10 ms·

DOJ Elevated Its Charges Against Swartz Because Internet Rallied on His Behalf

160 points by swartzrock 13y ago

VladRussian2 13y ago
They wanted to send a message. Just like mobsters tripping on power do.
- ferdo 13y ago
  The message seems to be, "If you assert your rights or your innocence, we'll make life very difficult for you. Comply." Pure mobster mentality.
  - fiatmoney 13y ago
    It's worse than that. "If anyone advocates on your behalf, we'll make sure you regret it."
    - Vivtek 13y ago
      I think the message was meant for the Internet, actually. Something like "You think you own this country? We'll show you who owns this country".
      - angersock 13y ago
        I don't think they appreciate how utterly annoying maintaining that position will prove to them.
        Vivtek 13y ago
        I certainly hope you're correct.
  - sigzero 13y ago
    Really? He didn't have the "right" or the "innocence".
- fleitz 13y ago
  What we've got here is... failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it... well, he gets it. I don't like it any more than you men.
  - ferdo 13y ago
    "Calling it your job don't make it right, Boss."
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
sp332 13y ago
This article makes the prosecution sound much more reasonable than other articles I've seen before. "The prosecutor’s response was that it disturbed him whenever a defendant ‘systematically re-victimized’ the victim, and that was what Swartz was doing by dragging MIT through hearings and a trial." The trial must have seemed like a deliberate waste of everyone's resources, when (from the prosecutor's view) Aaron would have been much better off taking the plea bargain since he had already admitted what he had done.
- flagnog 13y ago
  nope, it doesn't at all - it makes the prosecutor seem like a petulant child - they didn't get what they wanted (Swartz to quietly, meekly give in), so the pulled out the big guns and bullied him until he committed suicide.
  - consultant23522 13y ago
    I dunno. When I'm going 65 in a 45 and I know I'm dead wrong, when the cop only gives me a ticket for my broken tail light I don't give them a hard time. I would fully expect that if I gave the officer the finger he'd give me both tickets. The prosecutor probably felt he was doing the kid a favor and got snubbed. I'm not saying it's right, just saying there's more than one side to the story.
    - jack-r-abbit 13y ago
      > Prosecutors eventually offered Swartz a deal to avoid trial in which he’d have to plead guilty to all 13 charges and spend six months behind bars. Two days later, on Jan. 11, 2013, Swartz hung himself. Somehow I missed it before that they had come all the way down to 6 months in prison, and just 2 days before he killed himself. I thought he died still thinking he was facing 35 years in prison... not 6 months.
- defen 13y ago
  I'm hoping this is just really subtle sarcasm - there is a Constitutional right to a trial, you know...even when "everybody knows" that the defendant is guilty.
flagnog 13y ago
so, because someone's feathers got ruffled, they pursued him until he committed suicide. Let that be a lesson boys and girls - don't piss off people in power, bow and scrape like a good little citizen and you will be OK</sarcasm>.
tareqak 13y ago
This story makes me wonder what would have happened if the Watergate scandal would have happened in the age of the Internet. Would the Internet rally in favour of Richard Nixon's impeachment and against his subsequent pardon? Would impeachment proceedings still take place irrespective of the pardon because of massive public support?
- r00fus 13y ago
  The Internet is orthogonal to the issue (probably), the fact is that the US GOvernment is completely corrupt and captured now, from the highest levels to the lowest. The corporate capture has left the wealthy and powerful above the law, if they're just willing to join the corruption scheme. In short, the US is swiftly becoming a 3rd world country when it comes to equality of income and fairness of justice, and this is especially the case if someone like Aaron Swartz is looking to really rock the boat… they become the examples hung in plaza so everyone else meekly complies.
- ferdo 13y ago
  The NSA spying on all of us is a bigger crime and a bigger scandal than Watergate. I don't see any groundswell for impeachment.
  - tankbot 13y ago
    > a bigger scandal than Watergate. Depends on how you qualify its big-ness. Go out and talk to regular, non-techie folks about NSA spying. In the unlikely event that you even find someone who knows what you are talking about, they won't care. They will look at you like you're crazy and they'll say, "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about." If it's just a small, quickly forgotten blurb on Fox news between TERRORISM and Honey Boo-Boo then does it even qualify as scandal?
    - ferdo 13y ago
      People affected is my bigness metric, in this instance. Nixon got outed for spying on a hotel room. The Executive Branch just got outed spying on pretty much everyone. Watergate was also in a time when people were, by and large, a little more literate about the supposed balance that's supposed to exist between the government and the individual. I was a teenager during Watergate and recall more than one adult being outraged that the president would spy on anyone and shared their outrage. Today, the almost absolute apathy about being spied on is as disturbing to me as the surveillance itself. It doesn't bode well for the American political future.
s_q_b 13y ago
