But when Rosa Parks sat down on the bus that day, she was sitting in the black section. When the white section filled up, she was asked to move back some more and she refused. The police were called. They came and arrested her. She understood during this whole time that she would face prosecution and punishment, but she was doing what she believed was right. She fought the punishment in a very public way, and she became a symbol of the overall struggle through that.

Mr Swartz on the other hand was trying to be anonymous about his actions while he was doing them. Even though he was affiliated with Harvard and Harvard had access to JSTOR, but traveled to MIT specifically to use their network for this. He started taking the documents by WiFi, and when that was blocked, he found a closet in the basement to plug his laptop and external hard drive into. His program was designed to download the document slowly, to avoid being so obvious to be caught. He snuck in and out of MIT each day to swap hard drives, sometimes hiding his face from cameras. Much of what he did during this time was trying to avoid being caught. When caught, he gave back the data immediately and agreed never to release it. He was quiet about his legal struggle over the 2 years, not really pounding the drum to try to get attention to the injustice. Didn't blog about the case specifics, didn't do media interviews. Apparently he was trying to keep quiet about it not to upset the prosecutor. He was trying to convince prosecutors to drop the case entirely.

It's a subtle point perhaps, but Byrne is saying Swartz was not prepared for the consequences of his actions whereas other people fighting injustice usually are. After his arrest, he was not fighting publicly to rally support for what he did, but rather just trying everything he could to avoid prosecution.

I wonder if Swartz would have said he regretted the whole JSTOR incident before he died. Certainly Rosa Parks would not have regretted refusing to move seats, even if she landed in jail from it.

One is that Daniel Ellsberg did do his work surreptitiously. He didn't just openly take the documents, and accept being arrested while doing so. He took them secretly, then tried several different ways of publicizing them while insulating himself legally, including seeing if he could get a senator to enter them into the minutes, since you can't be prosecuted for official business on the senate floor. And when they were eventually released, he went into hiding for a while, before eventually deciding to turn himself in. And he did not, in the end, have to serve any time, as his case was thrown out due to many illegal actions taken by the government, including burgling Ellsberg's psychiatrists office, trying to bribe the judge, and illegally wiretapping Ellsberg.

However, nowadays the case is quite different. In the "post-9/11 world", there are many easier ways for the government to surreptitiously gather evidence. In fact, the government today has shown a willingness to pass laws granting retroactive immunity for illegal wiretapping. It's got to be a lot easier to feel despondent about your chances in a court case in todays world, especially with a prosecutor who has built his career on harsh prosecution of electronic crime.

And Rosa Parks is a completely different story than Ellsberg or Swartz. She was facing a $10 fine and $4 in court costs, not years in jail, hundreds of thousands to millions in fines, fees, and court costs, a felony conviction. While what she did is definitely laudable, it's a lot easier to accept the possibility of losing your case when the stakes are that much lower.

And Bradley Manning? He did something not too dissimilar to Ellsberg. But while Ellsberg got off free of charges, Brad Manning has been imprisoned for years without trial, including months of solitary confinement, and even a period of suicide watch in which he was not allowed clothes or a pillow at night.

First, in terms of sneaking around, remember that Swartz's goal wasn't to ensure that his children and grandchildren could enter MIT server closets and jump on the network whenever they want. It was to download and publish the contents of JSTOR, and to complete that he had to make sure his activities weren't cut short by discovery. He was basically still trying to board the bus. And to the extent that he used inappropriate means to reach his goal, we should condem him for it, but using questionable methods doesn't make it not civil disobedience. So the whole sneaking thing seems like a red herring.

Second, a huge part of this is that Swartz's could not have expected to face the railroading he did. The requirement that you accept the consequences of your civil disobedience isn't completely open-ended, so this matters a great deal. I can't pretend to know if he would have been willing to face some more proportional fallout for his actions, but it's unfair for us to assume he wouldn't just because the trumped-up charges proved to be too much. Take this, for example:

> Certainly Rosa Parks would not have regretted refusing to move seats, even if she landed in jail from it.

But what if they charged her with sedition and threatened to execute her? Of course I don't know what she'd have done, but the question is whether we'd think less of her if she backed down. "Well, that's civil disobedience for ya. Gotta accept the consequences." If that seems like an extreme analogy, let's look at it the other way: while Swartz's and Parks' actions were, in absolute terms, more or less on-par, Parks' was obviously way more--for lack of a better word--outrageous relative to the established power structure. She was facing down a much larger, more deeply seated, more sinister set of rules and was pursuing a much loftier cause; she was a black woman doing as she pleased in Alabama in 1955. And still Swartz faced much nastier consequences. So it's hardly fair to bash Swartz's unwilling to own up to the "consequences" of his actions; they can't be what he bargained for.

Another way of approaching this is to note that we've been comparing Aaron Swartz to Rosa Parks and Mahatma Ghandi, freaking giants in the history of civil disobedience. Is that really the standard we mean to set? You can't push the ball forward unless you're willing to spend significant portions of your life in jail? Gotta look unblinkingly into the eyes of false justice or accept things the way they are?

But if Swartz really believed in his cause, why did he give up on it so easily? Why not release the data or go on TV anywhere and everywhere to talk about the outrageous system that locks up research documents behind a paywall?

On the other hand, we should also remember that Swartz is human and not some activist archetype. Sometimes life, shifting priorities, or personal issues get in the way of our goals. Best laid plans, etc. That his followthrough didn't match his initial stab doesn't make the initial stab wrong.

"MIT running an open network" is not the same as "MIT allows anyone to do anything on their network." MIT runs an open network because it trusts users to use it responsibility. If someone does something that MIT admins don't like, they will try to shut down that activity.