Never Forget

donald trump gets 10 warnings for intimidating witnesses and indefinite trial postponement for hoarding and most likely leaking classified documents. Sweet sweet justice.
- People keep trying to convince me it's not evidence of two justice systems.
   
  But it is.
  
  It's evidence that we live in corporatocracies masquerading as "democracies". The 0.1%, shielded by the liability protections of the corporations they own, and their armies of lobbyists — they finance our politics, choose who ends up on the ballot, and shadow write most of our legislation, policies, and regulations.
  Trump is free because he is a part of that < 0.1%.
  The Boeing execs who oversaw systemic fraud, lied to the FAA, and murdered 166 people still ARE FREE AND RICH. Why? Because they are the 0.1%.
  The IPCC hosts fossil fuelled climate summits in fossil fuel exporting countries, inviting fossil fuel corporations and lobbyists to attend — at a scientific conference about how to solve the crisis they created and profited from! why? Because we live in corporatocracies.
  
  I think this is a consequence of any (unregulated) capitalistic system in general. The system is founded on money, more money will give anyone more influence and power over the system
  
  It's the subtle difference between a JUSTICE system and a LEGAL system.
  One aims to maintain law and order in society in a fair and equal way regardless of one's status or situation.
  The other is a system gamed to benefit the richest and wealthiest individuals to get away with everything.
  
  At risk of sounding cringe, it's evidence of one injustice system.
  
  Someone should look up the maximum sentence for what he's been charged with. The current biggest hold-ups are not being able to make someone appear in multiple trials in different places simultaneously, and avoiding the appearance that the court is trying to interfere with an election.
  You don't want the court to not care about the appearance of interfering with elections, or else you'll have the GoP trying to get Democrat politicians on dubious charges that they'll definitely not be guilty of but will definitely bury them in scandal and prevent them from campaigning effectively.
- For the record, Aaron Swartz never actually went to trial, nor was he "sentenced" to anything.
  Federal prosecutors came after him with overzealous charges in an effort to make him accept a plea deal (they do that a lot), which he rejected. It would have gone to court where the feds would have had to justify the charges they were bringing.
  But that never happened because he killed himself.
  We don't actually know how this all would have played out.
  
  The comment in OPs post is misleading but he did nevertheless kill himself because of the justice system trying to prosecute him for accessing science most likely funded by public money in the first place.
  
  And will never know, selfishly speaking, the possible extent of his further contributions to society. Died at 26 after an incredible life already.
  Besides his life, what else did they steal from us?
  RIP Aaron
- donald tr*mp gets 10 warnings for intimidating witnesses and indefinite trial postponement for hoarding and most likely leaking classified documents. Sweet sweet justice.
  Why are you censoring Donald Trump's name? Is it a swear word now in your country?
  We're big girls here, we can take a little rude language, don't worry :)
  
  I don’t know why but i just didn’t want to type that slur. It’s edited now.

Articles paid for by the public through grants btw
- With authors often paying for open access publications literally out of their very own money, not just grants.
  
  Not at the time this happened. Aaron's case was one of the motivating factors that led to the Open Access publication movement gaining enough traction that authors could publish that way. JSTOR access is paid for and administered on college campuses by libraries and librarians as a whole field felt terrible both about the paid publication system and the way Aaron was treated. As a community of professionals, the Librarian and Information Science community pushed very hard for the adoption of Open Access publishing into the Academic community.

Look, the kid was a hero, but this is also patently false.
He was not sentenced to 35 years. The trial hadn't started. 35 years was the maximum possible sentence. He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected.
We don't need to spin lies to make his story more tragic than it already is.
- 35 years max, plea for 1/2 that was rejected. He was going to get the book thrown at him to make an example. 5 years minimum but I wouldn't doubt 10-20.
  The rapist traitor that headed a insurrection on Jan 6 2021 has never spent a day in jail and is still the frontrunner for president to be legally elected in 2024.
  
  still the frontrunner for president to be legally elected in 2024.
  The front runner? Really?
  I'm not being sarcastic. Im genuinely interested, but can't be arsed to start going through polls because it'd mean going through the biases of the pollers.
  
  plea for 1/2 that was rejected
  The rejected plea was for 6 months.
- He committed the idealist's perennial sin: He thought that because the system is bullshit, it's okay not to play ball with it.
  "Hey this is a bunch of crap. I can be guilty or innocent, and the right move is always to plead guilty even if I didn't do a damn thing wrong, because if I try to fight the case they're gonna tack on a ton of new charges and they almost always win and I might go away for most of my life."
  "Preach."
  "I'm gonna plead not guilty because I didn't do anything wrong."
  "No no no no no that is not the way to reform the system no no no that is a bad mistake"
  Aaron Swartz was a fuckin hero. Read his posthumous book, it is wonderful. But the same idealism and faith that led him to the good things he did in his painfully short time here, also led him not to understand how to engage with the US federal government and keep your skin.
  
