It's natural to look for someone to blame. Should we lay the blame on MIT? If they had called off an overzealous D.A. from throwing the book at him, he might be alive today. Why not blame the D.A.? Or JSTOR? In any case, aiding in prosecution did not cause his death directly.

The decision to commit suicide was ultimately his own. Of all the options he had available to him, he consciously chose that option. I'm reminded of a quote by Viktor Frankl:

"Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation."

Aaron had the power to choose right until his last choice. Why do some people survive terrible hardships, and others don't?

According to his close friends' personal accounts, Aaron suffered from suicidal thoughts and depression for many years. Long before the JSTOR case, and long before MIT ever got involved. As long as we're speculating about things we can't know for sure, I'm guessing depression was really to blame for his suicide. That won't satisfy everyone, since it doesn't give them a powerful organization to rage against. But reality doesn't always work that way.

That's bad reasoning.

That "some people survive terrible hardships, and others don't" can just as well prove the reverse: that NOT all people have the same "power to choose".

Especially a self-professed depressive like Aaron.

Some people are more thick-skinned, either due to temperament, upbringing, genetics, circumstances etc.

>I'm guessing suicidal depression was really to blame for his suicide.

And this "suicidal depression" was unknown to MIT/his prosecutors? Or they found it nice to taunt and threaten someone suffering with such, over a non-issue?

>That won't satisfy everyone, since it doesn't give them a powerful organization to rage against. But reality doesn't always work that way.

I'm finding pop psychology explanations like your serve another plausible rationalization mechanism: it makes those saying them feel superior and more logical compared to the naives that "seek a powerful organization to rage against". (If you allow me the same pop psychology)

In the real world, putting the blame with Aaron and his depression doesn't solve anything (even if it was true).

Blaming MIT and the prosecution will prevent people from being fucked for trying similar benfifical hacks in the future.

> Blaming MIT and the prosecution will prevent people from being fucked for trying similar benfifical hacks in the future.

So MIT and the prosecution unfairly targeted Aaron to serve their personal motives. And now you're suggesting we unfairly pin his death on them to serve your personal motives.

I'm done with this.

The thing is, a guy's dead, and the best thing we can do is use his death to make the world a better place.

Certainly the prosecution should have been in felony mode, but there wasn't no reason to avoid prosecution, except to pander to a highly vocal group.

No, I'm suggesting what you describe as "my personal motives" are actually the greater good.

And that it would not be "unfair" to pin his death on them, since they, as you say, " unfairly targeted Aaron to serve their personal motives".

(Also, you seem to conflate similar behaviour --e.g serving one's motives-- as being of the same moral value regarless of the causes and circumstances.

To give a vibrant example, a bully beating a nerd is serving his personal motives. The nerd fighting back will also be serving his personal motives. But it's clear where the moral superiority lies in this case).

Surely, you've heard the old aphorism "two wrongs don't make a right"? Besides being a noble thought, it's also pragmatic. If you're acting dishonestly or deceptively to make your case, you're going to lose the support and respect of honest people who are fighting for the same cause. It also just makes your cause look much weaker (why do you need to resort to that in the first place?)

> (Also, you seem to conflate similar behaviour --e.g serving one's motives-- as being of the same moral value regarless of the causes and circumstances.

I don't believe a positive end result excuses immoral behavior, particularly when all other options have not yet been exhausted.

Also, I don't believe your cause (getting law enforcement to look the other way on "beneficial hacks" that break the law) is a universal cause. When one person's "beneficial hack" violates another person's legal rights (even if it's for the perceived greater good), it's obviously not as black and white as you imagine it to be.

>To give a vibrant example, a bully beating a nerd is serving his personal motives. The nerd fighting back will also be serving his personal motives. But it's clear where the moral superiority lies in this case).

What if the nerd stole the bully's lunch money first?

Any morally ambiguous scenario can be reduced down to a simplistic example that ignores the nuances of reality.

> And this "suicidal depression" was unknown to MIT/his prosecutors? Or they found it nice to taunt and threaten someone suffering with such, over a non-issue?

Even if you know someone is suicidal, that doesn't make you accountable for them committing suicide.

By itself? No. Merely knowing is not sufficient to make you responsible in some way.

However merely knowing is not what they are accused of.

