Crime Story
The prosecution and suicide of Aaron Swartz took place in a context of celebrity. Swartz besides being a highly skilled developer was also a political person. “Swartz also focused on sociology, civic awareness and activism. In 2010 he joined the Harvard University Center for Ethics. He cofounded the online group Demand Progress (known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act) and later worked with U.S. and international activist groups Rootstrikers and Avaaz.”
So was the person who prosecuted him, Carmen Ortiz. She was gunning for high office in Massachusetts. The appropriateness of Ortiz’s legal actions is beyond my competence to comment on, but the context of her actions is pretty interesting anyhow. The Boston Globe ran a highly revealing article on Ortiz shortly before Swartz committed suicide, describing her as the protege of high Democratic Party officials. The Globe article began with this bombshell:
In a recent private meeting, the [Mass] House speaker and Senate president were stunned when Governor Deval Patrick, according to a person briefed on the conversation, raised the prospect of US Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz running for governor and spoke favorably of the prosecutor whose investigation of the state Probation Department has rattled the Legislature.
According to the person, Patrick said the federal prosecutor, whose Puerto Rican-born parents raised her in a New York public housing project, has a great story to tell about her successful legal career. He left the impression he was suggesting that the two should meet her.
The phrase “a great story to tell” may be the most fatal political expression of modern times. Ortiz had just assumed her new position as US Attorney for Massachusetts and was already set to aim for higher office. “In 2009, she was nominated to the position by President Barack Obama. Ortiz is both the first woman and the first Hispanic to serve as U.S. attorney for Massachusetts. … Noteworthy prosecutions by her office include those of Tarek Mehanna (ending in conviction) and Aaron Swartz (committed suicide prior to trial).”
While she doubtless had other qualifications, surely one of them was running on a “great story”. While no one can accuse Ortiz of base motives, it’s fair to say that had Swartz not spoiled the narrative by suicide, his scalp would have looked good on her wall next to Mehanna’s. 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.
The role of drama and stagecraft in politics has gone beyond the use of styrofoam pillars. Recently Emma Margolin defended president Obama’s use of children as a setting to announce his gun control measures by asserting that “both sides use children”. By accusing the president of using kids as props, his critics are attacking children since everybody does it.
It’s nothing new to call the current debate over gun control vicious. But somewhere between the mass murder of 20 elementary school students in Newtown, Conn., and President Obama’s decision to include four young kids during Wednesday’s gun control announcement, the political debate over guns has turned particularly nasty, and it has settled on a new target: children.
No longer are opponents of gun control attacking just the politicians. Attacks from the far right focus on children so intensely that it is sometimes hard to tell who is really in their bullseye–gun control advocates or the children themselves.
Girlsfriends, life stories, inspirational anecdotes — these and not a track record are what people rise on today. And if you don’t have a story, invent one. If Te’o had an imaginary girlfriend, Barack Obama had a composite one. Not that anyone can blame him for gilding the lily. In a world of 48 fps 3D video, where fantasy actually looks better than reality ever could, who can settle for humdrum truth. We live in a world of Thor, Iron Man and the Hulk. People with real girlfriends or a US Attorney who didn’t grow up in a housing project while Hispanic and female are out of the running.
Real people are boring. They are also actual. That circumstance in the past outweighed their lack of skintight body tights and superhero boots. But as pointed out in an early post, we live today in a world of “impossible objects”. And that’s where people want to stay.
Swartz and Ortiz were pulled around by the gravitational forces of publicity. He was not just another developer and she was not simply another US attorney looking for dangerous people to jail. In that distortion lay the seeds of a tragedy. They were a Romeo and Juliet of sorts. And such blooms are not alone. They are everywhere you look.
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99
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Found this by Googling. It looks like a good place to donate:
http://www.RememberAaronSw.com/
PLEASE GIVE AS MUCH AS YOU CAN
I’m sure this prosecution was justified and carried out in an appropriate manner because, after all, Ms. Ortiz is a “wise Latina”.
