If you hit someone with enough felony counts sooner or later something can snap. This in response to those that claim the DOJ didn't have anything to do with Aaron killing himself.
For some people the mere fact of being suspected of a crime they didn't commit is enough to push them over the edge. When you're placed in a holding cell the police will remove your laces from your boots so you don't hang yourself, that's how heavy being imprisoned can weigh on some.
Aaron did something that he thought was right, that he truly believed in and that upset a large number of applecarts and that had far reaching implications, had the proverbial book thrown at him and then some. The prospect of significant amounts of jail time (35 years for downloading scientific papers, it shouldn't even be a crime) and/or a felony record must have weighed very heavy on him.
For a person that is of a very stable mental make-up that would already be extreme pressure.
For someone with a mental issue it may very well be all it takes.
Aaron was inspiring to me, I think that no copyrighted piece of paper is worth a human life and that the DOJ, even if they are not directly responsible at least indirectly carry some of the responsibility here for beating down someone who was fighting for an extremely good cause in a somewhat haphazard way. The letter of the law and the spirit of the law should both be taken into account.
I hope those that had a hand in Aarons' continued prosecution will sleep miserably for a long time to come. Likely it won't weigh on their consciousness at all.
Aaron Swartz did something he knew was morally right but very probably illegal in some way, and, him being a prodigy, I'm very confident he was aware of this. It is called activism, and is a very brave and noble thing to do, something most people don't have the guts for. Governments often try to break activists who threaten their agenda (or in this case, that of a dying industry), and it seems they have succeeded with him, which I find very sad and which makes me so angry.
Maybe being indicted while free may even be a bigger psychological pressure on somebody than being in prison. When you are in prison, you can focus all your energy on your case, and the situation can only get better than your current one, not worse. You have certain legal protections, and your basic needs are taken care of.
Imagine having to work a job to earn an income (your assets probably being seized) and function in society with a constant feeling of danger looming ahead. They can fuck up your life one little piece at a time. Imagine working on your defence when the computer you are using to do so can be seized at any time (some DA having convinced a judge that you may be hacking right now). Imagine restrictions on travel that make making a living even more difficult. Imagine randomly being delivered a letter with one more bogus charge.
While being free seems to be better than in prison from an objective point of view, given the workings of the threat detection system in our mind, made for tigers in the savannah, not constant worry and fear, it may be much worse. It is well known that the functioning of our "higher" abilities like creativity and critical thinking are impaired under constant stress. It's easy to conceive what this means for the feeling of self worth of somebody who lives for doing cool, meaningful, big things (one of my favourite essays ever, btw):
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity
Also, it neatly avoids the aura of illegitimacy that imprisoning peaceful activists would have for a government.
One lesson that could be learned from this is to try and consciously provide people in his situation with an environment that feels safe. Nut just a fund for legal and living expenses and therapy to cope with the stress, but much more importantly, reliable relationships with people who are supporting, compassionate and willing to listen.
Anyone with access to a university network has access to those documents. I have access to JSTOR also. What moral issue can you possibly raise with someone using their access to download these documents? It's OK to download 10, but not 1000000? Do you have a moral issue with automated downloads -- and if so, how can you justify JSTOR itself?
It is worth noting that JSTOR did not want to press charges in this case. After contacting Swartz, they were satisfied that he was not going to share the documents with others (and they "recovered" them, whatever that means), and that would have been that. The government decided to prosecute, probably to show how serious they are about restricting access to human knowledge (or whatever it is that they thought this prosecution would accomplish).
> Anyone with access to a university network has access to those documents
The JSTOR site says "Libraries and organizations license full-text content for their patrons, and if you are affiliated with one of these institutions, you can access those complete articles."
Their site seems to say anyone with a uni affiliation.
Or anyone who is a patron of a university library system, which in this day and age means anyone who has been given access to a university network. Where I am, anyone can get one-week access if someone who is affiliated signs in and generates a unique token for the guest; we frequently do this when researchers from other schools or companies visit my group, but there is no actual restriction on who can be given access. Most universities have a system for allowing members of the public to access their library system, and by extension, JSTOR.
Really, it is not much different from walking into a university library and reading the books there. Most of the schools I see allow anyone to walk into their library, without having to prove they have any sort of affiliation.
It is as though universities believe their purpose is to spread knowledge or something crazy like that...
> Or anyone who is a patron of a university library system,
> which in this day and age means anyone who has been given
> access to a university network.
