I hope Carmen Ortiz gets adequate coverage in the movie to expose what she is and has done. I know its a bigger problem and all that but she shouldn't be let off the hook that easily. And I don't care if that sounds vengeful/mean/trolling - he was basically driven to suicide because of her cornering and bulling him using overzealous prosecutorial overreach.
I'm not familiar enough with typical prosecutorial practice in the US legal system. However, when a prosecutor's overreaching actions in a case, which clearly was not for a heinous crime, results in the death of a bright young man who was fighting for freedom of information, I think it warrants that all parties are put under the spotlight and their actions adequately examined. If corrective steps are to be taken to avoid such tragedies, people have a right to know what wrongs were done before they can voice their opinions via their lawmakers/voting etc.
I backed this movie & I am very excited about this movie! The trailer looks amazing as well.
Also- I would strongly encourage people to also look at Aaron's writing on making Wikipedia better (which has profound consequences for the internet)
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
====
So did the Gang of 500 actually write Wikipedia? Wales decided to run a simple study to find out: he counted who made the most edits to the site. “I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it’s actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.” The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from “people who [are] contributing … a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix … or something like that.”
====
Curious and skeptical, I decided to investigate.
====
I purchased some time on a computer cluster and downloaded a copy of the Wikipedia archives. I wrote a little program to go through each edit and count how much of it remained in the latest version.† Instead of counting edits, as Wales did, I counted the number of letters a user actually contributed to the present article.
If you just count edits, it appears the biggest contributors to the Alan Alda article (7 of the top 10) are registered users who (all but 2) have made thousands of edits to the site. Indeed, #4 has made over 7,000 edits while #7 has over 25,000. In other words, if you use Wales’s methods, you get Wales’s results: most of the content seems to be written by heavy editors.
But when you count letters, the picture dramatically changes: few of the contributors (2 out of the top 10) are even registered and most (6 out of the top 10) have made less than 25 edits to the entire site. In fact, #9 has made exactly one edit — this one! With the more reasonable metric — indeed, the one Wales himself said he planned to use in the next revision of his study — the result completely reverses.
I don’t have the resources to run this calculation across all of Wikipedia (there are over 60 million edits!), but I ran it on several more randomly-selected articles and the results were much the same. For example, the largest portion of the Anaconda article was written by a user who only made 2 edits to it (and only 100 on the entire site). By contrast, the largest number of edits were made by a user who appears to have contributed no text to the final article (the edits were all deleting things and moving things around).
Coincidentally, today I was going to edit a wikipedia article to correct a factual error in it but there was a note as a comment which discouraged against precisely that. Looking at the talk page I saw a bunch of wikipedia wankery on the subject (basically amounting to: this is the way we do things at wikipedia, thems the rules!) with issues of "no original research" and so forth, completely ignoring the fundamental importance of correctness. In the end I left the page alone, it's not worth the hassle. And that's one of the major problems with wikipedia today. Back when wikipedia was relatively unimportant and the main goal was simply duplicating data from elsewhere a lot of the foundational decisions for the site were valid, today those decisions are increasingly dangerous.
Worse, as the example of Aaron's research shows the folks who run Wikipedia are largely ignorant of these issues and don't think any change is necessary.
I had a similar experience on Wikipedia some years ago. I did some research for a couple of articles, but unfortunately it all got deleted, at which point I thought that further engagement wasn't worth the effort.
Probably didn't have enough positive stuff to say about him, so they opted not to say anything at all.
He lost interest in Reddit at some point and just got really flaky... not turning up for work and shit like that. Think he was going through depression at the time and there was a bit of drama around all that.
EDIT: It's a real shame he and Alexis Ohanian didn't get along better... it seems that thay could have made a great team, with him being the soldier and Ohanian the diplomat in a fight against govts/corporations (SOPA, TPP, etc) impinging on our freedoms online.
The tone in that comment thread is just poisonous. I'm not sure that reddit has really gotten worse with age. If I remember correctly, there was a period of 1-2 years when there were so many mean comments on AskReddit that I almost gave up the site.
I dunno dude. I can't seem to play anything on slate. ghostery blocks it. So I disable ghostery and the video element loads. I click play and the video does not play.