And no one in the tech community need be concerned that an aggrandized Federal Government will ever step on THEIR toes. Why, even now we can hear this soothing message from Washington, “Move along, nothing to see, nobody here but us cool guys & gals…”
Interesting that Wretchard should bring this up today. Another eloquent commenter, unfortunately not as prolific as Wretchard, has lent his voice to this topic.
However, his theory is that Noam Chomsky killed Aaron Swartz: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/01/noam-chomsky-killed-aaron-swartz.html
By accusing the president of using kids as props, his critics are attacking children since everybody does it.
Kids as props is the key phrase. 3,000 kids a day, every day, get poisoned or dismembered and tossed out with the trash so we can play politics with person-hood. When reality arrives, and surely it will, this will be a most foolish generation.
Real people are boring. They are also actual. That circumstance in the past outweighed their lack of skintight body tights and superhero boots. But as pointed out in an early post, we live today in a world of “impossible objects”. And that’s where people want to stay.
We now have a hundred years of movies, sixty years of television, and going on twenty years of Internet, not to mention computer gaming. I really do worry that Joe Average, much less me, really knows where the boundaries of reality lie, or that it’s even a difference between fantasy and reality. In an age where Bernanke is printing trillions (and the sky has not yet fallen), what is reality? I will note that 2000 years of books, much less story-telling, did not seem to cause so many problems – although Plato thought that writing, in particular, was dangerous for just those kinds of reasons.
The real cost is always the Opportunity Cost. Not so Wise Latinas and ersatz Native Americans and Magic Negros occupy space and while they are busy polishing their narrative and arranging their next feast at the public trough real work does not get done. Now some may consider that a good in that mice get ignored while elephants dance but if we are going to have a federal prosecutor or a POTUS or school teachers or any of a thousand other offices then there may be actual tasks to get done. There are criminals in Massachusetts just like there are children spending time in classrooms. We need the jobs, the dull take out the trash or teach the children or keep streets and markets safe jobs, done.
Aaron Swartz was no Rotary Club Republican. He may even have merited prosecution. The trace of schadenfreude at seeing an Activist betrayed by the grinding machine of the Left’s Corruptocracy does not justify however what happened to him. If an office is abused or power is used for private gain then we are all threatened. If resources are misallocated to embellish someone’s resume then we are all robbed.
The progressive nomenclatura will always eat their (progressive) idealistic malcontents. What times, what mores! Tree quarters of century ago, it was customary to offer one’s scalp to the more equal animals, not deny it by a self-snuff. Kids nowadays have no respect!
Please sign my petition to return federal lands to the states!!!
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/return-federal-lands-states/lGGcYkS6
It appeared that no one was calling for the prosecution of Swartz, not even the people who he wronged, MIT, and who also have since agreed to provide the material he “stole” and a great deal more as open source literature.
Nobody wanted to prosecute him – but Oritz.
Well, Al Sharpton rode to fame on the basis of utterly false accusations, so by that standard Oritz is exemplary. At least her actions had some basis in fact, if not in good sense.
“Story inflation” now rivals grade inflation in the credential game. Some time back there were some blond white guys who insisted they were aboriginal in Australia. The same thing happened to Elizabeth Warren and Ward Churchill.
It wasn’t enough to be able to do whatever job they were applying for. It was also necessary for them to assert they were the long-lost descendants of Geronimo or something like that.
Why? Because they needed a story. But just any story won’t do any more. The tales have to get taller and taller. What would it take to run against Ortiz? You’d probably have to be a baby who survived being aborted, crawled out of the dumpster, entered Oxford at age 3 to become the first woman quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys. Even if none of it is true at least you’ve got a chance.
The Swartz case resonates on both sides of the political divide. Conservatives are bound to see it as prosecutorial misconduct. But the Left, I think, is shocked to discover that they too can be the objects of abusive bureaucrats.
Yes, you too can be jailed. As Gerald Ford put it. Any government big enough to give you all you want can take all you have.
