Aaron Swartz’s death was due to depression, but his legaltroubles probably contributed to it. I hate to exploit the tragedy, but wereally need to address those legal troubles.
The problem with computer geeks is that they are too smart.Boundaries obvious to the average person are invisible to geeks. They will runafoul of the law without being aware of it. From Aaron’s point of view,liberating the JSTOR documents was no different than writing the RSS spec orcontributing to Reddit. There was a bug preventing JSTOR documents from beingpublicly accessible, so he simply fixed the bug. (Indeed, JSTOR itself laterfixed the bug and liberated 4.5 million documents).
But, you might argue, this sounds similar to thejustifications that criminals use. For example, when convicted of pushingsomeone off a cliff, a murderer might say “all I did was stretch out my hands,that’s not illegal, is it?”. A good point, but there’s a difference. Aarondidn’t intended to hurt JSTOR nor profit from his actions. The laws are thereto stop the methods bad guys use to do bad things, not catch good guys intechnicalities.
The idea of “intent” is at the center of the problem. AsArthur C. Clarke put it “any sufficiently advanced technology isindistinguishable from magic”. What computer geeks do seems like magic to theaverage person, to the “jury of your peers”. What’s more, magic is essentiallythe same as witchcraft. Once you believe someone has magical powers, you startto fear them, and question their good intentions. Thus, no matter how good ageek’s intention, it’ll seem like evil black magic to prosecutors and juries.What saw this a couple months ago with “weev”, and it’s probably what would’vehappened to Aaron.
Aaron’s prosecutor is Carmen Ortiz, a political appointeewho is a leading contender to become the next governor of Massachusetts. Shehad an opportunity to do the right thing and drop the case, but didn’t. Wecitizens should demand accountability from her, and demand why she insteadchose to hound a talented geek to death.
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