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.
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.
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.
For bulk downloading science journals he had access to.
for breaking and entering*
and DoS
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.
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:
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.
still… 35 years? obviously there is more missing information.
Most of these guys they just offer jobs to. This was needless. No wonder China is kicking our ass on the cyber front
The whole criminals getting job offers has never been true and will never be true. For many of such jobs you aren’t qualified if you have a criminal record, even small offenses disqualify you.
I mean thousands of war criminals were offered jobs after ww2 so I doubt they would care about a little red tape just hire them into the black no one needs to know
Judicially murdered by Carmen Ortiz.
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
Please don’t spread misinformation.
Edit: Why is anyone downvoting this? The text is inaccurate and should not be posted.
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
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.
After googling it it seems he was charged and those were the estimate of years if convicted so
So?
Looks likely he would have been convicted, especially considering the whole suicide thing??
Basically the same thing, calling it misinformation implies its creating a perception of the incident that is unwarranted, where I would disagree that the distinction has any merit
I am genuinely disappointed that on an ostensibly science-related message board I see comments along the lines “this isn’t actually true, but it kinda-sorta is, therefore, inaccurate claims somehow aren’t misinformation”. If all kinds of counter-factual things were true, then all kinds of things would be true: what is the point of this hand-waving to defend something that is riddled with untruths? Also, with whom did he purportedly share these documents? In 22 words, this person got no fewer than two things wrong and you are carrying water for what reason?
Law is not science, it’s politics. This is a political distinction, not a matter of the laws of reality
Their comment wasn’t a dissertation, i didn’t expect extreme precision, I’m defending the spirit in which I believe that comment was posted, because I agree with it, simple as





