So what? Given how much you've written on this case, you should read the court documents which establish that the 4th amendment wasn't violated and the lawyer didn't make the case. He claimed he was about to when Swartz committed suicide, but that was just a spin.
Eric Holder was right to scold the media, and the copyleftist tech media starting with TechDirt and CNET have been the worst!
A press release from the DOJ describing the maximum terms for *charges* is not the same thing as a *sentence* after what we call "a trial" is heard with a judge and jury -- and adversarial defense. To keep haranguing like literalist code-is-lawyers about this concept of "35 years" merely because abstractly, yes, these are the maximum sentences under the *charges* means you don't get how the independent judiciary works. And no, Swartz wasn't "bullied" into a plea bargain, but offered such a low bargain precisely because his conduct -- as Holder explained -- was not for mercenary reasons from all indications. As Holder said, he doesn't look at the charges, he looks at the *conduct* -- the acts, not the hysterical hypotheses of you geeks looking literally at these maximum sentences. Few court cases involve maximum sentences.
As for the notion that Swartz would get 7 years if he refused to plea, there's no evidence for that, either, because again, it's what the prosecutors think they can get if they make their case -- but there are many mitigating circumstances. Holder said it was never the government's intent for him to serve 3-5 months. As for the notion that having a felony on his record would ruin his life, he should have thought of that each time he committed such giant hacks serving as a "propaganda of the deed" -- and he committed at least three of them. With all his friends like Lessig, there's no indication he would have ever been lacking in jobs or positions. To be sure, he was banned from Harvard after this big hack, and it would be interesting to know what their thinking was, if what his friends keep ranting is true, that he "had authorized access" and it was "all forgiven and JSTOR didn't press charges". So why was he banned? That's a question to ask about his conduct and intent, not just their possible "oppression" -- which seems less likely.
As for Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman's claims that Heymann "lied," while she's understandably distraught and entitled to her grief and rage, she's not entitled to her facts. The case files published on the Internet let her know that his lawyers tried that gambit of claiming that the evidence was seized without a warrant. But citing Sanchez, the precedent case about such issues *when a person is trespassing*, then the government *can* seize the property. It was used to commit the offense, after all -- the laptop was hidden under a box in a wiring closet and logged directly into the LAN to use the system not as intended, after repeated circumvention efforts were caught and Swartz was knocked off the network. The lawyer doesn't seem to have argued successfully otherwise when Sanchez was invoked.
As for witholding exculpatory evidence, until we hear what that is, we can't make a judgement about it, and given how Swartz's girlfriend misrepresented Heymann "lying" about the "failure to get a warrant" when the feds had the right to impound property from a person committing a trespass, it's hard to accept it on good faith.
The DOJ isn't "admitting" errors because it hasn't made them. As Holder said to Coryn, in the Ted Stevens case, he found prosecutorial misconduct and overreach and he called it. If it were present in the Swartz case, he would call it, too. It wasn't. He didn't. Watch the whole video and not just the tendentious coverage of it in Huffpo and Slate:
I'll tell you what other clams are not opening up to fishing expeditions and are tighter than the clams in the federal government -- the hacker community in MIT. They know more than they are telling; they aren't talking. They are scared.
I've studied all the blogs and chat and tweets on this and thought about it a lot, and my question now is this:
Did Aaron Swartz help Bradley Manning download all those quarter of a million cables and other files illegally by helping create for him a scraper script and/or helping him move and store the files?
After all, Swartz really got to be an expert at that sort of "movement" work -- he dl'd the Library of Congress, PACER, and JSTOR files in record time and efficiently, although he did get caught. Even so, he was an expert.
Or did Swartz help Danny Clark do that, and Danny Clark helped Manning? Or some other MIT hacker?
The feds were absolutely right to fish in these waters, because Bradly Manning, who is properly arrested and will be appropriately tried, regardless of any issues with his mistreatment, did go to the MIT hacker community in 2010 with his then-boyfriend while on leave during his service in the Iraq war, and did then eventually reach Assange at WikiLeaks and did from all accounts leak the files he had obtained. I always thought he had to have had help.
The narratives at Empty Wheel and other sites where people ask a lot of questions to try to prove their case that the "feds are overreaching" in fact help create the plausible set of suppositions that Swartz and/or others helped WikiLeaks. Certainly Jacob Appelbaum was front and center helping WikiLeaks and was properly questioned by the grand jury.
