Comment by milkytron
11 days ago
The part that still bothers me so much about the US vs Swartz case is that JSTOR didn't pursue civil litigation against Aaron. It was the US government that pursued him.
There was little for the government to lose in the case. In a case vs Meta, at the scale it has reached, it could have wide ranging economic implications limiting the investment in AI, which the US is absolutely not willing to pursue at this point in time (or possibly ever).
Basically, being a rich public company provides legal advantages when the US government has similar goals.
The whole thing is incredibly sad and exposes the hypocrisy of the US court system and government as a whole.
RIP Aaron.
Maybe the real issue is selective outrage about legal injustice. I totally agree that this was wrong and he should not have been prosecuted but a large part of the effort that dealt this injustice to him was facilitated by the fact that the vast majority of people willfully turn a blind eye when the same thing or worse happens to people are not of their ilk. If we were to finally stand up and say that justice for all means justice for ALL; we might be able to prevent the next Aaron Swartz.
Edit: As someone that has done both state and fed time, the thing that makes me the saddest here is that the charges would have been drastically reduced if not dismissed and his appeals would have had a high probability of success. They use this "scare tatic" so much and I understand why it works; the possibility of facing those years is terrifying. I don't mean that in any demeaning manner, 25/26 and never having done time I cannot imagine how terrified he must have been.
Edit: I would also like to bring attention to the fact that M. Zuckerberg aggressively pursues these types of cases against people for doing far less than he has done.
"Maybe the real issue is selective outrage about legal injustice."
The real issue is selective enforcement of the law. If it applied equally to everyone, then more people would be outraged as it affected them.
> If it applied equally to everyone, then more people would be outraged as it affected them.
In order to do this you need to have laws that are designed to be reasonable for people to actually follow instead of laws that are designed to allow prosecutors to find a violation whenever they want to.
Actually enforcing them would create pressure to do that, but it would also create pressure to go back to selective enforcement when powerful people object to being subjected to the unreasonableness of existing laws.
A better solution might be to make a showing of selective enforcement a means to strike down a law. If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged then the prosecution either has to charge them too or that law is struck down and no one can be charged with it anymore.
Then instead of the incentive not to charge powerful people creating pressure for selective enforcement, the same incentive creates pressure to strike down the laws that can't reasonably be uniformly enforced.
25 replies →
For the in-crowd the law protects but does not bind. For the out-crowd, the law binds but does not protect.
Can’t remember where I read that but it has stuck with me.
5 replies →
Perfectly equal enforcement really isn't possible, but it should be the policy to enforce in proportion to active harm. The bigger the ongoing active harm, the quicker to react we should be. Some individual torrents a single movie? NBD. No matter the side of the argument you are on this should be ignored. A company intentionally throws content strikes causing legitimate harm to large numbers of content creators? That should addressed.
Reality should always have a place in the law.
31 replies →
The violation of the law as practiced is that a Little Person did this and threatened a Player's profits. A Player can do what they like to another and form some kind of mutually beneficial arrangement afterward... but Schwartz did not have enough commas in his bank account to be allowed to dabble, not a single investor behind him. Nor was his goal the overriding morally correct goal of maximizing social stratification through profit seeking. Knocking down paywalls is dead weight loss, not market predation. He had to go. He had to be made an example of. For the system, this was personal.
It all started going downhill once they started calling corporations "legal persons" and gave them all the same right as people, but without all of the constraints associated with having a body.
A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't go to jail, doesn't need a visa to work in a foreign country.
Imagine if the legal system took jail off the table and people could move to any country without a visa; only fines... We'd be overrun by criminals. They'd be able to monetize these two facts easily; they'd make more than enough money from criminal activity to cover all the fines.
2 replies →
[flagged]
39 replies →
I can't believe his lawyer didn't explain all of that to him? An important role for an attorney in this situation is as a counselor, to explain the actual reality and the possibilities.
I have had the misfortune of hiring many attorneys for a variety of different legal issues. They’re almost always fucking useless.
5 replies →
Not all legal professionals are good, and not all are even working in the interests of their clients.
The real issue is that in the US, everything is for sale.
Humans have incentives everywhere. Its not quite the same.
