prosecutor did, but she was operating within standard federal guidelines. In fact, until a few years ago, she would have been obligat
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This too, completely legal, campus police are just security guards with no special right to be told the truth.
This varies from college to college. At MIT the Campus Police are real police, with real police powers, just with jurisdiction limited to the campus.
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"lie to campus police and be let go free of charge"
This too, completely legal, campus police are just security guards with no special right to be told the truth.
Um, you sure about that? Most campus police are "real" police, and can arrest you, depose you, etc.
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The fuck is he smoking? You're telling me that if I entered your private property and hid a laptop in your closet and attached it to your router and started retrieving everything sent across or hosted locally and then retrieved it at a later date, that would not be illegal?
The breaking and entering would be, but that wasn't the focus here. And for your metaphor to work, you would need to have legal access to the "everything sent across or hosted locally." You chose your metaphor because it would necessarily involve stealing personal information, Aaron had access to JSTOR.
What he was charged with, was copyright infringement (possibly trespass), written up as hacking and wire fraud.
What's the matter you couldn't take the time to read the docket? Go ahead and say that the prosecutor was seeking overreaching charges but for fuck's sake, people, a lot of the things he did should still be crimes!
So... basically you're repeating what he just said with hysterics and obscenities. You've really contributed a lot here.
Re:Outward Appearances (Score:5, Interesting)
To the dispassionate and disinterested outside observer, a mentally disturbed man committed suicide.
No. To a dispassionate and disinterested outside observer, someone was being punished much more harshly than whatever he deserved.
It's simply really. Murder should carry the harshest punishment, whatever "harshest" means in a given culture. Anything that caused less severe damage should be punished less severly, in roughly this decreasing order: a) murder; b) physical damage to another person, c) physical damage to another's property, d) no physical damage to anyone.
Moral issues arise when one does something at 'd' level, but the law (and those enforcing it) are so sick they want to punish him at 'c+' level. Swartz case is a prime example, and clear symptom, of this very sickness.
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AC has a point. Whether it be Swartz, or some lackwit from Outback, Nowhere - if you're going to challenge authority, you'd best be prepared for any consequences.
Swartz freely engaged in questionable activities, of his own free will. No matter what he believed to be right, he declared war on the status quo. He didn't just challenge Mommy's decision over to much television - he challenged an entrenched system, armed with legions of lawyers, tons of money, and buttloads of unscrupulous business people.
Swar
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Under your(extremely flawed) world view no one who isn't a millionaire *at least* several times over is capable of standing up to these goons.
The system is sick. Swartz isn't exactly a hero, but he has made himself a martyr because his only other option was attempting to flee the country, and his face had been too widely publicized to make that an option. He downloaded a ton of files he had been given legal right to access. No one ever said he couldn't download them all. He's been prosecuted for things that
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I don't believe that I made any mention of wealth, did I? There are people who are crazy in the opposite direction. The harder you lean on them, the more you abuse them, the harder they fight.
Had Swartz been a little more - savvy is the term I guess - he would have foreseen that Corporate America would pull out their biggest guns to deal with him. Then, he could have intelligently decided whether the fight was worth it.
Jamie Thomason wasn't especially savvy, but she did fight the good fight. Single Mom
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No reasonable person would expect nuclear war to result from two ordinary cars from russia and the US crashing into each other with no fatalities.
This is something similar. He took things that he wanted to make free, as most(I believe all, but I could be missing something) of them aren't licensed with anything to prevent copying and distribution. The only thing preventing it is the only easily accessible copies are stored on that particular database. The retaliation of 20 years in jail for things that can o
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Or go to trial, or take the deal and spend a mere 6 months at Club Fed.
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Or go to trial, or take the deal and spend at least 6 months at Club Fed.
The deal offered was a recommendation of 6 months. He could have taken the deal and still gotten 50 years (based on the amended charges) because the judge isn't limited by the recommendation.
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Judges typically follow the recommendations of the plea bargain; while there's a chance of the judge coming up with something more harsh it is very, very unlikely. In any event while suicide might be a rational response to an actual 50-year prison sentence, it is not a rational response to an unlikely but theoretica
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I'm not claiming suicide was the right answer, just correcting the whole "all he had to do is take the deal" claim. The significant risk for him was that he would have to swear under oath that he was guilty of 13 felonies, meaning no matter what the judge might do, he couldn't take that back. He was already facing a legal system that was clearly gone crazy, so he could be forgiven for having more than a little apprehension. It's easy to say "just take the deal" when you're not the one facing the deal.
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And face bankruptcy.
And face the real chance of being raped in prison.
And possibly lose the right to vote or own a firearm.
And have the Scarlett Letter of a felony conviction for his every rent or employment application for the rest of his life.
And face the possibility that the judge would go ahead and throw the book at him, regardless of any plea deal with the prosecutor.
All the assholes wondering why Swartz didn't bend over and take it
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WTF did "I'm not a racist, but..." come from?