Once you suspend the hagiography, there really are a lot of questions to ask about Swartz, and you could sadly conclude that he killed himself precisely because he realized that he had either inadvertently or deliberately helped prosecute Manning, or sent someone else to the grand jury, or worse. We'll never know. But it's more likely he committed suicide over the despair and shame of such a thing, than fear of serving a mere six months in jail, in the plea bargain. That's never been a persuasive reason for his suicide. (Naturally, his suicide could be completely unrelated to his Internet causes and his hacking case, but based on sheer depression or personal matters.)
You have to ask what it was that his ex-girlfriend told the grand jury as well, she's mentioned in the court documents.
My operating theory is that WikiLeaks, with this accusation that Swartz was their source, was hoping to act quickly to pin the blame that might accrue to any hacker at MIT or anywhere else in the Manning loop on a dead man who wouldn't talk. I also assume they'd like to distract attention from Jacob Appelbaum -- again, to a dead man. They are opportunistic thugs. This is in keeping with their character.
One of the things that is tripping you up here is your certitude that the Feds "drew a blank" back then on these connections. You don't know that because the trial hasn't taken place. That's just something some prosecutor or other party leaked to the Wall Street Journal and which you reported because it fit your theories of fishing and overreach. You don't know that they leaked that as a false flag operation or just because there are wars among them on the theories of the case. It means nothing.
There is nothing to say that the Lamo chat logs published in Wired in fact will be used in the trial. They don't quite rise to the test of "trial truth," in my view, but this is a court martial. Furthermore, investigators said they found further proof of Manning's contact with Assange during the hearings, and we haven't seen that this was somehow "thrown out," or "countered" by the lawyer, who actually hasn't really made much of a robust defense on "I am a political prisoner!" grounds, preferring to lurch from "my transgender made me do it!" to procedural wrangles and admissiblity wrangles that haven't worked -- to simply gutting out his client's time in solitary so he can book it against his sentence to have him serve less time. What a strategy! 900 days! That's like the Siege of Leningrad. He should have been holding press conferences daily on the court house steps. He wasn't.
Remember David House? He wouldn't talk to the grand jury. But he published his notes. His notes let us know that the grand jury asked House whether Danny Clark had breakfast on the morning following the BUILDS open house with Bradley Manning at the Oxford Spa. So that means there is testimony about that or an allegation about that or something. He pleaded the fifth. But David House got mugged on Twitter and accused of all kinds of Bradsploitation by bloggers, and he seems rather quiet lately. The grand jury wanted to know about the girl with the purple hair, too. Who *is* the girl with the purple hair?
I think you nervously posted this blog because you think there might be something to it and you just want to be on the record as admitting it in case it comes out later. But you and Empty Wheel and other leftwing bloggers want to convert your analysis of "the fishing expedition" into a "prosecutorial overreach" narrative, even if in fact it may have been justified. You all want to liberate stuff and hack stuff, but committing treason big time, you might want to stop short there, and begin to mumble piously about "crossing a line" as Lessig has been doing about his dead protege.
Swartz's FOIAs were made not out of concern for Manning -- he didn't really campaign for Manning. They were made for concern about what Bradley told House in the brig in Quantico during his visit, to see what in fact House may have given them or may have said that they monitored or something.
Bradly Manning is going to allocute (confess). That means he might name names. There may be no way to get those people he named because maybe the feds can't pin it on people. Maybe it's not a crime for you as a script kiddie to give scraping tips to Bradass87. But maybe if you did you might want to consider moving to Canada now.
So, James, did you write a script called "keepgrabbing.py"? No.
Did you have 4 million files on your LawMeme? No.
Did you make a fake account and an alias to go on Internet Archive? No. It's open.
Did you write a script that grabbed other people's articles that were not your own, or not contributed to a site you edited? No.
Did you break into a wiring closet to do this job? No.
Did you wear a bicycle helmet to disguise your face while performing this hack? No.
Did you run away from campus police after you had done this? No.
So why are you pretending in such a fake way that you are "just like" Aaron and "they might get you"?
Honestly, you unicorn fairy-world dwellers think you can accomplish everything through language. If you just say a law is "outdated," why, it must be! Voila! If you think a prosecutor has "overreached," why, that must be true! Because you say so!
Look at the past cases of this nature. No hacker in the US or UK has ever gotten anything remotely resembling 35 years.
But he is a felon. He knowingly and deliberately and with cunning to hide his tracks hacked a system in a major, dramatic way to destroy *an institution* entirely and prevent *choice* on the Internet to have pay walls and walled gardens. I'm for prosecuting such Bolshevism in exactly the way it was indeed prosecuted -- with a series of careful allegations, that the defense was free to reject, and ultimately a plea bargain of 6 months. That's exactly right.
