People rarely live in a vacuum, they engage with society, and those interactions have tangible results. I feel this is obvious, but it seems lost on people. When a person is systematically bullied, that negative interaction with society will inevitably have an impact, and if severe enough, suicide is a potential result. Aaron had the weight of a state on his shoulders, and while I'm glad to say I've never experienced that the prospects of it terrify me. As someone with a history of depression, I can quite confidently state, I'm unsure I'd survive through the experience, and can foresee it simply becoming too much.

To state that no one has responsibility for his death is to excuse the gross abuses of those who's interactions with Aaron led to it. You are giving a pass to disgraceful prosecution tactics including intimidation and overreach. You are giving a pass to institutions that abandoned morality by siding with an abusive prosecution instead of standing up for a member of their community. Most egregiously, you are encouraging a broad view that only the victim is at fault for their choice. There's so much wrong with this view it's hard to know where to start, but for one, it suggests they're in the position to even logically and rationally evaluate the choice. If you're depressed to the point of suicide, it's fairly safe to assume, you aren't thinking logically or rationally. How can you then be held at fault for the resultant choice?

Suicide is horrible, and I've known some who've taken that path. But blaming those who commit such an act is the easy way out. To reduce the instances of people taking their own lives, you need to understand why. This means fully comprehending the circumstances that led to their choice, and this means holding those to account that contributed to it.

You have to admit that people that commit suicide are primarily responsible for their own deaths. That's like saying, people who drink alcohol are primarily responsible for getting drunk - it's just true prima face.

He killed himself, therefore he was responsible for his own death.

Perhaps in the same way that we might say someone who dies of cancer is responsible for their own deaths. That is: if we were in the habit of assigning blame to the suffering, for the medical problems they suffer.

Or if we are to outright deny what science has to say about it and instead further the US habit of denying mental health conditions as actual, legitimate medical issues.

Would you say the same thing about a war veteran who has PTSD and commits suicide? Or a rape victim who commits suicide? Or a middle school kid who commits suicide after months of cyberbullying?

I doubt it.

People undergo felony charges all the time without killing themselves.

A Federal charge sheet involving the possibility of a 'mere' 6-month sentence is not the equivalent of months of sustained cyberbullying.

To continue with your analogy somewhat, if a new sailor showed up to the boat and his divison said 'Hey look, it's the F.N.G.' on day 1, with no further hazing from there, and that new sailor hung himself, is his division to blame for 'cyberbullying'? Or is it appropriate to wonder whether the new sailor has something more going on inside that pre-dated his arrival?

Plenty of veterans don't kill themselves.

If we considered it the other way (that allowing someone to join the military or any difficult job is tantamount to cyber bullying) then imagine all the blame you'd have to spread around should a recruit or veteran kill themselves.

Then think about the possibility that the suicide many have been for reasons no different than they would have encountered, even if they had never joined at all.

Otherwise we'd literally be in a nanny state, and where does that stop? Should we prevent people from joining the police? How about firefighting? How about firefighting for wildfires? Or roofing?

Either way you can blame people until you're blue in the face and it won't help the veterans. The action that would be of help is to treat those who are wounded, and to prevent the politicians' use of the military in unneeded/unjust conflicts in the future.

This example is absolutely great.

Surely nobody would blame a conscripted Vietnam veteran for succumbing to illness caused by Agent Orange, but it seems many here would blame that same veteran for succumbing to mental illness induced by the same war.

Really makes you think how poorly we deal with mental illness as a society...

But for most of his pre-trial confinement he has been kept in the general population, and hasn't killed himself. Even after he plead guilty to charges that would have guaranteed him a sentence far worse than what Swartz would have received (even if Swartz had gone for a trial), Manning didn't kill himself.

EDIT: grammar

In response to this, by your own logic you've claimed that either 1) Aaron holds sole responsibility for his actions or 2) We can't assign responsibility to anyone. I disagree with both these conclusions because I don't think responsibility must be fully distributed to a single party. In what world are our actions absolved of any connection to outside influences? If I'm unconscious, and a doctor tests my knee reflex with one of those little hammers, and my leg moves - who has agency in causing the leg to move? (I in no way mean to insinuate this is an apples:apples comparison, just trying to tease out the implications of your logic.)

Whatever drives our argument, I guess.

Aaron did the deed, but the circumstances in which he found himself were extremely dire. Government and MIT have a lot of stake in that death, even they aren't the one who pulled the trigger.

Imagine if you would have the prospect of spending your best years in a prison, and the terrible prospect of joblessness once you left prison. Worse yet, his torment wouldn't end with prison, and adapting to life outside bars, I'm sure government would make him suffer for all the things he supposedly did. He would be under constant supervision, he wouldn't be able to stay true to himself. Even slightest doubt of activism would probably return him to a jail cell. He only could look forward to more fear and terror.

If adults who were abused as children become alcoholics, and then they drove drunk and killed someone, it's the kid who should be arrested and not the father.

That's not to say that we shouldn't have support systems in place for people to go get help, but moral responsibility has a clear line to me.

"their choice" is the key bit here.

We can (and should!) look at circumstances as you've described, but it does a disservice to everyone to accept a suicide as the result of anything other than the individual's choice--this cheapens the act.

It seems hard for people to grasp that the actions of Aaron's antagonists need to be judged independently of his decision to end his own life. We really don't want to start assigning responsibility for other peoples' suicides.