The actor I'm most disappointed in is MIT. Right now, the DOJ is one of the targets of a massive scared-straight campaign by Beltway technologists. One of the worst kept secrets in the world is that US cybersecurity, outside of the military and the IC, is incredibly bad. If most civilian agencies were private corporations, they would have been sued dozens of times by users for negligence in data handling. For those that understood the dangers of this lax security posture, for many years it was a game of railing into the wind about the potential consequences of continuing to ignore this attack vector. Then, China got involved. Suddenly, the dangers weren't speculative at all. They were right at our doorstep. And the same Cassandras that were on the outs for so long suddenly found themselves with the ear of every CIO in Washington. What followed was a massive purchasing binge, which is still ongoing, and a huge amount of advertising and mindshare devoted to this topic. It was amidst the height of this cyber-scare that the Schwartz prosecution was brought. For Mr. Heymann, Aaron Schwartz was a huge target. A US hacker, caught in the act of stealing information worth millions, was a great prize for Mr. Heyman, his boss Carmen Ortiz, who has rather naked political ambitions, and her bosses in DC. So why am I disappointed in MIT? Because the DOJ has never understood computer technology very well. MIT does. It was their job to educate the DOJ, to subordinate passion to reason, and to parse the difficult technological issues to explain the real lack of damage caused by Aaron Schwartz's actions. MIT is supposed to be a guardian of our online rights and a cradle for technologists like Schwartz. It should have been on the forefront of the opposition to Mr. Heymann, demanding that charges be dropped. Instead, they threw him to the wolves. And now, in one final insult, they ask the courts for special leave to screen documents in order to hide their involvement with the prosecution. I hope the individuals involved know that they abandoned a sacred trust, tarnished the name of a great institution, and negligently contributed to the death of a brilliant young man. I hope they know that they weren't "just doing their jobs," that they didn't "follow rules and procedures," and that no one buys their excuses anymore. I hope that at least one of the administrators responsible has lost even one night's sleep over Mr. Schwartz's death. But, knowing the disdain and disregard for Mr. Schwartz that these hired bureaucrats expressed while he was alive, I doubt it.
- rhizome 13y ago
  One of the worst kept secrets in the world is that US cybersecurity, outside of the military and the IC, is incredibly bad. Not sure why you're excluding Mil/IC here, in light of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, did you mean to restrict your point to Internet-connected devices?
praptak 13y ago
So how's the White House response to the petition to fire Carmen Ortiz?
pvnick 13y ago
Aaron was also involved in some groundbreaking software development for political activism [1] [2]. I find it extremely easy to believe that someone in the DoJ saw that and decided to make an example out of him to dissuade other "hacktivists." [1] http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/05/strongbox-and-aaron-swartz.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/05/stron... [2] https://github.com/naomifox/mass-email-delivery-code https://github.com/naomifox/mass-email-delivery-code
- s_q_b 13y ago
  The files themselves point out that the Secret Service first began investigating Swartz with the publication of his "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto." The smart people in law enforcement are scared sh*tless of hacktivists, so it's totally possible they lumped him in with the Sabu/Hammond/Lulzsec crowd.
rhizome 13y ago
So Heymann increased the apparent penalties based on Swartz exercising First Amendment rights? So much for rule of law.
- kps 13y ago
  It's universal for prosecutors to increase the penalties sought when a defendant exercises their Sixth Amendment rights; why should the First be any different?
  - rhizome 13y ago
    It's idealistic, sure, but exercising these rights doesn't change the evidence.
thufry 13y ago
I wouldn't even be 1% surprised if they forced Swartz into committing suicide, by threatening to harm his loved ones if he didn't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_suicide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_suicide
- jgross206 13y ago
  can you share some of your reasoning behind this (quite extreme) belief?
  - YokoZar 13y ago
    If I remember correctly, Aaron was convinced that the way things were going with the trial it would bankrupt his family by defending him. It's not too hard to imagine that "protecting" them involves taking yourself out of the equation there.
    - chrischen 13y ago
      In that case he could have just not defended himself.
  - superuser2 13y ago
    FBI repeatedly suggested that Martin Luther King kill himself. I think it's a little melodramatic for this case, but it wouldn't be the first time the DoJ has employed that tactic to protect the status quo against an activist.
  - thufry 13y ago
    I just wanted to see if anyone would agree with it.
D9u 13y ago
‘from a human one-on-one level to an institutional level.’ I fail to see how government vs a single individual can be construed as "a human one-on-one level."
beefxq 13y ago
The end of freedom.
- chris_mahan 13y ago
  What freedom?
tzs 13y ago
> MIT, whose archive was hacked while Swartz was a fellow at Harvard (which gave him access to JSTOR) So why not download from Harvard, instead of abusing guest access at MIT?
- twoodfin 13y ago
  My guess would be because he thought MIT would be more likely to look the other way.
Amadou 13y ago
Confirmation? PJ Media is a horrible news source, editorial standards poorer than Glenn Beck's "The Blaze." And this wasn't even reporting, it was an opinion piece in the blogs section. I'm all for piling on the malefactors in the Aaron Swartz case, but I wouldn't bet a nickle on anything that comes out of PJ Media.