The just-world thing? I guess that's possible. But, my thinking is more military than philosophical. You just don't challenge authority, unless you're prepared to DEAL WITH authority. It's a matter of relativity, if you care to think of it that way. A squad of trained men can take on a panzer, with the right weapons. We'll call it a sapper team. Two to six unarmored men, with a limpit mine can go up against a tank, if they are stealthy and lucky.
But, by n
Re:Outward Appearances (Score:5, Informative)
You're point is valid, but it's, at best,a Type D "crime" being punished as a type A "the most harsh society can inflict" and might not even be a good civil suit for mild contract violation.
Re:Outward Appearances (Score:4, Interesting)
You can't total up times that way. It isn't merely unlikely that he would have received such a sentence, it is impossible under federal sentencing guidelines. Saying that he faced a "maximum sentence of 65 years" is wrong, plain and simple. To put it differently, people who actually get 65 years usually face a maximum sentence of hundreds of years.
Swartz actually faced a maximum sentence of about three years. He had been offered a deal of six months in a minimum security prison by the prosecutor. Realistically, that's also about the maximum term a court would have imposed anyway.
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Yeah. You can. That's why prosecutors split up a single alleged crime into a dozen felonies: so they can be sentenced to a longer prison term or get them for one charge where others might fail. Like: kidnapping + crossing state lines + rape + assault + gun charge....
Not if the judge was as trigger-hap
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wartz actually faced a maximum sentence of about three years.
Cite your sources.
He had been offered a deal of six months in a minimum security prison by the prosecutor. Realistically, that's also about the maximum term a court would have imposed anyway.
Do it again here. And further explain why he should have had to spend day 1 in jail for the 'crime' he committed.
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There are plenty of sources you can read up on. Jennifer Granick is very sympathetic to Swartz, and even she admits:
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What?
Oh, and you might consider being less rude, in particular if you simply don't know the facts.
I asked you to cite facts. And then to explain why you think that something that has been established as a civil case should result in jail time. And you think I'm rude?
Really?
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A minute on Google would have let you check the facts yourself. Yes, you're intellectually lazy and rude.
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While I agree with you, a system of law where "no physical damage to anyone" has the smallest punishment would be remarkably kind to my plan to steal the world's money with my ingenious Hollywood computer virus.
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a) murder; b) physical damage to another person, c) physical damage to another's property, d) no physical damage to anyone.
You forgot e) victimless crimes, such as drugs, gambling, prostitution, etc.
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You forgot e) victimless crimes, such as drugs, gambling, prostitution, etc.
No, because those shouldn't be in a list of punishable offenses to begin with. ;-)
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Drugs may lead to crimes such as theft, in order to support the habit, and vandalism and battery if the user goes into a psychotic rage, or negligent homicide and property damage in the case of the drunk driver, but drugs alone shouldn't be criminal. Drinking is not a crime, DWI is. It is in any case a terrible approach to what may not be a problem at all, and where it is a problem, it may be better handled as a health issue, not an issue of moral failing. We have figured out that throwing the book at th
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Drugs aren't a victimless crime if the family has to deal with it.
Poor you, the weight of your family obligations must be absolutely crushing. Seriously, what kind of family do you live in, where if a family member is struggling your response is to have them thrown in jail?
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He hadn't been punished at all yet. He would likely have received a sentence somewhere between zero and six months. Federal sentencing guidelines wouldn't have allowed a maximum of more than three years. All of that is completely normal, both within the US and compared to other nations.
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So a record of multiple felony convictions would have no effect whatsoever on the rest of his life? Last I checked, it didn't work that way in the US. Not even close.
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If he had been found guilty, I assume it would have had an effect. What does that have to do with the sentence the prosecutor asked for? Why shouldn't it have "an effect" if he had been found guilty?
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The prosecutor's deal included Swartz gaining a felony record. In the US (and many other nations) a felony record carries its own punishment that lasts long after any actual prison sentence itself is served.
Serious question: would you rather spend three years in prison without a felony record or six months in prison with a felony record, and would your answer change depending on which US state you lived in?
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You can't spend three years in prison without a felony record; a felony is defined as any crime that potentially carries a prison term of longer than one year. If he was convicted under CFAA at all, he would have been a felon, no matter how long he served.
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Very well. Let's say you'd been charged by a prosecutor with a proper sense of proportion, under a statute that didn't carry a prison term longer than one year. Would you rather serve six months with a felony record or one year without?
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I don't see how that is relevant to anything. All violations of the CFAA are automatically felonies; the prosecutor didn't have a choice.
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The prosecutor had the choice not to use the CFAA, and you didn't answer my question. If you don't want to, that's fine. Me, I'd take a year and no record over six months and a record. But Swartz didn't have that option, since as you say, it was prosecuted under CFAA and that's automatically a felony record. So no matter how short or long he was in a physical prison for, he'd be stuck with that felony record for the rest of his life, yes?
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Indeed, the prosecutor could have chosen to let him get off free. But why should she?
