Aaron Swartz Could Have Killed Someone, Robbed A Bank & Sold Child Porn & Faced Less Time In Prison
from the the-system,-she-is-broken dept
Among the many injustices in the Justice Department's pursuit of Aaron Swartz was the disproportionate punishment he was facing. Remember that he used an open network connection at MIT, which explicitly allowed free guest access, to download academic research papers that were available for free for any user on that particular network. And yet, due to the US Attorney's Office led by Carmen Ortiz and Steve Heymann piling on additional charges, Swartz was potentially facing 50 years in prison.Yes, reports claimed that Heymann offered to plea bargain things down to a mere 7 years in prison, but that's still an insane length, and by rejecting such a plea offer, Swartz guaranteed that Heymann was likely to throw the book at him and seek the maximum. That's how they work.
Over at ThinkProgress, Ian Millhiser, looks at the maximum jail terms for other crimes, and wonders how it's possible that Swartz had the potential to spend even more years in jail. It's quite a list, and you should go check out the full thing, but here are a few of the more interesting ones:
- Manslaughter: Federal law provides that someone who kills another human being “[u]pon a sudden quarrel or heat of passion” faces a maximum of 10 years in prison if subject to federal jurisdiction. The lesser crime of involuntary manslaughter carries a maximum sentence of only six years.
- Bank Robbery: A person who “by force and violence, or by intimidation” robs a bank faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. If the criminal “assaults any person, or puts in jeopardy the life of any person by the use of a dangerous weapon or device,” this sentence is upped to a maximum of 25 years.
- Selling Child Pornography: The maximum prison sentence for a first-time offender who “knowingly sells or possesses with intent to sell” child pornography in interstate commerce is 20 years. Significantly, the only way to produce child porn is to sexually molest a child, which means that such a criminal is literally profiting off of child rape or sexual abuse.
- Knowingly Spreading AIDS: A person who “after testing positive for the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and receiving actual notice of that fact, knowingly donates or sells, or knowingly attempts to donate or sell, blood, semen, tissues, organs, or other bodily fluids for use by another, except as determined necessary for medical research or testing” faces a maximum of 10 years in prison.
- Selling Slaves: Under federal law, a person who willfully sells another person “into any condition of involuntary servitude” faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years, although the penalty can be much higher if the slaver’s actions involve kidnapping, sexual abuse or an attempt to kill.
- Helping al-Qaeda Develop A Nuclear Weapon: A person who “willfully participates in or knowingly provides material support or resources . . . to a nuclear weapons program or other weapons of mass destruction program of a foreign terrorist power, or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be imprisoned for not more than 20 years.”
- Violence At International Airports: Someone who uses a weapon to “perform[] an act of violence against a person at an airport serving international civil aviation that causes or is likely to cause serious bodily injury” faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years if their actions do not result in a death.
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Filed Under: aaron swartz, sentencing
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Something IS very wrong with the whole thing.
It was plain and clear revenge on him for his activism. And probably an attempt to make him an example to be used on more unconstitutional, draconian laws dealing with technology by telling people "see? advocates of free speech and against overreaching laws are bad criminals".
Those attorneys may be eventually removed from their jobs if popular pressure mounts but without broad and intense protesting against the system that leads to such abuses they'll only be replaced by other faces that will still do the same.
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"he wasn't going to get the max"
Except that's part of the problem. The prosecutor uses the insane "not gunna happen" maximum to intimidate and railroad suspects. And believe it or not, sometimes they DO get the max. And even if he didn't get the max, he'd still be labeled a felon, as if he were some violent murderer.
There had to be some motive on the part of the prosecutor to do this. The injured party even asked that the case dropped, and yet the prosecutor continued. Why? Who stood to gain from this?
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Re: "he wasn't going to get the max"
I hope (hope, hope!) that instead it becomes a lesson to the government that this isn't some disconnected pre-industrial situation where information can be controlled, corralled and exploited by the privileged few. You cannot will facts out of existence and spreading ideas is not a crime.