Well, no. You aren't "hounded to the grave" unless you are an emotionally fragile coddled child genius with bipolar or autism spectrum or both.
Again, if you don't want cases to be pressured to serve the task of deterrent of criminal hackers, you have to be for SOPA/PIPA which would define these cases more clearly and make it harder to overreach. Oh, but you didn't want the rule of law, you wanted code-as-law and you wanted "the Internet" to overthrow Congress and the courts. So, you get what you get.
No, this is why I tell the truth, because Swartz didn't stop SOPA, Mitch Kapor's funded groups, going back for 10 years working the usual stealth cadre networks, got it stopped. The rest is just window dressing.
It doesn't matter if plea-bargaining isn't used in every case; it was in this one and the high-priced lawyers didn't object! They didn't take the deal, but there's a far, far cry from the 35 or even 50 years you all were screaming about like bansheesh, and the...6 months offered for a legitimate and lawful guilty plea. Ortiz even noted that the lawyer was free to ask for probation given the prosecution's recognition that it wasn't a crime for personal gain.
I'm happy to. I don't believe in the notion of "troll" which is merely a technocommunist means of silencing dissent, engineered by very controlling people who want to take away our Internet freedoms. This entire "disappearance" of comments that the readers here don't like is like Stalin erasing people out of photographs. It's despicable.
Lawrence Lessig began mentoring Swartz when he was a mere 14 years old -- a teenage genius. He spent a lot of quality time with him and was frequently in touch with him; he had just saw him at a Christmas party before he died.
But Lessig, as much as he animated Swartz and indeed lured Swartz into the whole copyleftist doctrine, did not go to the mat for his protege. He was happy to push the doctrine of copyleftism and nod and wink about hacking and rail against the targets of the hack, like JSTOR, but he then said Aaron "crossed a line" and wouldn't defend him. He sits in his cushy job and piously talks about conflicts of interest at Harvard -- nonsense. If he cared about the issues he claims to (and I don't share his convictions), he should have been willing to put up websites and write letters and stump for Aaron BEFORE he committed suicide, not AFTER.
I write this here, and there is plenty of other material on the Internet to draw from.
That a 14-year-old boy genius willingly embraces the hacker set doesn't mean anything; these grown-ups are responsible for instilling in him also a notion of the rule of law. But oh, they don't have one, like Mike Masnick, so they are happy to send him off on a suicide bombing mission the way rich Saudi princes pay for Palestinian suicide bombers. And yes, I will use *exactly* those terms and not budge from my heartfelt conviction because some anonymous script kiddie like yourself with a fake name tells me I'm a "troll". BTW, my Internet name is solidly linked with my RL name on my blog.
SOPA was indeed stopped by Google, and the Google-connected long-time crusaders like Mitch Kapor who formed and -- most importantly -- funded the organizations that sustained Swartz and others:
Masnick repeatedly tries to pretend this was a "grass roots" campaign when it was conceived, executed, funded and fueled by the usual cadres. That they use mob psychology and get millions of kids on Tumblr scarified into thinking their blogs are going to be deleted by the police doesn't make it "grass roots" any more than anything of this nature in the 1930s was really "grass roots".
Masnick saying Swartz was "no fan" of Google is like people who say Larry Lessig isn't really on the left because he once clerked for a Republican judge. It's a dodge and a subterfuge that evades the very real role Google played in using their huge bully pulpit on their own website to get 7 million clicks. Not to mention their more subtle lobbying.
You and the rest of the tech press are despicable for not reporting the factual news of the six months' plea bargaining BEFORE Swartz's suicide (and perhaps because his lawyer manipulated the revelation of this truth to defend his client) and certainly AFTER his suicide when the lawyer ADMITTED this plea bargain -- which is certainly reasonable and lawful given the magnitude of the crime, and its purpose as a dramatic "propaganda of the deed" to try to smash the pay-wall and walled-garden systems of how universities wish to manage academic journals. When hackers deprive us of choice in this coercive way, it is right and just to prosecute them.
It doesn't matter if charges are added as fit the crime because the discussion all along, as Ortiz and *even the lawyer* admit, was about either a plea for a very lenient sentence or some far lesser sentence if it were put to a jury trial. You're forgetting about the media circus YOU would have created around an actual jury trial -- and even Swartz and his family might have wished to avoid THAT.
You must admit: There has never been a hacker ever in the US or UK who has ever remotely served anything like these sentences -- in fact some of them get out of jail free with the Asperberger's card or other extenuating circumstances -- or they turn state's evidence like Sabu. So it is utterly irresponsible for you to keep scarifying with these literalisms AND you have to ask yourselves whether you are in fact aiding and abetting a climate of intimidation that could have acted on Swartz's psyche -- when in fact he would have known about the plea offer and the likelihood -- as Ortiz indicated -- that he could face even just probation! Shame on you!