Not everyone is in a university, in fact there are billions of people who aren't in school and who would absolutely benefit from having access to the scientific knowledge contained in these tax-payer-funded documents. The current majority of people who read papers are, of course, going to be in colleges because they are the ones who have access in the first place.
I challenge you (in a very light-hearted, positive way) to demonstrate how to access papers as a member of the public. Most universities seem to require you to show up in person to use the library computers. You can subscribe to classes and get a student id to access literature, but then you no longer count as the public, do you?
Also, DeepDyve and ReadCube are scams. Anyone who reads a healthy amount gets charged out the wazoo. I didn't even know I had a wazoo!
"Not everyone is in a university, in fact there are billions of people who aren't in school and who would absolutely benefit from having access to the scientific knowledge contained in these tax-payer-funded documents"
Sure, but that was not my point; my point was that there was no moral issue with him downloading these documents, because he had every right to access them, just like anyone else whose computer is connected to a university's network. The underlying assumption of people who think he did something wrong is a combination of (a) that access is only supposed to be for reading the articles, not archiving them and (b) that there is something suspicious about writing a program that automatically downloads things (unless you are running an operation dedicated to archiving). The assumption is that anyone who thinks about these things differently must be some kind of criminal or public danger, and it is an assumption that has been fueled by years of propaganda from businesses whose profits depend on people not doing such things.
"I challenge you (in a very light-hearted, positive way) to demonstrate how to access papers as a member of the public"
Unfortunately, the only response I have is that the current system is designed to thwart that sort of thing. We live in an anachronistic age when it comes to accessing human knowledge. We continue to assume that we need academic publishing companies to spread that knowledge. We continue to assume that it makes sense for people to physically enter a major library to find the journal articles they are looking for.
A century ago, that did actually make sense. You needed industrial-scale printing equipment to make enough copies of academic publications to satisfy the world's needs. For the most part, only universities had the resources to pay the publishers for that work, and only universities had enough space to archive those publications. In this day and age, that is not even remotely true: a typical desktop computer has enough disk space to store more than many university library systems could store on their shelves. One only needs to walk through the bound journals section of a typical university library to see the reality of this century: the bound journals are just sitting there, collecting dust, because everyone is downloading the articles using a computer.
So in theory, the general public could have access to this knowledge, and to all future research, and they could even help in the dissemination of that knowledge. In practice, only the lucky few (like me!) who happen to be affiliated with a major university can access it without jumping through hoops or traveling great distances. The sickest part about it is this: I would be prosecuted if I dared use the desktop in my office to give other people access to that knowledge. Stated another way, if I were to use my own knowledge and affiliation with a university to spread knowledge to others, I would be a criminal.
Indeed. Public money should pay for the function of entities like JSTOR.
The public already paid 99% of the money for public research, yet only 1% of them have access to the fruits because those who paid 1% (for maintaining an archive) want it this way.
It's not a matter of restricting access to public knowledge; it's a matter of Aaron draining the village pool.
Information shares all of the downsides of the public commons: because it is freely available, no one wants to pay for the maintenance costs. JSTOR charges fees for access to cover the ongoing maintenance costs associated with storing access to thousands of journals and millions of articles published over several centuries. Note also that JSTOR provides assistance with locating articles relevant to the user's needs (i.e., library functions), and such services are frequently more valuable than its archival functions.
A wiki will not suffice to maintain access to this information; Wikipedia and Wikileaks have shown that. You would end up with all of the articles but no practical way to find the particular article or articles you are looking for.
"It's not a matter of restricting access to public knowledge; it's a matter of Aaron draining the village pool."
Copying documents does not destroy the original copies, so it does not drain anything.
"Information shares all of the downsides of the public commons: because it is freely available, no one wants to pay for the maintenance costs."
If JSTOR had made these documents freely available, there'd be plenty of people and organizations who'd gladly have paid for the maintenance costs. For example, archive.org.
"Note also that JSTOR provides assistance with locating articles relevant to the user's needs (i.e., library functions), and such services are frequently more valuable than its archival functions. ... A wiki will not suffice to maintain access to this information; Wikipedia and Wikileaks have shown that. You would end up with all of the articles but no practical way to find the particular article or articles you are looking for."
If anyone wanted to use those services, they could pay JSTOR for them regardless of whether these documents were also available elsewhere.