…Well RWE, I’m conservative and I wanted him prosecuted. My Dad could have and would have cured Aaron of the idea that he could take other folks’ stuff. He sure cured me.
..But Aaron grew up thinking it his privilege to steal stuff. And when he was caught, he showed them he really could avoid prosecution.
Here is Eugene Volokh ‘s take on Swartz:
http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-aaron-swartz-part-2-prosecutorial-discretion/
This is just another abuse of power – unfortunately one of the lesser ones- by our Boy Emperor Buraq Hussein and his cronies.
If I steal something, then you no longer have it nor are you compensated for choosing to part with it. Exactly what did swartz prevent someone from having it? Digital goods are not scarce. The folks whom you might argue perform a service for which they would be uncompensated did not agree with you. He at most violated the terms of use of a contract. Perhaps a problem for a civil court.
My fake girl friend is hotter than your fake girl friend.
The pisser is that Schwartz set out to liberate information that was already paid for by the public purse. He, in effect, was promoting open systems and incidentally, protesting double taxation. The guv has an interest in extortion and double taxation is the backbone of it.
Should have left it up to Chinese hackers to acquire the information for the PRC. What wise Latina bigot would care for that? EZ pickens lead to million dollar pensions. Defending America? PHhhssstt!
“Everybody must have a story” is the premise behind the social media. Twitterface are vehicles designed for self promotion, especially if you can invent great self promotional stories.
I am not a Lawyer but my layman’s impression is that, whatever Laws he may have broken (and he was no Boy Scout) , Aaron Schwarz was a casualty of the war between personal rights (to be subjected to the Rule of Law) and overweening ambition (of Ortiz, the social engineer). As it usually does these days, ambition trampled individual rights. In particular, the Bully Government tactics known as “Plea Bargaining” were used as an attempt to circumvent the normal legal process and may have literally frightened Schwarz to death.
In English Common Law, I believe that originally a crime was considered to be committed against the victim, not against the state and prosecution was therefore a private affair. Then the state declared that it alone had the right to create courts and the public prosecutor was born. At first these were appointed (and they still are in most countries) but in the U.S. by 1821 the first public prosecutor chosen by election was in Ohio. By 1859 the public prosecutor had become a locally elected official in America.
Elected public prosecutors became a hybrid figure straddling the boundaries between politics and Law. Before the early 1900′s American public prosecutors were not very powerful. In the early 1900′s American public prosecutors made the leap from limited to almost limitless power. In this way, the quaint old idea that Public Prosecutors are supposed to implement the Rule of Law was thrown out the window.
Endless participatory democracy can sometimes be a fertile garden for corruption and for enabling ambition to trample individual rights.
#9 RWE
And
#10 wretchard
I think that it might be helpful to look at it from another perspective. The phrase “prosecutorial misconduct” is used. That implies that what is happening is outside the factual norm. What if it is, in fact, the new normal. This is “prosecutorial conduct” as regularly conducted in the new Democrat/Leftist/Caudillo dispensation.
What under the Constitutional framework would be called “prosecutorial abuse” is in fact the norm under what we have now. Selective enforcement of the law, or refusal to enforce based on connections to the regime, and the use or selective non-use of the web of ever changing and subjective non-judicial regulations that enmesh us to promote the power and profits of those who rule over us and their rent-seekers is key to any totalitarian regime.
David Gregory commits a status felony [no mens rea or criminal intent required for the crime] on nationwide TV, a felony that 205 others were prosecuted for in the District of Columbia with no discretion in 2012; and the DA issues a statement admitting the crime but refusing to prosecute. Leaving aside the [denied] personal relationship between Gregory’s family and the prosecutor; there was no chance at all that he would be prosecuted.
1)he is a media personality whose felony was in the service of the regime.
2)he is employed by a media outlet whose blatant pandering in the service of the regime makes PRAVDA’s output look like the a paragon of truth and virtue.
3)his wife has personal and career connections to the DNC.
