donald trump gets 10 warnings for intimidating witnesses and indefinite trial postponement for hoarding and most likely leaking classified documents. Sweet sweet justice.
People keep trying to convince me it’s not evidence of two justice systems.
But it is.
It’s evidence that we live in corporatocracies masquerading as “democracies”. The 0.1%, shielded by the liability protections of the corporations they own, and their armies of lobbyists — they finance our politics, choose who ends up on the ballot, and shadow write most of our legislation, policies, and regulations.
Trump is free because he is a part of that < 0.1%.
The Boeing execs who oversaw systemic fraud, lied to the FAA, and murdered 166 people still ARE FREE AND RICH. Why? Because they are the 0.1%.
The IPCC hosts fossil fuelled climate summits in fossil fuel exporting countries, inviting fossil fuel corporations and lobbyists to attend — at a scientific conference about how to solve the crisis they created and profited from! why? Because we live in corporatocracies.
For the record, Aaron Swartz never actually went to trial, nor was he “sentenced” to anything.
Federal prosecutors came after him with overzealous charges in an effort to make him accept a plea deal (they do that a lot), which he rejected. It would have gone to court where the feds would have had to justify the charges they were bringing.
But that never happened because he killed himself.
We don’t actually know how this all would have played out.
The comment in OPs post is misleading but he did nevertheless kill himself because of the justice system trying to prosecute him for accessing science most likely funded by public money in the first place.
And will never know, selfishly speaking, the possible extent of his further contributions to society. Died at 26 after an incredible life already.
Besides his life, what else did they steal from us?
RIP Aaron
Look, the kid was a hero, but this is also patently false.
He was not sentenced to 35 years. The trial hadn’t started. 35 years was the maximum possible sentence. He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected.
We don’t need to spin lies to make his story more tragic than it already is.
35 years max, plea for 1/2 that was rejected. He was going to get the book thrown at him to make an example. 5 years minimum but I wouldn’t doubt 10-20.
The rapist traitor that headed a insurrection on Jan 6 2021 has never spent a day in jail and is still the frontrunner for president to be legally elected in 2024.
plea for 1/2 that was rejected
The rejected plea was for 6 months.
6 months is 1/2 of a year.
While that is true.
“1/2 that” would imply 1/2 of 35 years or 17.5 years.
He committed the idealist’s perennial sin: He thought that because the system is bullshit, it’s okay not to play ball with it.
“Hey this is a bunch of crap. I can be guilty or innocent, and the right move is always to plead guilty even if I didn’t do a damn thing wrong, because if I try to fight the case they’re gonna tack on a ton of new charges and they almost always win and I might go away for most of my life.”
“Preach.”
“I’m gonna plead not guilty because I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“No no no no no that is not the way to reform the system no no no that is a bad mistake”
Aaron Swartz was a fuckin hero. Read his posthumous book, it is wonderful. But the same idealism and faith that led him to the good things he did in his painfully short time here, also led him not to understand how to engage with the US federal government and keep your skin.
also he worked with wikileaks… i think he was named as a source posthumously…
he also wrote an open source system of servers that function exactly like wikileaks submission system (actually i think it is, given clues as to how it operates… like the manning chat logs)
dead drop is now called “open drop” and powers every major newspaper’s leak submission system…he was murdered.
not only the did it make no sense, given the 6 month plea bargain option, but he was an outspoken activist and would’ve at least left a note… in the form of some post online…
For bulk downloading science journals he had access to.
for breaking and entering*
and DoS
Articles paid for by the public through grants btw
With authors often paying for open access publications literally out of their very own money, not just grants.
Not at the time this happened. Aaron’s case was one of the motivating factors that led to the Open Access publication movement gaining enough traction that authors could publish that way. JSTOR access is paid for and administered on college campuses by libraries and librarians as a whole field felt terrible both about the paid publication system and the way Aaron was treated. As a community of professionals, the Librarian and Information Science community pushed very hard for the adoption of Open Access publishing into the Academic community.
