Put your tin hat away. The why of it is really, really obvious. Low hanging fruit, an easy target for prosecutors wanting to score an easy win.

Why are the low hanging fruit / easy win points "tin hat"?

The wrong part was the nonsense race point.

The race point isn't non-sense. The targets of aggressive prosecution are by and large involved in the drug trade or with gangs, and as such are very often black or hispanic. Aggressive prosecution pretty much evolved to target those people. One of the reasons you can get so many years out of what seem like relatively minor convictions is because prosecutors often have to deal reticent minority communities. Everyone knows that the defendant is involved with certain crimes, but nobody is willing to testify to the effect of "yeah, he's the major local drug source here," and the prosecutors end up having to go after the defendant on secondary crimes.

Swartz's case is unusual because of his background (upper middle class, well-connected with the community) but also because of his race.

... So Federal prosecutors said, "He's white and middle-class... Does... Not... Compute... Must... Prosecute..." ?

That's not what I said. I said that Swartz's case is unusual because he's white and rich and well-connected in the community, and he wasn't accused of a financial crime.

IIRC, one of the charges against Aaron was wire fraud. Bernie Madoff (rich, white, well-connected) plead guilty to wire fraud (amongst other charges).

I'm not sure how the fact that it wasn't a financial crime has much to do with how the Federal prosecutors handled things.

More like: "well, this'll show the world that we are color-blind when it comes to heavy-handed prosecution."

I think that was the poster's point. Not necesarily agreeing, just clarifying what I read as the intention.

> The system attacks those who threaten the system.

Is questionable. There is to date no proof that that is why Aaron was targeted, but there is quite a bit of circumstantial evidence that prosecutors wanted to be seen as tough on cybercrime.

I do consider it an open question, there have been some hints that his activism was part of the reason but for want of proof you can't really contend that it was.

The tin (foil) hat part was the rubbish about "those who threaten the system". That is just some pre-pubescent fantasy about being an outlaw and "sticking it to the man" to revive a 60's saying in the same vein. The reality was that the prosecutors wanted to seem tough and here was a case they couldn't lose.

"The system" is the reactive, situational, instinctual and not consciously volitional shared human underpinnings of the volitional choices of power-having agents in society. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy, because humans across society are running on brains with the same evolutionary history. Thus the commonality can be treated as having intentions as a social unit, because that's how it behaves, when what it really has are closer to reactive mood-influences in discrete humans acting without shared plans, which all point in the same direction.

The concept of "the system" got thrown out of mainstream discourse because the idea that there's a conspiracy is silly. But a conspiracy is just the simplest, crudest explanation for coordinated action.

Basically, "the system" is what you call society when you're angry with it.

I think that you and the parent post are in agreement.