Yes, that's the consequence when you break a federal law with a potential penalty of more than one year.
I find the outrage over Swartz hypocritical. The same people who couldn't give a f*ck over prosecutorial overreach and an encroachment of fede
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Why should she? Justice, perhaps?
Is that consequence acceptable to you? Do you find it "just"?
I don't find the outrage over Swartz hypocritical. We're not all those same people you refer to. And for anyone still outraged, who still objects to prosecutorial overreach etcetera, you can't say they want a special exception for Aaron now. He's dead. He didn't get an exception. What happened to him just helped make it a little more obvious to us sheep, that the exception he (and many others) didn't get should in
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Yes, I think charging him was just. Whether he was actually guilty and whether there were extenuating circumstances was for a court to determine, not the prosecutor.
That could be a valid response, but I don't think it is in this case. I think failure to even acknowledge and identify the more general problem while condem
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Odd, the NDAA's National Prosecution Standards says it is for the prosecutor to determine (4-2.4, Factors to Consider). That a court may subsequently agree or disagree does not absolve prosecutors of their responsibilities. Or do federal prosecutors use a completely different set of standards? http://ndaa.org/pdf/NDAA%20NPS%203rd%20Ed.%20w%20Revised%20Commentary.pdf [ndaa.org]
Hypocrisy, what comes around goes around, or social inertia? Some of all three, I think. Harshly condemning society for harshly condemning a mem
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I didn't say that prosecutors should never consider it. I'm saying that in this case the acts Swartz committed were serious enough that the decision should be left up to the court. A grand jury obviously agreed.
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Maliciously overcharging someone to further a political career is legal? http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/civilrights/color_of_law/color-of-law [fbi.gov]
Of course, I'm just an idealistic foreigner, in a foreign land, who believes in all that "truth, justice and liberty" stuff from experiencing American cowboy and superhero literature/cinema as a child, so... well... um... dammit.
Thankyou for the dialogue.
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Show me the law that it would violate.
You don't seem to understand that with liberty comes risk.
And if Swartz had done what he did in Europe, Japan, China, or Australia, he'd already be serving a couple of years
Re:Outward Appearances (Score:5, Insightful)
1a. You can be (i)charged, (ii)prosecuted and a (iii)jury determines your guilt. This situation was at the first stage (i). No foul.
So the next time you get a parking ticket, if you're charged with murder, you'd be OK with that because you'd get the chance to defend yourself in court?
A gross exaggeration of course, but your statement "no foul" about the gross prosecutorial overreach in this case makes me feel sick. How can anyone possibly say that in good conscience???
Re:Outward Appearances (Score:4, Insightful)
On one hand supporters want to say that he isn't a criminal because he wasn't convicted. The same group wants to say he was punished unfairly though he received no sentence. Contradiction.
Not at all. Being subjected to grossly exaggerated charges that only relate to your actual actions in the demented mind of a lunatic prosecutor, spending a fortune on lawyers, and living under the threat of bankruptcy AT BEST and at worst conviction with a monstrously disproportionate sentence--is most certainly punishment. You have to be a fucking sociopath to claim otherwise.
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I don't have a way to make this more fair
I think the solution is simple: it doesn't matter how many stuff you did at a level, if you get convicted, your total punishment cannot be more than the minimum punishment in the next level.
So, let's say 'c' had a minimum of 2 years in jail. Then 1 document downloaded or 1 million documents plus server crashes etc., the maximum punishment for your set of 'd' crimes should be 2 years (minus 1 second) tops. Got out of jail, committed another sequence of 'ds', and got caught? Another 2 years (minus 1s). And so
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To the dispassionate and disinterested outside observer, a mentally disturbed man committed suicide. The only one at fault is the mentally disturbed man.
I've long believed that suicide is nobody's fault except for the one who committed the act. However, I very much want to blame the DA for pushing him to commit suicide. I realize it's an emotional response, but there must be some basis in fact. At what point does provoking someone who then commits suicide become the moral and ethical responsibility of the provocateur?
I know I'm responding to a troll, but it hits upon an issue I've been thinking about for some time. It's well known how DAs threaten dispr
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Thank you, that answers my question perfectly. An immoral act is immoral in and of itself. Someone's suicide does not affect the morality of the original act.
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Makes perfect sense to blame her for that as well, when she was warned of the possibility and still tried to cut off his proverbial arm for shoplifiting a pack of gum. It's like buying an alcoholic a round of drinks and then pretending you had no involvement when he gets in a drunken car crash.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't get your life ruined. Fair deal.
Where of course by "breaking in" you mean "opening an unlocked door" and by "company" you mean "a university with an open campus and extremely liberal access policies". I wonder if there are job openings in Carmen Ortiz's office?
He did trespass, and he deserved to be punished for it. A $100 fine, or maybe a small amount of community service in lieu.
He did commit some copyright violation, and although the amount of stuff downloaded was massive, he didn't do anything with it, and so the damages to JSTOR were