Shout out to Alexandra elbakyan. She continues part of aaron’s work by running sci-hub and libgen, but lives safely out of reach of the american criminal “justice” system 💔
If I remember correctly, it wasn’t even illegal since these scientific articles should have been public to begin with because they used public funds.
That may be so, but IIRC he was charged with breaking into MIT’s networking room and illegally tapping into their network to get the articles:
That also may be so, but 35 years is fucked up for that. pretty sure child porn first time offenders is like 15 to 30 so hacking MIT for stuff that should have been free gets you more jail time then a first CP offence. OK thats fucked up
He was a defender of child porn though.
https://web.archive.org/web/20031229025933/http:/bits.are.notabug.com/
OK a reason to not like him but sending him to prison for his views that he didnt act on sounds like fasicm lol I dont agree with his views just saying
Assuming this is actually by the guy, here is what the linked article says about child porn:
In the US, it is illegal to possess or distribute child pornography, apparently because doing so will encourage people to sexually abuse children.
This is absurd logic. Child pornography is not necessarily abuse. Even if it was, preventing the distribution or posession of the evidence won’t make the abuse go away. We don’t arrest everyone with videotapes of murders, or make it illegal for TV stations to show people being killed.
Wired has an article on how these laws destroy honest people’s lives.
Child pornography is not necessarily abuse.
Yikes.
An image of an event is not the event. That’s the reasoning there. There’s some sense of logic there, though the knowledge their abuse is used by pedophiles can absolutely be a continuing trauma for the victims.
Well that’s definitely burying the lede from the OP.
It wasn’t the sharing part they had a problem with, it was the B&E and hacking.
He didn’t even share them as far as I know, he just downloaded them. And the trial hadn’t started yet when he committed suicide.
He didn’t get the chance to share them because he was caught downloading them, and his download requests were getting blocked.
And to be clear, he wasn’t downloading from the Internet as one might download a car, he went into a restricted networking closet and connected directly to the switch, leaving a computer sitting there sending access requests. He had to keep going back to it to check on the progress, which is when they caught him.
And the trial hadn’t started yet when he committed suicide.
Yeah, I agree with the sentiment of the post, but this is just wildly misleading. He was not sentenced to anything, he committed suicide before the trial.
He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected, in an effort to make the feds justify the ludicrous charges they were pressing. Had it gone to trial, he certainly wouldn’t have been found not guilty, but it’s unlikely many of those charges would have stuck. It’s extremely unlikely he would actually have served 35 years.
Downloading isn’t a crime, is it?
He was being charged under the CFAA, a hacking criminal statute that prohibits unauthorized access to computer systems. It was controversially being stretched to cover Aaron’s conduct that violated TOS by an ambitious prosecutor.
Are TOS violations felonies now?
If you want to read about how we got into this fucked up situation I’d recommend The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling (a notorious cyberpunk sf writer among other things) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/101
Yes, technically any TOS violation is one ambitious prosecutor away from a felony, thanks to the CFAA.
You wouldn’t download a car would you??
https://www.printables.com/search/models?q=Car
Come on, you know you want to.
bits are not bugs
I never heard of this guy before today. What a goat RIP AARON SCHWARTZ
There’s a good behind the bastards episode on him (a good guy holiday episode; he’s not a bastard)
That’s not exactly what happened.
Aaron committed suicide before his case went to trial, and so he was never convicted let alone sentenced. 35 years was never even likely; had it gone to trial there’s every reason to think he’d have been acquitted outright, or at worst given a slap on the wrist. Not that he should have even been charged, of course.
Well now I’ve got two competing claims, and I can’t believe either one until I see the authoritative history on it
There’s a documentary on YouTube called “The internet’s own boy”, if you want to learn more. Basically, he was offered a 6 month plea, but he would be a convicted felon, and basic logic/morality tells you that you shouldn’t plead guilty to a crime that you didn’t commit. However, the justice system is very imperfect, and often people plead guilty for reduced sentencing even if they’re not guilty. He stood on principle until his legs gave out. they were already in millions spent in attorney fees. Not a shred of justice can be found in how Aaron’s story ended.