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Re: "he wasn't going to get the max"
"Swartz's attorney was lobbying for the following deal:
Plead guilty to a misdemeanor
No jail time
The prosecutors, meanwhile, were insisting on:
Plead guilty to all 13 felonies
4 months in jail".....
"Swartz's other option, meanwhile, was defending himself. Although Swartz's lawyer believes he had a good case, and although he would probably have been a sympathetic defendant, he obviously could have lost. And if he had lost, he would have been convicted of at least some of the felonies and gone to jail for much longer than four months. (The prosecutor's estimate, Swartz's lawyer told the Daily Beast, was 7 years--because the judge in the case is known for harsh sentences."
So it appears that he was looking at 4 months on a plea and was risking up to 7 years if he went to trial and lost.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/aaron-swartz-plea-deal-2013-1#ixzz2I4KY3gFM
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Re: "he wasn't going to get the max"
The prosecutors stood to gain. Maybe they wanted a promotion, and they need to show felony convictions. Maybe they have political ambitions and need to point to their "tough on crime" or "tough on white collar crime" to get elected. Maybe they wanted a case to point to against "those hacker kids" so they can get a job at a lobbyist firm for the copyright cartel.
Instead of looking at the facts, instead of being fair, instead of using discretion, there was some motive for them not to be reasonable. Whatever the motive, it ends up at either they were corrupt or stupid, and we lost an incredibly promising person.
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The really amazing thing is...
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Re: The really amazing thing is...
And it's because they thought they knew the rules and they figured out how to break them for profit (Hollywood accounting, unfavorable contracts for artists and actors, lawyer tricks, lobbying to buy legislation) and then a new generation of upstart tech-savvy kids comes along and undermines the power they've built up by shifting the paradigms so that the old standbys such as being able to artificially limit and legally control copying aren't as powerful as they once were.
They were the old pirates that became the establishment and they hate it when young punk pirates think they know how to game the system that they created, despite the fact that they gamed the system that was created before them.
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Re: The really amazing thing is...
In computer-related crimes, it is over time and you are therefore stacking up charges for a single crime. On top of that several different charges can apply to a single case.
If the bankrubber had to go to jail for illegal weapon posession, threats, endangerment, several accounts of theft, threspassing, and potentially violence and several other charges depending on the situation, he would also face a far higher sentence than he gets for a single bankrubbery charge. That is the real problem here. That the single charges have a pretty high end penalty in itself is of lesser importance to the case.
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It was an animation using implicit surfaces.
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Re: Re: The really amazing thing is...
Steal 10,000 in 20's, that's 500 counts of robber. Stacked.
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Re: The really amazing thing is...
There is a another, even larger, percentage who are essentially passive. They don't pay attention to details and tend to have a rose-tinted view of institutions like our Justice System. They vaguely support whatever their mainstream media outlet of choice supports.
Perhaps only 5% of the public actually care about legal principals, proportionate punishment and similar issues.
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Re: The really amazing thing is...
The government, regardless of whoever is currently in charge, are far more loyal to the corporations, than the people they are supposed to represent.
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Re: Re: The really amazing thing is...
Correction: it supposedly hurts them, but this has never been proven and in fact many studies show that "pirates" also spend the most money on content.
One of the most problematic things is that the corporations have *claimed* that this is destroying their businesses but have never proven it beyond a vague correlation - e.g. music album sales dropped in the period since Napster, but there's 100 other possible factors ranging from competition from videogames and other media to unbundling having made the album itself obsolete in favour of much lower revenue single content. In some cases, even the correlation isn't there - e.g. box office grosses being at an all time high at the same time studios that whine about lost sales through piracy.
