[raganwald]

You're asking readers to grant you an awful lot of your assumptions. For example: "committed suicide as a direct result of his mental illness."

Neither you nor I know that. Suicide is often precipitated by stressful incidents. Is the mental illness the direct cause? What if the stress is the direct cause and the mental illness simply prevents the depressed person from handling it, much as AIDS damaging the immune system so that the victim is killed by some other illness? AIDS is the indirect cause.

The next thing that strikes my eye is "glorification of his suicide." Really? What have you read that suggests his suicide was glorious? I haven't read everything, but what I've seen glorifies his attempts to free information and laments his suicide and the years of his life that have been lost forever.

I'll pick once last thing. "Witch hunt" is an inappropriate metaphor. Witch hunts are McCarthy-esque persecutions of people for something that isn't actually wrong or illegal. For being "un-mutual." The arguments I've seen are that people have been doing something very wrong. If you don't think it's wrong, that's your business. But you can hardly argue that this is a persecution of people for doing little more than being different.

What crimes did Aaron commit? My understanding is that he was alleged to have committed crimes, but this has not been proven in court, so we don't know that he committed crimes, and if he did, we do not know that he did so knowingly.

The innuendo carefully stage-managed by those who stand to gain from a conviction seems persuasive, but people have seemed guilty beyond the shadow of a doubt in the past and have in time been discovered to be innocent.

And in this case, I am reminded of Dr. Henry Morgentaler, who knowingly broke Canada's anti-abortion laws of the day but was declared innocent by juries, leading to changes in the laws. Who knows what might have happened?

I don't know what might have happened. Do you?

[tzs]

> What crimes did Aaron commit? My understanding is that he was alleged to have committed crimes, but this has not been proven in court, so we don't know that he committed crimes, and if he did, we do not know that he did so knowingly

IF he did what is alleged, it is pretty hard to see how it could not be knowingly. He had access to JSTOR as part of his work at Harvard. If he didn't know what he was doing was violating the rules, he would have done it at Harvard. He would not have bought a new computer, went to MIT, used a fake name and email address to access the guest network, used MAC address spoofing and a second computer to evade MIT and JSTOR's attempts to stop him, or trespassed and connected his computer directly to the wired network to bypass the guest wireless network.

Here's the indictment: http://web.mit.edu/bitbucket/Swartz,%20Aaron%20Indictment.pd...

[todayiamme]

If I'm correct then the central assertion behind your comment is that in this case obfuscation of identity occurred because Aaron was aware he was performing some malicious activity and sought to distance himself from the "crime" in question. The problem with that is that it requires the following implicit leaps to be made;

Underlying Leap; People only obfuscate their identity whilst doing malicious activity.

Contextual Leap 1; Aaron was aware that what he was doing was a federal crime.

Contextual Leap 2; He hatched a plan to perform that activity in context of knowing that his actions were a criminal activity

Leap 1 is decidedly false as people obfuscate their identity for all sorts of reasons including anonymity. What if Aaron was simply trying to be anonymous?

Leap 2 and leap 3 follow on the basis of what was going on inside his mind, and that is something we are not aware of, so let's not comment.

That said, here's my counter to your assertions, if indeed Aaron was as brilliant as his track record suggests, then do you not think he would have hatched a better way to obfuscate his identity if he knew it would cost him his entire fortune and deprive him of his freedom? Do you not think that he would have come up with an alternate, more anonymous plan such as accessing JSTOR at another library under a fake ID? Or have the common sense to pay some homeless guy $100 to put the laptop in their instead of doing it himself?

Of course this assumes that intelligence in one specific field translates to better planning capabilities in other, that he had the will and the ability to do so. However it can be demonstrated, given his track record, this is not an unreasonable assumption to make and that he was indeed capable of such planning if he assigned importance to it.

[raganwald]

My first instinct was to crack a joke along the following rough lines:

I like this idea of debating what we can infer beyond a reasonable doubt from the evidence. But just to be sure we're both playing the same game, let's agree on a common set of rules. I'll start by proposing that instead of judging who wins according to up- and downvotes from thousands of anonymous Hn readers, we pick twelve reasonable people to read the evidence and listen to our arguments We can appoint an experienced referee to keep us on track and instruct our panel of twelve. Your turns. What other rules should our game have?

Snark aside, I'm uncomfortable arguing someone's guilt in such an unstructured fashion. That's what our courts are for.