160 points by swartzrock 13y ago

VladRussian2 13y ago

They wanted to send a message. Just like mobsters tripping on power do.

ferdo 13y ago
The message seems to be, "If you assert your rights or your innocence, we'll make life very difficult for you. Comply." Pure mobster mentality.
- fiatmoney 13y ago
  It's worse than that. "If anyone advocates on your behalf, we'll make sure you regret it."
  - Vivtek 13y ago
    I think the message was meant for the Internet, actually. Something like "You think you own this country? We'll show you who owns this country".
    - angersock 13y ago
      I don't think they appreciate how utterly annoying maintaining that position will prove to them.
      - Vivtek 13y ago
        I certainly hope you're correct.
- sigzero 13y ago
  Really? He didn't have the "right" or the "innocence".
fleitz 13y ago
What we've got here is... failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it... well, he gets it. I don't like it any more than you men.
- ferdo 13y ago
  "Calling it your job don't make it right, Boss."

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

sp332 13y ago

This article makes the prosecution sound much more reasonable than other articles I've seen before. "The prosecutor’s response was that it disturbed him whenever a defendant ‘systematically re-victimized’ the victim, and that was what Swartz was doing by dragging MIT through hearings and a trial." The trial must have seemed like a deliberate waste of everyone's resources, when (from the prosecutor's view) Aaron would have been much better off taking the plea bargain since he had already admitted what he had done.