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i sincerely hope that his passing will not be in vain but i fear the control that has been afforded to the labels, the studios and similar organisations by unthinking, uncaring and 'i am so keen to do what you want me to, sir, that i am falling over backwards to screw the public as well' politicians and law enforcement, they are going to ignore this tragedy and try to tighten their grip even more, adding further stupid laws along the way! this is an ideal opportunity for EVERYONE to learn. dont throw it away!!
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So it is the entertainment industry behind this? You truly are delusional.
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The other AC did not say that the "entertainment industry" was directly behind this. Clearly stated "in his case, why were the documents that were already in 'the public domain' still only available if money changed hands?" The crux of the argument was that the punishments Swartz faced were due to the many laws the entertainment industry passed over the years.
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Most of the serious charges were under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. That is not an entertainment industry bill. Which entertainment industry bills was he charged under? Sounds like the crux of the argument is bullshit.
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It remains unclear the motivations for the prosecutor bullying in this particular (Swartz) situation, though. What is clear is that it should not have happened.
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It sure as hell wasn't free to generate that research. Why shouldn't you assume a small portion of the cost?
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so why should we have to pay twice?
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...
It sure as hell wasn't free to generate that research. Why shouldn't you assume a small portion of the cost?"
He did. Part of his tax dollars went to pay for the grants that bought the equipment and paid the researchers' salaries. Now the publishers (who neither did the actual research work nor wrote up the results) want another $25 to let him see the papers. The publishers are just gatekeepers, just like the legacy entertainment industry.
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Really? JSTOR doesn't include scholarly works of private institutions? Nice try.
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It sure as hell wasn't free to generate that research. Why shouldn't you assume a small portion of the cost?
Really, journals fund research of private institutions ? Nice try.
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There is almost no such thing as a private institution in research. Those that do exist do not receive any money from the journal publishers - because
1 They tend to keep their research to themselves.
2 The form of IP that they use to monetise their work is patent - not copyright.
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why shouldn't you assume a portion of the cost and pay me five minutes out of your own lifetime?
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It's mostly due to the legacy journal publishing industry. If I understand it correctly, they basically sold the prestige of being "published" in exchange for exclusive publishing rights, which they then used to charge huge subscription fees to few institutions that had both the interest in the field and the money to afford the fees. All this, of course, only makes sense in the context of the pre-digital era, where publishers were effectively the only way to disseminate information. Their only effective competition was other publishers. In the of case of fringe interest, such as technical and research papers, the competition would only have been other journal publishers. Even though they could legally reprint papers that were in the public domain, they did not have any interest in poaching each others articles. They effectively had exclusive rights, even over public domain documents, and could charge through the nose for them. Now, with the advent of the Internet, anyone with even passing interest can distribute these works.
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Court documents are public domain by nature, but are kept from the public by a paywall.
JSTOR, on the other hand, is a repository for various articles provided to it by researchers and publishers. They make note on the JSTOR site that they have both copyrighted and public domain materials.
So while JSTOR articles may have been produced in part from public money, they are not part of the public domain unless specifically released as such.
That's all from me now. Carry on.
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Ordinary laws are only designed to protect ordinary citizens. That's not nearly as important.
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sad we still haven't advanced past medieval times when it comes to laws and power
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See also: Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono
Surprised anyone here needs this citation.
I too had a time getting past the public outcry part though.
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These laws were put in place because of corporate influence.
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According to WSJ article -- Plea deal was 6-8 months (not years) of jail if he plead guilty to all counts. 7 years was the punishment the prosecutor said they would seek if they indeed went to trial.
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So, the point is that to exercise his right to a trial, he risked a disproportionate penalty if found guilty - 50 years - or perhaps 7 years if the prosecution kept their promise. You think the prosecution would have kept that promise when one of the leaders of the SOPA protest was found guilty of computer hacking? Yea, right.
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http://mashable.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-plea-deal/
That's a far cry from saying that that they offered him 4-6 months.