The mental anguish of being ruthlessly sued by a government, with the cooperation and possible collusion of your school, and facing the potential for many years in prison is inarguably substantial. How well would you have handled the same thing?

Whether a more stable person would have been able to suck it up is inconsequential - they still did the damage that they did. In his case, it was too much. The damage is there either way. They may not be responsible for the ultimate outcome, but they are responsible for the anguish that put him there.

Aaron went to Stanford, and was for a time a fellow at Harvard. To my knowledge he was never an MIT student, and chose MIT for the network hack for separate reasons.

MIT may not be culpable in his suicide, but they sure don't come out of this looking good. They maintained strict neutrality, when they could have stood up for open access.

Their behavior makes me ashamed to be an alum of my school.

Do need weigh every prosecution against the ability of the accused to act rationally? Do rational actors break laws or go to extremes to do so?

I am all for levying some culpability on MIT, but it started with him

This is exactly addresses NOT my point.

False dilemma. I am capable of blaming both.

People on HN like to remind others about need to take responsibility for one's own actions. They did it to Aaron before his death and do this after. Being a passive observer while something awful is being done to another human being is a bit uncomfortable, it is much easy and self-comforting to our consciousness to think about the victim as being the one who is solely responsible for and is causing the awful things being done to him.

Just as it's much easier to heap the blame on a villain, rather than consider that Aaron had other options and a life still full of potential.

My point is that both perspectives are one-dimensional and both rely heavily on speculation about things that you and I don't really know about.

And more to the point, both downplay the reality that Aaron suffered from severe depression for years preceding the trial. If MIT was the tipping point, so be it. But often the tipping point is just the proverbial straw, and shouldn't be held responsible for Aaron's actions.

Depression is a fatal illness. Treatment for mental illness is sub-optimal. People are always responsible for their actions - Aaron was responsible for killing himself.

Having said all of that, a legal system that is so brutal that people kill themselves is fucking barbaric and is something that Americans should be deeply ashamed of.

Putting a person who you know to be vulnerable into solitary confinement, naked, is evil. It is baffling how anyone thinks that could be a suitable option.

Prison should be reserved for severe crimes - people who kill, who rape, who show themselves unable to live in society.

(In case it matters I've done some voluntary work around "secure mental health units" in the UK, including medium secure units. These are 'forensic', ie, part of the criminal justice system and they're where prisoners with severe mental illness go if prison is unsuitable. I'm not against locking people up, even if those people have mental illness.)

1.redirect the blame from actual villain to the victim.

"easier to heap the blame on a villain" - an especially great line, i immediately felt sorry for doing it.

>My point is that both perspectives are one-dimensional and both rely heavily on speculation about things that you and I don't really know about.

2.sow the doubt.

>And more to the point, both downplay the reality that Aaron suffered from severe depression for years preceding the trial. If MIT was the tipping point, so be it. But often the tipping point is just the proverbial straw, and shouldn't be held responsible for Aaron's actions.

3.downplay the villain's actions severity through showing a perceived weakness of the victim.

Nice, man!

> Aaron suffered from [...] depression for many years.

This answers the question, although I would prefer not to use the term 'suicidal depression', which is not a medical term.

As someone who's attempted suicide, I also believe your choice of quote is both wrong and unfair. Surviving the holocaust is in no way comparable to surviving the things your mind can convince you to do when you suffer from anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder or any other such condition.

My impression of depression is that it's pervasive and crippling, and often the events surrounding it can be incidental. Not to say that one event couldn't be a tipping point, but neither is it fair to put all blame on one event or one organization or one person, as it downplays the effect of the underlying condition.

It's an incredibly difficult topic to discuss.

One can argue that both MIT and the DOJ needlessly helped exacerbate a problem over a victimless crime of providing free access to publicly funded research.

http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/news/2011/July/SwartzAaronPR.....

"AARON SWARTZ, 24, was charged in an indictment with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. If convicted on these charges, SWARTZ faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million."

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/01/15/humanity-deficit...

"Andy Good, Swartz’s initial lawyer, is ­alternately sad and furious.