People can be provoked into suicide by a number of things. If a woman divorces her husband and he commits suicide, the woman may be blamed for the manner of the divorce, whatever that may be, but it was not her choice for the man to die. Conversely, if Aaron didn't commit suicide, the prosecutors would be no less responsible for their cruelty and injustice towards him.

Your moral responsibility for what you do to me has nothing to do with how I choose to react to it. I am not exonerating Aaron's prosecutors, though the logical conclusion of your argument is that you would exonerate them, had Aaron reacted differently.

People have a responsibility to diligently consider the consequences of their actions, and to act based on their expectations of those consequences. "Consequence" isn't hard to define here; it's "what things are likely to happen after X, versus what things are likely to happen after ~X". There's no "will it be my fault?" There is only "will it be more or less likely depending on what I do?"

After the fact, the matter of responsibility is a function of whether the person took reasonable measures to obtain information, and whether the person acted in a way that would maximize the utility of the expected outcome based on that information.

Note that responsibility need not be a conserved quantity. Had the prosecutor not been informed that Swartz was a suicide risk, he would bear exactly the same amount of responsibility for his own death. The prosecutor would have just born less.

Thanks for this, you should post more, a community is only as good as its active members.

Arguably life in our modern prison system is one of the most horrific experiences you can have, some of the most miserable living conditions on the planet. The effect on your psyche of having a group of highly empowered, well funded government agents seeking zealously to place you in that cage over what is really a silly reason cannot be overestimated.

Yes it's tragic that Aaron committed suicide. But the real tragedy is that we as a people let our government cage non-violent offenders in a veritable hell all the time for stupid stupid reasons. It's an atrocity that it happens, and for MIT to take a position of neutrality on whether or not a human should be caged up for downloading documents is at the very least condoning that atrocity.

that's a black and white view of the world. One that I also don't think would hold up to the slightest logical scrutiny.

Can we delve into your comment a bit. Is your claim that when someone commits suicide that no else ever bears any responsibility for their death?

Safe to say that for me, I find your comments unclear.

let's recap. Here's how the thread started.

This may in fact be true, but this claim is leveled with the implication that MIT is responsible for his death. -pkfrank

You're the second comment on the thread

No one else bears any responsibility for his death.

from that I infer (and I think most people would as well) that you don't think MIT has any responsibility in the matter. Furthermore, because of the terseness of your comment (there's no qualification or explanation) your comment reads like an almost absolute claim that when someone commits suicide no one else ever bears any responsibility. That's why I asked for clarification.

Here you acknowledge that the British state bears responsibility for oppressing and chemically castrating Turing. But would you say the British state has no responsibility for his suicide?

Furthermore, IMO, this thread probably isn't the place to pursue your jihad about the semantics of the word responsibility.

Would you say the same about any person facing a six-month plea deal?

Why, I bet it's possible that one could even go on to great success in the tech field, even with (or especially with) a CFAA felony.

That's kind of besides the point, because a felony conviction would have been overkill here. But it still would have been much better than the alternative we ended up getting. Let's face it, many hackers have faced felony charges before without killing themselves, and few of them had as much potentially going for them after the trial as Aaron would have.

I'm not trying to downplay the significance of a felony conviction, but it shouldn't be overplayed either.

Sure - 2% of people survived a fall from the Golden Gate bridge, so that means it's silly to focus on the death aspects of such a fall when reasoning about "if someone does fall".

Similarly people occasionally choke to death on food. So we should stop talking about eating without serious choking warnings all over the place, right?

Swartz wasn't like that. A felony conviction would have prevented him from working at IBM but he wasn't going to do that anyway. For all possible jobs he could have gotten before, a felony conviction would have been a badge of honor or irrelevant.

Swartz happened to work in one of the very few fields where a CFAA felony is not only not a big deal, but might even be considered a badge of honor. So IMHO the argument that a felony would have been some kind of death sentence for aaronsw definitely requires evidence.

We're in maybe the one field where it really, truly doesn't matter what your background is--if you make the test suite happy, if you delight the customers, then fuck man, join the team!

I think it's time to start setting precedent in our companies that we welcome folks with colorful backgrounds as long as they can ship good code or move product.

I worked with a business bro who had a multi-million dollar fine levied by the .gov; he was one of the kindest and sharpest business folks I've had the pleasure of being with, and if I ever have the revenue to justify it I'll try to hire him from my old company.

It's time to stop assuming that felons in the US are not worth working with or employing.

It's not just the sentence itself. Defending his case was ruining his finances. Once out of prison he would have faced numerous hurdles, which would become more severe if his sentence were longer.

This is not to say that suicide was the right choice. Rather it is to point out that we are not talking about a slap on the wrists; the prosecutor was going for his throat. Any rational person would be scared in that situation.

Now is a year is an easy sentence? Probably not, but it's certainly not a very hard sentence. Either way according to Dr. Lessig the sticking point for Aaron wasn't the length of the sentence, it was the 'felon' label.

All the other hurdles you've mentioned, all of them, are surmounted all the time by much lesser men than Aaron. Sometimes I think that Aaron might have actually started to believe the type of crap that gets slung around here on HN about how being a felon ends your life, and I wonder if that had any influence...

[1] http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/01/towards-learning-l...