You can't have a tragedy of the commons when the commons belongs to one company. JSTOR isn't a village pool unless it's public, which it isn't.
JSTOR's charges aren't at all proportional to the hosting cost. If they were only charging for hosting then they should be happy if people share the data without using their servers, but they aren't, so it is manifest that they are charging for more than the hosting.
Indexing articles for browsing and search is not a real problem if the information is made public. If other people want to help JSTOR with this, they are not allowed to because JSTOR keeps all this publicly-funded information proprietary in perpetuity
So according to your argument, the risk is not that we will be unable to access such articles without JSTOR, but that we will be unable to search for articles? That's basically saying that a document search system is too costly to create or maintain for a university library to deal with, and so JSTOR is necessary for queries. Which sounds like an unfounded assumption to me, considering how widely deployed CiteSeerX is.
Even if your argument were true, what exactly was Aaron draining? If JSTOR is providing this valuable search service, wouldn't that alone fund their operation? If having millions of documents is useless because we have no way to search those documents, what difference does it make if Aaron really had been sharing the documents with others? Would it not have been a good thing if Aaron had amassed these articles and made them available using a better search service -- wouldn't we have benefited (and isn't that the whole point of copyright anyway?)?
Had Aaron been accused of hacking into JSTOR to download the source code of their search system, you might have a point. Instead, he was accused of copyright infringement and of violating a network use agreement (because he was trying to evade the ban of his laptop's IP address); at no point was JSTOR's valuable search service even an issue in this case.
Then Swartz was no threat. He was going to upload the articles to other people if he wanted to. He was going to have to provide the search tools.
I don't understand why they would "[secure] from Mr. Swartz the content that was taken, and [receive] confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed".
There are already places for open-access articles, mainly PLOS and arXiv. PLOS stands for Public Library Of Science and was create around 10 years ago. It has got quite popular among scientist, and it's peer reviewed. However, it charges the authors with a small fee, usually around $1000 per article. For some scientists this is a problem. Personally I think this is a much better and a more economic systemic model than subscriptions. The subscription model unfortunately is pretty nasty (http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=890), to the point that thousands of scientists, and among them some renown geniuses, have decided to boycott it (http://thecostofknowledge.com). And now, with the death of Aaron there is one more reason to make the research articles free to the tax-payers, who in fact already fund the researchers, but somehow have to pay extra to access their results.
Because most academic research is at least partly funded by taxpayers (even more so everywhere but in the US), and scientists pay submission fees (again, with taxpayer money) to cover what the journals consider their contribution to the process.
For some more information about the business practices of this industry, this is a nice, short text: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/22/academic-pu...
Man, it's just really too bad he took his own life. Man. That being said, I would advocate working through the legal system to effect change in this unjust area, not break it.
Do you know of anyone working through the legal system to effect such change?
Someone on Reddit explained this better than I can, but JSTOR is basically a scam. It pockets the money that it receives and doesn't pay anything back to the authors. As an author, you yourself have to pay for access to your own work (or your university does, via a subscription).
JSTOR has scholarly articles dating back centuries - when you consider that that information deserves to be free, and the societal cost of keeping that information and research hidden, JSTOR's mere existence is practically a crime.
CERN has been very clear in their opposition to JSTOR's practices, from what I know.
In the copyright wars, JSTOR is hardly a bad actor compared to the publishers. It's a nonprofit formed by libraries so that there would be a single entity to negotiate with publishers and digitize journals. I'm not saying they've always moved as quickly and aggressively as I'd like, but calling their existence "practically a crime" strikes me as very wrong. If they didn't exist, most libraries wouldn't have access to the journals JSTOR archives.
>If they didn't exist, most libraries wouldn't have access to the journals JSTOR archives.
This isn't true. Something else would be in its place. The only question is whether it would be better. I believe that society has already paid a number of times for the benefit of most of the knowledge in this archive. This should be freely available to anyone with access to the internet.
I don't know much about this system JSTOR, but you know with what you said about "scholarly articles dating back centuries" I'd expect them to have some costs associated with those efforts. Its not a popular way to raise money, yes, but who else are you going to charge other than the people interested in using that system...just saying.
"JSTOR is basically a scam. It pockets the money that it receives and doesn't pay anything back to the authors"
We are not talking about "authors" in the sense of some guy living in a townhouse, smoking a pipe and drinking scotch while writing a novel. We're talking about people who are paid to do scientific research, usually by the government, and who must publish their work in a journal or conference to continue continue or advance their careers.