  Yeah. Don’t talk to cops. Get a sympathetic/movement lawyer. And this is fucking crucial, do what they say.
  A lot of idealistic people understand that you can sell your soul piecemeal and are always in danger of it. But they don’t really understand what not giving up your values is vs not doing what’s smart. You take the plea deal unless you have to rat someone out. And also you don’t commit crimes you aren’t comfortable with the consequences of.
- For bulk downloading science journals he had access to.
  
  for breaking and entering*
  and DoS

If I remember correctly, it wasn't even illegal since these scientific articles should have been public to begin with because they used public funds.
- That may be so, but IIRC he was charged with breaking into MIT's networking room and illegally tapping into their network to get the articles:
  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2261840/Aaron-Swartz-MIT-surveillance-shot-ruined-tragic-Reddit-founders-life.html
  
  That also may be so, but 35 years is fucked up for that. pretty sure child porn first time offenders is like 15 to 30 so hacking MIT for stuff that should have been free gets you more jail time then a first CP offence. OK thats fucked up
  
  Well that's definitely burying the lede from the OP.
  It wasn't the sharing part they had a problem with, it was the B&E and hacking.
  
  I hacked my highschool servers when I was young and shared the upcoming exams, so everyone could prepare for them. Someone told the authorities, all I got was some extra exercise. Sure it wasn't MIT, but still 35 years is ridiculous, even a year of prison would have been ridiculous.
- Paradoxically, that's not how science jourals work. There are no difference between public or prívate funds in this regard.

Shout out to Alexandra elbakyan. She continues part of aaron's work by running sci-hub and libgen, but lives safely out of reach of the american criminal "justice" system 💔

He didn't even share them as far as I know, he just downloaded them. And the trial hadn't started yet when he committed suicide.
- He didn't get the chance to share them because he was caught downloading them, and his download requests were getting blocked.
  And to be clear, he wasn't downloading from the Internet as one might download a car, he went into a restricted networking closet and connected directly to the switch, leaving a computer sitting there sending access requests. He had to keep going back to it to check on the progress, which is when they caught him.
  And the trial hadn't started yet when he committed suicide.
  Yeah, I agree with the sentiment of the post, but this is just wildly misleading. He was not sentenced to anything, he committed suicide before the trial.
  He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected, in an effort to make the feds justify the ludicrous charges they were pressing. Had it gone to trial, he certainly wouldn't have been found not guilty, but it's unlikely many of those charges would have stuck. It's extremely unlikely he would actually have served 35 years.
- Downloading isn't a crime, is it?
  
  He was being charged under the CFAA, a hacking criminal statute that prohibits unauthorized access to computer systems. It was controversially being stretched to cover Aaron's conduct that violated TOS by an ambitious prosecutor.
  
  No, but he obviously felt that JSTOR could persuade a court to make it one. Poor kid.
  
  You wouldn't download a car would you??

Oil CEOs pay fines for bringing about a global climate catastrophe. Fascist politicians are given slaps on the wrist for an attempted coup d'etat. Government officials openly commit gross violations of privacy and suffer no consequences.
But a guy hacks a university network and downloads a hoard of scientific articles that should have been freely accessible to begin with and he gets 35 years in prison. I'll admit I wasn't familiar with this case before I saw this picture. Which is kind of insane in and of itself.
- Remember Kim Dotcom? He had a file sharing website and the police raided his house with guns like he was a dangerous criminal. There is a video of it on YouTube.
  
  Honestly I had forgotten about the whole MegaUpload stuff.
  Given, Kim Dotcom had a long history of being a trash person before the MegaUpload raid; Trading in stolen credit card info, embezzlement, black-hat hacking, etc… But he definitely didn’t deserve to get swatted just because he hosted a site that was popular with media pirates. The police used his prior convictions as justification for their heavy-handed tactics. But the reality is that they likely would have gone in with SWAT even if he had a squeaky clean record beforehand.
- There's a recent Radiolab episode about those that have taken up his mantle and the impact he's had on scientific publishing.

That's not exactly what happened.
Aaron committed suicide before his case went to trial, and so he was never convicted let alone sentenced. 35 years was never even likely; had it gone to trial there's every reason to think he'd have been acquitted outright, or at worst given a slap on the wrist. Not that he should have even been charged, of course.
- Well now I’ve got two competing claims, and I can’t believe either one until I see the authoritative history on it
  
  There's a documentary on YouTube called "The internet's own boy", if you want to learn more. Basically, he was offered a 6 month plea, but he would be a convicted felon, and basic logic/morality tells you that you shouldn't plead guilty to a crime that you didn't commit. However, the justice system is very imperfect, and often people plead guilty for reduced sentencing even if they're not guilty. He stood on principle until his legs gave out. they were already in millions spent in attorney fees. Not a shred of justice can be found in how Aaron's story ended.
  
  https://web.archive.org/web/20140721052709/http://www.boston.com/metrodesk/2013/01/14/mit-hacking-case-lawyer-says-aaron-swartz-was-offered-plea-deal-six-months-behind-bars/hQt8sQI64tnV6FAd7CLcTJ/story.html
  
  Robert Evan's did a Behind the Bastards episode on this back in December I believe.
- Also JSTOR never wanted him prosecuted only to have the files deleted and call it a wash. It was MIT that supported prosecution and who called the fuzz in the first place.

i would say jstor are cunts, but actually it's the US government that were being cunts here.
- Law Enforcement and the Justice System have every responsibility to enforce laws as they were written, JSTOR pressed charges and the US Government offered Auron a plea deal to reduce his sentence to 6 months.
  Definitely an argument about the inadequacy of US Healthcare to be made here, though. Auron clearly could have used some counseling.
  