And for the record, I never said they didn't offer him that. I said that from what I had seen at that point all of the quotes about 4-8 month plea offers were statements that came AFTER the fact and not from Peters. Which is easy for them to claim now that they are facing a shit storm over this.
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http://www.boston.com/metrodesk/2013/01/14/mit-hacking-case-lawyer-says-aaron-swartz-was- offered-plea-deal-six-months-behind-bars/hQt8sQI64tnV6FAd7CLcTJ/story.html
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http://www.wral.com/swartz-death-fuels-debate-over-computer-crime/11974285/
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One day is too much if I am to still be labeled a criminal.
For copying publicly funded papers that are in the public domain.
Now we have a clear case of how copyright harms society and stifles innovation.
I used to say take it back to it's original terms, now I say take it back.
There is no benefit.
Next great invention? "First!" Seems to be all the incentive needed.
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That is just so fair and just. /s
16,000 People Are Asking President Obama To Fire Aaron Swartz's Prosecutor
Petition
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A little HTML fail there.
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https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/fire-assistant-us-attorney-steve-heymann/RJKSY2 nb
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/posthumously-pardon-aaron-swartz/DVpdmSBj
Off topic:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/outlaw-and-revoke-all-patents-naturally-occurrin g-molecules/jNqJkmYf
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/make-distributed-denial-service-dd os-legal-form-protesting/X3drjwZY
. . . and others
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US Attorney's Office are probably fans of ideas described in Fahrenheit 451, since they view accessing knowledge as a really terrible crime. After all knowledge can make people think... Surprisingly they didn't propose to burn JSTOR down yet, just in case.
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Computer = Magic
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Re: Computer = Magic
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That's kind of inaccurate. There are other ways, as we know it. One can just draw a picture - that would be enough...
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or take a picture of yourzelf on your own phone and text it to one of your classmates. or edit a pic in photoshop. or draw a picture. just correctin your bull
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Apple to Apples Comparison
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Re: Apple to Apples Comparison
The fact that so many counts were applicable on paper is part of what makes this case so ridiculous.
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This is all coming out now because he seems to have an unusually high profile in being extremely aggressive.
It's kind of like a redwood... The bigger they are, the harder they fall. I think the damage over this suicide is going to be devastating.
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This is all coming out now because he seems to have an unusually high profile in being extremely aggressive.
It's kind of like a redwood... The bigger they are, the harder they fall. I think the damage over this suicide is going to be devastating.
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Though I absolutely agree that the maximum penalties that could be imposed by sentencing even combined is and would be excessive if anyone was given them by a sentencing court after being found guilty on all counts in reference to the charges Aaron was charged with.
Though they were property/infrastructure charges that have always historically had greater sentences than most personal violence offences. ie: Common Assault (non violent causing no lasting damage) has always been less than common theft in most common law (based on original English law) countries. It's without going into the history basically to do with property owned by the sovereign compared to the personal body/self of the common serf.
Sentencing though has always been a strange phenomenon that is highly unpredictable (to an extent) everywhere in common law countries especially if the court has discretion and is guided by community mores, character, previous history of criminality, mental health, family & community ties, etcetera (the list is huge) and not by what a maximum can be (and no more). It's rare you see MUST be X number of years/months on penalties.
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And how is an act of causing "serious bodily injury", noting that the only thing special about it is that it occurred on an airport(seriously why is this special at all? As far as I am concerned civil workers are no more or less human beings than anyone else who happen to be seriously wounded? Someone explain please) , more of a crime than for example giving people AIDs, assuming here that AIDS "is likely to cause serious bodily injury" just as well if not more?
The list of crimes and how society punishes them is a bigger issue then what you are pointing out, it seems, just hope people realize that justice systems world wide are pretty much jokes that for the most part are broken and or don't work, the list, more than the article, makes the case nicely.
