As much as I try to admire Anonymous's efforts, their missives, like this one, convey an incredible sense of being tippy-top full of themselves. For every valid point they make, they seem to make multiples that sound like the anti-RIAA rants of a few years back that boil down to "I'm a broke college student and therefore I shouldn't have to pay anything for music."

I am still unclear on why I am supposed to mourn Aaron Swartz. He poked a tiger in the ass and, rather predictably, got mauled pretty good. I am sorry when anyone too young to see through their problems opts for the egress, but I don't see how his not being strong enough to stand up to the storm he created is a separate and special tragedy caused by government jackboots.

It is a matter of proportionality, doubtless enshrined somewhere in the criminal code in a Latin tag. Making any kind of error should not lay someone open to the entire gamut of punishment. If someone gets a parking ticket and the judge orders his hands cut off, we don't shrug and say, "Well, his fault for overstaying the meter."

The official reaction here was way over the top. The complaint appears to be that he took too many copies of documents he was entitled to get free of charge anyway, like borrowing too many books at the library. For this he was facing 35 years in the slammer. And the library he accessed ended up being made open to the public anyway.

I also find the entire Anonymous response to be spot on in its analysis of American jurisprudence, a more pedestrian but no less trenchant poke in the eye than And Justice for All. Of course, the DoJ hasn't the slightest intention of reforming anything. So it will be interesting to see what the "warheads" are.

“The complaint appears to be that he took too many copies of documents he was entitled to get free of charge anyway, like borrowing too many books at the library.”

This is a vast oversimplification of things. The complaints against him include:

Wire Fraud 18 U.S.C. 1343
Computer Fraud 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(4)
Unauthorized Access 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(2)(C) and 18 U.S.C. 1030(c)(2)(B)(iii)
Computer Damage 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(5)(B) and 1030(c)(4)(A)(i)(I) & (VI)

The terms and licenses of every commercial database I’ve ever seen or used prohibit wholesale downloading of large quantities of articles. Swartz downloaded something like 4 million articles – far beyond what he might have been “entitled to get free of charge anyway”. When JSTOR realized that someone (Swartz) was engaging in bulk downloading, they blocked his IP address and he spoofed a new one. When JSTOR informed MIT that this was continuing, he also spoofed his computer’s MAC address. He even went into a comm closet and wired his computer directly into the network, and returned to it later to swap out hard drives which had filled. JSTOR ultimately suspended the entire MIT account (disrupting the rest of the MIT community’s legitimate access).

Previous statements and actions by Swartz made it reasonable to believe that Swartz intended to download everything JSTOR had, and broadly disseminate (like the Wikileaks files).

This is much more than borrowing extra library books. Swartz overtly, and with premeditation, took data to which he was clearly not entitled. He did it in a way that demonstrated intent and evasiveness. He took steps to hide his identity. He knew he was breaking the rules, and he tried not to get caught.

That Swartz felt so overwhelmed by his circumstances that he took his own life is a tragedy. There have been some wonderful things accomplished by Civil Disobedience. But I’m with Jim on this one -- if you are going to break the law, it is foolish to expect the law to let it slide.

If you want to argue that these laws are bad laws, or that prosecutors will throw everything onto the wall to see what sticks, or that the whole plea-bargain process is a travesty, those are discussions worth having. But Swartz was intelligent enough that he should not have been surprised at the situation he ended up in – this is how the government works, and none of how it was specifically applied to Swartz’s case was particularly unusual.

“And the library he accessed ended up being made open to the public anyway.” JSTOR has opened up access to a limited amount of their database (the pre-1922, out-of-copyright stuff), and now allows individuals to do limited (3 articles every 2 weeks) downloads of subsets of their copyrighted journal files. This is far from the whole library, which is what Swartz was ultimately after.

In a world where a "computer hacker" can imperil millions of people or make life indescribably miserable for individuals, customers of a particular firm or any group up to a nation, just how benign are their activities, and why should their threatened punishment be any less than that for direct physical threat or harm?