Really, JSTOR is not even that bad; they are a search service. Look at the journals themselves if you want to talk about a scam: the authors are not paid by the journal publishers, the journal publishers do not fund grants any more than any other tax payer does, and it is often the case that the reviewers of the articles (peer review, the foundation of scientific publishing) are unpaid, and in some cases even the editors of the journal are volunteers. What do the journal publishers do? They print and bind journals, sometimes, or else they charge people (including JSTOR) for access to electronic copies of the articles. Journal publishers are an anachronism that is being kept alive by an out-of-control copyright system; JSTOR is just an outgrowth of the problem, like a little hair growing out of a cancer (and make no mistake, "cancer" is an apt description of journal publishers: they get in the way of scientific research and make it harder for scientists to make their findings available to humanity).
JSTOR is a non-profit created to store scholarly articles and maintain archives of scholarly work for future access. JSTOR is and was a driving force behind the digitalization of scholarly works and most academic journals. JSTOR's sole function is to maintain these archives, even if/when it is not commercially viable to do so.
All of this costs money. Universities and companies pay for JSTOR so that it can keep doing its job. More importantly, universities and companies pay for JSTOR so that they don't have to take on the burdens of maintaining complete archives of all academic works.
Except that the access fees paid by any single large university would be enough to completely fund an open digital archive.
Yes, the fees are paid to the publishers— who themselves do not pay the authors, reviewers, and even (sometimes) the editors of the journals. As part of the NYC non-profit high society Jstor is far from the most efficient non profit— but their fault is not their inefficient spending and high salaries. Their fault is facilitating a system which is amoral and harmful to society.
Absent Jstor the universities and libraries would have an easier time reforming the system because writing a single big check per quarter wouldn't remove most of their problems (while leaving everyone outside of those institutions without access).
Oh really? I thought universities and companies paid for JSTOR so that they could redistribute those academic works for profit. If not, why would they care if someone else gets access without paying? And if the universities and companies didn't care, why would JSTOR, a non-profit, care?
This is the sum total of human academic knowledge. It must be freed. The first tragic thing was that he failed to torrent it immediately. Now this. A great loss.
That depends on your philosophy about knowledge. If you believe that the ability to communicate our knowledge to each other and to future generations is our most important advantage, then anything that makes it easier to access knowledge is a good thing. If instead you believe that individuals should profit from their knowledge, Swartz is just as bad as JSTOR and our government is corrupt for not prosecuting the lot of them (most of the people whose articles were downloaded were probably paid nothing for their writing).
Or, maybe you believe that corporations are our saviors and therefore anything that goes against their interests is a bad thing. In which case the government is doing exactly what it should be doing.
All academic journals where the underlying research was paid for by the state should be available to any taxpayer without cost -- which for all practical purposes means any person without cost -- because they have already paid for them.
Paywalled journals are a form of rent-seeking which while arguably an acceptable evil in the days of print are an unacceptable evil today.
It really rubs me the wrong way when something like this happens and folks jump to conclusions as you have here. You didn't know this person. For all we know he could have not given two shits about the whole legal process and this is linked to family or relationship problems or long term general depression.
And this was in response to people jumping to completely different conclusions, for instance that these things are not related at all. I wouldn't be so quick to make that call.
To be clear -- I'm totally fine with people who knew Aaron well commenting on these matters. I did in fact assume that was not the case and apologize if I was wrong there.
I guess my rub is two-fold:
- The visible portion of public figures lives is only a fraction of the complete picture, and extrapolating from that visible portion rubs me the wrong way.
- These things are complex. As another commenter noted, suicide rarely has a single reason. (And I think we put labels on these things mostly for ourselves; it's easier to cope when there's an label to pin onto a tragedy.)
I questioned what you said I didn't (when I asked you) state that the poster wasn't his mother. I don't know that she is or isn't.
That said I will now say that I feel that it's highly unlikely that a mother who has lost her son to suicide is going to open up a HN account [1] and post something when a loss like this happens.
Of course if a HN admin has access to IP addresses or where and how the account was setup or some other non public information that's something else.
I worked closely with Aaron over the last year, and knew him, though not as well as I would have liked. My belief is that the legal process weighed on him tremendously, though he didn't often show it.
Here here. Charities that work with people struggling with suicide and mental health problems consistently ask the media to not attribute a suicide to one particular cause.