You binary geek thinkers also refuse to consider how precedent law plays a role in our system; and how a judge is separate from a prosecutor and will reach his own conclusions about how to *apply* the law in a given case. There is absolutely no indication anywhere that Swartz would have served anything like 7 years, let alone 35 or 50, and you're just making this up in service of your despicable copyleftist cause.
If we're to blame people beyond Swartz for this tragedy, I blame Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, and all his other mentors who knowingly incited him to this act yet pulled back and didn't defend him at the end.
When you like it or not, the plea bargaining system is in fact what enables enormous numbers of people to go free doing just community service or getting sentences to time served in pre-trial. You're writing about the system in an ignorant, tendentious fashion merely to serve your cause.
You're a terrible advertisement for the kind of justice we would live under if you were in charge. Oops, we've already seen that with your outrageous anti-SOPA crusade that succeeded in overthrowing Congress so that legislation didn't even come to a vote. And BTW, precisely because there isn't a good law to establish the line of criminality you refuse to reckon with regarding piracy and copying that prosecutors are going to feel entitled to "make examples" -- even with six months -- of people like Swartz. So you are to blame as well.
I used to have to struggle to answer this sort of technocommunism from Mike Masnick alone in these comments, or on my little blog, all by myself.
But now, there are plenty of others to point out how backward his collectivism is, and the high-traffic Pando Daily explains why it's completely retrograde to be whining about paid content in the age of tablets:
Yes, we are finally turning the corner on that silly Web 2.0 technocommunism stuff, I couldn't be happy! I pay for a NYT subscription to read on the web or on my phone, works great, they have bills to pay for their real journalism, and they certainly shouldn't get caught up in silly collectivist fads like "crowdsourcing" stories and expecting the mob to pay for their investigations that aren't going to always please the flashmobbers.
All the usual fake argumentations of the copyleftists.
What's the modern hipster jogger doing manually ripping DVDs anyway? He, what, bought a DVD and didn't get a service online? He didn't stream from Spotify or GetGlue or something? This isn't even the modern delivery system for content.
And as such, the notion that "I should get to do it because these are my gadgets" is only edge-casing and whining, because in reality, you know full well you won't keep just to your own gadgets, and you are merely looking for yet another way to undermine copyright.If you really believed in "freedom only among my own gadgets" you would subscribe to the idea of licensing or hash-registration of hardware for all the devices, but of course we can't imagine you'd do that, ever.
Give it up, people have to make a living, paws off.
No. It wouldn't be nice. Because people like you who are really technocommunists in your beliefs (liberating property, enabling secretive geek governments like the Obama For America Big Data gang) would pretend that you are "independent," and would not be subjected to even the minimal accountability that a party affiliation and endorsement would compel you to have.
Sergei Brin just wants the Soviet Academy of Sciences to run everything on the basis of "science". And his geek friends are happy to code up a Google-based platform where everyone would just 'like' (yes votes only!) the "principles" that people like you would put up for ballot.
Oh, come now. The Russian government already filters, sock-puppets, and spies on its own people with SORM, etc. it doesn't need anything special.
And SOPA specifically said within the text of the law that it did not mandate massive pre-filtering by ISPs. That's just hysteria on your part and you know it.
There's no moral or legal equivalence whatsoever and you're just trying to gin one up.
Russia is hardly likely to crack down on piracy, they get too much out of it.
Re: You Can Seize Property from a Trespasser
Links to court documents:
http://web.mit.edu/bitbucket/Swartz,%20Aaron%20Indictment.pdf
http://tech.mit.edu/V13 2/N46/swartz/swartz-suppress2.pdf
Re: Re: Re:
So what? Given how much you've written on this case, you should read the court documents which establish that the 4th amendment wasn't violated and the lawyer didn't make the case. He claimed he was about to when Swartz committed suicide, but that was just a spin.
Re:
The rules are different for trespassers. Read the court documents.
You Can Seize Property from a Trespasser
Eric Holder was right to scold the media, and the copyleftist tech media starting with TechDirt and CNET have been the worst!
