>Wasn't she just doing her job?

Absolutely not. There is a reason that prosecutors have prosecutorial discretion and this case is it. The prosecutor's job is not to zealously convict anyone they encounter with everything they can convict them with, it is to represent the interests of the people. There is no fathomable way that sending Aaron Swartz to prison for 35 years could possibly do that.

But let's not put all of the blame on the prosecutors. The prosecutors did wrong here, but we allowed it to happen by giving them the authority to do wrong. We are, as we speak, allowing laws to remain on the books that make "crimes" that should be a minor misdemeanor at worst (and not illegal at all at best) into felonies punishable by a sentence of imprisonment longer than the sentences received by many unrepentant criminals who have committed premeditated murder.

These outrageously disproportionate laws are what allowed these prosecutors to abuse their discretion. Get rid of the laws, or cut the penalties by a factor of a thousand, and you get rid of the problem. That should be the goal here. Making an example of these prosecutors is not a bad first step, but actually prohibiting what they did by removing their ability to levy outrageous charges at minor offenders has to be the long-term solution.

Critical thinking skills. Instead, you're repeating a tired emotional appeal to top-down prescribed "morals".

Here is a program to download "4M+" articles:

    i=1;while true;do wget http://foo/$i;i=1$i;done

I'll license my Unary Downloader Pro to you for $120MM. Oh wait, you just copied it into your brain and then reverse engineered it even!? You just did $120MM+ worth of damages!

I didn't realize simplicity had anything to do with the severity of a crime. How hard is it to kill someone? How hard is it to download something on Pirate bay? How hard is it to stash a laptop in an unused MIT closet and write code to download 4M articles? Why does it matter how hard one of these things is?

Ok, I give up. Please read this article before commenting any more: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/aaron-swartz-felony...

Aaron fucked up and got caught. It sucks that we lost such an extraordinary individual but claiming he did nothing wrong is naive.

He used the Internet as it was meant to be used. MIT had no security, JSTOR had no security. Issuing a GET request to a web server is not, and should not be a crime.

http://unhandled.com/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron-swartz...

> Issuing a GET request to a web server is not, and should not be a crime.

A DDoS is also "the Internet as it was intended" by your logic.

Did MIT and JSTOR really have no posted TOS? That is not my recollection of MIT wifi.

Does violating a few TOS's warrant 35+ years in prison?

That's a separate matter entirely. The point being discussed is whether Aaron did in fact violate the law. I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone here who believed Aaron deserved the sentence or the prosecution brought upon him, but personally I find it incredible how quick people are to absolve him entirely.

First, he wasn't using wifi. Second, JSTOR does not have a click-through ToS on university campuses, so he never had to agree to anything.

Then why is it the backbone of your appeal?

Every persecution of a hacker invariably emphasizes how they created some scary powerful tool in furtherance of their goal. It's the modern day witch hunt. Your average slob thinks "I can't even write a program to download one file, he must have dangerous knowledge and powers". If they knew it was one step beyond rightClick->saveAs, and felt like anybody could do the same with little effort, they would wonder why the plaintiff had failed to secure something so simple if it really were as important as claimed.

What he used doesn't matter as much as the fact that he did it.

If you kill someone with a knife, it does not matter how difficult it was to obtain or create that knife.

But this was not even a copyright case. They accused him of hacking. He had access to wifi network with free access to JSTOR. He scraped JSTOR. They banned his IP. He connected directly to the network (didn't break into anything, didn't hack into anything) and began scraping again. If this was against the law, how could it be anything more than a misdemeanor?

How many other illegal things can I do in this country now? If violating a TOS is hacking, so is sniffing and port scanning and every other imaginable "unusual" activity. This is worse than locking away a phreaker for 50 years -- at least a phreaker may have bypassed technical restrictions. What he "intended" to do with the files is irrelevant. If I put in my website's TOS "You cannot scrape our website!" and Google did, should Google be indicted for wire fraud and a host of other made up charges?

If Hacker News has gotten to the point where they're willing to call a prosecution of 50 years for a "crime" like this the way of the world I really can't imagine you have any heart for this industry anymore. Aaron was one of you.

He didn't kill someone with a knife, he put butter on his toast with a knife. There was literally no crime committed, certainly no crime worthy of federal prosecutors and decades of potential incarceration.

He downloaded a bunch of files using a publicly accessible computer network, from a web site that was available without authentication from that network. He didn't crack any passwords or encryption schemes, he didn't access any material he was supposed to pay for without paying, he simply didn't do anything to warrant the type of prosecution that was launched against him.

The article below explains a lot. What Aaron Swartz did was rude, not illegal.

http://unhandled.com/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron-swartz...

Tell it to the jury. Sounds like a slam dunk acquittal.