YouTube works fine with ghostery.
I want to watch shit online without people watching me. I don't think that's unreasonable. Lots of sites try to make it really fucking hard, though.
If sites embedding video would simply post links to the YouTube content, that would help markedly.
I had the same problem FWIW: absolutely nothing on Slate's page evidenced that there was video let alone where it was hosted. Thanks HN for pointing out the sources.
He wrote some really interesting articles too, aside from his activism. For all of you Dark Knight fans check the most recent one out:
(http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/)
Here's my question. I don't know if the documentary follows this vein or answers it, but I'd like to know. Does Carmen Ortiz (or her bosses) feel sincere remorse? Or does she feel like she's a victim of who-knows-what?
Like Richard Fernandez [1], I can say the appropriateness of her behavior is beyond my competence to comment on, but the context of her actions is pretty interesting.
Carmen was being groomed for a potential run for Governor. Before her witch hunt blew up in her face, she was getting glowing media exposure [2], describing her as the protege of high Democratic Party officials, helping cement her story in the minds of voters.
Sadly, in American politics it's all about the story you can tell. Oh, your parents were born in Puerto Rico, and you grew up in poor areas of NYC? Well, dear, with your rags-to-riches story and our headlines, we'll sell plenty of birdcage liner, we'll sell your story to the masses, and good luck on your election.
The story is what matters ... and the story of a US Attorney who grew up in a housing project while Hispanic and female makes a formidable political opponent. The "narrative" plays such an important part in public life these days that people can hardly go anywhere without it. From Lance Armstrong to Manti Te'o everybody seems to need an angle.
It seems to me like Carmen just needed a good scalp to hang on her wall, and if that meant charging Aaron to the moon and back (hoping for a plea deal to a tiny fraction of the charges) well you know what they say about eggs and omelets.
But ... Aaron was a human being. You can only push someone so far, before they behave in a way you don't expect. And how the mighty Carmen fell [3]:
Just days ago, speculation was rampant. Gov. Carmen Ortiz? U.S. Sen. Carmen Ortiz? Well, that’s all over now. U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz is done. Finished. Forever linked to bringing the full and frightening weight of the federal government down upon a 26-year-old computer genius — and a suicide risk.
So like I said, how does she feel? Another article in the Boston herald [4] mentioned she was terribly upset at Aaron's death ... but if you read carefully, the article says she was terribly upset at being blamed for Aaron's death. Now that's something different.
I know where I stand. I suspect for legal reasons the film doesn't even touch this question, which is maybe even reasonable, I guess ... give her the benefit of the doubt ... but at the same time it's rather sad, since she certainly didn't give that to Aaron.
hope the movie is not as one sided as the long version trailer.
aaron knew about the current laws.
aaron decided to break the law, absolutely no grey area there. trespassed, hooked his machine physically up where it did not belong.
aaron tried to be a hero, just like ghandi or mandela.
when he faced similar consequences like those - his weakened state of mind kicked in and he ended his life.
a little bit like a little kid touching a hot plate and then being surprised about the massive consequences and overwhelming pain. where were all his friends and peers during those actions? did nobody notice he was playing with fire? nobody told him to back off?
Aaron went into a place with public access internet (MIT) and had a python script download public documents that anyone on MIT's network had access (and the legal right) to download.
While an argument could be made that JSTOR didn't want people downloading so many so quickly they could have solved that other ways - nothing here was breaking the law. It was technically legal.
An argument could be made that Aaron planned to publicly release them to everyone on the internet for free (I didn't get to meet him personally, but from what I know about him I think this is likely). That was never part of the crimes he was charged for and frankly I'm not sure if it was even alleged. JSTOR understood this, dropped charges and backed out.
He was then charged with 13 felonies:
Wire Fraud - 2 counts
Computer Fraud - 5 counts
Unlawfully Obtaining Information from a Protected Computer - 5 counts
Recklessly Damaging a Protected Computer - 1 count
Aaron was someone who probably would have been acquitted ($1.5 million dollars in legal costs later), who's actions weren't illegal that was bullied with multiple decades in prison and driven to suicide because he was trying to do the right thing.
