On 2013-03-04 11:09 AM, Patrick Mylund Nielsen wrote:
Say what you will about the semi-morbid posthumous inflation of Aaron Swartz contributions and stature, but don't pretend to know what he thought
I know what Wallace thought and Wallace was evil, insane, and suicidal. Swartz described himself as a die hard fan of Wallace.
, or whether the prosecution's attempts were "feeble."
Everyone knew that after much drama Swartz was going to be let off, after the fashion of Thoreau and the Occupy arrestees. This dance, where the official left charges the official left with crimes against the state, then lets them off with a slap on the wrist, has been carried out every couple of years ever since Thoreau, carried out every few years for a hundred and sixty years. Why would Swartz be treated differently from all the others? And then, right in the middle of the dance, he kills himself.
There was never the slightest danger that Swartz, official genius, was going to do hard time, any more than Thoreau was in any danger of doing hard time.
It is government policy, and a perfectly sound, wise and uncontroversial government policy, that science should move to open publication. Swartz, like Thoreau, was doing the standard official left thing, of heroically demanding that the government do what it wants to do anyway and is about to do regardless. The prospect of going to jail for criminal acts committed in the course of making such demands is remote.
And, to get back on topic, the prospect of going to jail for having encryption script on a web paged accessed from North Korea is remote, because the silliness of such laws is widely recognized, though unmentionable - which was, I think Peter Gutmann's point.
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