'The thing that galls me is that I told Heymann the kid was a suicide risk,' Good told me. 'His reaction was a standard reaction in that office, not unique to Steve. He said, ‘Fine, we’ll lock him up.’ I’m not saying they made Aaron kill himself. Aaron might have done this anyway. I’m saying they were aware of the risk, and they were heedless.'"

"Marty Weinberg, who took the case over from Good, said he nearly negotiated a plea bargain in which Swartz would not serve any time. He said JSTOR signed off on it, but MIT would not.

'There were subsets of the MIT community who were profoundly in support of Aaron,' Weinberg said. That support did not override institutional interests."

Sorry, I'm just curious, but how do you propose funding the scanning, organizing and hosting of this research? JStor is a non-profit that has spent tons of money going back and doing all of this for millions of articles, and continues to spend money doing it so researchers can access the data without having to flip through thousands of paper research journals in some library.

As you've also pointed out, JStor is a non-profit. Donations and soliciting volunteers would probably help fund this stuff; it seems to work fine for Wikipedia. Regardless, publicly funded research shouldn't be kept behind pay walls.

So who's going to go back and digitize the 50+ year old articles from a journal that has long since ceased publishing? Also, a decentralized system would make research much more difficult. A lot of academic journals have their own websites where they publish articles; they aren't used because it's much easier to just use JStor.

>As you've also pointed out, JStor is a non-profit. Donations and soliciting volunteers would probably help fund this stuff; it seems to work fine for Wikipedia.

JStor is a relatively large non-profit, I'm sure they've looked at different methods of funding and have determined which methods are feasible and which aren't. Wikipedia is not comparable at all to JStor; one is targeted to the general public, the other is to researchers. There is a huge difference in the userbase.

>Regardless, publicly funded research shouldn't be kept behind pay walls.

Until a centralized distribution method is publicly funded as well, this is the way it has to work.

Volunteers. I did this type of volunteer work for hospitals and a museum when I was in high school. I didn't get paid for it but I still enjoyed it.

> Wikipedia is not comparable at all to JStor; one is targeted to the general public, the other is to researchers. There is a huge difference in the userbase.

Does it really matter who the target audiences are? They're both just publishing documents over a network. It's not like classified information or financial transactions, so there's not a huge difference. The only big difference between the two organizations is that one is open and more efficient while the other is not.

> Until a centralized distribution method is publicly funded as well, this is the way it has to work.

No it doesn't. All you need to do is free the publicly funded data. Who do you think Aaron was downloading the documents for? He was downloading them for another non-profit organization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public.resource.org) that was willing to publish and host these documents themselves. JSTOR wouldn't have to pay for them to host it and people would have at the very least a backup for accessing this data. JSTOR isn't the only non-profit that has the capability of serving documents online.

I still haven't seen a good argument for keeping publicly funded research paper under a central paywall. It kills innovation, access, and it's inefficient.

imo a major reason Aaron was prosecuted, was because certain parties wanted to keep their paywall racket going without competition.

Sorry, but you're being completely unrealistic. Do you honestly think JStor would be able to rake in nearly as many donations as Wikipedia does with a userbase that is no where near as big as them? The people behind JStor aren't some cabal that just loves charging people a ton of money for access to journal articles (key word being access). If it were feasible to use donations and volunteers alone to provide their service to the general public for free, they would've done that.

> No it doesn't. All you need to do is free the publicly funded data.

I'm getting tired of this pointless philosophical debate. Hosting the articles is a small portion of what JStor actually does. When this Public.Resource.Org group goes to the library and digitizes all these journals, including tagging and sorting them, let me know if they'll still be able to provide them for free. Hint: they won't. Unless they keep getting people to unlawfully access them from an organization that does, that is.

If JStor were some big corporation that was raking in millions of dollars each year, then you'd have a point, but they're not. They are a non-profit that is doing excellent work.

1) I would think that most researchers use computers and not typewriters to write their papers. It's been this way for a few decades now.

2) While Wikipedia has more donations, since they also have more users and way more data; they have much bigger hosting operations related costs than JSTOR. Even then, they've been able to run below $5 million dollars a year. Correction: JSTOR generates $65 million per year. They have a lot more resources, nicer offices, and much bigger salaries than Wikipedia; even though they have a much smaller audience and less data.

3) Other organizations are scanning books and they aren't charging for access to that data. Also once it's scanned, the ongoing costs are minimal. Storage is cheap and it continues to get cheaper.