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That is simply untrue. The deal on the table was for 4 months. The prosecutor advised Swartz attorney that he'd likely get 7 years if he went to trial and lost. Seems like the facts don't square with your position. Sorry.
http://www.businessinsider.com/aaron-swartz-plea-deal-2013-1#ixzz2I4KY3gFM
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Even if he accepted the plea, he'd still be a convicted felon. [b]Which is a big deal.[/b]
Regardless, the article is pointing out the ridiculousness of the term he faced in comparison to other, more heinous crimes.
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cruel and unusual punishment
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Re: cruel and unusual punishment
I want to reiterate for those of you who are young and idealistic - find a way to live on and fight another day. It is very clear that our current regime is evil. It does not necessarily follow that there is no hope. Please hang in there.
The only real harm Aaron ever did was to himself and the ones he cared about. You don't win by destroying yourself and breaking the hearts of your family, your friends, and your allies
I don't mean this as a judgement against Aaron. I mean it as a hopeful call to others to resist the temptation to capitulate.
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That doesn't actually change anything. Taking files that were free to anyone on the MIT campus, from publicly funded research studies, can create a situation that is more negative to society than murder or selling child pornography?
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Murder, robbing a bank, selling child porn, and even helping terrorists get their hands on nuclear weapons has a FINITE amount of ECONOMIC damage! Banks only have so much money to steal! Murder victims only have so much lifetime economic value!
But IP papers he stole! PRICELESS!!! Those papers he stole are worth terrorists with their hands on 100 nuclear weapons! Because terrorists can ONLY do a a few dozen BILLION dollars of economic damage with a nuclear weapon! Giving away IP for FREE however, could undermine the ENTIRE IP system, and destroy TRILLIONS in wealth if that knowledge were actually SHARED!!!
The horror!!!
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http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
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II(a) He was accessing an open computer system through a guest account. MIT keeps the network open, allowing this sort of access. It seems unclear how his access could be unauthorized on a system specifically designed to freely give anyone that authorization. Since MIT was a JSTOR client, giving that access to anyone legally accessing their network, I really find the argument presented to be difficult to sustain.
II(c) First, he didn't 'break into a restricted closet.' There was no breaking involved, as it was unlocked and openly accessible. Knowing nothing specifically about the JSTOR site, I cannot know for fact that he didn't just use a common password linked to the MIT account. Considering that there was no hacking involved, and only simple scripting to use common command line commands, I find that argument to be weak.
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II(a) He was accessing an open computer system through a guest account. MIT keeps the network open, allowing this sort of access. It seems unclear how his access could be unauthorized on a system specifically designed to freely give anyone that authorization. Since MIT was a JSTOR client, giving that access to anyone legally accessing their network, I really find the argument presented to be difficult to sustain.
II(c) First, he didn't 'break into a restricted closet.' There was no breaking involved, as it was unlocked and openly accessible. Knowing nothing specifically about the JSTOR site, I cannot know for fact that he didn't just use a common password linked to the MIT account. Considering that there was no hacking involved, and only simple scripting to use common command line commands, I find that argument to be weak.
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Right, a bunch of law professors. What do they know.
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We can all be forgiven, I hope, for being more fond of lawyers who use their expertise for the good than those who make excuses for evil.
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Actually they know a lot. They are really quite scary for how much they know, how smart they are, yet how blind they are. It is wise to study the ways of the adversary. Many of the finest rationalizations for the ascendance of property rights to dominion over human rights can be found there yet every once in a while they are genuinely right about something. The world is a strange place.
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I see, so you somehow know better.
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Terms of Service
Part of the "unauthorized access" discussion seems to be that the gentleman writing the article doesn't seem to know the difference between stealing someone's password and changing your own IP address in terms of whether you gained "unauthorized access". Passwords designate authority. IP addresses do not.
All of this to say, Aaron had authorized access by dint of being on the MIT network. He attempted to violate the terms of service. This is not a crime. Period. End of story. Stop lying.
