While they offered a relatively short sentence,
prosecutors were absolutely determined to get a
felony plea and some kind of prison time, according
to sources cited by The Huffington Post. They wanted
those results because they believed it would justify
their bringing charges in the first place, according
to HuffPo.There is a very widespread belief that Swartz faced decades in prison. Rayiner is a lawyer, but you don't even need to be one of those to learn that Swartz didn't face decades in prison. His own attorney wrote a long, detailed post about the situation Swartz was in. The prosecution threatened 6-7 years, and his attorney thought it was unlikely that Swartz would have received a custodial sentence at all even if convicted on every charge.
All Rayiner is doing is correcting a misconception.
Rayiner is an AC, if he's a lawyer beyond his claim he should stick his name on his profile, until then he just claims to be a lawyer. Grellas is a lawyer.
Since the lawsuit never came to a conclusion you can claim that you can see into the future all you want but the sentence was never passed so you don't actually know how it would end. All we have is what Aaron was charged with, and we know is that he took the push to get him to face jailtime very seriously.
There is no certainty in going before a judge, performance in the past is no guarantee for the future.
It's quite possible that Aaron would have just been 'slapped on the wrist', but since it isn't your head on the block I think you should lay off. And even 'just' being labelled a felon is apparently a small thing to you, to me it would matter a great deal so if that's all there was that is too much for me.
I understand you have a problem with people breaking the law and not getting punished, let's hope that one day you will move beyond 'level 2'.
The longest sentence for hacking in the U.S. on record, according to Wired, is for a guy who stole two million credit card numbers and sold them for $20 a pop to organized crime: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/02/max-vision-sentenci.... He was sentenced to 13 years and paying $27.5 million in restitution, but will be serving about 9 years in a minimum security prison.
The maximum sentences exist for guys like that (and I don't think 9 years in prison is unreasonable for hacking that resulted in $86 million in fraudulent charges).
A quick Google-ing shows that people who engage in activity that doesn't actually cause substantial economic damages, even when facing a dozen felony counts, just don't get substantial jail time. Which makes the "35 years in prison" hand-waving just plain misleading.
Now, maybe you think a 6 month suspended sentence and a felony record are too harsh for illegally accessing a network. I tend to agree with you--I think that copyright infringements should be purely civil matters and accessing networks without permission should be misdemeanors, not felonies. But that's a totally separate argument than: "OMG our system is so fucked he was going to get 35 years for not doing anything wrong!"
I guess my point is that things can be wrong without being an indictment of our whole society. Not everything we should change is the result of the fundamental corruption of our society, the fact that our Congress people are bought out, the fact that our government is one step away from fascism, etc. When you throw the misleading "decades in prison" language around, you force the debate in that direction, instead of more sensible and productive ones ("maybe we should make the misdemeanor case of the CFAA more robust and not so easily side-stepped by simply claiming the hacking was in the furtherance of some other crime.")
I think one of the problems here is that the 'decades in prison' thing is actually used at all, especially by the prosecutors.
If there is no chance of 'decades in prison' then it shouldn't be used in the first place. Such bluffing and posturing leads to all kinds of trouble and I can't see anything good coming from it.
The other part - the civil / felonies - bit I think is slightly more nuanced. Big time commercial piracy versus most others kinds, where the felonies should obviously be handed out to big time commercial pirates. This may be hard to put together in a way that holds water legally, but that opens the door to overreach.
What I've gleaned from the Aaron Swartz case so far is that the actual thing Aaron tried to do (the downloading) turned out to be non-punishable because of the JSTOR reversal, so instead, a lot of hay is being made over something that is actually peripheral to the whole case.
It's like someone with driving with their lights off being charged with a whole slew of offenses because they can't be charged for breaking and entering. Going for the absolute maximum penalty that you can attach in every contrived way possible to driving with your lights off.
This comes across as quite surreal and unjust.
As for "unspecified chance"--of course there is some unspecified chance of anything happening. You don't piss off the federal government and a key piece of the military industrial complex by knowingly breaking laws and then rest easy in the knowledge that there is zero chance of your getting in serious trouble. But based on previous cases we've seen, it's highly probable that nothing serious would have happened. Other young hackers who broke into networks but didn't cause any damage mostly got probation. Kevin Mitnick got 5 years, but for his second offense after spending 2.5 years as a fugitive.
Sure, he could have just rolled over. After all that's much cheaper, justice is, after all, for those that can afford it.
He wanted to fight a political battle, arguing that there was nothing wrong using someones network without permission or distributing peoples work without permission. People here in HN treat that as a given, but that's not how the law views things, and that's not how ordinary Americans view things. My mom wouldn't have needed to know about mac address spoofing to know what he did was wrong. Hell, if I wandered into random closets like that without permission as a child I wouldve known it was wrong.