I'm sorry but it would not cost $250 million dollars to make this available to everyone. Maybe a huge portion of these costs are due to their expensive Park Avenue office in Manhattan?

> Hint: they won't. Unless they keep getting people to unlawfully access them from an organization that does, that is.

This isn't privately funded research that JSTOR and academic journals are hoarding. It's publicly funded and it should be easily accessed by the public.

There is no sunset plan for the pay wall, so your premise is false.

You don't rebuke the text you quote of her's.

This may in fact be true, but this claim is leveled with the implication that MIT is responsible for his death. They surely could have responded better; taking a "non-neutral" position (actively supporting lessened punishment), but this claim seems overreaching and narrow.

Certainly the prosecution was overbearing, and MIT could have been more on Aaron's side. But if we're going to reach into the realm of "If X had done Y Aaron would be alive today" then I think it would be distressing to think how many X's there could be.

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...

So how about we take the more obvious Xs and condemn THOSE?

It's not like anyone blames Lincoln for going to the theater that day instead of having a quit dinner at home.

Aaron suffered from suicidal depression. We know that from his closest friends' own accounts that his depression long predated the JSTOR incident. So to lay all the blame for his depression and eventual suicide on MIT is just lazy and irresponsible.

The idea that Aaron did something illegal and the idea that Aaron was treated incredibly poorly are not mutually exclusive.

What definition of what term makes that case for you? You seem to basically be denying the concept of causality entirely, which, fine: causality is a brittle concept. But we can still use it to help us reason around things. There are proximate causes and distal causes and all kinds of causes in between and beyond. These are messy, flawed concepts that are useful for trying to analyze systems.

You act like you don't understand the distinction between the relationship between MIT and Aaron and the relationship between those negotiations and Aaron, but I am fairly certain you do.

MIT made its decisions with the knowledge that Aaron was being prosecuted, and therefore were in a position to consciously influence the outcome of the case.

JSTOR and the Royal Society in '99 did not, and therefore were not.

Besides, what would you do in situations where there was no clear 'smoking gun'? Let's say a child dies of anaphylatic shock after eating a cookie that had accidentally touched peanut products on the counter, and that the guy who made his PB&J sandwich hadn't know there was a kid running around with peanut allergies. Who do you shame and despise in that situation? "If X had only cleanup the counter Y would be alive today!"

It must be nice for the world to be so binary.

I'd also posit that its hypocritical of people who support the legalization of suicide as a "victimless crime" to engage in such exercises.

To be clear: I do feel the case against Aaron was unjust, but we can't give extra attention to a case due to suicide.

It must be terribly painful to have strangers commenting on the loss of a loved one, especially in such a politically charged and public arena.

I'm always loath to say what amounts to "take what they say with a grain of salt, they're heavily emotionally invested." It's fair to say that that's the case here, though. I say that as someone who thinks MIT does have some level of culpability and have had the pleasure of interacting with the wonderful and brilliant person that Taren is.

It's sad that there is a need to apologize such as you did.

This is one of these issues in which ordinary discourse is not possible. You would have to spend so much time padding your thoughts about what you might think to lessen the impact on those that are highly sensitive for one reason or another.

I know but this wasn't in response to someone who claimed they were directly connected to this case though.

I wish I could track down her paper on southern states putting urban minority prisoners in rural white area prisons. They are put on the rural census and removed from urban census. Not only do they not get to vote, their representation power goes to the white rural voters.

Certainly it doesn't mean she's wrong, but we should think critically, just as we would if Ms. Ortiz were making a statement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taren_Stinebrickner-Kauffman

It is clearly true that Shwartz's prosecution was a major factor in his suicide, and, according to Taren, it is equally clear that MIT was a non-neutral party in assisting this prosecution. If these statements are true; it is perfectly reasonable to call misrepresentations by MIT about its participation a "whitewash" and a serious matter.

What's with this fear of reaching a conclusion and assigning blame?

Better give the individual that hanged himself the benefit of the doubt, than an organization like MIT that acted against him.

If you want to prevent the next gifted hacker from hanging themselves, however, then it pays to search for the truth so that lessons can be learned from what actually happened, not merely from what scenario received the most benefit of the doubt.

