The Forced Suicide of Aaron Swartz (Reddit Founder and Internet Freedom Advocate) — Was almost Certainly due to Unconscionable Prosecutorial Excess from U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz — an Example of Why Freedom Lovers, on Both Left and Right, so often Despise the Federal Government — and a Comment regarding the Obama Administration’s Responsibility for Letting this all Get Out of Hand

15 January 2013 (Revised 16 January, adding a URL link to a subsequently published essay by Glenn Greenwald)

Theme — Is American Government de-evolving into Tyranny?

Maybe.

The Federal Government’s intentional forcing of Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz to suicide and its torture of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning are only two of many indicators.

Who was Aaron Swartz — and why do we care?

Mr. Swartz is probably known only to Internet lovers.

Given that the Internet is one of the last bastions of freedom on the planet — and it is under unceasing governmental attack, even in the United States — his admirable contributions deserved wider recognition:

Born in 1986 in Chicago, Swartz created his first Web application — an online encyclopedia that operated much like Wikipedia — when he was 13.

At 14, he helped develop the software behind RSS feeds, which distribute content over the Internet.

Mr. Swartz founded Reddit. And he initiated RSS syndication. More recently, he downloaded tax-payer funded research papers.

More recently, Mr. Swartz assisted in leading successful opposition to the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), which was (duplicitously and ostensibly) intended to surveil the Internet for copyright violations. The Act was such an impressive invasion of intellectual freedom that Wikipedia joined in actively motivating American voters to pressure Congress into rejecting it.

What happened to Aaron Swartz?

Mr. Swartz downloaded (often taxpayer funded) research papers that were usually only available for a fee. He compounded the crime by using MIT’s computer system, allegedly (again) without permission.

Legal reporter James Barnes explains:

Mr Swartz was charged two years ago with the unauthorised use of a university network to download millions of articles from the on-line archive of scholarly literature at not-for-profit digital library JSTOR.

The charges came just months after US Attorney Carmen Ortiz – who led the case - vowed to ‘use all available resources’ to investigate and prosecute cyber criminals, reports The National Law Journal.

Marcia Hoffman, a lawyer with San Francisco-based advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, claimed that ‘extremely problematic elements of the law’ allowed prosecutors to hound Mr Swartz.

What is JSTOR?

From John Schwartz, writing in the New York Times:

Founded in 1995, JSTOR, or Journal Storage, is nonprofit, but institutions can pay tens of thousands of dollars for a subscription that bundles scholarly publications online.

JSTOR says it needs the money to collect and to distribute the material and, in some cases, subsidize institutions that cannot afford it.

On Wednesday, JSTOR announced that it would open its archives for 1,200 journals to free reading by the public on a limited basis.

What the Times does not tell you is that contributing scholars are usually not paid for their work-related publications. And these authors’ reasonably inferred intent in participating in the JSTOR journals is to distribute work that, in many cases, taxpayers have arguably already paid for.

In other words, the majority of the people who are profiting from JSTOR’s fee-wall are middlemen — including university establishments that are themselves are often partially funded by taxpayers. Given the cumulative size of the fees involved, these middle people (at least debatably) add little or no value to the scholarly endeavor.

You can see why Aaron Swartz might have seen this as slightly immoral.

That Mr. Swartz was undisciplined, foolish, and unlawful in his means of protest is inarguable. But that is beside the prosecutorial proportionality point.

Citation — to the single best media discussion regarding (a) what Mr. Swartz did and (b) the legal considerations in the legally overwrought case against him

Inside Story Americas, What is Aaron Swartz's legacy?, Al Jazeera (15 January 2013) (embedded video)

This is a panel discussion involving:

Professor Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law School and Harvard’s Center for Ethics

Maria Bustillos, writer and journalist

Tim Lee, adjunct scholar, Cato Institute

The most legally relevant part of the discussion begins at about 15:00 minutes into the 25:00 minute video.

The double twist — which demonstrates the absurdity underlying the U.S. Attorney’s disproportionate behavior

JSTOR refused to press charges. The service apparently recognized that “stealing” arguably “should be free” documents, which Swartz presumably intended to redistribute for no charge, hardly qualified as an immense crime.

This apparently left MIT as the only civilian complainant.

Which apparently was enough for U.S. Prosecutor Carmen Ortiz (and her sidekick Stephen Heymann) to read punishment proportionality out of the ethically inapplicable language of the pre-Internet era Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (1986), as codified in 18 U.S.C. § 1030.

Instead of applying even a smidgeon of common sense, the Honorable Ms. Ortiz decided to go whole hog in squeezing Mr. Swartz’s figurative guts out:

He faced 13 felony charges, including wire fraud, computer fraud and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer.

Swartz pleaded not guilty, and his trial in federal court was scheduled to begin next month. If convicted, he could have faced decades in prison and steep fines.

The Honorable Carmen O was probably motivated by the American Establishment’s unmodulated desire to obliterate Army Private Bradley Manning and make an cyber example of both young men.

Recall that Pfc. Manning illegally released (often nonsensically) classified government documents at approximately the same time that Mr. Swartz was up to his own electronic mischief.

