> Overall, there is a feeling that Aaron Swartz’ death has to mark the beginning of a change. This petition could be a ticket and an opportunity for the administration to begin such a change, if nothing else, just by firing an overreaching prosecutor. That would be a symbolic action that would still send a message, albeit a weak one, but it would go a long way for many. In contrast, a nonaction from the administration would be a signal that vigilante justice is the only remaining option, which would be unfortunate on many levels.
This is a silly article. There are actually steps that happen before the firing of an official, most notably an investigation. But this article reads as: "We got 25,000 signatures, if the President doesn't ax her then people will resort to armed revolt"
(I'll skip the debate on whether it's good for a government to be directed by the popularity of an online petition, unless people favor the country renamed to 'The United States of Bieber')
The main point is that action in government is slow. And for good reason. If people want to hold onto the fantasy that when a bunch of people get angry, the government will take drastic action...then fine...but people who really want to see change should be prepared to accept that the original problem (the case against Swartz) may not be satisfactory dealt with, but that attitudes change and reform can eventually happen, as long as the people who care continue to speak up and apply pressure.
In Lawrence Lessig's essay titled "Prosecutor as Bully", he writes the following in his last paragraph:
Somehow, we need to get beyond the "I'm right so I'm right to nuke you" ethics that dominates our time.
If that's the case, threatening "vigilante justice" based on 25,000 signatures would seem to indicate those who want to see action against the prosecutors have failed to learn that lesson and are only interested in continuing the downward spiral.
Let's try to eliminate the equivocating, shall we? One the one hand, we have someone who was being threatened with being imprisoned for half his life, for doing something that couldn't have possibly merited that kind of retribution. On the other hand, we have a person being threatened with being removed from an position of power so that she (hopefully) can't abuse power over others again. She most likely will be able to get another job, and more importantly, won't have to live most of her life behind bars.
Yeah I love how people keep acting like "oh, his life was ruined so now you need to ruin hers?" NO, we need to make her not have the power to ruin more lives. If because of this, her and her millionaire husband manage to rationalize this as their lives being ruined while not caring about the kid's death they are responsible for than that really tells one everything they would need to know about the content of their character.
Maybe it's worth hearing Aaron's own words to understand the folly of attacking this one person:
When you’re upset with someone, all you want to do is change the way they’re acting. But you can’t control what’s inside a person’s head. Yelling at them isn’t going to make them come around, it’s just going to make them more defiant, like the GM workers who keyed the cars they made.
No, you can’t force other people to change. You can, however, change just about everything else. And usually, that’s enough.
-- http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/nummi
You want to fix how she behaves. Instead, change everything else. Change the system she operated in. There's a way to do that without violence, either physical or "cyber".
You won't find me in disagreement with a campaign to change or repeal the CFAA and similar laws. But I think you mistake the point of attempts to remove these prosecutors. It isn't about them as individuals, it's about them as symbols of the broken system they represent. I would not be surprised to learn that the average prosecutor would have done exactly what these ones did, but that's the issue. You can't be a saint while working in a factory whose product is human imprisonment. We need to shut down the factory and turn it back into a justice system, and in the meantime disgorging a high profile offender can serve as a warning to the others -- that seems like something prosecutors should be able to relate to.
Don't you think their goal was to make the next politically-motivated hacktivist think twice before unleashing hell on some university, business or individual?
If you want to go and double down on his mistake, fine. Just don't expect a different response from the government when you do so.
Or, perhaps, instead of promoting "vigilante justice", you could make a rational argument and campaign with your local representatives to get these overly generalized laws and overly punitives sentencing guidelines changed.
He was never in danger of being locked away for half his life even on the revised trumped-up charges. Please read http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5063435 as it's a well-sourced comment, unlike mine.
I would suggest that asking that someone be removed from a position of power that they are to all appearances misusing; is not vigilante justice.
In point of fact, it is the proper procedure to ask that someone who has abused the public trust and shown a lack of judgment be removed from a position that requires trustworthiness and judgment.
Vigilante justice would be hacking into her personal files and threatening her life; asking her boss to fire her is the furthest you can get from that.
Speaking of which; if anyone is thinking about acting directly against Ms. Ortiz or Mr. Heymann, I would discourage that as strongly as possible; it would be counterproductive as well as criminal.
My comment is not in response to the petition itself, but into the threats that are going around with respect to actual vigilante justice as described in the original article and by the original comment.
Just a - friendly - reminder that the field that such ethics operate on isn't always symmetrical. At the other end of every "I'm right so I nuke you" you will find some "I'm right but they nuke me", and if you're looking for a rational explanation why rational people may consider "vigilante justice", you'll probably find it there.
"There are actually steps that happen before the firing of an official, most notably an investigation."
Actually, if she's a political appointee, she can be fired at any time.
My recollection is the head prosecutors of each office are considered political appointees, but the assistant prosecutors are not. This has come up before.
I could be completely wrong in this recollection, however :)
> The main point is that action in government is slow. And for good reason. If people want to hold onto the fantasy that when a bunch of people get angry, the government will take drastic action...then fine...
Sandy Hook was one month ago and the President is having a big news conference tomorrow about the administrations response re: gun violence. Is that "slow"? "drastic action"? something else?