  I thought there was a prosecutor who pursued this beyond all reasonable bounds, making Aaron's life a living hell and driving him to suicide?
  
  and the US government was almost definitely trying to make an example out of him: literally anybody who read the case details whatsoever.
  
  Only prosecuting district attorneys can chose to bring a crimial charge to court.*
  *except in north carolina... for some reason they actually let victims prosecute.

He didn't transfer or share he only downloaded.
- It's also likely that he was never intending to share them. One of the things he was looking to do is aquire a large dataset to analyze trends.
  In other words, he was charged for entirely legit use.
  
  I recon he was looking for a specific trend the us government really didn't want him to prove they had been forcing.
- He also was not sentenced. This post is misinformation.

I highly recommend watching the documentary on him, Internet's own boy.
- Behind the Bastards dedicated their last Christmas episode to Aaron as well: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-christmas-hero-episode-aaron-136561888/
  
  Just for context for those who haven't heard the podcast: the Christmas episodes often center around non-bastards. This is one of those. :P
- Link https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaronSwartz

Reddit could've been so good with him at the helm...
- He likely wouldn’t’ve stayed. We’d be better off with him anyways. He was moving towards activism and politics. He’d probably either be a prisoner or a congressman by now. And like honestly, we could use a congressman like him.
- Good thing we've got a second opportunity. ;)
  
  He's dead so no we dont
  
  Lemmy is already cooked

The most infuriating thing was and still is the fact that some people justify the sentence and blame him for killing himself.
- Well killing oneself is always one’s own choice, but it’s terrible that he was given such a ridiculous sentence for no more than a copyright issue. Not even sure if he made money on the material, but even if he did he should have gotten maybe a fine, and imprisonment is just insane.
  
  He wasn't sentenced, he died before he could go to trial or accept a plea deal, but there is record of a 6 month jail sentence being offered to him.

He’s probably rolling in his grave at the enshittification of reddit now too

Judicially murdered by Carmen Ortiz.

They got the wrong reddit founder .
(not that I wish that on spez even tho he is bad I don't think he is that bad )
- Well when you put it like that .

The weirdest shit about this is that JSTOR apparently has a very expansive social media presence.
They have an official Tumblr account.
I had to follow it out of morbid curiosity.

There's a reason the EU doesn't extradite their citizens to the US: the justice system is considered inhumane.

Frankly, I don't think that was enough to make Aaron commit suicide. However, having close relations like Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian completely turn sour and blame him probably did, and I'm akin to believe they know what they did given how hard they doubled down on "well, Aaron really wasn't that great of a guy" narrative.

I never heard of this guy before today. What a goat RIP AARON SCHWARTZ
- There's a good behind the bastards episode on him (a good guy holiday episode; he's not a bastard)
- He was one of the inventors of Reddit.

This is like the Oliver Stone science meme kind of fact.

he didn't even share the articles did he? it was an "intent" crime.

Jesuschrist. 🤦‍♂️

Think I'm gonna be taking the solidarity approach pretty soon. Humanity is truly a cancer.

This is propaganda he got sucicided. And he didnt transfer or share scientific articles he simply downloaded them thats all. This poat is extremely damaging as its almost correct juat slightly shifting the commonly accepted reality of history. This is not the first time I've seen posts about him here doing a simmillar thing this raises the question who's trying to rewrite history and what for?

help, why does it looked photoshopped (aaron swartz)

bits are not bugs

Please don’t spread misinformation.
Edit: Why is anyone downvoting this? The text is inaccurate and should not be posted.
- You can't make a claim like that without elaborating why you think it's misinormation [SIC].
  
  It didn't get to trial if I remember right. He definitely wasn't sentenced.
  
  It makes two claims and he did commit suicide. Also, my keyboard is broken. :/
- What about this is misinformation?
  
  It is not true that he was sentenced to 35 years in prison by US authorities for transferring and sharing scientific articles from JSTOR. It is true that he killed himself.
- Rocking up to a popular conversation, and saying this is wrong, but not providing what you consider correct. Is a great way to not be a contributing member of society.
  Requiring people to have a 15 message subthread to figure out what you meant from your first comment is very unhelpful
  
  I thought it was pretty obvious, since there is so little actual content in the post, but I guess you're right. Thanks.