A press release from the DOJ describing the maximum terms for *charges* is not the same thing as a *sentence* after what we call "a trial" is heard with a judge and jury -- and adversarial defense. To keep haranguing like literalist code-is-lawyers about this concept of "35 years" merely because abstractly, yes, these are the maximum sentences under the *charges* means you don't get how the independent judiciary works. And no, Swartz wasn't "bullied" into a plea bargain, but offered such a low bargain precisely because his conduct -- as Holder explained -- was not for mercenary reasons from all indications. As Holder said, he doesn't look at the charges, he looks at the *conduct* -- the acts, not the hysterical hypotheses of you geeks looking literally at these maximum sentences. Few court cases involve maximum sentences.
As for the notion that Swartz would get 7 years if he refused to plea, there's no evidence for that, either, because again, it's what the prosecutors think they can get if they make their case -- but there are many mitigating circumstances. Holder said it was never the government's intent for him to serve 3-5 months. As for the notion that having a felony on his record would ruin his life, he should have thought of that each time he committed such giant hacks serving as a "propaganda of the deed" -- and he committed at least three of them. With all his friends like Lessig, there's no indication he would have ever been lacking in jobs or positions. To be sure, he was banned from Harvard after this big hack, and it would be interesting to know what their thinking was, if what his friends keep ranting is true, that he "had authorized access" and it was "all forgiven and JSTOR didn't press charges". So why was he banned? That's a question to ask about his conduct and intent, not just their possible "oppression" -- which seems less likely.
As for Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman's claims that Heymann "lied," while she's understandably distraught and entitled to her grief and rage, she's not entitled to her facts. The case files published on the Internet let her know that his lawyers tried that gambit of claiming that the evidence was seized without a warrant. But citing Sanchez, the precedent case about such issues *when a person is trespassing*, then the government *can* seize the property. It was used to commit the offense, after all -- the laptop was hidden under a box in a wiring closet and logged directly into the LAN to use the system not as intended, after repeated circumvention efforts were caught and Swartz was knocked off the network. The lawyer doesn't seem to have argued successfully otherwise when Sanchez was invoked.
As for witholding exculpatory evidence, until we hear what that is, we can't make a judgement about it, and given how Swartz's girlfriend misrepresented Heymann "lying" about the "failure to get a warrant" when the feds had the right to impound property from a person committing a trespass, it's hard to accept it on good faith.
The DOJ isn't "admitting" errors because it hasn't made them. As Holder said to Coryn, in the Ted Stevens case, he found prosecutorial misconduct and overreach and he called it. If it were present in the Swartz case, he would call it, too. It wasn't. He didn't. Watch the whole video and not just the tendentious coverage of it in Huffpo and Slate:
http://nation.foxnews.com/aaron-swartz/2013/03/06/eric-holder-never-intention-aaron-swartz -go-prison-more-3-or-4-months
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/03/eric-holder-says-a aron-swartzs-prosecutors-did-their-job-properly.html
Those Other Clams Not Opening Up on Fishing Expeditions
I'll tell you what other clams are not opening up to fishing expeditions and are tighter than the clams in the federal government -- the hacker community in MIT. They know more than they are telling; they aren't talking. They are scared.
I've studied all the blogs and chat and tweets on this and thought about it a lot, and my question now is this:
Did Aaron Swartz help Bradley Manning download all those quarter of a million cables and other files illegally by helping create for him a scraper script and/or helping him move and store the files?
After all, Swartz really got to be an expert at that sort of "movement" work -- he dl'd the Library of Congress, PACER, and JSTOR files in record time and efficiently, although he did get caught. Even so, he was an expert.
Or did Swartz help Danny Clark do that, and Danny Clark helped Manning? Or some other MIT hacker?
The feds were absolutely right to fish in these waters, because Bradly Manning, who is properly arrested and will be appropriately tried, regardless of any issues with his mistreatment, did go to the MIT hacker community in 2010 with his then-boyfriend while on leave during his service in the Iraq war, and did then eventually reach Assange at WikiLeaks and did from all accounts leak the files he had obtained. I always thought he had to have had help.
The narratives at Empty Wheel and other sites where people ask a lot of questions to try to prove their case that the "feds are overreaching" in fact help create the plausible set of suppositions that Swartz and/or others helped WikiLeaks. Certainly Jacob Appelbaum was front and center helping WikiLeaks and was properly questioned by the grand jury.
Once you suspend the hagiography, there really are a lot of questions to ask about Swartz, and you could sadly conclude that he killed himself precisely because he realized that he had either inadvertently or deliberately helped prosecute Manning, or sent someone else to the grand jury, or worse. We'll never know. But it's more likely he committed suicide over the despair and shame of such a thing, than fear of serving a mere six months in jail, in the plea bargain. That's never been a persuasive reason for his suicide. (Naturally, his suicide could be completely unrelated to his Internet causes and his hacking case, but based on sheer depression or personal matters.)
