If you punch a stranger in the face, you probably don't expect him to fall, crack his head on the corner of a table, and die; but you don't get to claim you're blameless if that happens, either.
* This is the bit where someone says that Heymann didn't really want to lock Aaron up 'til 2045, he just said that to scare him. Where I come from, "but I was lying" isn't considered much of a defense either.
I hardly think "suicide is a choice" is an appropriate thing to say. Take recent suicide rates in the military. Do all those soldiers decide to become so depressed as to kill themselves, or does environment have something to do with it?
Seriously? I'm not blaming MIT. What did I say that indicated this? I'm arguing about "suicide is a choice." It's not. Choice has something to do with it, but to say it is choice is asinine. To say that is to never have been depressed or truly known another person who was depressed or suffering from another mental illness.
Also, is it not selfish of a family to expect a person with mental illness (or other serious problems) to suffer for the rest of his/her life just so they can delay the loss?
The concept of selfishness is not applicable here, since the individual does not gain anything by suicide, nor does it have anything to do with excessive self love. Suicide is simply an act deemed pathological by society, any other value judgment is bound to be derived from philosophically arbitrary and subjective ethical convictions.
The mistake you're making is that responsibility isn't zero-sum. Is Swartz responsible for killing himself? Sure. But if prosecutors are unjustly harsh with a lot of people in a way that causes the suicide rate in that group to jump, are they responsible too? Yes indeed.
If multiple factors cause something, multiple people can be responsible, and the responsibility of one does not diminish the responsibility of the other.
Didn't say it directly, but follow the logic.
If the prosecutors are now responsible for only proferring charges on suspects who won't kill themselves then it obviously follows that we need to ensure that no one appoints prosecutors who would do this (it's life and death after all!).
So now the person appointing the prosecutor potentially has blood on their hands. Likewise for the person appointing the person appointing the prosecutor. And God only forbid the population as a whole votes for someone in this chain, could you live with yourself if you had voted for the person who appointed Ortiz or Heymann?
That is insanity and I refuse to go down that path.
Instead point your finger at the person (or even persons) responsible, but don't act like simply being a big mean jerk is by itself tantamount to putting a noose around a man's neck. If that were really the case the vast majority of humanity would at some point be liable for manslaughter or attempted manslaughter.
In 2007 Schwartz posted what was believed to be a suicide note after being fired from reddit: http://digitaljournal.com/article/341150
Being fired is also high on the depression list.
You're pointing out two dark moments in someones life. I've had far more than two and I don't by any means consider myself depressed.
That's actually the point... it is depression that kills, not merely subjecting someone to a "dark moment" in their life. We wouldn't have blamed Alexis and the rest of Team Reddit if Aaron had killed himself after being fired, we would have blamed his depression.
Seriously, please educate yourself before offering embarrassing opinions. Clinical depression does not mean automatic suicide, it just makes you more prone to considering suicide when things are bad.
But why are the rates of attempted or completed suicide so high?
If you also consider the differential susceptibility thesis (which seems to apply to Aaron rather well) then it's easy to argue that the government's conduct most likely did significantly contribute: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_susceptibility_hyp...
P.S. it was actually 50 years, but thanks for paying attention...
MIT's IS&T office had a knee jerk security-oriented reaction, and was over impressed with interacting with Steven Heymann, who is a fixture at the sort of conferences where Swartz's "crime" is inflated out of proportion.
It's not OK that Heymann, Ortiz, and MIT's personnel who overcooked this case contributed to the death of Aaron Swartz. And it's not OK they got away with it so far.
They didn't know the guy was Aaron Swartz and that they ought to have been privileged to have him on their network, invited or not.
Suicide is not completely a personal choice. Part of it is a problem with mental wiring, yes, but a significant part of it is also environmental. Suicide is far more prevalent among people who view themselves to be in hopeless situations, whether financial or otherwise.
I hate to resort to analogy, since everyone always then argues the analogy instead of the subject it's trying to describe, but if you have an engine that redlines at 5,000 rpm and you redline it for a while and it self-destructs, you don't turn around then and say, "well, that wasn't the driver's fault, that was completely the engine's fault."
Aaron made the sad decision to take his own life. Ultimately, yes, he made that decision and nobody else did. But that doesn't mean that there isn't some responsibility to go 'round. He made that decision because of the future he believed he was facing, because of the situation he believed he was in.
Also, the entire point of this article was that MIT did have at least one good reason to defend Aaron: self-interest. He was as much a symbol of what people believed was a hacker ethos at MIT as anyone else of his generation. The message now is clear: hackers are not safe at MIT.
"Just following the rules" has never been a socially acceptable defense for bad behavior. Sometimes the rules are wrong, and the wonderful thing about humans -- when they choose to be human -- is that we have the ability to judge a situation and decide when to bend or even break the rules.
Because they didn't know what was going on and needed help to figure it out. It's all laid out in the Abelson report.
