Posted on 01/13/2013 5:13:19 PM PST by libstripper
At the time of his suicide, Aaron Swartz was preparing for a crucial hearing in his federal criminal case, likely his best chance to thwart federal prosecutors who had developed solid evidence against the Internet activist who was facing an April trial on a 13-count felony indictment.
The 26-year-old Swartz, who killed himself Friday in his Brooklyn apartment, was scheduled for a January 25 evidentiary hearing in U.S. District Court in Boston, Massachusetts. Lawyers for Swartz were seeking to suppress material gathered in connection with Swartz’s breach of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer network.
The January 2011 incursion netted Swartz, a Reddit cofounder who also helped develop the RSS standard, millions of scholarly papers from the JSTOR archive. He was planning to make the material public at no cost.
(Excerpt) Read more at thesmokinggun.com ...
Exactly. A case of prosecutorial over-reach by an ambitious US Attorney and power-mad DoJ. This is the same DoJ that declined to prosecute Jon Corzine for mis-appropriating hundreds of million dollars in customer money in the MF Global scam. I work in the brokerage industry and have seen people go to jail for only mis-appropriating THOUSANDS of dollars.
Come full coup, the “useful idiots” are the first to be lined up and shot
I recall a conversation I had with a hippy friend over
forty years ago. He was convinced that eventually
people of his age and bent would control the reins of
government. Then he added, “When the young don’t agree
witn us and try to revolt.....Boy, will we STEP on THEM!”
Let me play devil's advocate for a moment, as I am very familiar with this case and the exploit he utilized to download the data from JSTOR.
Being that the overwhelming majority of the data and journals that he downloaded and intended to make available for public use were funded by grants from the government (ie taxpayers), would the rightful owner of said material not be the American public? Do you willingly give your tax funds to the government to utilize in proprietary research? Does that not pi$$ you off, as it does me?
There was a lot at stake for A LOT of special interests with this case. The MPAA and RIAA were loitering around like rabid dogs awaiting a ruling that could be applied like a two ton brick to file sharing cases. This case stinks to high hell and the Justice Dept. chose a target that held a very large bullhorn. I have a lot of suspicions, but I’m far from willing to strap on my tin foil hat - but I’ve got it handy......
Yep. It all goes according to the standard script.
People who don’t know the past are destined to repeat it. This country has been deliberately dumbed down and demoralized, and we are going the way of all societies groomed to be sheep to the slaughter.
The one danger the communists face is if they take off the sheep’s clothing too soon, before the people are fully ready to be taken over. If there’s one hope this country has left, it is that Obama bared his teeth too soon. I guess we’ll see.
A LOT of people are jumping to a whole lot of unfounded conclusions here.
To ALL:
Familiarize yourself with this case the feds brought before you condemn this kid. HE fought them and he won. You don’t win with this administration. And if by some miracle you do, you will pay the heaviest price they can possibly extract from you.
Aaron Swartz spearheaded just such a miracle and the price was just too high for him to pay.
First of all, he was NOT, as they erroneously say, a ‘co-founder’ of reddit. We are being subjected to a torrent of misinformation designed to do what the government ALWAYS soes when it has overstepped, and that is to confound and confuse issues and bury the truth using its press footsoldiers.
LOOK for the truth. Aaron Swartz was as untypical as any genious ever was. Do not attempt to stick him into some neat little niche he where he does not belong.
(Quote from accolades to him found elsewhere.) Is that enough? A young communist dies, and it's certainly not an occasion for a celebration, but neither is it an occasion to declare sainthood. Hackers pursued by the government have in the past been associated with the anarchists or libertarians, and they fought on, and they went to jail. This young man was a Communist (to you perhaps a euphemistic "progressive"), and bets here are that he felt betrayed by the leaders of his movement in the White House and the Justice Department. The Revolution ate one of its own!
JSTOR was charging fees for access, but NOT paying royalties to the content creators. A non profit that keeps the pay of its executives and officers on the down low.
The social justice this young man sought was the end of the featherbedding of the government-academe-corporate troika.