You have to ask what it was that his ex-girlfriend told the grand jury as well, she's mentioned in the court documents.
My operating theory is that WikiLeaks, with this accusation that Swartz was their source, was hoping to act quickly to pin the blame that might accrue to any hacker at MIT or anywhere else in the Manning loop on a dead man who wouldn't talk. I also assume they'd like to distract attention from Jacob Appelbaum -- again, to a dead man. They are opportunistic thugs. This is in keeping with their character.
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/02/did-aaron-swartz-help-bradley-manning -hack-for-wikileaks.html
One of the things that is tripping you up here is your certitude that the Feds "drew a blank" back then on these connections. You don't know that because the trial hasn't taken place. That's just something some prosecutor or other party leaked to the Wall Street Journal and which you reported because it fit your theories of fishing and overreach. You don't know that they leaked that as a false flag operation or just because there are wars among them on the theories of the case. It means nothing.
There is nothing to say that the Lamo chat logs published in Wired in fact will be used in the trial. They don't quite rise to the test of "trial truth," in my view, but this is a court martial. Furthermore, investigators said they found further proof of Manning's contact with Assange during the hearings, and we haven't seen that this was somehow "thrown out," or "countered" by the lawyer, who actually hasn't really made much of a robust defense on "I am a political prisoner!" grounds, preferring to lurch from "my transgender made me do it!" to procedural wrangles and admissiblity wrangles that haven't worked -- to simply gutting out his client's time in solitary so he can book it against his sentence to have him serve less time. What a strategy! 900 days! That's like the Siege of Leningrad. He should have been holding press conferences daily on the court house steps. He wasn't.
Remember David House? He wouldn't talk to the grand jury. But he published his notes. His notes let us know that the grand jury asked House whether Danny Clark had breakfast on the morning following the BUILDS open house with Bradley Manning at the Oxford Spa. So that means there is testimony about that or an allegation about that or something. He pleaded the fifth. But David House got mugged on Twitter and accused of all kinds of Bradsploitation by bloggers, and he seems rather quiet lately. The grand jury wanted to know about the girl with the purple hair, too. Who *is* the girl with the purple hair?
I think you nervously posted this blog because you think there might be something to it and you just want to be on the record as admitting it in case it comes out later. But you and Empty Wheel and other leftwing bloggers want to convert your analysis of "the fishing expedition" into a "prosecutorial overreach" narrative, even if in fact it may have been justified. You all want to liberate stuff and hack stuff, but committing treason big time, you might want to stop short there, and begin to mumble piously about "crossing a line" as Lessig has been doing about his dead protege.
Swartz's FOIAs were made not out of concern for Manning -- he didn't really campaign for Manning. They were made for concern about what Bradley told House in the brig in Quantico during his visit, to see what in fact House may have given them or may have said that they monitored or something.
Bradly Manning is going to allocute (confess). That means he might name names. There may be no way to get those people he named because maybe the feds can't pin it on people. Maybe it's not a crime for you as a script kiddie to give scraping tips to Bradass87. But maybe if you did you might want to consider moving to Canada now.
You are Fake, James
So, James, did you write a script called "keepgrabbing.py"? No.
Did you have 4 million files on your LawMeme? No.
Did you make a fake account and an alias to go on Internet Archive? No. It's open.
Did you write a script that grabbed other people's articles that were not your own, or not contributed to a site you edited? No.
Did you break into a wiring closet to do this job? No.
Did you wear a bicycle helmet to disguise your face while performing this hack? No.
Did you run away from campus police after you had done this? No.
So why are you pretending in such a fake way that you are "just like" Aaron and "they might get you"?
Honestly, you unicorn fairy-world dwellers think you can accomplish everything through language. If you just say a law is "outdated," why, it must be! Voila! If you think a prosecutor has "overreached," why, that must be true! Because you say so!
Look at the past cases of this nature. No hacker in the US or UK has ever gotten anything remotely resembling 35 years.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
But he is a felon. He knowingly and deliberately and with cunning to hide his tracks hacked a system in a major, dramatic way to destroy *an institution* entirely and prevent *choice* on the Internet to have pay walls and walled gardens. I'm for prosecuting such Bolshevism in exactly the way it was indeed prosecuted -- with a series of careful allegations, that the defense was free to reject, and ultimately a plea bargain of 6 months. That's exactly right.
Re: Plea Bargain BS
Well, no. You aren't "hounded to the grave" unless you are an emotionally fragile coddled child genius with bipolar or autism spectrum or both.
