Specifics? I don't recall seeing this, but maybe I'm just unobservant.
> The law cannot hope to capture every possible nuance of all conceivable offenses
On the other hand, the point of having the law instead of The Decider is that acceptability of a particular behavior can be reasonably foreseen. And for the long standing laws most everybody now thinks of as self-evident (murder,rape,robbery,etc), this is basically the case. But the problem with many newer widely-scoped laws, especially federal ones, is that they're highly vague and allow so much leeway, the question becomes quite unanswerable. Are these vague laws primarily used to punish bona fide criminals? Yes. But when we fail to examine the law for what it conceivably could do and instead take comfort in what it usually does, when we fail to stand up for injustices against people who are ultimately not very nice, we set ourselves up for exactly what happened here - a grave injustice against an unlucky blatantly-undeserving target. It's simply the only thing remaining that provides any check on the expedience of the Deciders.
I unfortunately never interacted with Aaron. I identify with a lot of his optimism, even while feeling older than his naivety. I think we've probably had similar principles offended in this case. It just took a tangible incident with high wtf-levels to offend yours, where as mine go off for hypothetical possibilities and run-of-the-mill wtf-levels.
Those prosecution threads should give you pause just the same, and Aaron is absolutely not the only person that you've acted like that with. I respect you tremendously for your technical knowledge, but for someone who reminds people to 'stay classy' and who claims the moral high ground with some regularity a bit of introspection wouldn't hurt. I'd respect you a lot more still. I'm very happy to see you come around in your way of thinking about this particular case though.
I definitely don't think of myself as any classier than you; I think we occupy opposite poles of some deranged message board energy sphere. Or you're the heat miser and I'm the cold miser. Either way, I can spot a dumb argument as quickly as you can, and just because I'm imperfect doesn't mean I'm not going to point them out.
I'll take your word for it but I'm getting a different impression.
Aaron was fairly clearly being made an example out of, and I think that after the expansion of the indictment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4528083, a thread in which you commented, and which came before the thread about Aarons friends setting up a defence fund) that would have been pretty obvious even to those not already of that opinion.
Maybe I'm slightly more sensitive to this stuff because of some of the things that happened in the wake of reocities.com but let's just say that if Aaron had charges worth a few decades thrown at him for TOS violations and unauthorized access I should probably be in jail for at least several decades because of that little gig.
I know everybody is shocked at what happened, but I'm far more shocked at Aarons' suicide than at the travesty of justice perpetrated there, there are lots more examples of such things happening on a daily basis.
We should stop talking about us, or at least, about me. This isn't about me/us.
The law cannot hope to capture every possible nuance of all conceivable offenses. As every lawyer who's ever argued with a Hacker on HN has pointed out, the law is not a programming language and courts aren't computer architectures. We want our rules, laws, and metalaws to provide every protection to the accused that they reasonably can, but at some point it's always going to come down to the discretion of humans appointed to positions of authority. Those authorities need to be equal to the task, or we delegitimize the whole effort.
I'm sad about what happened to Aaron. I look at the photos of him in his teens hanging out with Dave Winer and Lawrence Lessig; he was a small kid, and I have a big 13 year old. I exchanged an email or two with him, but my wife didn't know him at all and she's upset, as I would assume any parent reading about this would be. And obviously in light of what happened, I'm a little harsh on how I interacted with Aaron online --- not on the prosecution threads, but you know, on threads about "hollywood launches" and stuff like that.
But beyond that, what happened offends me in principle. If they're not the exact same principles that you've had offended, that doesn't matter much, does it? The justice system seems to have achieved a pretty high level of coverage in offended principles.