"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." ~ H.L. Mencken
Toward Learning from Losing Aaron Swartz
"When I learned that Aaron Swartz had taken his own life, I cried. I am still desperately sad, for him, his family, for the close friends who loved him, and for our community. We lost a rare and special person, one who did so much in his short life to make the world a better place. Any do-gooder, including myself, could be proud were we to accomplish as much. We don't know what else he would have acheived were he to have lived. But I admit that I also cried for myself, because I felt guilty that I didn't do more to help Aaron in his criminal case. This article is about part of that challenge, the challenge to improve computer crime laws, and the criminal justice system more generally. Hopefully in the end, there'll be something that I, and you, can do about it."
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Comments
**terriably long article and with no jurisprudience skills it is difficult to follow. The author rambled a lot, loging in a large number of cases that made it difficult to decipher how it fit into Swartz's case.
Government is all over the place and the main goal is creaping more and more toward raping the liberties America has left if there are any liberties left at all. Swartz's blowing his head off is not atypical of young people caught in a tight spot. I feel there was a lot more to this case than what this extraordinaryly long diologue produced.
Back to reality the government has its sticky fingers into every aspect or our lives that it is pathetic. The only good news except for 118 arms and munitions dealears have banded together to refuse to sell their wares to any LEO organization in a state that prohibits the citizens from owinging the same firearm and 27 states legislated an ANTI NADD act, making it illegal to come into their boarders to kidnap a suspected person indefinitely without benefit of a lawyer or knowledge of charges. The other good piece of news has been the Michigan Senator Carl Levin is not running again for office whch means if Michigan has a good Libertarian contorl begins to happen in Washington.
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tl/dr
didn't finish anyway...
My bottom line: white, college educated, middle-class and > kiddies shouldn't mess around with serious stuff like this. These "outlaw hacker" types, with few exceptions, go into melt-down panic at the first flip of a federal badge case. As with the Earth First!, ALF, et. al. they don't have the testicular fortitude to go the distance. Esp. with the feds. These guys should stick to fundraising bake sales, and letters-to-the-editor type stuff. The Atlantic recently ran a much better profile of Schwartz than this lawyer's piece featured above.