Again, if you don't want cases to be pressured to serve the task of deterrent of criminal hackers, you have to be for SOPA/PIPA which would define these cases more clearly and make it harder to overreach. Oh, but you didn't want the rule of law, you wanted code-as-law and you wanted "the Internet" to overthrow Congress and the courts. So, you get what you get.
Re: And this is why you fail.
No, this is why I tell the truth, because Swartz didn't stop SOPA, Mitch Kapor's funded groups, going back for 10 years working the usual stealth cadre networks, got it stopped. The rest is just window dressing.
Um, 6 Months is Not Very Much
It doesn't matter if plea-bargaining isn't used in every case; it was in this one and the high-priced lawyers didn't object! They didn't take the deal, but there's a far, far cry from the 35 or even 50 years you all were screaming about like bansheesh, and the...6 months offered for a legitimate and lawful guilty plea. Ortiz even noted that the lawyer was free to ask for probation given the prosecution's recognition that it wasn't a crime for personal gain.
Re: Re: Response to: Rikuo on Jan 18th, 2013 @ 9:51am
I'm happy to. I don't believe in the notion of "troll" which is merely a technocommunist means of silencing dissent, engineered by very controlling people who want to take away our Internet freedoms. This entire "disappearance" of comments that the readers here don't like is like Stalin erasing people out of photographs. It's despicable.
Lawrence Lessig began mentoring Swartz when he was a mere 14 years old -- a teenage genius. He spent a lot of quality time with him and was frequently in touch with him; he had just saw him at a Christmas party before he died.
But Lessig, as much as he animated Swartz and indeed lured Swartz into the whole copyleftist doctrine, did not go to the mat for his protege. He was happy to push the doctrine of copyleftism and nod and wink about hacking and rail against the targets of the hack, like JSTOR, but he then said Aaron "crossed a line" and wouldn't defend him. He sits in his cushy job and piously talks about conflicts of interest at Harvard -- nonsense. If he cared about the issues he claims to (and I don't share his convictions), he should have been willing to put up websites and write letters and stump for Aaron BEFORE he committed suicide, not AFTER.
I write this here, and there is plenty of other material on the Internet to draw from.
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/01/lessig-and-the-internet-are-the-bullies-th e-prosecutor-are-only-doing-their-jobs.html
That a 14-year-old boy genius willingly embraces the hacker set doesn't mean anything; these grown-ups are responsible for instilling in him also a notion of the rule of law. But oh, they don't have one, like Mike Masnick, so they are happy to send him off on a suicide bombing mission the way rich Saudi princes pay for Palestinian suicide bombers. And yes, I will use *exactly* those terms and not budge from my heartfelt conviction because some anonymous script kiddie like yourself with a fake name tells me I'm a "troll". BTW, my Internet name is solidly linked with my RL name on my blog.
(untitled comment)
SOPA was indeed stopped by Google, and the Google-connected long-time crusaders like Mitch Kapor who formed and -- most importantly -- funded the organizations that sustained Swartz and others:
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/05/who-was-really-behind-the-anti-sopa-camp aign-not-grass-roots-but-the-astroturf-machines-of-mitch-kap.html
Masnick repeatedly tries to pretend this was a "grass roots" campaign when it was conceived, executed, funded and fueled by the usual cadres. That they use mob psychology and get millions of kids on Tumblr scarified into thinking their blogs are going to be deleted by the police doesn't make it "grass roots" any more than anything of this nature in the 1930s was really "grass roots".
Masnick saying Swartz was "no fan" of Google is like people who say Larry Lessig isn't really on the left because he once clerked for a Republican judge. It's a dodge and a subterfuge that evades the very real role Google played in using their huge bully pulpit on their own website to get 7 million clicks. Not to mention their more subtle lobbying.
Lessig is to Blame -- and So Are You
You and the rest of the tech press are despicable for not reporting the factual news of the six months' plea bargaining BEFORE Swartz's suicide (and perhaps because his lawyer manipulated the revelation of this truth to defend his client) and certainly AFTER his suicide when the lawyer ADMITTED this plea bargain -- which is certainly reasonable and lawful given the magnitude of the crime, and its purpose as a dramatic "propaganda of the deed" to try to smash the pay-wall and walled-garden systems of how universities wish to manage academic journals. When hackers deprive us of choice in this coercive way, it is right and just to prosecute them.
It doesn't matter if charges are added as fit the crime because the discussion all along, as Ortiz and *even the lawyer* admit, was about either a plea for a very lenient sentence or some far lesser sentence if it were put to a jury trial. You're forgetting about the media circus YOU would have created around an actual jury trial -- and even Swartz and his family might have wished to avoid THAT.