If you're looking for a key juncture at which MIT made a mistake, I would ask why they didn't make a statement similar to the one JSTOR made after the civil settlement: basically saying "we're satisfied that this is resolved and don't have any interest in further legal actions being taken". (I'm not sure this would actually have stopped the prosecutors, since they seemed bound and determined to "get" Swartz no matter what, but at least it would have been something.)
This is common knowledge about the case, also found in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#JSTOR
http://www.mass.gov/courts/courtsandjudges/courts/districtco...
See, the problem here is that we are talking about giving aid to overly aggressive prosecutors, whose entire careers are devoted to undermining civil rights and destroying their targets. If that is the sort of prosecution you are aiding, yes, you should share in the blame for what happens to the prosecutor's victims.
If the punishment vastly outweighs the crime, to the extent that one's mental health is impacted, can he be completely to blame for that?
There's no such thing as a "completely personal choice".
In fact the whole notion of a "completely personal choice" is ludicrous, bordering on the metaphysical.
There is an outside world, a reality, and things that happen there influce our actions, including any decision to commit suicide.
Basically, this case embodied almost everything that is wrong with the criminal justice system in America.
E.g. there's no reason that this should have been a felony, but the option of pleading to something that was a misdemeanor wasn't even available to Aaron here because of the way the law is constructed.
However given the law and the way the legal system works the prosecutor was certainly treating this just like any other CFAA case.
A lifetime in prison is not worse than death. At least you can still talk to your family. You can acquire new skills. There is the chance you get paroled early. Etc, etc.
Yet when the tables are turned suddenly suicide is viewed with such disdain?
I'm not advocating suicide or anything, I'm just arguing that when faced with an immensely harsh sentence, it's not a surprising decision to reach.
The fuck it isn't. Or, more civilly, that is definitely a statement on which reasonable people may disagree.
I'm not particularly depressed, but if I were actually sentenced to life in prison, I would check out in a hot second. There's no point. My opportunities to create joy in the world and to experience unalloyed happiness are done. The rest of my life would be nothing but marking the days and the years until death. It's a waste of good consciousness. I'm opposed to capital punishment because it's irreversible, but I do believe that death is more merciful than life in prison.
From his perspective it was a rational decision because he didn't see any better one. There is absolutely not mental instability in play here.
My feeling is that most people who commit suicide do it because they decided it on a rational basis. Some people commit suicide because they want to stop a pain they feel and in their view will apparently last forever or will get worse. I.e cancer, someone has to spend the rest of his life in a bed after an accident ... People can also commit suicide as a sacrifice to save others. But I guess you were not talking of these types of suicide.
Suicide due to mental instability is probably just a small fraction of all suicide.
Your claim is typical from someone who didn't took the time and made the effort to understand what can lead someone fully rational to suicide. A rational thinking compares the cost and benefit of dying or living. According to some context a perfectly sain person may rationnaly conclude that commiting suicide is the best choice.
The rational thinking they had from their perspective and knowledge may have been wrong, but this is not to be confused with mental instability.
You think that more people commit suicide for others than for themselves? Care to explain why or cite anything?
>Suicide due to mental instability is probably just a small fraction of all suicide.
Cite?
Cite? Just found this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide.
From the graphic shown on the page, not all suicide are caused by mental illness. That was my main point.
I have some doubts about the mental illness importance shown in this graph. Anyway, the mental illness could be the source of pain leading to the rational decision to end it by suicide.
I think we should only invoke "mental instability" when someone's projection of their future level of suffering is clearly mistaken.
Regardless, the vast majority of suicides are the result of a combination of depression and loss of inhibition, both of which are psychiatric symptoms that can be brought on or exacerbated by severe stress. The assumption can and should be that this is the case, not that an individual who was self-admittedly under huge amounts of personal stress performed a rational evaluation of their own future prospects in life and determined that it wasn't worth living.
You say that there are some situations where suicide is a rational choice. But even in these cases it's not that clear.
While I respect the right to chose death, and support changing of law to allow people to seek medically assisted suicide, I am worried that people with undiagnosed depression who would respond to treatment are allowed to die.
user: mentalhealth
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Then don't comment if you're so afraid of your rep. I mean, what's the point of this site? To me, it's to exchange various thoughts/ideas related to tech and otherwise.
Creating a new account to comment cause your afraid of being down-voted is cowardly. And insulting, frankly.
Regarding the "unsubstantiated claim", I don't feel the need to substantiate every assertion I make on HN. People here are generally smart and motivated enough to do their own research (when they're not busily dismissing everything they can with "citation needed"), and suicidal ideation as mental illness is universally accepted by the professional community qualified to discuss the phenomenon.
It's a natural response to a suicide; we try and search for something to blame. But unless you argue that MIT should have known Aaron was mentally unstable, saying MIT "caused" him to kill himself is illogical. People who commit suicide may desire to because of what they feel about their lives, but the final decision is one's own.
It's sad that it takes a death to bring attention to the IP issues that Aaron's trial had raised.