Compare that to Schwartz whose supposed victims did not want him prosecuted and what he “stole” is open source. Ortiz will not suffer for this, and indeed has made her bones with the Nomenklatura.
Look at the appointees of the regime, the various felony charges lodged against them, and the lack of prosecution. Criminal conduct is an initiation rite for the Democrats.
Lack of prosecution for real or fictional crimes is based solely on utility to the State or its rent-seekers.
Do not depend on the protection of the law or its rule, because the law and its administration has become infinitely malleable. We are not in the country we grew up in.
Subotai Bahadur
She was no Frank Hogan. How is “The Miserables” doing at the box office? Too many prosecutors are tyrants, they seek to rise by means of scalp count.
Hogan employed the plea bargain to reduce expense and promote justice. He was a heart of Justice and a head of practicality. But after Hogan’s innovative ways, more mean and debased men and women in the offices of counties, cities, states latched onto the technique to wield only to get more convictions upon the innocent and the near-innocent (that is those who did something wrong but not as wrong as whole list of charges could make it). To make use of Hogan’s tactic, to employ it for evil and career advancement in a industry where process has replaced purpose, there were some things that had to be done, and these were done.
What were those things, that turned the tools of a good man into a crushing Jagannath? More many more criminal laws and layers of detail in them, the better to bite you with my dear.
As Ed Meese wrote: Too many criminal laws! http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2010/04/too-many-criminal-laws
Time to scrape them off the hull of the Ship America.
Wretchard says: The phrase “a great story to tell” may be the most fatal political expression of modern times.
Guess what President Narcissus is featuring at his inauguration? “Obama names 8 citizens to highlight his successes”
“President Barack Obama is featuring eight Americans as ‘citizen co-chairs’ of his inauguration, a new role created to highlight his first-term accomplishments with examples of lives that have either been improved by his actions or inspired his presidency.
The honorees announced Thursday include a woman with a brain tumor who no longer is denied health care for a pre-existing condition; an autoworker who got her job back after the General Motors bailout; and a gay pilot-in-training kicked out of the Air Force before the president repealed the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy.
Inauguration officials said the president has met most of the eight individuals during his first term and their inclusion in inaugural events is meant to showcase his administration’s core values through real-life examples that people across the country can relate to. . . . After Obama’s swearing-in ceremony Monday, the eight co-chairs will ride on an inaugural parade float highlighting the inaugural theme of “Our People: Our Future,” then attend the official balls that night.”
http://news.yahoo.com/obama-names-8-citizens-highlight-successes-040100625–politics.html
I wonder whether the group includes a restaurant worker whose hours were cut back to part-time because of Obamacare, or a coal miner put out of work by the EPA.
I saw Zero Dark Thirty and have a few comments
1) Jessica Chastain is CUTE when she gets angry!
2) Obama and his misogynists have to be pissed about this true story of the CRUSADER WARRIOR PRINCESS MAYA.
3) There is a rhetorical question, “What is the risk of doing nothing?” The answer can be derived from the Deepwater Horizon static kill operation. Doing nothing meant watching as the shut in pressure rose one psi per hour for the next 24 hours, for a total pressure rise of 24 psi and having done and learned NADA! And then, according to the plan, they would open the capping stack and start oil spewing from the wellhead into the Gulf of Mexico only days after it had FINALLY been stopped after 87 days of torture.
However, pumping in mud at an initial pressure increase of 20 psi (less than the 24 allowed) could increase the average density of the oil/gas mixture in the well, thereby decreasing the pressure at the wellhead. If it worked as predicted, the pressure would almost immediately begin to drop and it should be possible to reduce the pressure inside the wellhead to be equal to that of the sea water outside, permanently bringing the well into balance and “killing” the well.
DAMN IF IT DIDN’T WORK EXACTLY AS PREDICTED! TAKE THAT STEVEN CHU!!!!!!!!!!