Note I'm not saying the MIT Report constitutes the truth if Taren's assertions don't.

Is that what we're doing here? I thought it was more about MIT administration being absolute shits to important, creative, contributing members of the community, and how they might stop doing that. Swartz's suicide is not the only thing that makes MIT's behavior shameful. Ideally, next time the administration will correct their craven, copsucking behavior before it gets to that point.

"creating, contributing" member or not, Aaron didn't deserve extra privileges (or warrant worse punishment) compared to anyone else who had DDoS'ed MIT's network and repeatedly gained unauthorized access to their internal subnet.

MIT should not have allowed themselves to be used in throwing the book, but I would hardly call them a bunch of absolute shits over this.

No, I don't want to do that (not that I could).

What I want to do is to prevent the next gifted hacker from being prosecuted for BS and under overblown terms.

I've commented on threads like these before, and have mentioned that I lost a loved one to suicide. It was abundantly clear through journal entries and conversations as to what the impetus of self-harm was, but attributing those events as the things "responsible" for her suicide would have been shortsighted.

This thread seems to have devolved into an argument about whether Aaron or MIT was responsible for his suicide. That's the wrong question. We can all agree that MIT surely could and should have handled the situation differently, and I'm hesitant to say anything about Aaron's actions because I'm not informed enough.

In many jurisdictions (in the US) the legal standard of 'negligence' has two requirements. First, proximate cause. That's the "but for" part, that op mentions here. "But for MIT's actions, Aaron would be alive today." The other part is foreknowledge. Someone must have known, or reasonably should have known, that their actions would result in the bad consequence to meet this second standard. I don't think it would be fair to say that MIT could reasonably have foreseen Swartz's suicide.

It's interesting to note that Heymann, the federal prosecutor, arguably does meet both of these standards. But for his overzealous -- and I would add abusive -- prosecution, Swartz would still be alive. Further, Swartz's lawyers warned Heymann the day before that Swartz was an imminent risk of suicide, so it seems pretty safe to say that he also meets the foreknowledge standard.

I want both Heymann and Ortiz to be fired, and my sense of vengeance wants it to be both public and messy. Wishful thinking.

IANAL, blah blah blah and all that.

Taren's eulogy for Aaron was one of the best eulogies/call-to-actions I've watched (http://www.livestream.com/democracynow/video?clipId=pla_f83c...) and it sheds some more light on the difficulties Aaron was facing in this case.

However, when looking at additional facts, including those provided by Taren and others close to Aaron, it kind of rubs me the wrong way to treat the prosecution's causality of Aaron's suicide as fact.

via Taren: http://tarensk.tumblr.com/post/42260548767/why-aaron-died

> I don’t know exactly why Aaron killed himself. I don’t know exactly what was going through his mind. If I had known those things on January 11, if I had even known the right questions to ask, maybe I could have stopped him. Since January 11, I think about it every hour of every day.

> The Aaron I knew was active. He worked out most days until he got the flu two weeks before he died.

It's hard to second-guess someone who lived with Aaron and say, "Well, us armchair psychologists know better than you"...but the fact is, Taren was the closest person to Aaron and yet can't identify any particular warning signs that Aaron was going to kill himself. She provides compelling evidence that the trial was a huge burden on Aaron...but the question here is: why suicide on that day? There was a procedural deadline, but it didn't seem much more of a conclusive event than anything so far. It's not as if Aaron had been convicted, was on house arrest, and had just heard his appeal had been denied.

But as Taren said, Aaron was unusually sick up until the day of his suicide...at least sick enough to stop exercising, which, pedantic as it sounds, is a huge factor in mood swings. Enough to cause someone to commit suicide?...

Who knows? I guess why this all bothers me is that, by arguing that Aaron's death was conclusively caused by malicious actors perpetuates the misunderstanding that suicide and depression are, in general, caused by life circumstances....but it seems that some depression is due to physiological factors that aren't related to the "bigger picture". People who face horrific tragedy don't often kill themselves; people who seem to live in enviable circumstances sometimes do.

