[jacquesm]

> Is Kristin Lee a state prosecutor?

Yes. By her own account.

> If she's worked as a prosecutor, we should 10000x more want her here. > I'm trying my best to find someone who's worked as a prosecutor to explain the mentality behind the baffling-in-retrospect decisions made in the Swartz prosecution.

Agreed, but she has already made up her mind. Aaron killed himself because he was mentally ill, and that's that as far as she's concerned.

> It is very obvious how upset you are.

You don't know the half of it.

> But we should want more perspectives, not fewer, especially from people with actual legal training.

This I agree with. But attempting to whitewash this is not very productive.

[tptacek]

Jacques, I hear you, and I'm sorry. But can we ask her questions? There's so much I want to know about how this happened.

[jacquesm]

Go for it, I don't think anybody ever stopped you from doing anything you wanted to do.

My biggest question is this: was there any link at all between the PACER case and the way Aaron was hit over the JSTOR issue?

And if there wasn't what was the reason that Aaron was prosecuted when the aggrieved party was already satisfied that no harm had been done?

I'm pretty sure that with Hal Abelson as the head of the MIT internal investigation that we'll get a very clear picture of what happened at MIT but I'm not so sure that the Justice department will come clean (in fact I'm pretty sure they'll just put the blame squarely on Aaron, just like ms. Lee did here).

And I highly doubt ms. Lee has any of the answers here that would truly give us insight in where this whole thing went off the rails.

[tptacek]

I'd like to know if there was a link between PACER and this, too. Other people seem to suggest that there's some kind of grudge between the MA US Attorney's office and the Cambridge hacker community. I'm not familiar with either, but the PACER case wasn't managed by Heymann or Ortiz.

Other people seem to suggest that the prosecution in this case was driven by gamesmanship and an urge to "make their numbers". But Heymann is a nationally acknowledged authority on the prosecution of electronic crimes and a deputy chief. Is by-the-numbers quota- style prosecution so endemic to the US Attorney's office that it reaches that level?

I agree that the Abelson appointment is a heartening development.