treated Aaron Swartz as a pawn in the political game she is playing
Well, maybe. It's also entirely possible that she was just doing her job, and didn't totally understand the technical aspects of what Swartz was accused of doing.
This hits the nail on the head. If the government can form legislation in a domain, and have the power to prosecute in a domain it should completely understand said domain. Ignorance on many levels is the reason for much of the discontent and injustice occurring where government and internet coalesce.
> and didn't totally understand the technical aspects of what Swartz was accused of doing.
She had the resources to hire the types of experts who are what I call "executive whisperers." She doesn't need to know what a perl script is to understand what happened at JSTOR.
On top of it, when the "victim" JSTOR is saying "what the hell, why are you prosecuting this guy?" Then its pretty obvious we're looking at political motivations here. Sorry, but you have way too much faith in people if you think what just happened was one big 'honest mistake.'
She is still responsible. There is a chain of command and she is the one getting the pats on the back if a lot of prosecutions go through and crime goes down in the country, but that means she also gets to respond for fuck ups.
Very entirely possible. However I have a hard time believing that someone smart enought to make it through law school and pass the bar is not be able to learn enough about technology and motivations behind the actions in this case.
As a tax payer I don't want a prosecutor who doesn't know who to go after or how far to go. From reading the thread(s) here and loosely following the case in the news I am not convinced that the money spent to prosecute this case was the best possible use of my tax dollars.
"However I have a hard time believing that someone smart enought to make it through law school and pass the bar is not be able to learn enough about technology and motivations behind the actions in this case."
Much of law is a very technologically backwards field. Up until recently, some law schools (and not backwater ones, but major top-tier ones) only accepted hard-copy, type-written (as in, on a physical typewriter) applications. Harvard's student library had several typewriters specifically for this purpose.
That does not mean that someone who goes to a law school like Harvard's is not smart enough to learn about the high level concepts driving things things outside legal education. This is especially true for someone who goes through said school and strives to become a prosecutor with political ambitions. For if they attain high level success as a prosecutor and in the political arena yet they cannot understand the fundamental difference between malicious intent and a prank rooted in activism then they are a scary person to be in a position of power. They will be making and implementing policy decisions with arbitrary and personal bias not hard facts.
Someone in a position of power is not strong unless they know when to apply the full amount of power entrusted to them and when to practice restraint; when and how to apply less so that the level of punishment is commiserate with the crime being prosecuted. It is bad for our society to give give someone a pass when they over prosecute a crime in both the short term and the long term.
Whether or not she totally understood the situation, she's just as liable. Either way, she'd be doing a horrible thing. You don't wield such power so haphazardly or harshly and still be a good person.
Well, maybe. It's also entirely possible that she was just doing her job, and didn't totally understand the technical aspects of what Swartz was accused of doing.