It doesn't matter if Aaron Swartz is ineligible. We should still nominate him. We should nominate him so many times that granting the award to anyone else makes this award an obviously disingenuous publicity stunt.
Unpopular opinion: Aaron Swartz abused the trust which was placed in him by MIT as its guest when engaging in his civil disobedience, and MIT was perfectly justified not to intercede in his case.
A bit like if your friend comes to your house, you tell him, "don't smoke weed outside, the cops around here will arrest you," and your friend says "I support marijuana legalization, so I'll smoke wherever I want." Your friend smokes up on your front steps, you try to get him to stop (it's your house after all), and then the cops show up, rough you up a bit, and arrest him.
There are many more deserving than Aaron Swartz of this award, within and without the MIT community.
That is simply not what happen. He was never warned off MIT campus. The case was never one of trespassing with MIT - otherwise he'd have been slapped on the wrist with a local case.
Rather he was arrested by a federal secret service agent for CFAA violations that were based on extremely tenuous arguments that at the least most legal commentators concede was an egregious case of over-prosecution.
I'd love to hear your list of deserving award winners who are somehow notable dissidents without breaking something as lowly as a trespass law.
I'm not talking about violating trespass laws or any other legal principle---I'm talking about guestright. Aaron Swartz abused MIT's institutional journal subscriptions, which he had access to as a guest of the institution. He was warned to stop by MIT IS&T to an e-mail address he wasn't monitoring. When his IP was blocked, he got a new IP and kept downloading. He knew, or should have known, that his behavior was out of line, and yet he continued.
Do I think he should have been rung up on federal charges? No. But he wasn't a student, or a teacher, or a visiting researcher, or an alum. He had no official affiliation to MIT, and he showed no understanding of or respect for our culture. The flip side of an open culture is respect for and maintenance of the commons, and instead he exploited ours. It was really hard to defend him at the time for abusing the openness of the MIT community.
(And now, in fact, MIT affiliates like Aaron and me no longer have access to MIT's institutional subscriptions, in what I can only assume is partly a response to his actions.)
MIT's history has no shortage of people who were part of the institution and part of the culture, who the administration failed to support when that support was more justified and more needed than it ever was in Aaron's case. I'm sorry for the outcome, and I don't think he deserved it, but I don't think he deserves either some kind of posthumous award, nor does MIT deserve the scorn heaped on it by those who would canonize him.
Look: there were a lot of people to whom he mattered, whom he left behind, and they're good people, a number of them my friends, and I care a lot about them. Their voices and concerns deserve to be heard, whether or not I agree with them.
The people who never knew him, and who don't know MIT or MIT culture, and who want to turn Aaron into some kind of Internet freedom martyr all out of proportion to who he was and what he actually accomplished, those are the folks who I have a beef with.
There are many messages to take from Aaron's death.
I think one of the messages is that mental illness can affect anyone. Even people who seem perfectly normal. Even those who are rich. Even elites.
One reason Aaron took his own life might be that he felt he had no one to turn to. Or maybe he felt he shouldn't turn to anyone because he'd somehow be considered a failure.
Although it's perfectly valid to say that he was a victim of an injustice, I think we should also be conveying an additional message: That if you're dealing with something heavy, it's ok to reach out.
Hand in hand with that, the stigma against mental illness needs to end.
However, what 26 year old computer nerd without a black belt wouldn't give suicide some thought when staring at an unjust sentence in a federal prison of fifty years, AKA five decades, AKA half a century, AKA the majority of their remaining life expectancy, AKA about twice as long as their entire life up to that point and more than twice as long as they can remember?
Who wouldn't at least consider suicide when faced with the realization that even with time off for good behavior, by the time they got out they'd be closer to retirement age than to a reasonable age for restarting a career? That they'd have spent the most productive years of their life rotting away in prison instead of producing?
Weighing your pain avoidance instinct against your self preservation instinct is entirely rational. We don't put all of the blame on mental illnes, even if the person was mentally ill, when someone jumps to their death from a burning building or when a cancer patient opts for euthanasia. It's inappropriate to do so for Aaron Swartz.
It's not at all MIT's fault, blame lies with the prosecutor. In fact, blame also lies with the prosecutor when the defendant didn't end up committing suicide; and by extension, the various societal institutions that one way or another have allowed such overzealous legal harassment to be accepted.
I'd vote for Swartz or Snowden any day. But IMO voting for Swartz would serve mostly to shame MIT. Voting for someone else might make a difference to a live person.
MIT needs to be shamed publicly, regularly and continuously until they publicly apologize for their shameful behavior.
Giving this award to Swartz, and giving the money to his parents, along with a public statement of remorse and a public commitment to behaving more honorably in the future, would be an excellent way for them to do this.
If MIT were a person, sure. But it is a large organization with members holding multiple competing views. If one group is trying to do something good, do not shame them for another groups deeds, use them.
I'm not saying that this prize corrects the injustice done. It's an orthogonal option to do good. My 2c.
Those good people would hopefully want people to hold MIT to a standard when it comes to things like admissions, community involvement, support of students and researchers etc. rather than formal prizes. But maybe (hopefully) this is important for internal politics at MIT and not the best they can do.
It's not my intention to "punish" Media Lab, I like the work they do. But from the article you just posted:
> The mood changed later in the memorial when speakers began criticizing MIT’s involvement in the Swartz case. Swartz’ partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, asked MIT to consider whether it considered itself a “scientist” or “bureaucracy” and expressed skepticism about the Abelson report.
It's clear from the dialogue in here that this was not a sufficient response for the wider community, and that more reform and response was (and still is) expected. The perception is that there was a largely neutral response from a part of MIT that should have been one of the loudest.
I just spent a month in Cambridge, and while I met some great people working on important things, I have to say, there's definitely some ossification over there and it's a real problem. We need some very loud advocates for online and software freedom in the academic world right now, perhaps more than we've ever needed them. And yes, we still need the right to read research produced with public funding.
I agree with many of the people in here that this should have been named the Aaron Swartz Disobedience Award, in his honor. Or keep the name, but say that it being awarded in his memory. It would have sent a powerful message, both to future Aarons and to the MIT upper admins that have steadfastly refused to own up to what they did.
This award is a great idea, but the silence of not even mentioning his name in it when it's the thing on everyone's mind is deafening.
> I just spent a month in Cambridge, and while I met some great people working on important things, I have to say, there's definitely some ossification over there and it's a real problem.
A bit like if your friend comes to your house, you tell him, "don't smoke weed outside, the cops around here will arrest you," and your friend says "I support marijuana legalization, so I'll smoke wherever I want." Your friend smokes up on your front steps, you try to get him to stop (it's your house after all), and then the cops show up, rough you up a bit, and arrest him.
There are many more deserving than Aaron Swartz of this award, within and without the MIT community.