It's 25 dead children who were completely innocent of any crime. It's an incident in a long line of incidents over many decades in which many innocent people were killed.
I think you need to calibrate your moral barometer a bit better.
Here's a likely controversial statement: I am much more worried about the effects of prosecutorial overreach on our society than I am about gun violence.
We are rapidly developing a "criminalized culture" to which the easy and popular response to everything is "put them in jail". Sandy Hook was a horrible tragedy, to be sure, but in my mind, our growing population of prisoners is a much more concerning problem.
Violence as a cause of death has continued to drop in the US. It is no longer in the top 15 ways people die in the US[1]. The worst year for massacres in the US was 1929 and worst occurred in 1927 (45 dead by explosive).
Yet suicide is in the top 10 and mental illness is under funded. Risk factors are what the President should concentrate on, not the incident of the moment. A President coming up to the podium and announcing a serious attempt at dealing with mental illness in this country would fix more problems than something that is declining without the President's attention.
Prohibition era violence may have created more massacres, but they were much smaller. And the people killed were much less likely to be innocent bystanders.
September 11 and Oklahoma are listed in a different category (terrorism). I guess I should have used the matching terminology better and said "mass shooting".
Prohibition era violence had a whole lot of bystanders killed. 1929 had the most in number according to Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has done a lot of research in the area.
He also point out that although there was a rise in mass shootings from 1960 to 1990, a decline started in 2000.
I should also point out that neither incident you cited had guns involved.
The Bath School disaster, which you referred to, may have had a gun involved, but was very much not a mass shooting.
There may have been a decline in mass shootings since 2000, but in the last several years there has been a cluster. Whether this is an anomaly or a trend is too early to tell.
I agree that Prohibition era violence had a whole lot of bystanders killed. But compared to the number of gangsters killed, the proportion was much lower than the massacres that I pointed to. For example in 9/11, hijackers and armed military personnel were under 2.5% of the fatalities.
Yeah, I got caught in and edit to point out that the highest school killing was not a gun incident. The highest mass shooting at a school was Virginia Tech.
My point, is that gun violence is not increasing, instead it is decreasing despite the media attention. If the media and people would look at actual risk factors in our world, we would be a lot better off. Mental illness is such a thing.
GGP commment made an unqualified statement "action in government is slow" adding that the idea of "drastic action" was a "fantasy". I countered by noting that in the present day the government is moving very fast on at least one particular issue. We will know tomorrow whether the action is drastic. Full stop.
How many mass murders has it taken to get to this point? How is that "drastic" or "very fast"? Oh, wait, there's a commission that might "recommend" we re-enact legislation that expired a few years ago? How is that "drastic"? How is that "very fast"?
As the GGP said, what's gonna happen first is an investigation and a review. Why the need to jump to "vigilante justice"?
The end result of "vigilante justice" is going to be more young people squandering their careers and futures, creating further justification for harsh sentencing and prosecution of "hacktivists", and probably just more work and demand for the very people they are trying to unseat.
Blowing this situation out of proportion and encouraging rash behavior is not going to solve the underlying problems.
Mass murders may be flashy, but they are not a large problem. They only feel large. Immediate fast response here is a political tool to push policies that have little to do with stopping school shootings, not a governance tool. (Evidence: almost no proposed policies show any evidence that they could have prevented this shooting, even if they were magically 100% effective; for instance, "more background checks" doesn't prevent someone from stealing a gun obtained by somebody else, as in this case, and so on.)
Prosecutor overreach is a much more widespread problem, though absolute quantification is difficult. It isn't hard to rate it as a much bigger problem than mass murders, because mass murders are a very, very small problem right now. It may not rate next to our other problems we face right now, though.
(If saying mass murders aren't a big problem right now bothers you, let me also make this observation, which is that non-mass murders are also a much bigger problem than mass murders. Just the murders that can be directly traced to our War on Drugs, many of which also hit school-aged children, is a much larger problem than mass murder right now. Murders in Chicago alone is a significantly larger problem than mass murders.)
Regulations mandating safer showers and bathtubs would save more lives, and far more hospital visits, than getting rid of all of the assault weapons in the USA.
As for prosecutorial overreach, I believe that it is part of the reason why the USA has a higher portion of its population in prison than ANY other country in the world. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat... if you don't believe me. And our "justice" system is not race neutral. South Africa under apartheid did not imprison as high a portion of its black population as the US does now. In major cities about 80% of black males have a criminal record. This contributes to their difficulty in getting jobs. Which in turn contributes to the economic circumstances that perpetuate these shocking statistics.
We are living in a post-civilized society, insofar as civilization implies city-rooted social order. We live in the era of continent-scaled nation-states.
This is a silly article. There are actually steps that happen before the firing of an official, most notably an investigation. But this article reads as: "We got 25,000 signatures, if the President doesn't ax her then people will resort to armed revolt"
(I'll skip the debate on whether it's good for a government to be directed by the popularity of an online petition, unless people favor the country renamed to 'The United States of Bieber')
The main point is that action in government is slow. And for good reason. If people want to hold onto the fantasy that when a bunch of people get angry, the government will take drastic action...then fine...but people who really want to see change should be prepared to accept that the original problem (the case against Swartz) may not be satisfactory dealt with, but that attitudes change and reform can eventually happen, as long as the people who care continue to speak up and apply pressure.