• thetablesareorange@lemmygrad.ml
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    2 years ago

    So he knowingly committed a political crime with zero monetary benefit and when he was caught the secret service got involved and he immediately killed himself? for the digital equivalent of stealing library books?

    • loathsome dongeater@lemmygrad.ml
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      2 years ago

      He didn’t immediately kill himself. He was hounded for many years by authorities to point that he and his family could not afford the legal fees.

    • HiddenLayer5OP
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      2 years ago

      TIL pirating some scientific papers from JSTOR (read: not the CIA or anything) is a political crime.

      Also, he was caught by the MIT police and regular police. Where the hell did you get secret service from?

      • thetablesareorange@lemmygrad.ml
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        2 years ago

        you misunderstood me, I’m saying it sounds like he got killed by James Bond… It says on his wiki page the secret service got involved which is super weird for such a low level crime, I know they get involved in counterfeiting sometimes but wtf?.. and hell yeah its political JSTOR basically middleman’s students and makes huge fees charging students for copies of scientific papers that most of their authors would give out for free, and if you call most of the authors they will actually send you for free, whatever places like JSTOR are trying to charge you for, out of protest of this shitty system. This was hacktivism.

        This would be like if one of those guys who threw soup on the paintings were threatened with 35 years it’s just silly, any freshman law school student will tell you thats bullshit and would never hold up in court, it’s just a tactic to scare people into plea bargaining. So again he was committing a political crime, meaning he wasn’t doing this to get millions of dollars or revenge. It’s highly unlikely any normal person would commit suicide over this tactic. Much less someone who was going out of his way to commit a political crime in protest. He knew he might go to jail for this, that’s the whole point, if you’re so afraid of jail the thought makes you want to kill yourself, you dont do things like hacktivism.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz

        • HiddenLayer5OP
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          2 years ago

          He knew he might go to jail for this, that’s the whole point, if you’re so afraid of jail the thought makes you want to kill yourself, you dont do things like hacktivism.

          Way to victim blame someone who was clearly suffering from a collapsing mental health at the hands of the US empire.

            • HiddenLayer5OP
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              2 years ago

              Were you not implying that because he knew he could go to jail, he’s somehow foolish for killing himself when that possibility surfaced? A la he should have seen it coming and if he couldn’t deal with it it’s his own fault?

              Again, your exact words were:

              if you’re so afraid of jail the thought makes you want to kill yourself, you dont do things like hacktivism.

              Implying that his literal death was his own fault.

              Because that’s victim blaming. It’s not that different logically from “she wore skimpy clothing in a dark alley so it’s her own fault she was assaulted!”

                • HiddenLayer5OP
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                  2 years ago

                  you misunderstood me, I’m saying it sounds like he got killed by James Bond…

                  I literally thought this was sarcasm. Like, genuinely didn’t connect that line to a serious statement of “I think he was assassinated”. Maybe don’t reference a movie franchise when expressing that you think a real person was really killed by a real regime? Even if people realize that’s what you’re saying, IMO it’s still in poor taste.

                  But yes, if your intended context was that you think he was murdered and did not commit suicide, then no it wasn’t victim blaming what you said. My mistake.

                  • thetablesareorange@lemmygrad.ml
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                    2 years ago

                    so you genuinely mistook that for some “don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time” conservative mumbo jumbo about laws being important? you’re not just fucking with me?