That the public have access to the public commons they paid for.
“(to you perhaps a euphemistic ‘progressive’)”
Why the insult, RC?
You quote what someone else said about him as if that was the beginning and end of it.
What do you KNOW about this kid other than what you have read in the press?
Sorry, that wasn’t meant as an insult, but the euphemism is prevalent, here also.
I don’t know anything about the kid except what I have read in the press, do you? Then share it with us.
What I have read however was that he was an leftist activist and a true believer. “Social justice”. Oh yes, a familiar phrase, very likely familiar to a leftist activist. According to Thomas Sowell it means whatever the speaker means at the moment. In another place the same Thomas Sowell talks about something called the “cosmic justice”, which is what the Left seeks. It is (social justice) in any case something vague, and as a post above tells us it means in this case wrestling control of some database from some organization to benefit some narrow groups. It can mean anything at all, and because of it believers in it are confused people.
Forest and the trees. Those obsessed with the government focus on the Justice Department. Others focus on the freedom of information. I focus on this activist leftist seeing him in historical terms and without giving him the benefit of a doubt just because he’s dead. There have been others before him, true believers, who following a Revolution remained true believers, and if they were not eliminated by the Stalins and Berias they often committed suicide.
An anarchist, or a libertarian would fight on. A Conservative too. And here we reach the gist of the matter (all assuming that the information about this young man’s fervent leftist beliefs is correct). The trees in the forest. Unlike the anarchists etc, the leftists believe, and this is the fundamental tenet of their beliefs, that the government is or can be a force for the Good, with a capital “G”. Imagine young Aaron’s disappointment when he finds the government of his hero pursuing him a seeker of social justice!
We’ll find out more perhaps, but I am confident, and the shenanigans of the Justice Department don’t particularly interest me in this case.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
The yob (sorry prayers for his family) felt like the rules didn’t apply to him because he was special and had a wider vision. The guy was a thief and couldn’t understand that when you do the crime you will do the time.
He took a coward’s way out and has left the usual devastation in his wake
These social justice types and their supporters feel its their right to decide who should make a profit and who shouldn’t.
Modern Robin Hoods - take from the rich and give to the poor and they decide which is which. It’s amazing that he has any support here on FR other than sympathy for a wasted life. That support would doubtless evaporate pretty quickly if it was their business that was being hacked.
Just an observation on JSTOR - government funds are often used to generate the information, and government pays for access to the information for its employees. Cough up some moar, taxpayers.
Thanks. I do know that and admit that this is not the best of examples to make my point, but hacking into computer systems because one individual thinks the contents should be ‘free’ is just wrong.
Ignorance writ large.
Young Aaron is beginning to look more and more like a hero.
There are quite a few posters on this thread who need to get a clue (OBVIOUSLY not you two guys!).
We are on the opposite sides of this one, my friend.
File sharing is to hacking what copying a CD for a buddy is to forcible entry.
If the grants fully funded the research and production of the articles - no MIT resources were used and there was no expectation by the government of any repayment - my view could be different.
expat, this kid stopped the online piracy act from passing. He also killed obama’s killswitch for the internet that would have allowed him to shut us down should HE deem it necessary. He developed RSS. He developed web.py, a web structure now used by many business...among other leaps in software and programming.
And he didn’t charge a penny for any of it. He tried to use his talent to make the world a better place. He started this at the ripe old age of thirteen. He was an idealist, not a communist. He was a giver, not a taker. But his love and his obsession was computers and how they could bring knowledge and culture to the whole world.
I said before, he doesn’t fit in a niche. He was more of an explorer. Those who had political motives used him. Those who didn’t admired him. He belonged to nobody and owed nobody anything.
He beat the obama administration TWICE. They made an example of him by not simply prosecuting him, but by persecuting him, upping the ante when all charges SHOULD have been dropped while knowing he was deeply clinically depressed. They did it maliciously and they might as well have shot him because either way he was a dead man walking.
He didn’t deserve it and he does not deserve the malevolence directed at him that I have seen.
He wasn’t evil. Naive, maybe. But evil? No.
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