Agreed. But do want to say being a HN community its good to observe/"hack" his life and learn from this. As one big question arises: Was his death to make a statement, give up, or escape this life. Food for thought:
Reddit life:
"I was miserable. I couldn't stand San Francisco. I couldn't stand office life. I couldn't stand Wired. I took a long Christmas vacation. I got sick. I thought of suicide. I ran from the police. And when I got back on Monday morning, I was asked to resign."
"I followed these rules. And here I am today, with a dozen projects on my plate and my stress level through the roof once again." "Every morning I wake up and check my email to see which one of my projects has imploded today, which deadlines I'm behind on, which talks I need to write, and which articles I need to edit."
-https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget
Post Reddit Era:
"The post-Reddit era in Aaron's life was really his coming of age. His stunts were breathtaking. At one point, he singlehandedly liberated 20 percent of US law. PACER, the system that gives Americans access to their own (public domain) case-law, charged a fee for each such access. After activists built RECAP (which allowed its users to put any caselaw they paid for into a free/public repository), Aaron spent a small fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into the public domain. The feds hated this. They smeared him, the FBI investigated him, and for a while, it looked like he'd be on the pointy end of some bad legal stuff, but he escaped it all, and emerged triumphant."
-http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html
Aaron makes a parallel between the Batman movie and his own struggles, highlighting the corruption of the system and how the Joker was actually the only "sane" person in an insane world. Sadly, he decided to pursue the same path as Heath Ledger. -zatara -doktrin
-http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/tdk discussion on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5047421
"Later, I tried to take care of him while he was being destroyed, from inside and out. I struggled so hard, but not as hard as he did. I told him, time and again, that this was his 20s. It would be better in his 30s. Just wait. Please, just hold on."
-His Girlfriend http://www.quinnnorton.com/said/?p=644
Lessons to learn for myself: Depression is a serious issue ... no doubt the Govt case played a big role in his last moments, but so did the little things: previous thoughts of ending life, excessive stress, depression. Love how jacques_chester said below: "Depression is insidious because it makes all the alternatives to suicide seem much more difficult than they actually are." It might be easier to blame one person, than these smaller hard to see things. Things we can find fault in ourselves, and improve, putting bigger focus on these clues and hints of depression that exist in many of our relationships, and other early warning signs.
Aaron Swartz did many amazing and courageous things in his life, and his life was a great service for our nation, but had he lived another day...
I want to end with this word of hope to HN community and others by Pitarou:
"TL;DR If Swartz's death is triggering suicidal thoughts, you must understand that this will pass, and life will be worth living.
After seeing the impact of Aaron Swartz's death on the Hacker News community, I am concerned about the Werther effect (the tendency of a prominent suicide to trigger other suicides). I hope I can help by sharing what I learnt through 10+ years of depression and recovery.
Depression robs you of the ability to: 1. remember happiness 2. feel happiness 3. anticipate happiness 4. make considered decisions
#1-#3 make you miserable, but #4 is the killer. Bits of your brain actually shut down, and you run on pure emotion. For example, when I was depressed, I was easy prey for offers like "4 for the price of 3 on this crappy overpriced chocolate" because I couldn't weigh it up. All I could think was "chocolate: good. 4 for 3: good. 4 for 3 chocolate: irresistible". But if you're running on pure emotion and your emotions tell you "everything sucks" well ... suicide looks like a good option.
So why didn't I kill myself? Somewhere in my guts, there was a stubborn belief that "this will pass". You might even call it a sense of entitlement: "come on world -- you can give me something better than this!" And you know what? It DID! Thanks to some wonderful people, and to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, I found a way to recover.
With the best 10+ years of my life lost to depression, starting from scratch in my 30s has been hard, but it's still a life, and I swear that life is worth more than you can possibly understand when you're depressed.
Even if the assumption were wrong in this particular case, it is a worthwhile discussion to have. Intelligent people doing something relatively harmless being threatened with the possibility of decades in prison means something is very wrong.
Some people commit suicide after breakups --the other person often times feels guilt, yet they are not really guilty in any sense. There is at times a perception, though.
Aaron makes a parallel between the Batman movie and his own struggles, highlighting the corruption of the system and how the Joker was actually the only "sane" person in an insane world. Sadly, he decided to pursue the same path as Heath Ledger.