flagnog 13y ago
nope, it doesn't at all - it makes the prosecutor seem like a petulant child - they didn't get what they wanted (Swartz to quietly, meekly give in), so the pulled out the big guns and bullied him until he committed suicide.
- consultant23522 13y ago
  I dunno. When I'm going 65 in a 45 and I know I'm dead wrong, when the cop only gives me a ticket for my broken tail light I don't give them a hard time. I would fully expect that if I gave the officer the finger he'd give me both tickets. The prosecutor probably felt he was doing the kid a favor and got snubbed. I'm not saying it's right, just saying there's more than one side to the story.
  - jack-r-abbit 13y ago
    > Prosecutors eventually offered Swartz a deal to avoid trial in which he’d have to plead guilty to all 13 charges and spend six months behind bars. Two days later, on Jan. 11, 2013, Swartz hung himself. Somehow I missed it before that they had come all the way down to 6 months in prison, and just 2 days before he killed himself. I thought he died still thinking he was facing 35 years in prison... not 6 months.
defen 13y ago
I'm hoping this is just really subtle sarcasm - there is a Constitutional right to a trial, you know...even when "everybody knows" that the defendant is guilty.

flagnog 13y ago

so, because someone's feathers got ruffled, they pursued him until he committed suicide. Let that be a lesson boys and girls - don't piss off people in power, bow and scrape like a good little citizen and you will be OK</sarcasm>.

tareqak 13y ago

This story makes me wonder what would have happened if the Watergate scandal would have happened in the age of the Internet. Would the Internet rally in favour of Richard Nixon's impeachment and against his subsequent pardon? Would impeachment proceedings still take place irrespective of the pardon because of massive public support?

r00fus 13y ago
The Internet is orthogonal to the issue (probably), the fact is that the US GOvernment is completely corrupt and captured now, from the highest levels to the lowest. The corporate capture has left the wealthy and powerful above the law, if they're just willing to join the corruption scheme. In short, the US is swiftly becoming a 3rd world country when it comes to equality of income and fairness of justice, and this is especially the case if someone like Aaron Swartz is looking to really rock the boat… they become the examples hung in plaza so everyone else meekly complies.
ferdo 13y ago
The NSA spying on all of us is a bigger crime and a bigger scandal than Watergate. I don't see any groundswell for impeachment.
- tankbot 13y ago
  > a bigger scandal than Watergate. Depends on how you qualify its big-ness. Go out and talk to regular, non-techie folks about NSA spying. In the unlikely event that you even find someone who knows what you are talking about, they won't care. They will look at you like you're crazy and they'll say, "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about." If it's just a small, quickly forgotten blurb on Fox news between TERRORISM and Honey Boo-Boo then does it even qualify as scandal?
  - ferdo 13y ago
    People affected is my bigness metric, in this instance. Nixon got outed for spying on a hotel room. The Executive Branch just got outed spying on pretty much everyone. Watergate was also in a time when people were, by and large, a little more literate about the supposed balance that's supposed to exist between the government and the individual. I was a teenager during Watergate and recall more than one adult being outraged that the president would spy on anyone and shared their outrage. Today, the almost absolute apathy about being spied on is as disturbing to me as the surveillance itself. It doesn't bode well for the American political future.

s_q_b 13y ago

The actor I'm most disappointed in is MIT. Right now, the DOJ is one of the targets of a massive scared-straight campaign by Beltway technologists. One of the worst kept secrets in the world is that US cybersecurity, outside of the military and the IC, is incredibly bad. If most civilian agencies were private corporations, they would have been sued dozens of times by users for negligence in data handling. For those that understood the dangers of this lax security posture, for many years it was a game of railing into the wind about the potential consequences of continuing to ignore this attack vector. Then, China got involved. Suddenly, the dangers weren't speculative at all. They were right at our doorstep. And the same Cassandras that were on the outs for so long suddenly found themselves with the ear of every CIO in Washington. What followed was a massive purchasing binge, which is still ongoing, and a huge amount of advertising and mindshare devoted to this topic. It was amidst the height of this cyber-scare that the Schwartz prosecution was brought. For Mr. Heymann, Aaron Schwartz was a huge target. A US hacker, caught in the act of stealing information worth millions, was a great prize for Mr. Heyman, his boss Carmen Ortiz, who has rather naked political ambitions, and her bosses in DC. So why am I disappointed in MIT? Because the DOJ has never understood computer technology very well. MIT does. It was their job to educate the DOJ, to subordinate passion to reason, and to parse the difficult technological issues to explain the real lack of damage caused by Aaron Schwartz's actions. MIT is supposed to be a guardian of our online rights and a cradle for technologists like Schwartz. It should have been on the forefront of the opposition to Mr. Heymann, demanding that charges be dropped. Instead, they threw him to the wolves. And now, in one final insult, they ask the courts for special leave to screen documents in order to hide their involvement with the prosecution. I hope the individuals involved know that they abandoned a sacred trust, tarnished the name of a great institution, and negligently contributed to the death of a brilliant young man. I hope they know that they weren't "just doing their jobs," that they didn't "follow rules and procedures," and that no one buys their excuses anymore. I hope that at least one of the administrators responsible has lost even one night's sleep over Mr. Schwartz's death. But, knowing the disdain and disregard for Mr. Schwartz that these hired bureaucrats expressed while he was alive, I doubt it.