The world would make more sense if everyone committed suicide out of fear, hopelessness, or even weakness (as those who accused Aaron of "rage-quitting" seemed to do)...but this isn't the case, and this belief is unhelpful for those who suffer depression because of physiological, treatable factors...but who may avoid treatment because they think, "Well, I'm not being persecuted, so I must not really be depressed and thus have no reason to seek help"

I know I'm being naively idealistic here...because if Aaron hadn't died, if he had only suffered a drawn out trial and even a conviction, the call to reform the U.S attorney's office and the MIT administration would have much more diffuse support without the catalyst of his death. But I do think it's worth being mindful that the issue of treating depression isn't obfuscated.

Either way, what a tragedy. Reading Taren's words again really underscores how much of a loss Aaron's death was for civic reform.

So he has no responsibility for the decisions he made, up to and including the final one?

Yes, MIT's actions may have had influence. Or they may have hastened the inevitable - a person who makes this choice is not untroubled to begin with, and it's never about just one thing.

Ultimately, it was his choice in the end. The responsibility is his.

Organizations have no conscience and no "human rights". Kicking an organization for bad judgement is cool.

- If the murderer's mother had refused to have sex with the murderer's father, the victim would be alive today.

- If the train driver had had a sudden impulse to stop his train, the suicide could not have taken place.

- If he had subscribed to the protection racket scheme, his family would not have been harmed.

Responsibility is finer than causality.

Again - the mentality that leads to suicide does not develop in isolation. It is not "weev has picked on me and I am a loser and have no choice or other way out". That may be back-breaking straw, but it's not the underlying issue.

There are a host of contributing factors that can add up to this - so while it's great when we have a face to assign to The Bad Guy in these cases, and it's a perfectly natural response... it's seldom the correct one.

What I think is not debatable, unless you think humans are emotionless automatons who cannot be influenced by the treatment of others (a viewpoint seemingly being espoused by several here), is that bullies can be held partially morally^ accountable for the suicides of their victims.

^ I am not saying legally accountable.

You might not think what Aaron did was morally wrong or deserving of negative repercussions, but others might reasonably disagree.

> You might not think what Aaron did was morally wrong or deserving of negative repercussions, but others might reasonably disagree.

That has absolutely nothing to do with this discussion. Nothing in the slightest. If you think that is what this discussion is about, then I have to wonder what exactly you have been reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6128690

Either way, I don't think either of us is ever going to convince the other of anything on that score, so it's probably best to agree to disagree on it.

His death shouldn't be seen so much as a cause and effect so much as a wake up call that acting in the way MIT, JSTOR, and the government did isn't right and is hurting people in ways we don't necessarily pay attention to or care about when it's just some small news item about a trial.

Even if Aaron was still alive, the things MIT did would be no less wrong, so let's bring the focus back to that.

So as we do bring focus on back to it, I only ask that we do so without clouding the issue by branding them as murderers for their wrong actions.

MIT could have stopped of all this by doing what JSTOR did.

IF A is responsible for X THEN B is not responsible for X

is false, in general.

Responsibility does not mutually exclude. It is often arranged that responsibilities do not overlap, but this is an organisational expediency. It is not a moral principle.

So saying "the responsibility was his" as if that somehow means that no-one else can have any responsibility is wrong.

Did you you ask his psychiatrist and he told you what his, (a self admitted depressive's) "amount of agency" was at the prospect of being thrown in jail and paying a hefty fine (plus legal expenses)?

This playing both sides (MIT/Aaron) is just another way of "blaming the victim".

And I don't think a person commiting suicide is less serious to rape.

What we have and have had for some time is a democracy (or republic depending on which brand of kool aid one drinks) behind closed doors, by a government that is publicly funded submitting to the will of private institutions. Not that what is going on here is better than anyone else…

    This report claims that MIT was “neutral” — but MIT’s lawyers gave 
    prosecutors total access to witnesses and evidence, while refusing 
    access to Aaron’s lawyers to the exact same witnesses and evidence. 
    That’s not neutral. The fact is that all MIT had to do was say 
    publicly, “We don’t want this prosecution to go forward” – and 
    Steve Heymann and Carmen Ortiz would have had no case.

and the surrounding comments.

Instead, because of their pigheadedness, the govt. got a chance to threaten him him with a very large Jail sentence leading to the completely avoidable tragedy that happened.

Whitewash indeed...his death is certainly attributable to MIT & Carmen Ortiz, et al.