This whole case really makes me wonder. A lot of people are blaming the DOJ for leveling so many charges against him. Yet when you read the case, it would seem the only entity who wanted to punish him was the government.
Maybe I'm just being optimistic, but with the sum total of evidence, I would have thought he had a better than 70-80% chance of winning outright. The other possibility is he would get a lighter sentence, or simply cop a plea for lesser time. The fact he may or may not felt compelled to take his own life based on what he perceived was going to happen to him is shocking. Instead of playing the hand he was dealt, he simply folded and ended the game.
It makes me wonder what advice people were giving him where he truly believed he was going to jail for the rest of his life. His case could've been a huge landmark case against this sort of unlawful litigation. Sad, really sad.
I asked the lawyers “Suppose that the government’s case is completely frivolous and Swartz is guaranteed to be acquitted. What would he expect to spend in legal fees to defend the case?” They didn’t want to reveal anything particular to Aaron’s case but said “Generally the minimum cost to defend a federal criminal lawsuit is $1.5 million.”
A daunting prospect for anyone. Apparently too daunting for a 26-year-old.
Wow I liked that decription of the movie better than the movie! Its a huge loss to society that he is gone; if the subject matter was not so grave I'd point to the staged suicide reference.... But it is, sadly.
I just want to say the desire to kill oneself does not have to do with outside circumstances. Its the faulure to realize who you really are, it requires a complete living inside the mind, and into believing that your thoughts actually are reality.
Some emerge from wanting to kill themselves enlightened - they realize the true nature of reality before they go through with it. Some of the most potent spiritual leaders today went throught this - Byron Katie, eckhart tolle both wanted to kill themselves.
Others, dont. There is no blame, it does not make it any less sad for those left behind, especially family members; Aaron lives on in all of us who were touched by him. I looked up to him as a hacker, brave hacktivist, and generally kick-ass guy. RIP Aaron.
>Can we stop the speculations until we actually know what happened? :-(
No, because:
1) we'll never know what "really happened" (even if he had left a note stating a reason one can never know if something not mentioned also weighted on him psychologically)
2) speculation is, counter to what some may think, productive. For example, it gets you questioning stuff like the legal system in the comment above.
There is no need to speculate. The DOJ bought by corporate interests is directly responsible for his suicide. They are more worried about protecting corporate interests than worrying about the spirit of law.
> Nobody is directly responsible for Swartz's suicide but Swartz.
Numerous courts around the world have put responsibility on third parties pressuring victims into suicide. Cult gurus pressuring people into (possibly mass) suicides, companies and managers for their employees suicides, and individuals pushing their own parents to commit suicide for will benefits.
Responsibility is a nebulous concept. The extent to which a clinically depressed person (if indeed he was) can be said to "be responsible" for their own suicide is pretty debatable.
Supporting your (hypothetical reasoning, yes), I'd rather say that it is in most cases inexistent (at least from a relevance point of view): the urge can be so overpowering that 'responsibility' becomes almost meaningless.
That is why support is so so so so so so so important.
Actually, I think it's reasonable to say that if someone is so depressed, their responsible diminishes as the pain deepens. It's a terrible thing and if he was unwell he can't really be classed as responsible surely?
There have been a few people in my life who have committed suicide. Knowing what they went through, feeling it a lot myself, it often feels like the only way out, the only way it will bring an end to your pain. It's not true but it feels totally like that, like you have absolutely no option.
Adversity, even extreme adversity, doesn't cause suicide; if it did, many, many people on earth would kill themselves.
I would even argue that it's often the opposite; adversity gives motivation and meaning; meaninglessness is more dangerous.
People I knew who committed suicide did it when they enjoyed a limited level of success. For instance, twenty years ago I was an actor in a play by an author who had been trying to make it for years. This play was a (moderate) success. Two days after the last show, the author jumped out of a window in his grandmother's apartment.
It baffled everyone around him, but I think the reason is that success didn't bring him the joy he thought it would bring. There wasn't anything left to look forward to.
"The criminal investigation and today’s indictment of Mr. Swartz has been directed by the United States Attorney’s Office. It was the government’s decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR’s. As noted previously, our interest was in securing the content. Once this was achieved, we had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter."
So it's not as if anybody outside the government was still pressing charges over this.
Judges, United States Attorneys, they could have all put a stop to this, instead they allowed it to roll on destroying a life in the process, regardless of what Aaron did to himself or not.
