See, here's the problem. In one sentence you're arguing that he should "accept the consequences", and in literally the very next sentence, you're describing how bad the consequences ended up being.

That is what is wrong with saying, "just accept the consequences", when you have no damn idea what the consequences are.

A story and the reality are always different. The story as presented to people at the time was Aaron had done something (legally) wrong and was in trouble for doing it, some people believed what he did was for a just cause (education material should be free) and others didn't.

If the people reading the story at the time were expected to act on the situation by donating, why is it wrong for them to act in the form of a comment? How can it be fair to say people should have donated based on their understanding of the situation but not be able to comment on the situation?

Every single person in that comment thread is just as guilty of wrong doing if edw519 is guilty of any, because they all formed an opinion around something they knew very little of. It just so happens that the opinion edw519 expressed is unfortunately one that is at odds with the reality of the situation.

First, just to be really clear about this: Ed is pretty much the very last example of bad behavior that I would ever look to on HN. He's a heck of a nice guy, and I wish he wasn't the one being discussed here.

That said, surely you can acknowledge that there's a difference between donating and posting a comment?

oh of course, they're very different things that have very different motivations and very different results, what I'm trying to argue is that they are both actions that come from an interest in the subject at hand. If you act on something (regardless of the specifics of that action) then you're making a commitment to that subject.

The point is every single person that acted on that post was doing it under exactly the same idea, "I have read about this situation and based on what I have read I believe x to be (true / false) and therefore I (support / don't support) Aaron" so when someone said "I believe that Aaron does not deserve to be bearing the burden here, I am donating $10 to his fund" they were making exactly the same assumptions as edw519 made when he said "I believe that Aaron is responsible for this situation and therefore should be responsible for the consequences".

The only difference is edw519 is on the wrong side of the outcome. Those that donated didn't know that Aaron was in some serious shit way beyond what anyone imagined, just like edw519 didn't know that Aaron was in some serious shit way beyond what he imagined.

If everyone took the line you're talking about, "I don't know the full story (because nobody ever can) so I'm not going to pass any judgement" Aaron would not have been the recipient of any donations, because Aaron could have been more in the wrong than edw519 thought! Maybe the prosecution had evidence that showed Aaron intended to rip people off, or commit a terrible crime? I don't want to be behind supporting that! I had better just ignore everything.

> If everyone took the line you're talking about, "I don't know the full story (because nobody ever can) so I'm not going to pass any judgement"...

sigh. I never said that. I have no idea how you got from "comment publicly" to "pass judgement".

I think I'm misunderstanding the point you're making, I'm not much good at interpreting things. From what I understand of your comment:

    That is what is wrong with saying, "just accept the consequences", 
    when you have no damn idea what the consequences are.

I think you're saying that he shouldn't have passed judgement because he wasn't aware of the situation, although now reading your emphasis on ""comment publicly" to "pass judgement"" I suspect you may have meant that edw519 is at fault for his specific action (commenting that he thought Aaron should accept the consequences) not for thinking that Aaron should have accepted the consequences? If that's the case then my comment will not have been particularly relevant, sorry about that.

> I suspect you may have meant that edw519 is at fault for his specific action (commenting that he thought Aaron should accept the consequences) not for thinking that Aaron should have accepted the consequences?

Yes, exactly, with the caveat that I'm absolutely not putting Ed "at fault" for anything here -- I'm talking about comments like that one, in general.

Everybody judges things, we on HN perhaps most of all. That's fine, it's part of our nature. However, we really need to think it over before we declare our judgement in a comment on a public forum, especially when it's likely that we aren't fully aware of the situation we're judging.

> If that's the case then my comment will not have been particularly relevant, sorry about that.

Hey man, no worries. Glad we got it sorted.

Except that a large, negative comment from a widely respected HN poster is a pretty effective anti-donation.

> when you have no damn idea what the consequences are

Because this is unprecedented. People are still shocked at the excessive nature of the charges. No one expected it. To expect everything to be so severe would be paranoia.

I guess that's fair. I honestly hadn't considered that; I've had enough dealings with the justice system to know that it's impossible to overestimate the damage they're willing to do to someone's life when it suits them.

I think I remember that thread, and I remember thinking of typing "criminal defenses, guilty or innocent, are extremely expensive, and this is by no means a good thing" but I guess I didn't pull the trigger and say it.

In retrospect, I wish I'd made it, and I also wish I'd said "even though I consider Aaron in the wrong, I'm still donating $5 so he knows that other people know he's alive, and I encourage those who are on his side to donate as well." Lots of donations, even if small in amount, would have at least helped him not feel alone. Depression sucks.