I dont think anyone bought the judge or prosecutor for Aaron
1 reply →
the sentences that US courts dream up around digital offences are absolutely obscene and seem to only exist as a means of coercion. However because they're still technically real and it feels disgusting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._...
The prosecution offered 6 months in low security in a plea deal.
He had been mass downloading and evading them at MIT for months until he had MIT and FBI involved and was finally caught on camera.
I bring this up because A. maximum exposure to charges are rarely applied but makes great headlines for outrage and B. the plea deal seems reasonable to someone who was unreasonably persistent in the details of the case.
14 replies →
Not in this case, also why because it's "digital" does it change anything.
SWATing is "digital" but leads to very real death
> large part of the effort that dealt this injustice to him was facilitated by the fact that the vast majority of people willfully turn a blind eye when the same thing or worse happens to people are not of their ilk
Reminds me of Marx's 1870 letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_...
The exact same mechanism is used to keep poor white Americans voting Republican: even if they're poor, they see themselves as the white ruling class over black and Hispanic people, despite the fact that they themselves are kept poor by the real ruling class.
11 replies →
It absolutely is. Youth services is one such thing that people just refuse to get upset about. Not when they attack kids for flimsy reasons. And, conversely, people also utterly refuse to react when kids eventually figure out that their way out is to attack people, other kids, social workers and anyone else in institutions, which is one factor that makes youth services facilities such horrible places to be.
Remember it was MIT that dobbed him in.
MIT then helped the criminal prosecution even after JSTOR settled with him.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/mit-aarons-swartz-case...
And whitewashed their own involvement.
https://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.p...
I mean he was arrested initially not for the material downloaded but the fact that he, not an MIT student, was found hiding in a facilities closet with his laptop hooked into the network.
I get that MIT's police were meant to join him in a chorus of "Information wants to be free", but let's not act like it's unreasonable to want someone arrested or prosecuted who was not authorized to be in an equipment closet with their computer wired into a switch.
And even then, it wasn’t really about justice but more for the prosecutor, Carmen Ortiz’s career advancement.
The case ultimately did not help her in her run for governor of MA.
the blood of a prodigy as status symbol make-up
How does prosecuting someone who downloaded articles in a broom closet help her career advancement?
I suppose in pleasing the right people with money and power.
prosecutors with higher conviction rates are typically viewed more favorably than prosecutors with lower conviction rates.
3 replies →
"look at me, I'm serving the interests of the incumbent education and medical industries by prosecuting the shit out of someone who dared give them the bird, now donate to my campaign".
Easy notch on her belt.
1 reply →
In many cases it's "all about the money" (and the lawyers). Take the case of Billionaire hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen of SAC Capital Advisors who was famously pursued by federal prosecutors as their ultimate "white whale" in a massive insider trading probe. Though his firm pleaded guilty and paid a record $1.8 billion fine, Cohen himself was never criminally charged or convicted. Yet two lower underlings were convicted and served time (the 2 fall guys).
An "Army of lawyers", no less than 6 top lawyers appeared in the courtroom that day representing Cohen (he did not appear), as a "shot across the bow" message to the US Government that Cohen was prepared to spend a vast sum of his wealth to defend himself and make it a huge undertaking for the government if they wished to proceed.
Lawyers present for Cohen:
Peter Nussbaum: SAC Capital's General Counsel, who entered the plea.
Theodore "Ted" Wells Jr.: Renowned partner from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
Martin Klotz: Partner at Willkie Farr & Gallagher and Cohen's personal attorney.
Michael Schachter, Daniel Kramer, and Michael Gertzman: Senior litigation partners assisting the defense.
Because the defense consisted of prominent partners from multiple top-tier firms simultaneously, analysts famously calculated that the collective group was costing SAC Capital roughly $10,000 an hour (mere pocket change for a successful hedge fund guy).
> Steven A. Cohen
Owner of the New York Mets now, by the way, which maybe non-sports following readers will be happy to hear remain a boondoggle. He tried very hard to spend his way to glory, leading the league in payroll at the beginning of the 2025 season, only to crash and burn and end up in last place this season.
That’s infuriating.