Prosecutors can usually act on their own initiative. It's because of the historical legal concept that an offence against a person is really an offence against the Crown. So the Crown takes a legal monopoly on force and logically, this means that the Crown gets to decide what to pursue. The USA inherited this concept from England.
What I was trying to say above is that a prosecutor's goal is to prosecute as many cases as fully as possible. They do not consider whether it is meritorious to pursue a case according to some outside moral standard, that's not their job. Most of the time cases are picked if there's strong evidence.
I know you want to imagine that the DOJ prosecutors were some sort of Disney villains, according to a moral standard that they themselves do not abide by. A good man is dead, we all want somebody to kick.
But the place to make an argument that a case is flawed, or that a case is irrelevant, or repugnant to the letter or the spirit of the law, it's not in the prosecutor's office. It's in front of the judge.
As you can see I'm not a firm believer in the 'this is my job so I do what I'm told' concept.
Everybody - including prosecutors - gets to decide what they do for themselves. If your job is so repugnant that you go after good people you have to question your own morality. Just following orders isn't good enough for me.
That you have a different criteria for what cases to prosecute doesn't make them evil.
Oh, but it does -- it makes them morally questionable in -- at least -- jacquesm's eyes (note, he didn't use the term "evil").
How else would you decide that someone's actions are morally dubious, other than using your own moral criteria? By consulting a lawyer? Running a popular vote?
> They would have been doing what they think is the _right thing_ to do: prosecute suspects aggressively
Or the "thing" that improves their career, or annual review.
Let's see: Essentially defenseless hacker-type, historical success of draconian prosecution strategies, and penalties /way/ outside the realm of reason because of fanned-up hyperbole, fear and misunderstanding in the criminal justice system.
Low-hanging fruit, to a prosecutor. Three before breakfast every day. Aaron probably did not _matter_ once he was in the system.
Cases won versus cases lost. In this one, we all lost.
> What I was trying to say above is that a prosecutor's goal is to prosecute as many cases as fully as possible. They do not consider whether it is meritorious to pursue a case according to some outside moral standard, that's not their job.
I have no idea what the situation is in the US. But here in England that's just not true.
The CPS (Crown Prosecution Service)'s job is not to bring all the prosecutions that it believes it can win. It's to bring all prosecutions that it believes it can win that it's in the public interest to be brought. (http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/code_for_crown_prosecutor...)
The result is that CPS discretion is an important part of the system. And has the side-effect that the legislature has less incentive to narrow the scope of offences, since they believe (rightly or wrongly) they can rely on the CPS to not bring prosecutions where it wouldn't make sense to do so.
(Hence e.g. there's little pressure to amend the Sexual Offences Act with US-style 'romeo and juliet' laws to protect teenage couples who are technically both sexually assaulting each other, since the CPS guidelines (http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/p_to_r/rape_and_sexual_offences/...) in practice have the same effect).
Whether this system is better or worse than one where the prosecutor doesn't use discretion, but offences are defined more strictly, is an interesting discussion.
The situation in the US is this: prosecutors advance their careers by winning cases. It makes no difference whether or not the cases serve the public interest or even if those who are convicted are guilty. There are a lot of people in America -- possibly a majority -- who love the "law and order" approach to government and who will vote for a lawyer-turned-politician who runs on a right-wing platform and points to his history of throwing people in prison. If you want to see just how out-of-control this can get, read about the Kern County child sex abuse prosecutions from the 1980s, where one prosecutor proudly put dozens of innocent men and women in prison for crimes that never happened.
There is also an established system of prosecuting people the government does not like, and of robbing them of their ability to build a good defense -- usually by freezing their assets before they have been convicted, and building enormous cases against them that overwhelm their attorneys. I suspect Swartz was a victim of these tactics, probably because the government wanted to drive home the message that human knowledge must remain locked behind university firewalls and that hacking is a heinous offense. I would not put it past them to include Swartz' suicide in future propaganda about copyrights, as evidence that copyright infringement leads people to depression and suicide.
> an offence against a person is really an offence against the Crown
This is also common sense. If not, it would be difficult to prosecute murderers, since the victim doesn't exist anymore. It would be next to impossible to prosecute murderers of people who have no family and no friends.
In the actual UK, the "public interest" is the decider of whether the state prosecutes when it has enough evidence. The way you phrase it, you make it sound like the only criterion is likelyhood of conviction (i.e. strength of evidence).