The continuing Bradley Manning episode, which involves intentionally torturing him, is a travesty of both legal process and moral justice.

Aaron Swartz’s family summed the injustice

They wrote:

Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy.

It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death.

The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims.

Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.

The larger national security picture — intellectual capital

An irony pertinent to Aaron Swartz’s government-induced death is the Administration’s continually delivered hot air about improving America’s declining “brain” standing in the world. If that is our goal, persecuting the provenly brilliant Mr. Swartz into prison, death, or financial ruin seems counterproductive.

What the ethical mediocrities in the Obama Administration and Congress forget is that genius and brilliance rattle organizational cages. Genius is, by definition, “abnormal.” Expecting genius to play by “our” rules is statistically idiotic.

If the United States really wants to attract and support brilliant people, it is going to have to demonstrate a patient tolerance for their occasionally annoying shenanigans. That, the Obama Administration, demonstrably does not do.

Apparently the President and his minions, as well as the mostly brain-dead members of Congress, are incapable of seeing beyond the ends of their immediate self-interest and its unbreakable attachment to secular power.

The Obama Administration’s inescapable culpability

Specifically relevant here, the Honorable Carmen Ortiz works for Attorney General Eric Holder.

General Holder is the same pusillanimous Honorable-ness who hasn’t done “squat” about the arguably criminal financial institution excesses that led to robbing the American middle class of a huge amount of wealth. Nor has he, or his often hypocritical leader (the President), done anything to combat the torture policy that the Bush II Administration concretized into formal American policy.

In a similar display of disrespect for Law and elementary societal morality, the Obama Administration often kills innocent “foreigners” with drone attacks — a practice that has been sold to the American people as a legitimate anti-terrorist activity. Drone murder, done outside formal war zones, very arguably:

violates the Rules of War,

ignores historically American ideas about the applicability of Due Process,

transparently squashes even primitive ideas about acceptable morality,

and

further motivates our enemies to attack our Imperial Presence — which realistically means that our troops, rather than their too frequently cowardly and self-interested leaders, suffer the consequences.

Not content with sprinkling its Imperial Sky Tyranny abroad — domestically, the Commander in Chief, with Congress’ eager assistance, has also multiply expanded his predecessor’s willingness to spy on the American people and to step on whistle blowers and freedom activists.

In sum, we have a Government dedicated to:

restricting personal freedoms;

indulging in near-indiscriminate collateral murder abroad;

bone-headedly motivating America’s enemies to heighten their efforts to crush us;

and, simultaneously,

actively misusing American law to torment and punish Libertarian-minded activists, who are determined to resist these Government sponsored oppressions.

If you can come up with a more ethically contemptible Government performance, I would like to hear it.

The inadvertent irony presented by President Obama’s intended Inaugural use of Abraham Lincoln’s Bible

A laughable irony exists in President Obama’s choice of two Bibles for his second inauguration. The first was used to administer Abraham Lincoln’s oath of office at his first inauguration in 1861. The second is Martin Luther King Junior’s “traveling Bible.”

Our Poser President is not even a passable shadow of these men. His work performance, to date, is leadership-challenged, to put it diplomatically. And his apparently ineradicable political spinelessness is contrasted by the extraordinary courage that Lincoln and King displayed throughout their lives.

That President Obama ranks like a moral dwarf — in his self-selected comparison to President Lincoln and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — speaks to the power of the psychological denial that marks his and most people’s lives.

Note

I make no assessment as to President Obama’s personal ethical worth, which is most probably admirable.

But the requirements of leadership have a tendency to reveal the plentiful sand that lies just beneath the surface of our souls.

“Tyranny” is a word that Second Amendment advocate James Yeager used recently

Although it is likely that Gun Libertarians would disavow Mr. Swartz — the Government excesses that drove him to suicide parallel (in perception) those that prompt Second Amendment advocates to speak of quasi-Revolution.

Circles of Hell — and public apathy

A Celestial Prosecutor would need only our Government’s actions in regard to (i) Pfc. Manning, (ii) Aaron Swartz, and (iii) the Administration’s serial drone murder program to hammer us into the remote circles of Dante Alighieri's Hell.

It is a pity that so few among the public care.

So much for the widely boasted influence of Christianity on American sensibilities.

Citation — to Glenn Greenwald’s essay (making similar points)

Glenn Greenwald, Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann: accountability for prosecutorial abuse, The Guardian (16 January 2013)

The moral? — President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann are hardly exemplars of high moral or government virtue

I am persuaded, on the basis of the preponderance of the evidence, that the better human being (in this tragic mess) lies indirectly and unjustifiably dead at their hands.

Nothing, of course, will come from our upset. The Obama Administration has already proven (beyond a reasonable doubt) that it cares comparatively little about human life, less about personal freedoms, and not at all about moral proportion.

One cannot exclusively blame the President or the Congress. We the People put both in office. And We the People continue to support them in their transgressions against ordinary human decency.

No wonder that Aaron Swartz, genius, despaired.

PeteFree.com