If you want to prevent the next gifted hacker from hanging themselves, however, then it pays to search for the truth so that lessons can be learned from what actually happened, not merely from what scenario received the most benefit of the doubt.

Note I'm not saying the MIT Report constitutes the truth if Taren's assertions don't.

Is that what we're doing here? I thought it was more about MIT administration being absolute shits to important, creative, contributing members of the community, and how they might stop doing that. Swartz's suicide is not the only thing that makes MIT's behavior shameful. Ideally, next time the administration will correct their craven, copsucking behavior before it gets to that point.

"creating, contributing" member or not, Aaron didn't deserve extra privileges (or warrant worse punishment) compared to anyone else who had DDoS'ed MIT's network and repeatedly gained unauthorized access to their internal subnet.

MIT should not have allowed themselves to be used in throwing the book, but I would hardly call them a bunch of absolute shits over this.

No, I don't want to do that (not that I could).

What I want to do is to prevent the next gifted hacker from being prosecuted for BS and under overblown terms.

I've commented on threads like these before, and have mentioned that I lost a loved one to suicide. It was abundantly clear through journal entries and conversations as to what the impetus of self-harm was, but attributing those events as the things "responsible" for her suicide would have been shortsighted.

This thread seems to have devolved into an argument about whether Aaron or MIT was responsible for his suicide. That's the wrong question. We can all agree that MIT surely could and should have handled the situation differently, and I'm hesitant to say anything about Aaron's actions because I'm not informed enough.