Yes, it's also solvable; the crux of the issue is that these people have made it problematic to even discuss any solutions that do not serve their personal, financial and nationalist interest.
All and any fact should be up for discussion. For example, the black community; my community has a serious problem with violence that has caused increased police presence as it spilled out and impacted other communities. We can discuss the why but the fact exist and its up for discussion.
All discussion of the conditions which allow situations like this to occur are shut down and labeled an ism, ist etc...
1 reply →
It was Carmen Ortiz, not abstract "US Government".
This is the (John Perkin's coined term) "Corporatocracy" at work.
If you want to know how and why it is like this, read Perkin's books (atm I'm reading "The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man"). It's why Meta will not get sued but Aaron was, and it is why ships are now lining up in front of the Panama canal paying as much as 400k for a crossing with little of that wealth making it to the people of Panama.
JSTOR dropped civil litigation only after getting about $25k in the settlement from him.
Meta's bots are spectatularly awful, and if your organisation needs to use facebook advertising, they're also unblockable. There are ways around it that doesn't exactly block them but does clearly communicate they should GTFO, but it just shows you what an awful company Meta is.
Who was it ? The ^US government^ .. or for that matter, any government or corporation doesn't pursue litigation. It is humans who make this decision (at least for now ...).
Who in the government bureaucracy made the decision and followed through? It's sad that we've become accustomed to accept governments/corporations as entities by themselves when they clearly aren't.
> The whole thing is incredibly sad and exposes the hypocrisy of the US court system and government as a whole.
It does, but it's not like that's new information to minority communities.
I believe JSTOR did, and then backed off after public outcry. JSTOR is not an admirable operation, for this and many other reasons.
I think the root problem is Corporations being Legal Persons.
An alternative would be the CEO to be the “legal person” of each Corp. and be the one against all legal actions should be targeted.
In that case it would Zack himself the one facing any legal action.
A Corp’s actions result to the death of a person. CEO should be trialed as if they were the one driving the car.
The issue is limited liability. I don't think companies should shield stockholder, shareholders, or owners from any liability
While this sounds good in theory, I suspect the actual result would be much worse for justice in most cases. With the corporation acting as its own legal entity, if you are wronged, you sue and obtain justice from the corporation. If instead you needed to sue each and every shareholder to obtain their share of the liabilities, you'd likely spend many more years in court as each individual owner argues why they aren't personally liable for the given act because they didn't have knowledge, or control over the specific chain of events that caused you harm, and the courts have to sort out each individual case.
3 replies →
the government is made up of the people. the people are mostly greedy because our culture worships wealth. broken people, broken culture, broken government.
Luigi Mangione
He was done in by a career prosecutor who just wanted to use him as a stepping stone in their path. They had little or no humanity.
Is that not how it always goes? Robbing a bank got you in jail a lot longer than assaulting a woman.
This is an argument against capitalism.
Under capitalism money and power are inextricably linked. Your influence in a democracy is tied directly to your access to capital.
This is why expensive elections are are desire of those funding Super-pacs. The more elections cost, the fewer people decide them.
Aaron didn’t matter because he was poor. Had he been named Musk, or Zuckerberg, he would suffer the consequences they do when they break the law which is zero.
This is how capitalism is supposed to work and does.
You can’t have capitalism is being rich doesn’t confer privilege in every area including the legal system. It’s why American oligarch can safely “ask forgiveness not permission”. The risk to them personally is nil.
>Basically, being a rich public company provides legal advantages when the US government has similar goals.
This has always been the case. It's why lots of us who came up in the 80s and 90s embraced the "fuck corporations" and "information wants to be free" zeitgeist of the times.
It's also why the corporate bootlicking on this site is so grating at times. IDK, maybe I'm the only one but it seems like the veneer has worn off and over the last couple years I've realized HN is "special", not because of the reasons its proponents will recite but because it's where you come to post about the interesting technical challenges you solved while designing a system that goes down to the corner store and buys Hitler a pack of his favorite smokes and everyone laps that up.
I feel like you just made the opposite case you actually made
[flagged]
Yes, you know why - it had nothing to do with copyright infringement - he was going to win the fight to get money out of politics.