The guy has been dealing with this law for years. I get that he seems to you to gain some credibility because of that, but any lawyer has a vested interest in making the law and its mechanisms seem reasonable. The man is attempting to blur the line between malignant attempts at theft or damage and violating a terms of service agreement.
The typical punishment for violating a terms of service agreement is to not be allowed to use the service, and neither MIT nor JSTOR seemed interested in bothering with it.
Your government, on the other hand, wanted blood. This, in no small part, is the fault of you and people like you who stubbornly defend the indefensible. They get away with murder because no one stands up to them like men and says, "no farther."
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Re: Terms of Service
My essential fault with Kerr's reasoning falls when he cites the Seidlitz as justification. In Seidlitz (according to Kerr) the reason that WYLBUR became "property" was that it had been "customized" for OSI's purposes and therefore was transformed from something that was previously in the public domain into something that OSI owned. Yet he fails to explain how the public documents that were simply being made available through JSTOR's database were in ANYWAY "transformed" such that they should be considered JSTOR's property. If anything this case supports the idea that this was NOT wire fraud as the implication from Seidlitz is that if WYLBUR had not been transformed into OSI's property then there would have been no fraud.
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i hope the Kopimism religion in Sweden adopts him as their version of Jesus
i shit you not, i actually want that to happen, and i don't know why
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal
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That's probably per count, so if the guy was selling five video tapes, he'd probably get 100 years. Any time CP is involved, they like to pile on as many charges as possible in the hopes of keeping someone locked up for the rest of their lives.
Helping al-Qaeda Develop A Nuclear Weapon: A person who �willfully participates in or knowingly provides material support or resources . . . to a nuclear weapons program or other weapons of mass destruction program of a foreign terrorist power, or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be imprisoned for not more than 20 years.�
Violence At International Airports: Someone who uses a weapon to �perform[] an act of violence against a person at an airport serving international civil aviation that causes or is likely to cause serious bodily injury� faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years if their actions do not result in a death.
Actually, thanks to the NDAA, you'd probably spend the rest of your life in some nameless hole in the ground.
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WHAT THE FUCK...
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Preaching to the Choir
A.k.a. overpriced hosting because peer to peer file sharing works too well and they can't make a metric tone of cash off of it.
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Orin Kerr
Not sure why that dood dislikes that site....
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Torture your underage sex slave, get 20yr. Release documents, get 35yr�
-gumnos
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This is Aaron Swartz we're talking about...
If he actually had robbed a bank or done any of the other things in the list, you could almost be certain that they would add a whole bunch of bogus charges against him to make sure he would get potentially locked up for life anyway...
US "justice" is scary, and I don't think I'll ever dare set my foot on US soil now. It seems more like a legal minefield from here.
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Clearly, this incident was not the only reason why he took his life, he was clearly a troubled person. It is NOT ANYONE'S FAULT he killed himself, except for one person HIMSELF. It's the cowards way out, he was briefly mentioned on the news here in Australia, but no mention of this charges, so he has most certain NOT become a role model for his cause.
Trying to put the blame on the Government or the legal system is stupid, they did not hang him, and he had 'ways out' that certainly are better than death.
In killing himself he has left behind many, MANY victims who will probably NEVER recover from it.
Again, he's a coward who is now responsible for a lot of people having significant pain and suffering that HE ALONE is responsible for causing.
It's disgusting for you, and Masnick to say "at least something good may come of it" sure, way to promote others to do the same stupid and highly selfish as of killing yourself.
NOTHING GOOD COMES FROM SUICIDE, and to try to make out otherwise shows the depth's Masnick will go to put his 'message' across.
I also not how nice Masnick was about providing this poor person some honour in death.. NO not a fucking work, All masnick wants to do on the back of this human tragedy is to get some mileage from it.
And he could not even do that right. New all time low for Masnick and his cult followers.
What next Masnick, how low can you go ?
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Re:
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Don't Mess with Academia
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This has happened before
Though on the positive side, making every crime a serious offense is how Australia was created.
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