NOBEL PRIZE WINNING PHYSICIST, KISS MY ASS!
http://www.foxbusiness.com/government/2013/01/16/us-interior-head-salazar-to-leave-post/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY0WxgSXdEE
Those of you who wasted your youth reading socialist tracts will easily recognize that these stories for the Stakhanovite propaganda that they are. In the Soviet Union Pravda was always holding up some citizen as a model for all to emulate — what today we call “role models”. They all had great stories that advanced the narrative Stalin was trying to promote.
This is the same thing as the “story inflation” referred to earlier. Soon it will not be enough to be simply black or homosexual or Muslim. You have to be a black homosexual Muslim to make the grade.
Impossible you say? No more unlikely than Nikita Izotov doing the work of 70 men, which evidently he did. The new ambition is to have a story, like traveling for the Tierra del Fuego to the Artic Circle on a pogo stick. Heck that would get you on Oprah! Or on Ellen, at the very least, unless you are a Republican. Then it gets you 15 minute radio interview in a North Dakota local station.
It is the obsession to put yourself in a story which constitutes the ring through our noses. They’re racing us like rats.
“President Barack Obama is featuring eight Americans as ‘citizen co-chairs’ of his inauguration”
That’s great, phuck three hundred and seven million minus eight. Sound justified to mhee.
“President Barack Obama is featuring eight Americans as ‘citizen co-chairs’ of his inauguration, a new role created to highlight his first-term accomplishments with examples of lives that have either been improved by his actions or inspired his presidency.”
That is just great. Screw three hundred and seven million people minus eight. And about those gun snatching crazed kiddies, do they vote?
You will need to be black* and homosexual and Muslim and it wont hurt to be multiply handicapped, like paraplegic, blind, and left handed. You win the victim full house.
2016 will be about running what ever gimpy fugup either party can promote. My wise Latino has darker skin than your Tio Santo Thomas does. White people have ruined everytng man. Racist bigotry is justice. Big brother will help the little people destroy the real people.
* Its still OK to be all my baby mama’s ladies man.
Annoy Mouse @ 22 – I see your full house and raise you black, lesbian, Muslim, paraplegic, blind, left handed, mentally “challenged”, short, obese, Democrat low information voter who has had her vote stolen and been accused of plagiarism by those damn Republicans.
http://machiasprivateer.blogspot.com/2011/10/plagiarism-masquerading-as-leading-from.html
Dammit! I forgot lesbian. No body likes fat people. Off to the camps with ‘em.
I don’t understand why Schwartz is being made a hero of for stealing other people’s intellectual property.
I have no patience for identity-based justice narratives – Latino, open source hero flavored, or otherwise. The identity and hate crimes regimes expanding throughout our justice system are destroying justice itself — and it’s important to note that such narratives are necessarily zero-sum: the non-narrated lose as the narrated gain. I’m also a strong advocate for free universal access to all data created by the justice system and at all universities and colleges that receive taxpayer subsidies — that basically includes all higher education, for few institutions refuse federally guaranteed student loans and aid, nor humanities, medical, scientific, criminological and legal research funding. We pay for it, and we shouldn’t pay twice.
So, you fight for that access. You don’t hack it. What am I missing in the Schwartz case?
Annoy Mouse @ 24 – No body likes fat people?
ALL KIDS LOVE LOVE SANTA CLAUS, THAT JOLLY OLD ELF!
So kids are NOT PEOPLE?????????????????
What am I missing in the Schwartz case?
What are the secrets of case law? Privy institutions use public information to sell their brand. It is ostensibly public information and there is no evil to make that kind of information available to those who can’t afford Harvard lawyers to protect them from a predatory class of government. That is my understanding though I must admit that I heard most of it from Leo Laporte.
Maybe he is an evil scoff law and libraries should be burned less little people with no connections have access to the information. Information is dangerous, that is why it is too valuable to share with the slave class less they think they have rights./sarc
Creative Commons is making the world of information more robust and accessible to all.
{{{{}}}}
“So kids are NOT PEOPLE?”