That's the wrong way to look at it. The process had wiped him out financially and almost certainly damaged his mental state. It doesn't matter if you're acquitted if you are punished before the trial even begins.

ewillbefull - he wasn't just charged with hacking, do some research: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/aaron-swartz-felony...

Again, it doesn't matter if it's extremely easy to run someone over with a car or whether it's easy for a computer programmer to bypass download limits and sneak a laptop into a closet at MIT with a spoofed MAC. Simplicity has nothing to do with it.

What is wrong with you? You keep posting this article wanting it to say what you think it says, but it doesn't. Maybe you should read it. Better yet, read the actual indictments which are linked on that page.

* Computer Fraud (7 counts, for each time he 'deceived' JSTOR) "the defendent, knowingly and with intent to defraud, accessed a protected computer -- namely, a computer on MIT's network and a computer on JSTOR's network -- without authorization and in excess of authorized access"

* Unlawfully Obtaining Information from a Protected Computer (12 counts??? These weren't even protected computers!)

* Recklessly Damaging a Protected Computer (because he downloading the files fast enough to impact other users)

* Wire Fraud (because he was logged in as a guest on MIT's network and downloading JSTOR articles)

They throw in details like him using a mailinator email as if it's illegal to do that. It's ridiculous. You're ridiculous for trying to justify it.

And yes, all of these charges are basically 'hacking' charges. He was not charged with copyright infringement or anything of that nature.

Nothing is wrong with me, I'm just shocked at the amount of hero worship going around and complete ignorance of the facts of the case. He didn't just break the TOS and he wasn't charged with "hacking" as you keep referring to it. He was charged with several crimes.

Forget the last article, read this one instead: http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/. Now read the ridiculous comments throughout this post that I've been arguing against.

Without even getting into the morality of Aaron's actions (though I think you're a pretty shit person if you don't support them), it's pretty clear that the actions of the prosecutor did contribute to Aaron's death. This means that if the prosecutor didn't take those actions, or took different actions, Aaron would still be alive. Therefore, the prosecutor's actions caused Aaron's death. This is simply an objective fact, independent of any moral framework. The fact that the prosecutor's actions were taken as a part of her "doing her job" doesn't change that they caused Aaron's death. If you agree that it is immoral to cause somebody's death (or at the very least that it was immoral to cause Aaron's death in this case), then the prosecutor's actions were immoral. If her actions are a part of her job, then her job is immoral (and maybe the entire ‘justice’ system needs to be smashed). As for the argument that the prosecutor couldn't possibly have foreseen that her actions would have caused Aaron's death (which I imagine you or somebody else would make): of course she could have. People kill themselves because of shit like this all the time, and you don't have to be an empathic genius to understand how the pressure of facing possibly 30+ years in prison could drive someone to suicide.

Not to mention that he intended to distribute the articles for free, turning this into a billion dollar case. I am 100% for open access, but the public and current law isn't. People blaming prosecutors are looking for a scapegoat where there just isn't one.

  | Not to mention that he intended to distribute
  | the articles for free, turning this into a
  | billion dollar case

No where does it mention this in their case against him. Calling it a 'billion dollar case' is over-stating the fact. Especially since JSTOR withdrew their complaint against him and recommended that the US government back off.

The people that he supposedly hurt said that they don't care, and to leave him alone. Attempting to use the 'harm' to them as justification makes no sense.

> The people that he supposedly hurt said that they don't care, and to leave him alone

From the perspective of the state, that matters only as far as the details of "Can I still get the evidence needed without victim's support" and "How should I prioritize this case from here?"

Often going through with a prosecution is just a further hassle for the victim (a process of "re-victimization"). In real life sometimes the trial would reveal further unpleasant things about the victim to public view. Maybe the victim wants to take care of it themself. Maybe they genuinely don't want any consequence to befall the suspect.

But the responsibility of the state is to society at large. A prosecutor wouldn't refuse to charge a serial rapist that they had enough evidence for even without the victim's support, because of the risk to society if the serial rapist were allowed to go free.

While Aaron was charged with far different things, he had shown a propensity for flouting the law on this particular topic, and escalating each addition time he did so, so it's not really that surprising that the D.A. would decide to continue with the case, especially given that they still had some of the other 'victims' supporting the prosecution.

I say this all as a proponent of Open Access (certainly would have been nice while I was in college instead of having to use my university's proxy servers all the time). But the D.A. doesn't get to decide which laws are on the books and which aren't (as others have mentioned, this is how white people were mysteriously never charged of racial crimes in the Jim Crow-era South).

JSTOR only withdrew their complaint cause he got caught. If Aaron succeed they certainly wouldn't have dropped it. My point is his intent was certainly criminal in terms of billions of dollars in the eyes of the law and public, even if they aren't in mine and most of HN.

Agreed.