Swartz "was deeply committed to civil disobedience and to the moral imperative of breaking unjust laws."

"On the other hand, he seems to have had his soul crushed by the prospect that he would spend time in jail. This is an unusual combination. Usually the decision to engage in civil disobedience comes along with a willingness to take the punishment that the law imposes. But despite Swartz’s apparent interest in legal questions, he seems to have made his decision with a blind spot to the penalties that would actually follow. It’s a strange situation: Swartz was really interested in the law, and he knew he was violating the law. He knew a lot of lawyers who would have told him that this would likely happen if he went ahead with his plan. But there was some apparent blind spot that led him to act anyway."

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Aggressive prosecution #2: Internet activist driven to suicide.

The Wall Street Journal delves into the prosecution of Aaron Swartz:

Mr. Swartz's lawyer, Elliot Peters, first discussed a possible plea bargain with Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann last fall. In an interview Sunday, he said he was told at the time that Mr. Swartz would need to plead guilty to every count, and the government would insist on prison time....

With the government's position hardening, Mr. Swartz realized that he would have to face a costly, painful and public trial....

He knew what he was doing was criminal, and he was a very intelligent man who chose to do it anyway and conceived of what he was doing as actively virtuous. Wouldn't a public trial serve his purposes in critiquing the laws he opposed and arguing for the liberation of the data files he tried to set free? (I'm picturing Swartz as a bit like those animal rights activists who steal into a mink farm and open all the cages. They believe that they are serving a call of morality higher than the interests embodied in the law they willingly violate.) It's civil disobedience, which — in classic form — demands that you take the law's punishment. That's part of the acted-out argument that the law is immoral.

"It was too hard for him to ask for the help and make that part of his life go public," [his girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman] said. "One of the things he felt most difficult to fathom was asking people for money."

His crime was about making more information freely public, and yet he cringed at publicity about his own plight, even where his plight was something he invited into his life and believed in as an especially good thing to do. Why the shame? Why not expose yourself as a martyr to laws you oppose?

Swartz's girlfriend and family released a statement saying: "Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy.... It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach." Understandably, they want to infuse their loss with meaning. But did the prosecutors go wrong?

The Massachusetts U.S. attorney's office declined to comment Sunday, saying it wanted to respect the family's privacy. But in a news release from July 2011, when the charges in the case were announced, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said, "Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar."...

The government indicated it might only seek seven years at trial, and was willing to bargain that down to six to eight months in exchange for a guilty plea, a person familiar with the matter said. But Mr. Swartz didn't want to do jail time.

"I think Aaron was frightened and bewildered that they'd taken this incredibly hard line against him," said Mr. Peters, his lawyer. "He didn't want to go to jail. He didn't want to be a felon."

But he knowingly and willingly committed numerous felonies, did he not? I'm not hearing the lawyer say that Swartz didn't do what the prosecutors said he did. The argument was that the law ought to be different. If you break the laws as a way to make that argument, how is the prosecutor supposed to respond? Your argument is to the public and to the legislators.

To say he didn't want to be a felon is to express a wish about the past. And it's a wish that wasn't even true. Swartz wanted to be a felon who eludes prosecution. Who gets that wish in a system of law? The intelligent, educated, nice-looking, good guy with lovely friends and family? The person who credibly threatens self-murder? The activist capable of articulating why the crime he committed should not be a crime? 

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"We need more harlequins, fewer ticktockmen."

Said Icepick in last night's thread about Boston banning drinking games in bars. He began:

I recently read "The Scouring of the Shire" chapter from Return of the King. It was disturbing how much the Shire under (ultimately) Saruman's direction sounded like modern America. The country is being run by over-officious jerks, and the American people are putting up with it. Land of the free no more....

And then:

We need more harlequins, fewer ticktockmen.

A link goes to the Harlan Ellison story "Repent Harlequin!' Said The Ticktockman." 

Icepick advises:

Professor, I believe you need some more tags. One for over-officiousness, and perhaps tags for harlequins (see Swartz, for example) and for ticktockmen (anything with Bloomberg).

Ellison begins his story with a quote from Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience":

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purposes as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

Ellison introduces that quote with: "There are always those who ask, what is it all about? For those who need to ask, for those who need points sharply made, who need to know 'where it's at,' this...."

That story was published in 1965, when the phrase "where it's at" was quite the thing. 

ADDED: I just bought "Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the 20th Century," which contains "Repent Harlequin!"

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