He wanted to challenge the law, and argue that things we percieve to be wrong were either not wrong or otherwise justified. That's what was expensive--not getting a fair shake from the system.
Yes, we make it expensive and difficult to upset the settled order. That's by design and its a hallmark of civilization.
That's an opnion, not an established fact. What is a fact is that to establish whether you broke the law or not will bankrupt you regardless of whether you did or not.
See, you are not a judge, you simply are some guy on a forum arguing that Aaron broke the law. If you want to know for sure then you go before a judge and you defend yourself. Unfortunately that is now no longer affordable, tough luck.
The law does not 'view' things, the law is made by people and interpreted by people, ordinary Americans should - and plenty of the them do - view these things as strange and inscrutable. They don't understand why high profile banker criminals walk free but some kid that tries to do the world a service gets hounded to the point where he sees no way out.
I'm pretty sure that you as a kid already were a 'good boy' but there is more to this life than obedience, sometimes you have to think for yourself and figure out what is really right or really wrong. The results may surprise you.
Making things 'expensive and difficult to upset' is not a hallmark of civilization, it's a hallmark of a system that has gone wrong.
Of course to lawyers that's a great thing, it means more gravy for them.
When has this ever been affordable?
Can you craft a legal system where everyone receives at least the minimal amount of legal expertise that they need inexpensively?
Either way if you prefer semantics then even going through the expensive legal process will never verify the fact of whether Aaron broke the law. It will only verify whether or not a jury unanimously agreed that the prosecution appeared to have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Aaron broke the law.
Given that the law (CFAA) is fairly unjust in this case, and deliberately so, I don't see why it's a stretch to claim that Aaron "broke the law", it was intentionally written to be easy to prove charges written against it!
Yes, we have exactly that here.
Because the common-law system that the U.S. uses is much more complex, which increases the complexity for the lawyers, which increases the cost of the lawyers/judges/etc. However rich a few of the lawyers may be, most struggle through and don't pay off their student loans until comparatively late.
But over there the lawyers are inexpensive (or simply unnecessary)? Because if that's the case it sounds like the issue is already solved, simply move to where you live.
If the lawyers are expensive, but not for their clients, it simply means that someone else is footing the bill, which has analogs within the U.S. (public defenders) but most who can pay choose to forgo public defenders (assuming the state even provides that option).
People find taxes strange and inscrutable. They find municipal regulations and housing codes strange and inscrutable. In my experience, they're pretty good with the various provisions of the law that provide for private property and enforced boundaries for private property. We're a society that believes very deeply in boundaries and walls, and are skeptical of people who breach those boundaries even when they have a political agenda that ostensibly justifies their actions.
> They don't understand why high profile banker criminals walk free but some kid that tries to do the world a service gets hounded to the point where he sees no way out.
It's just an opinion that Swartz broke clearly stated laws against illegally accessing networks, but it's a fact that bankers broke criminal laws. I have that straight?
> I'm pretty sure that you as a kid already were a 'good boy' but there is more to this life than obedience, sometimes you have to think for yourself and figure out what is really right or really wrong.
Sometimes you do, but when you do, you should be prepared to deal with the consequences of rocking the boat.
> Making things 'expensive and difficult to upset' is not a hallmark of civilization, it's a hallmark of a system that has gone wrong.
Civilization comes from stability. There is a reason Rome is remembered more for the Pax Romana under the empire than for the republic. There is a reason the peak of British civilization and the peak of American civilization are coincident with periods of their military supremacy.
> Of course to lawyers that's a great thing, it means more gravy for them.
Some lawyers? Sure. Lawyers generally? Not really. The set of people who can afford million dollar legal fees and the set of people are targeted for individual criminal actions is a small group of people. It's profitable work for a few high profile firms, but there just isn't a lot of it and it doesn't account for all that much revenue. By and large the targets of overzealous prosecution are low-income minorities who are put away for drug crimes. Not much money to be made there.
As a result, you'll find very few groups of people more against overzealous criminal prosecution than lawyers. I have too many public defender friends to be unaware of the problems of over-prosecution. But wealthy tech entrepreneurs breaking the law to push their political agenda just doesn't tug at my heart strings the way say a young man actually getting 20+ years for some drug possession does. People like that have the resources to push for change they desire through "official channels" without resorting to dramatics.
More generally, stability is good for lawyers for the same reason it's good for everyone else. Legal industry revenues are a function of GDP, weighted towards GDP from financial services. In a stable environment, people invest in the future. They do deals, some of those deals are a success and result in successful companies, some of those deals go sideways. All of those things generate legal work.
http://www.volokh.com/2011/05/24/congress-considers-increasi...