You must admit: There has never been a hacker ever in the US or UK who has ever remotely served anything like these sentences -- in fact some of them get out of jail free with the Asperberger's card or other extenuating circumstances -- or they turn state's evidence like Sabu. So it is utterly irresponsible for you to keep scarifying with these literalisms AND you have to ask yourselves whether you are in fact aiding and abetting a climate of intimidation that could have acted on Swartz's psyche -- when in fact he would have known about the plea offer and the likelihood -- as Ortiz indicated -- that he could face even just probation! Shame on you!
You binary geek thinkers also refuse to consider how precedent law plays a role in our system; and how a judge is separate from a prosecutor and will reach his own conclusions about how to *apply* the law in a given case. There is absolutely no indication anywhere that Swartz would have served anything like 7 years, let alone 35 or 50, and you're just making this up in service of your despicable copyleftist cause.
If we're to blame people beyond Swartz for this tragedy, I blame Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, and all his other mentors who knowingly incited him to this act yet pulled back and didn't defend him at the end.
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/01/lessig-and-the-internet-are-the-bullies-the -prosecutor-are-only-doing-their-jobs.html
When you like it or not, the plea bargaining system is in fact what enables enormous numbers of people to go free doing just community service or getting sentences to time served in pre-trial. You're writing about the system in an ignorant, tendentious fashion merely to serve your cause.
You're a terrible advertisement for the kind of justice we would live under if you were in charge. Oops, we've already seen that with your outrageous anti-SOPA crusade that succeeded in overthrowing Congress so that legislation didn't even come to a vote. And BTW, precisely because there isn't a good law to establish the line of criminality you refuse to reckon with regarding piracy and copying that prosecutors are going to feel entitled to "make examples" -- even with six months -- of people like Swartz. So you are to blame as well.
Finally Turning the Corner on Technocommunism
I used to have to struggle to answer this sort of technocommunism from Mike Masnick alone in these comments, or on my little blog, all by myself.
But now, there are plenty of others to point out how backward his collectivism is, and the high-traffic Pando Daily explains why it's completely retrograde to be whining about paid content in the age of tablets:
http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/27/talking-about-paywalls-without-talking-about-tablets-is -just-wrong/
Yes, we are finally turning the corner on that silly Web 2.0 technocommunism stuff, I couldn't be happy! I pay for a NYT subscription to read on the web or on my phone, works great, they have bills to pay for their real journalism, and they certainly shouldn't get caught up in silly collectivist fads like "crowdsourcing" stories and expecting the mob to pay for their investigations that aren't going to always please the flashmobbers.
Really? They Still Rip DVDs?
All the usual fake argumentations of the copyleftists.
What's the modern hipster jogger doing manually ripping DVDs anyway? He, what, bought a DVD and didn't get a service online? He didn't stream from Spotify or GetGlue or something? This isn't even the modern delivery system for content.
And as such, the notion that "I should get to do it because these are my gadgets" is only edge-casing and whining, because in reality, you know full well you won't keep just to your own gadgets, and you are merely looking for yet another way to undermine copyright.If you really believed in "freedom only among my own gadgets" you would subscribe to the idea of licensing or hash-registration of hardware for all the devices, but of course we can't imagine you'd do that, ever.
Give it up, people have to make a living, paws off.
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/11/joggerdvd.html
The Singularity
No. It wouldn't be nice. Because people like you who are really technocommunists in your beliefs (liberating property, enabling secretive geek governments like the Obama For America Big Data gang) would pretend that you are "independent," and would not be subjected to even the minimal accountability that a party affiliation and endorsement would compel you to have.
Sergei Brin just wants the Soviet Academy of Sciences to run everything on the basis of "science". And his geek friends are happy to code up a Google-based platform where everyone would just 'like' (yes votes only!) the "principles" that people like you would put up for ballot.
No thanks! Go away!
Re:
You're right. The text of the law in fact says the opposite. Glyn is just panic-mongering.
Oh, come now
Oh, come now. The Russian government already filters, sock-puppets, and spies on its own people with SORM, etc. it doesn't need anything special.
And SOPA specifically said within the text of the law that it did not mandate massive pre-filtering by ISPs. That's just hysteria on your part and you know it.
There's no moral or legal equivalence whatsoever and you're just trying to gin one up.
Russia is hardly likely to crack down on piracy, they get too much out of it.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Google and Techdirt
Could you point to a critical article Mike has written about Google?
Re: Re: Yes, it was Google-- and the people Google pays....
Er, only 7 million signed a petition, but I bet if we scrutinized it we'd find a lot of alts and copies.