rhizome 13y ago
One of the worst kept secrets in the world is that US cybersecurity, outside of the military and the IC, is incredibly bad. Not sure why you're excluding Mil/IC here, in light of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, did you mean to restrict your point to Internet-connected devices?

praptak 13y ago

So how's the White House response to the petition to fire Carmen Ortiz?

pvnick 13y ago

Aaron was also involved in some groundbreaking software development for political activism [1] [2]. I find it extremely easy to believe that someone in the DoJ saw that and decided to make an example out of him to dissuade other "hacktivists." [1] http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/05/strongbox-and-aaron-swartz.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/05/stron... [2] https://github.com/naomifox/mass-email-delivery-code https://github.com/naomifox/mass-email-delivery-code

s_q_b 13y ago
The files themselves point out that the Secret Service first began investigating Swartz with the publication of his "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto." The smart people in law enforcement are scared sh*tless of hacktivists, so it's totally possible they lumped him in with the Sabu/Hammond/Lulzsec crowd.

rhizome 13y ago

So Heymann increased the apparent penalties based on Swartz exercising First Amendment rights? So much for rule of law.

kps 13y ago
It's universal for prosecutors to increase the penalties sought when a defendant exercises their Sixth Amendment rights; why should the First be any different?
- rhizome 13y ago
  It's idealistic, sure, but exercising these rights doesn't change the evidence.

thufry 13y ago

I wouldn't even be 1% surprised if they forced Swartz into committing suicide, by threatening to harm his loved ones if he didn't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_suicide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_suicide

jgross206 13y ago
can you share some of your reasoning behind this (quite extreme) belief?
- YokoZar 13y ago
  If I remember correctly, Aaron was convinced that the way things were going with the trial it would bankrupt his family by defending him. It's not too hard to imagine that "protecting" them involves taking yourself out of the equation there.
  - chrischen 13y ago
    In that case he could have just not defended himself.
- superuser2 13y ago
  FBI repeatedly suggested that Martin Luther King kill himself. I think it's a little melodramatic for this case, but it wouldn't be the first time the DoJ has employed that tactic to protect the status quo against an activist.
- thufry 13y ago
  I just wanted to see if anyone would agree with it.

D9u 13y ago

‘from a human one-on-one level to an institutional level.’ I fail to see how government vs a single individual can be construed as "a human one-on-one level."

beefxq 13y ago

The end of freedom.

chris_mahan 13y ago
What freedom?

tzs 13y ago

> MIT, whose archive was hacked while Swartz was a fellow at Harvard (which gave him access to JSTOR) So why not download from Harvard, instead of abusing guest access at MIT?

twoodfin 13y ago
My guess would be because he thought MIT would be more likely to look the other way.

Amadou 13y ago

Confirmation? PJ Media is a horrible news source, editorial standards poorer than Glenn Beck's "The Blaze." And this wasn't even reporting, it was an opinion piece in the blogs section. I'm all for piling on the malefactors in the Aaron Swartz case, but I wouldn't bet a nickle on anything that comes out of PJ Media.