When asked about the government's actions in pursuing him, Carmen Ortiz defended her (and the government's) actions as "appropriate".
Is that Justice?
Copyright law was originally intended as an incentive for people to create, a deal with the government for a limited time monopoly in order to generate content for the public's benefit. The original spirit of the law has been lost - along with our republic. [1]
The MIT network isn't "public." They let guests use it with proper registration. You ignore MIT's repeated attempts to lock him out and his working around their countermeasures each time, leading to more and more escalation. If he had just run his scraper exactly once and then stopped the first time he was kicked off, no one would have cared.
He also wasn't facing "multiple decades in prison." This has been debunked so many times it's getting exhausting, but once again I'll point out that his lawyer was not a complete hayseed and understood that, even if Aaron went to trial and was found guilty on every single count, he would face at most a few years in jail, and quite possibly no jail time at all.
What is the distinction between public and allows public guest use without registration? Yes it's MIT's network, but they were basically allowing public access.
Being pressured with multiple years in prison, 13 felonies and a 7 figure defense cost is a difficult problem to face. Even if your lawyer tells you 30 years in prison is not going to happen and worst case you'll be in prison for a year -- Even if he wasn't actually facing it - he was still being pressured with it (that's essentially the purpose of stringing together multiple charges for a plea).
It's not "basically allowing public access." MIT was actively and repeatedly kicking him off their network, and it got to the point where Aaron gave up and resorted to physically trespassing to regain access.
Facing criminal charges is indeed difficult. You don't need to make up stuff to make the problem sound worse than it is.
I know a little about this situation, but not the legal
proceedings. Aaron downloaded JSTOR documents (bulk
scrape) over the wireless network, and was blocked
by the sysadmins (rate ban).
So he spoofed his MAC address, and the cat and mouse game continued. When wireless was throttled (and the ban/spoof game reduced the rate of download to something too slow),
Aaron then accessed a data closet and plugged a cable into a switch, leaving his notebook in the switch room with
a USB drive.
The admins traced the JSTOR downloads to the switch port,
and installed a video camera to see who was accessing
their switch.
Aaron would access the closet to retrieve his USB drive full of downloaded files, saw the camera, and on
return visits he hid his face with a bike helmet. (He could see through the air slats on the helmet.)
These facts, called "atmospherics" by some, really
changed my mind about the case. Prosecutors call
this "intent" to gain unauthorized access to a network
(the cisco switch and data closet, after repeated
attempts to ban access).
I've also heard the prosecution was aggressive, and
read this everywhere, mostly focusing on Ortiz as a
person and her judgement (which worries me, since
I don't know if we'd use the same 'aggressive'
adjective for a male prosecutor). I think 'zealous'
is the word lawyers use generally for being tough.
I don't know enough about computer crime to
judge, but if this guy behaved this way on my network, I
would call the police, frankly. A few events evading
a ban? Ok fine. Account jigger and email or
in-person discussion to get them to stop.
Accessing a data closet to keep it up, and installing a cable to my switch, and installing gear?
And then wearing a mask to get the hard drives? Wow.
In my mind, all I can think of is: "he knows it's wrong".
So I think Aaron should have answered for this.
What degree of prosecution would be non-"aggressive"?
(And isn't the whole thing like an auction where the state
starts high and pleas down?)
I think Aaron really just lost perspective (about
access. Suicide is a whole other thing).
It's very sad, how it ended in Aaron's death, but for me,
I just can't put that blood on Ortiz.
The trespassing charges were dropped, but even if they weren't it's a bit of a stretch to say walking into an open closet and plugging in a laptop is breaking into a wiring cabinet. I can understand the argument for trespassing though.
The charges that actually went forward were erroneous and that's the current law that mattered.
I dunno, middle of the road-ing the issue by focusing on "don't rock the boat" aspects is both boring and more suited to daytime cable news viewers with their brains turned off or never progressed past Kohlberg's 4th stage.
they don't appear teary eyed in the video. i am sorry, but the trailer makes it look like a one-sided propaganda piece. angels & demons. and as i wrote, i hope the trailer does not reflect the whole documentary.
