> I merely pointed out that public prosecutions should only proceed if they are in the public interest.
Sure, everyone agrees on the tautology, just like no one in Washington claims to like "Big Government" or wasteful spending.
If one considers it in the public interest to ensure that those with advanced computer skills do not use those skills to essentially write their own laws, then it's not hard to see why prosecutors like Ortiz and Heymann would consider it necessary to bring charges against Swartz.
It's "cybercrime", which they are responsible for prosecuting, the suspect has a manifesto indicating that this won't just be a one-off affair, the suspect has in fact done stuff like this before at a lesser scale, etc. etc.
Now you or I might say that it's all for a good cause and that we can trust Aaron not to do anything actually seriously malicious, but I can also see why a reasonable Federal prosecutor just doing their job would not agree.
That's not to say Ortiz has clean hands on all of this, just that there really is a plausible "public interest" reasoning to charging Swartz with something. If Swartz were allowed to continue unfettered where would it end (when you answer this remember that you're a lawyer, not a computer expert)?
It's easy to say that IP law is stupid in a world of patent trolls and continuously-expanding copyright for corporations but that doesn't mean the right answer is to burn the whole building down.
For instance, how did Swartz verify that he only downloaded publicly-funded articles? How much collateral damage is acceptable in the name of Open Access?
Swartz may have had answers to all these questions but they're questions none-the-less, and questions I would expect that a reasonable U.S. prosecutor might have as well.
I don't think I even hinted at anything that stupid... Swartz did enough to face the possibility of charges even without counting what he might have done later.
I am saying that the possibility of re-offending is one of the things a prosecutor has to consider when judging the public interest, especially in a resource-constrained environment.
What do you think his offence was then? He had the right to access all of the articles he downloaded individually. You seem to be suggesting that he should be prosecuted because he might have distributed them.
> He had the right to access all of the articles he downloaded individually.
Had he downloaded them all individually he might have retained that right. As it stands, MIT and JSTOR both took action to remove his specific permission to do so, so it is incorrect to say that he had permission to download anything from JSTOR after his download permissions were removed.
He should be prosecuted for repeatedly gaining unauthorized access to a computer network that he had no permission to be on. The manifesto simply shows to the prosecutors why he was doing that in the first place, and why he wasn't just some bored MIT student on a pen testing spree.
Sure, everyone agrees on the tautology, just like no one in Washington claims to like "Big Government" or wasteful spending.
If one considers it in the public interest to ensure that those with advanced computer skills do not use those skills to essentially write their own laws, then it's not hard to see why prosecutors like Ortiz and Heymann would consider it necessary to bring charges against Swartz.
It's "cybercrime", which they are responsible for prosecuting, the suspect has a manifesto indicating that this won't just be a one-off affair, the suspect has in fact done stuff like this before at a lesser scale, etc. etc.
Now you or I might say that it's all for a good cause and that we can trust Aaron not to do anything actually seriously malicious, but I can also see why a reasonable Federal prosecutor just doing their job would not agree.
That's not to say Ortiz has clean hands on all of this, just that there really is a plausible "public interest" reasoning to charging Swartz with something. If Swartz were allowed to continue unfettered where would it end (when you answer this remember that you're a lawyer, not a computer expert)?
It's easy to say that IP law is stupid in a world of patent trolls and continuously-expanding copyright for corporations but that doesn't mean the right answer is to burn the whole building down.
For instance, how did Swartz verify that he only downloaded publicly-funded articles? How much collateral damage is acceptable in the name of Open Access?
Swartz may have had answers to all these questions but they're questions none-the-less, and questions I would expect that a reasonable U.S. prosecutor might have as well.