In another forum I compared Swartz's behavior with staging a bank robbery, guns threats and all, ending with tossing the bag of money back and saying, "Ha ha, it was all a joke." It wouldn't matter that he was a 22yo pulling a prank, or making a point, or even that the bank would be willing to forego pressing charges on its own... all issues parallel to what Swartz and JSTOR and MIT did. The feds would drag his butt off to prison because it's their designated job to protect both citizens and property.

You can make the argument that what Swartz did, on any level, was benign and/or a prank and/or foolish... but the feds, who are as sick of this mass "liberation" of intellectual property as anyone else, chose not to be humored and passive about it. Swartz should have seen that as a potential outcome.

Computer hackers can cause actual harm to life and limb if they get into, say, hospital databases, medical equipment programming, power grid controls, or manufacturing plant operations. (Although the only instance I know of that actually happening is Stuxnet. But it surely won't be long.)

To hold the theft of intellectual property to the same standard devalues the precious nature of human health and life. Whether this case even constitutes theft of IP seems open to debate, but even if we stipulate it as being equivalent to the most heinous kind of IP theft, equating someone pirating a Disney DVD with armed assault is casuistry.

That's the problem with lumping all computer hackers under the same statutes and sentencing guidelines. It blurs the distinction between the joyrider and the terrorist, a chasm wider than any umbrella ought to span.

The USA imprisons a higher proportion of its population than every other country in the world. (St. Kitts and Nevis comes second. You have to get down to Russia in 8th place, at 4/5 of the USA rate, to get past the statistical blips.) Exercise for the reader: Is this because the USA inherently raises more felons per capita, or because the other countries let more felons roam free?

when you have enough laws everyone's guilty of something aren't they ?

Once again, I'm not saying no punishment. I'm saying that the punishment shouldn't exceed the maximum permitted for a child rapist. Some kind of misdemeanor and community service would have been appropriate.

I do also believe strongly in general that "I was following <deeply-held conviction>" is not a get-out-of-jail free card. So many people think so, especially if <deeply-held conviction> emerges from some religious tenet. Nope, that just means your conscience is clear. You should still be prepared to deal with the consequences, evil though they may be. The early Christians sang while they were being burned (well, if Quo Vadis is anything to go by); they didn't bitch and whine and say they should get a free pass because of their religion.

I agree with both of you (Jim and Peter). Swartz definitely stole intellectual property, although his intentions were not personal profit. If the Justice department had charged him at a level that would have resulted in, say, an 18-month sentence if he was convicted, I'd have thought that they were well within their rights. If he'd gone to jail for a few months, I suspect that he might have learned a lesson that he needed to learn.

But not for 35 years. I'm an incest survivor. The man who raped me, IF HE HAD DONE SO TODAY, would not have qualified for a sentence that long. Most murderers do not qualify for or serve sentences that long. Something is desperately wrong that the government could even charge Swartz with crimes that added up to that sort of sentence. It is disporportionate, and the process needs to be fixed.

IMHO, of course. And hindsight is easy. But we've grown into a rather vicious society, one that thinks that tougher and tougher punishments is the answer to rising crime. I've come to doubt seriously doubt that belief. Draconian punishments -- the sort that are seen as draconian by the people subject to the law -- destroy public belief in the justice and rightness of the law. Punishment is supposed to teach, not destroy both individuals and the very system of law that it is supposed to uphold.

I have trouble summoning much sympathy for computer hackers. In one way, it might be said they provide a valuable service by pinpointing vulnerabilities that need to be corrected. However, in essence they are just vandals. I have no problem with civil disobedience. That's how many of our great societal changes have been accomplished. I just have a hard time putting a hacker on the same pedestal as MLK or Ghandi. I sincerely doubt that many hackers have pure motives - I think it's a "look at what I can get away with" culture - and should be prosecuted.

"35 years" keeps coming up. It's a trope, seized by the media to make their stories more sensational. Swartz was savvy enough, and had competent enough counsel, to know this. is a detailed explanation why.