I'm a little scared to post here, given how abusive HN has become over the past few days.
As someone who's been reading Aaron's writings for years, it's clear he was a student of civil disobedience. It seems like the JSTOR act was a deliberate act intended as a statement of civil disobedience, given the little I've read here. My facts may be wrong here.
But if that's the case, going to jail seems like a common component of civil disobedience as a way to demonstrate how unjust a law is. The men I'm certain Aaron admired -- MLK Jr, Gandhi, etc. -- all served time in jail as a mechanism of galvanizing society around the injustice of the laws they were fighting.
I ask this as a legitimate question: Did Aaron not expect to go to jail for an act of civil disobedience?
This is all speculation, since the only person who can answer authoritatively is dead. I think that he honestly believed that it would be no big deal. If you read comments here on HN, you can see the same attitude - that since there was no real security, it wasn't a crime, since he didn't lie to anyone they couldn't claim he misrepresented himself to get access, etc. I think that Aaron honestly believed that what he was doing was "hacking the legal system" - accomplishing his goal by exploiting loopholes in the law rather than breaking it.
What he found out was that the people in the legal system do not take kindly to being "hacked". Rather than give a wry smile and say "You got us this time, Aaron Swartz!", the prosecutor grabbed on to the part that she thought she could make stick and went for it. The rest is, as they say, history. There are a lot of lessons in what happened, but one that I haven't seen get much mention here on HN is that the US legal system is comprised of people, with all the advantages and disadvantages that that entails. It's not something that should be "hacked" lightly or by the unprepared, because the consequences are not always as deterministic as you might think they should be.
On a side note, I think your comment about HN being "abusive" lately is spot-on. Some of the discussion has bordered on "internet lynch mob", and I can't say I'm very comfortable with that regardless of the circumstances.
Not only does he have a history of disobedience but also a history of unstable mental health.
Frankly, you can't break the law even with just cause, kill yourself for being prosecuted, and blame the government for prosecuting you.
Although imperfect, we have a pretty good justice system that is based on an adversary model whereby the prosecutors will try their best to prove you are guilty; the defense will do their best to prove you are not; and a jury of peers guided by the judge will decide.
Everyone in the right mind will see that there is no way Aaron would get 35 years. Now, in fact, he was offered 6 months.
I have no idea what is the basis of that statement. I think that if he didn't agree to a plea bargain, if found guilty he could have gotten more than 35 years if the prosecution got their way. In fact, the prosecution just upped their accusation count to 13 a short while before Aaron's suicide.
Jail sentences are not speed limits. The maximums are set high so that a judge determining sentencing has flexibility in extreme cases, not because they expect most sentences to actually be that high. Yes, he could've gotten more than 35 years if they threw the book at him on every count, but he also could've gotten the minimum sentence, which everyone completely ignores. I don't know what the minimum sentences are for the crimes in question off the top of my head, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were very light. If anyone feels like doing the legwork on that, I'd love to have some definite numbers to throw around.
Even if the prosecution could prove he's guilty, the sentence will be decided by a judge. There are cases in similar spirits to this case when someone knowingly commits an illegal act for a just cause. In these cases, even if they could prove guilt, judges typically would hand out a very light sentence.
Under the federal sentencing guideline system there are a series of factors the Judge must take into account when setting the sentence. Given that some of these are wholly objective (i.e. first time offender), it can be said that it would have been impossible for him to have gotten the maximum penalty theoretically allowed.
Well, all of the persons you cite belonged to unprivileged minorities, unlike Aaron, whose state of mind must have been quite different.
This comment however does not negate the fact that he was driven to his suicide by his prosecutors, for them he did belong to an unprivileged minority!
As someone who's been reading Aaron's writings for years, it's clear he was a student of civil disobedience. It seems like the JSTOR act was a deliberate act intended as a statement of civil disobedience, given the little I've read here. My facts may be wrong here.
But if that's the case, going to jail seems like a common component of civil disobedience as a way to demonstrate how unjust a law is. The men I'm certain Aaron admired -- MLK Jr, Gandhi, etc. -- all served time in jail as a mechanism of galvanizing society around the injustice of the laws they were fighting.
I ask this as a legitimate question: Did Aaron not expect to go to jail for an act of civil disobedience?