Exaaaacccttttllly. DO THEY VOTE? Shall they rule with a dictator doing their bidding?
[[[]]]
The Khmer Rouge believed parents were tainted with capitalism, so they separated children from their parents, indoctrinated them in communism, and taught them torture methods with animals. Children were a “dictatorial instrument of the party”[7] and were given leadership in torture and executions.
Der ahhh and its Swartz. Sorry Aaron. God Speed.
Wretchard wrote:
“It is the obsession to put yourself in a story which constitutes the ring through our noses. They’re racing us like rats. . . unless you are a Republican. Then it gets you 15 minute radio interview in a North Dakota local station.”
There are now millions of Americans and indeed others who have bought into this Twitterface nonsense (love that expression!) for exactly that reason. The huge numbers of humans who are not highly evolved enough to distinguish between well crafted media fiction and reality actually believe that the stuff that they see in public broadcasting and the MSM and mainstream entertainment are real, and are made to feel that their own lives are sickly simulacra of what should be. “Why am I”, they say to themselves, “not famous and in possession of the status and wealth and joy and (most importantly) drama of what I see coming from the magic box?”
So they imagine that they are not physical people existing in a universe with physical laws living what the media tells them is a humdrum existence (but see Charles Murray’s words on the “stuff of life” regarding the flaw there); rather they fancy themselves to be a star character in a movie which is being watched and enjoyed by the rest of the world. Twitterface allows them to complete the fantasy and even have control over it. “I went to the store today and bought PINEAPPLES! “Oh, that’s so cool!’
Pffft.
That anyone needs to believe this in order to feel comfortable inside their own skin is a sad commentary on the state of the nation if there ever was one. Sorry, kids, there is no “narrative”. Postmodernism is a lie. Your teachers and politicians and entertainers decieved you. There is only the universe, and God.
And regarding the Republicans ending up treated badly…more and more lately I see this as being their own fault. The Repubs continue to insist on fighting by Marquis of Queensbury rules when the Dems fight by the Marcuse of Queensbury rules. Guess who’ll win that fight?
Nothing new under the sun except that dear leader is putting it together in new combinations mixing style with decrepid Marxist ideology. Mix it up enough and you can not name it. If you can not name it, you can not criticize it let alone procescute it or vote it out.
It is easy to razzle dazzle sycophants.
27. Annoy Mouse “What am I missing in the Schwartz case?”
There was no Aaron Swartz and no Khmer Rouge. They were both made up to frame enemies- what you might call communism, except done by capitalists. So in other words capitalism.
Please donate in Aaron’s memory, however. Please pay using Paypal or cash (cheque or credit card unacceptable).
Thank you.
“There was no Aaron Swartz and no Khmer Rouge.”
Huh? Sources? Are you a commie Baobo?
“President Barack Obama is featuring eight Americans as ‘citizen co-chairs’ of his inauguration”
The highlight of the inauguration ceremony will no doubt be a guy in a wheelchair who suddenly stands up, turns to Obama, and shouts, “Mein Fuehrer….I CAN WALK!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww7WlSPi9gc
20. wretchard
“No more unlikely than Nikita Izotov doing the work of 70 men, which evidently he did.”
No. It was kind of a scam. In order for him to break the record (let alone “do the work of 70 men”), all the men in his team had to do all the prep work and remove mined coal from under his feed an erect the support beams so his way is unobstructed. It also meant for them 4 unpaid extra hours (2 prep, 2 cleanup). Izotov then likely took 3 days off because he couldn’t move the next morning. Miners hated these “heroes of socialist labor”.
“Those of you who wasted your youth reading socialist tracts”
I read Nazi- and Communist-tracks aplenty when a youth. Know thy enemy. Not wasted, but of somewhat limited applicability these days, when we are all Socialists according to our media. I could never figure out why anyone fell for that garbage even as I had living examples standing before me.
“Heck that would get you on Oprah”
Any forthcoming columns on Oprah’s network spending itself into bankruptcy while Obama spends his country into bankruptcy?