I'm not entirely certain that Aaron knew he was doing something wrong, or, for that matter, whether he was in fact doing something wrong. It seems he made little effort to cover his tracks and pretty much acted out in the open. And from what I've heard from friends who've met him in person - Aaron was brilliant, idealistic, a nice guy, and hopelessly naive about how the world actually works.

I'm pretty sure that he believed strongly that he was doing something right and that he must have been very upset at being persecuted in the way that he was for doing what was right.

If he didn't think he was doing anything wrong, why didn't he just ask permission?

There is this bit: "It is better to ask forgiveness than to ask for permission". This especially holds true if you're up against what we'll loosely label the establishment here, especially if said establishment is capable of marshalling serious force against you. Once it's done it's done, but during the execution phase just getting the job over with is often the smartest course of action.

See the PACER incident for how that can play out when it works. And I guess the JSTOR one for when it doesn't.

I'm not sure that this forgiveness vs. permission rule works well with civil or criminal law...

It has worked well for me so far. Of course it always does until it no longer works so this is just another instance of survivor bias. Unfortunately for poor Aaron it did not work out well for him.

It's possible to believe you're doing something right and still be acting against the rules.

Let's just imagine -- completely hypothetically, of course -- that I recently wrote a crawler specifically designed to rescue client websites from a terrible DIY website service (which might or might not be Jimdo). Let's imagine it was tuned to load Jimdo-related assets (or the assets of a similar service), fix broken code, etc.; I'm pretty sure this would have been against Jimdo's rules (or the rules of a related service, if I had done such a thing, which, surely, I did not), but let's say I did it anyway because I think it's reprehensible that they don't provide a way for their customers to export their websites.

It's possible that I could have found myself on the pointy end of an expensive lawsuit over something like this. It's possible that I would have broken some laws that I am unaware of, had I done that -- and, had I done that, it would only weaken my case further to claim foreknowledge of the laws being broken. It's likely that there are laws which could be loosely enough interpreted to make me guilty of some form of "hacking". (And it would be most certainly utterly stupid to even consider leaving a comment like this under my regular username -- if, of course, I had done such a thing. Fortunately, as HN occasionally reminds me, I'm not competent enough to have done something like this.)

But there's no way I'd ever say that I did something "wrong", and there's no way I would have asked for Jimdo's permission to do something like that. I simply knew what the rules were, and I believed it was the rules, not I, that were wrong.

More to the point, why did he keep taking specific action to evade the feeble roadblocks the admins managed to put up in front of him before he finally just hooked his laptop to a switch? Why did he ignore the Terms of Use statements when he started off on the Wifi MIT network?

Guys, aaronsw was wicked smart, he was undoubtedly at least vaguely aware of there being a Federal law covering "computer crime". It's far easier to believe that he felt he was doing the right thing despite the law than to believe he was completely unaware.

Is it wrong to jaywalk? Assuming you'd say yes then, if one jaywalks across the street to pick up the cure for cancer and subsequently disseminates said cure, would you persecute him for jaywalking? Because jaywalking seems like a pretty good analogy to Swartz's causing a short disruption of the Jstor service, and it wouldn't surprise me if the open publication of all scientific knowledge had the direct result of curing cancer, or the equivalent, many times over.

And just like hacking, in many places, Cambridge included, "jay" walking (I refuse to acknowledge this preposterous concept with its own word) may be purportedly illegal, but is actually accepted and encouraged. But you still must beware the rare meddling fed; they don't like people undermining the need for painting all those hazardous crosswalks.

You're basically saying that the ends justify the means. You may believe that (we probably all do, for some ratio of ends:means) but please keep in mind that the legal system does not believe that in general, as that logic has often been perverted in our history.

He may've believed that the people who he would have to ask permission from are doing something wrong.

Maybe you have heard of The Underground Railroad? Or "Separate but equal" policies and the movements which nonviolently opposed them? Or the United States of America, which was born of disagreement with the rules of the time?

Laws and rules are written by humans. Sometimes other humans don't agree with the rules as they are currently and try to make the world a better place. Sometimes they succeed. Sometimes they fail.

Aaron (supposedly) did something illegal. Whether his actions were wrong is an entirely different question, and one that is highly subjective.

And what's more, it's entirely possible to feel that Aaron's actions actually were wrong and yet still feel that the prosecution was overbearing.

> accept the consequences

Everyone has to accept the consequences. Reality doesn't allow you not to. There's no way to 'log out' of the real world; the most you can do is kill yourself, and then your suicide becomes the consequence.

Whenever someone says "accept the consequences" they mean "accept the consequences in silence", as opposed to accepting them under vocal protest and attempting to challenge them. When the consequences are unjust, accepting them in silence is acquiescing to the injustice, which only serves to perpetuate it.

Merely accepting the consequences is inevitable; accepting the consequences in silence is a choice, and it is not always the best choice.