No, I hadn't. It's your emphasis and attitude that come across as completely different. I kept trying to tell ya, the legal machine looks a lot different when you examine it as if you're the one at odds with it.
By abusing computer fraud laws to needlessly persecute Aaron Swartz, these Boston prosecutors have done grave damage to the entirely legitimate enterprise of having the state help protect individuals and businesses from criminals who can and do hire out superior security talent. Look at HN over the last two days: anyone who's ever been convicted of a computer crime, even if that crime involved the mass theft and subsequent resale of credit cards, is a newly minted hero of the cause of openness. That's Boston's doing.
The law cannot hope to capture every possible nuance of all conceivable offenses. As every lawyer who's ever argued with a Hacker on HN has pointed out, the law is not a programming language and courts aren't computer architectures. We want our rules, laws, and metalaws to provide every protection to the accused that they reasonably can, but at some point it's always going to come down to the discretion of humans appointed to positions of authority. Those authorities need to be equal to the task, or we delegitimize the whole effort.
I'm sad about what happened to Aaron. I look at the photos of him in his teens hanging out with Dave Winer and Lawrence Lessig; he was a small kid, and I have a big 13 year old. I exchanged an email or two with him, but my wife didn't know him at all and she's upset, as I would assume any parent reading about this would be. And obviously in light of what happened, I'm a little harsh on how I interacted with Aaron online --- not on the prosecution threads, but you know, on threads about "hollywood launches" and stuff like that.
But beyond that, what happened offends me in principle. If they're not the exact same principles that you've had offended, that doesn't matter much, does it? The justice system seems to have achieved a pretty high level of coverage in offended principles.
> anyone who's ever been convicted of a computer crime, even if that crime involved the mass theft and subsequent resale of credit cards, is a newly minted hero of the cause of openness
Specifics? I don't recall seeing this, but maybe I'm just unobservant.
> The law cannot hope to capture every possible nuance of all conceivable offenses
On the other hand, the point of having the law instead of The Decider is that acceptability of a particular behavior can be reasonably foreseen. And for the long standing laws most everybody now thinks of as self-evident (murder,rape,robbery,etc), this is basically the case. But the problem with many newer widely-scoped laws, especially federal ones, is that they're highly vague and allow so much leeway, the question becomes quite unanswerable. Are these vague laws primarily used to punish bona fide criminals? Yes. But when we fail to examine the law for what it conceivably could do and instead take comfort in what it usually does, when we fail to stand up for injustices against people who are ultimately not very nice, we set ourselves up for exactly what happened here - a grave injustice against an unlucky blatantly-undeserving target. It's simply the only thing remaining that provides any check on the expedience of the Deciders.
I unfortunately never interacted with Aaron. I identify with a lot of his optimism, even while feeling older than his naivety. I think we've probably had similar principles offended in this case. It just took a tangible incident with high wtf-levels to offend yours, where as mine go off for hypothetical possibilities and run-of-the-mill wtf-levels.
> I'm a little harsh on how I interacted with Aaron online --- not on the prosecution threads, but you know, on threads about "hollywood launches" and stuff like that.
Those prosecution threads should give you pause just the same, and Aaron is absolutely not the only person that you've acted like that with. I respect you tremendously for your technical knowledge, but for someone who reminds people to 'stay classy' and who claims the moral high ground with some regularity a bit of introspection wouldn't hurt. I'd respect you a lot more still. I'm very happy to see you come around in your way of thinking about this particular case though.
You're definitely the same Jacques I remember. I haven't come around on this case; I have the same opinion of it I always had. Like Aaron's own lawyer, I was confident he was at no real risk of serving time --- first time offender, no commercial purpose, no co-conspirators, minimal attempt to hide, no damage. It was hard to fathom that he'd do worse than credit card thieves. Unlike his lawyer, who was privy to all sorts of facts neither you nor I had, I was unaware of the psychological games the prosecution was playing. Have you noticed how shocked everyone is at what happened? That's because what happened was shocking. I think what Aaron did was wrong, but like I said at the time, I was hoping he'd do well at trial.
I definitely don't think of myself as any classier than you; I think we occupy opposite poles of some deranged message board energy sphere. Or you're the heat miser and I'm the cold miser. Either way, I can spot a dumb argument as quickly as you can, and just because I'm imperfect doesn't mean I'm not going to point them out.
> I haven't come around on this case; I have the same opinion of it I always had.
I'll take your word for it but I'm getting a different impression.
Aaron was fairly clearly being made an example out of, and I think that after the expansion of the indictment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4528083, a thread in which you commented, and which came before the thread about Aarons friends setting up a defence fund) that would have been pretty obvious even to those not already of that opinion.
Maybe I'm slightly more sensitive to this stuff because of some of the things that happened in the wake of reocities.com but let's just say that if Aaron had charges worth a few decades thrown at him for TOS violations and unauthorized access I should probably be in jail for at least several decades because of that little gig.
I know everybody is shocked at what happened, but I'm far more shocked at Aarons' suicide than at the travesty of justice perpetrated there, there are lots more examples of such things happening on a daily basis.
I think my mentality about the law is different enough from the one that prevails on HN that I appear much more conservative or authoritarian than I am. I say something anti-authoritarian and I sound like I've done a 180.
We should stop talking about us, or at least, about me. This isn't about me/us.