[1] http://gothamist.com/2013/01/15/aaron_swartzs_lawyer_mit_ref...

MIT’s counsel stated that, while the government might believe that jail time was appropriate in this case, the government should not be under the impression that MIT wanted a jail sentence for Aaron Swartz. The prosecutor responded that the government believed that some custody was appropriate. He said the government had to consider not only the views of the immediate victims, but also general deterrence of others.

I'm not sure we are going to have productive discussion if you say this.

Either you read the report and think "handing over to the government whatever they asked for without being forced to do so" is an accurate assessment, when MIT explicitly denies turning over anything outside of what was required by subpoenas except for the first few days around the arrest, when they didn't realize that the guy breaking into their network was an internet hero and allowed to do that.

Or you didn't read the report.

For others watching the conversation, I'll point out other things from that very page:

• The prosecutor said that, pre-indictment, he had wanted to approach the case on a human level, not punitively. To this extent he made an extremely reasonable proposal, and was “dumb-founded” by Swartz’s response.

• The prosecutor said that the straw that broke the camel’s back was that when he indicted the case, and allowed Swartz to come to the courthouse as opposed to being arrested, Swartz used the time to post a “wild Internet campaign” in an effort to drum up support. This was a “foolish” move that moved the case “from a human one-on-one level to an institutional level.” The lead prosecutor said that on the institutional level cases are harder to manage both internally and externally.

[...] The lead prosecutor’s comment about a “wild Internet campaign” orchestrated by Swartz to drum up support made MIT concerned that any public statements that MIT might make on Swartz’s behalf could backfire.

"On January 24, 2011, the Secret Service Agent asked IS&T for a copy of the packet data capture and the video surveillance file. IS&T duplicated the hard drive it had used to capture the packet stream (see section I.B), and the special agent picked up the copy at MIT on January 26."

"There were few communications between the prosecution and MIT after the indictment, except for occasional emails from the government seeking bits and pieces of information relevant to the government’s case."

(This second bit was done supposedly under the belief that the information was covered by two previous subpoenas. Nobody seems to have been bothered enough to check.)

"For example, when the government’s investigation had begun, in January 2011, OGC made the decision that the lead prosecutor, the Secret Service Agent, and the Cambridge Police detective could directly telephone and email previously interviewed IS&T employees without first going through an MIT attorney for follow-up questions, provided no new topics were covered"

"However, MIT did not, reciprocally, voluntarily provide to the defense the same documents that it provided to the government. Similarly, MIT did not produce to the defense, even though requested by subpoena, documents that the defense sought from MIT but that MIT had already provided to the government."

"Initially, OGC approved the production of information to law enforcement, without a subpoena, as part of a continuing investigation of an ongoing intrusion into MIT’s network as well as of a possible crime being committed on the MIT campus. IS&T continued to provide information to the investigators, pursuant to this initial approval, until OGC was eventually served with a subpoena on January 27, 2011."

In other words, we can summarize MIT's conduct as follows: they gave the government whatever the government wanted, and eventually the government served a subpoena that changed almost nothing (at one point, MIT did ask for another subpoena to be served; this is a minor detail, as they were clearly far more cooperative with the prosecution than they were ever required to be).

Those aren't really facts, those are assertions that could use some documentation. Which specific witnesses and pieces of evidence did the defense request (and is there a record of this) but were denied to them (and is there a record of that)?

There should be record of both and if I'm not wrong, not handing over discovery materials to the defense is against the law. This is the same type of behavior Zimmerman's defense team alleged when Angela Korey failed to turn over evidence from Trayvon's phone.

[0] http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010...

Long live Aaron's spirit and his zeal.

Well, the author's proposal for action by MIT is also not "neutral." Though I hold the same opinion about how MIT should have acted, I feel it's [inadvertently] written with this juxtaposition that goes from a level-headed "that's not neutral and here's why" to an emotional "they should have done X instead" which I fear reduces the effect of this statement.

However, there's been boatloads of public outcry over this whole thing and I'm certain I feel that MIT should address each and every issue people continue to raise, regardless of the how emotionally charged such statements might be.

Dow Chemical bought Union Carbide

Here's the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.

I'm sorry, but where exactly did this report, or any other literature on the case, indicate that MIT refused access to the defense's lawyers?