A prosecutor's duty and role is to seek justice[0]. Justice isn't always black and white, but it certainly isn't applying the toughest charges that could possibly be made to stick nor seeking the highest possible penalty in every case. The prosecutor should attempt to determine what a just outcome to a case would be, then seek to achieve it.
I would agree with you if the separation of powers would work flawlessly, but it seems to me that even in many modern democracies, prosecutors have the means to do things that are quite punishing.
It's called activism. Sometimes bad laws must be resisted, by breaking them deliberately.
The best among us do it in public, under their own names, daring the state to make good on their threats.
The law is not a unitary piece. Were Aaron's case to proceed to its natural conclusion, the courts might have found that higher principles override the civil agreements that he was charged with breaking.
And even when the courts are of no avail - when the basic procedures and principles of the state are corrupt - then it is up to activists to fight that corruption, and one way is through the theatre of breaking the law in public.
The parent is narrow, but you beat him up with a position which is also contestable.
For some people, obedience to the law and its flaws, is itself a virtue because of the net win we all have by having a strong rule of law. Others are outraged at abusive exercises of power and find virtue in any struggle against it, even obligation. Others are indifferent to the system and focus on practical experiences. I think when you understand the way that different positions are built up, it's easier not to be heated about this.
If you hit someone with enough felony counts sooner or later something can snap.
There are the conditions for suicide, and then there's the impulse that drives it to happen. The first is visible and appears over a long period of time-- felony convictions, mental instability, or extreme career adversity-- but it never seems that things are that bad (especially because a lot of people refuse to admit that good things can happen to bad people). The second is fairly sudden and seems "random". This is why suicides are so unexpected. A person can seem to be "not that bad off" one day, and the next day, commit suicide.
The scary thing is that the first kind of conditions are being more common. We have:
* draconian sentences for minor crimes, including drug possession, white-hat hacking, and file sharing,
* an increasing willingness of corporations to use extreme and illegal career adversity (e.g. blacklisting) against whistleblowers,
* increasing difficulty for a person to "re-invent" him- or herself in the wake of a bad reputation.
Thirty years ago, if your life got fucked up, you could pull a Don Draper. You could pay people off to represent themselves as past employers and reconstruct your career under an alternate name, and move halfway across the country. (I don't consider this unethical in the context of radical reinvention, providing that you're not feigning competences you lack or defrauding people.) In 2013, that's becoming increasingly hard to do.
"Thirty years ago, if your life got fucked up, you could pull a Don Draper. You could pay people off to represent themselves as past employers and reconstruct your career under an alternate name, and move halfway across the country. In 2013, that's becoming increasingly hard to do."
You can still do that today although agreed it is much harder. You could simply buy someone's company for example with a history and claim that is where you were (and modify the website with the appropriate collateral.) You can fairly quickly setup a linked in profile and get lots of contacts of people in any industry that you don't even know (source: I get people writing to me wanting to be a linked in contact constantly as I'm sure most people do.)
There are people that actually have an inventory of old websites that have been around since the 90's (and domains registered back then) representing a wide range of industries.
That said this is not as easy and of course if someone does a really through vetting much will be uncovered. But how often is that done?
If you hit someone with enough felony counts sooner or later something can snap. This in response to those that claim the DOJ didn't have anything to do with Aaron killing himself.
For some people the mere fact of being suspected of a crime they didn't commit is enough to push them over the edge. When you're placed in a holding cell the police will remove your laces from your boots so you don't hang yourself, that's how heavy being imprisoned can weigh on some.
Aaron did something that he thought was right, that he truly believed in and that upset a large number of applecarts and that had far reaching implications, had the proverbial book thrown at him and then some. The prospect of significant amounts of jail time (35 years for downloading scientific papers, it shouldn't even be a crime) and/or a felony record must have weighed very heavy on him.
For a person that is of a very stable mental make-up that would already be extreme pressure.
For someone with a mental issue it may very well be all it takes.
Aaron was inspiring to me, I think that no copyrighted piece of paper is worth a human life and that the DOJ, even if they are not directly responsible at least indirectly carry some of the responsibility here for beating down someone who was fighting for an extremely good cause in a somewhat haphazard way. The letter of the law and the spirit of the law should both be taken into account.
I hope those that had a hand in Aarons' continued prosecution will sleep miserably for a long time to come. Likely it won't weigh on their consciousness at all.