No, you don't understand the rule of law.

A crime requires a victim.

What you think are 'laws' are uniform commercial codes. UCC.

There are so many of them, you are probably breaking a few in every hour of every day.

he broke several federal laws...when people think like what your saying, they end up in prison... laws are for a reason, not to be dismissed because you think they "shouldn't be a law". no wonder he was facing 35 years in prison, they needed a scapegoat to keep the other idiot thinkers like this from doing the same thing. he knew he screwed up up, thats why he killed himself, to hide his stupidity and shame...

I should expect you to react like that. You sound like lypdon.

In Germany it was against the law to protect or hide a Jew in your house too. It was against the law.

There are times when you just have to do what you believe is right and stop being such a sheep bowing down to tyrannical laws.

Our freedom of speech is at stake and someone steps up to protect it and to me THEY ARE A HERO. Not a criminal.

The prosecutor who went after this guy is not going to get away with it. Congress is looking into it even.

Abuse of office is wrong. Censorship of our Internet is wrong. It is an attack on the first amendment. If you can't see that then you are just one of the sheep.

I know right from wrong, and what they were doing to him was wrong.

The movement for freedom of the Internet will surge now because of this event. Malicious prosecution of people who are fighting for our freedom will not be tolerated.

People who don't stand up for their rights and freedoms will loose them. I thank God for people who 'break laws' like that.

Huuuray for him.

An "outlaw" and a "criminal" are not the same thing.

.... he took something that wasn't his... you can claim "robin hood" all you want, but it till doesn't change anything, he broke some laws... and what freedom? just because you and a few other don't wanna pay for some files, you think you have the right to take them? the only freedom your talking about is paying for some files... you really think thats an oppression? get real, the universities use that money for all sorts of things, from keeping the school clean to funding experiments... your just trying to make something from nothing again

You're completely missing something that I don't think Aaron missed at all. I don't think he was worried about his case. I just read the indictment against him and KNOW he was innocent of the primary charge against him. Aaron was a smart cookie, so I'm pretty sure he knew too that the government had no provable case. This only lends credence to the idea that he was suicided because the government couldn't afford to lose such a precedent-setting case.

Here is the indictment. If you know anything about law, I'm sure you'll pick up on where the case falls apart.:

http://web.mit.edu/bitbucket/Swartz,%20Aaron%20Indictment.pdf

I feel I must criticize your "lynchmob" mentality. You have convicted him without trial and labelled him a lawbreaking thief without even knowing the specifics of the case. In my eyes, that is less forgivable and far less noble than anything that Aaron might have done.

And if you are so in favor of punishing people who "break laws" and steal money, then you should be outraged by the Banksters who are the biggest thieves and criminals in the world and who end up just paying a fine that is small compared to the money they stole.

Learn the difference between a crime and UCC regulations.

A crime requires a victim.

The fact that you don't understand what it is all about just shows that you did not read the links and show that you don't understand activism.

I will make it simple.

Some idiotic ignorant politicians who don't understand the concept of freedom of speech were convinced they should support a bill that would allow our government to block any website they didn't like under the excuse of copyright infringement.

Most everything is copyright protected. People quote others, post articles, etc. The rules of fair use are vague.

But this bill was about controlling the Internet, not about copyrights. That was just the excuse they were using.

Anyway, because Aaron was the main person who rallied the public to object to this bill and prevented this bill from passing, he became unpopular with certain people.

The alleged crimes he was charged with did not deserve 35 years in prison and that was trumped up by a prosecutor who targeted him to use him as an example. This is wrong.

RIGHT AND WRONG.

Freedom of speech is the issue. This is the first amendment.

Because Aaron was fighting for freedom of speech and freedom of the Internet, he became a target of unfair prosecution for the files he downloaded and made available to everyone. What he did does not warrant prison. Nobody lost anything and he did not hurt anyone!! There were no victims.

That is the rule of law.

Information should be free. Education could be totally free, and it should be.

I thank God for anonymous and for hackers like him who are on the front lines defending the Internet from idiot politicians and tyranny.

The U.N. has declared that Internet access is a right.

We and everyone in the world has a right to Internet access and a free flow of information.

http://archive.mises.org/17835/from-3-to-4500-what-laws-have-you-broken-today/

From 3 to 4,500: What laws have you broken today?

July 23, 2011 by Douglas French


The U.S. Constitution mentions three federal crimes by citizens: treason, piracy and counterfeiting. Today, there are an estimated 4,500 crimes in federal statutes, write Gary Fields and John R. Emshwiller for the Wall Street Journal.

Clarence Darrow anticipated the prison nation that America is today a hundred years ago in his book Resist Not Evil. All areas of life have become part of the penal code, with an army of people operating as police, legislators, and the court system to enforce these laws through force and violence. But even Darrow wouldn’t have dreamed that the unauthorized use of the Smokey Bear image, or of the slogan “Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute” can land a person in federal prison.

Fields and Emshwiller’s frightening article tells about a father and son chased by the Feds for unknowingly digging on federal ground for arrowheads. “The Andersons are two of the hundreds of thousands of Americans to be charged and convicted in recent decades under federal criminal laws—as opposed to state or local laws—as the federal justice system has dramatically expanded its authority and reach.”

The Amercian Bar Association can’t even tally up the federal offenses exactly but believe the number exceeds 3,000. The ABA’s report said “the amount of individual citizen behavior now potentially subject to federal criminal control has increased in astonishing proportions in the last few decades.”

A Justice spokeswoman told the WSJ, that there was no quantifiable number. “Criminal statutes are sprinkled throughout some 27,000 pages of the federal code,” write Fields and Emshwiller.

These crimes of the state’s making are sending 83,000 people a year to federal prison. While the US population has grown 36% in the past three decades, three times more people are going to prison, with immigration and drug violations making up over 60% of the offenses in 2010. The federal prison population has grown eight fold during this period.

Of course much of the public cheers on the increasing prison state.

Roscoe Howard, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, argues that the system “isn’t broken.” Congress, he says, took its cue over the decades from a public less tolerant of certain behaviors. Current law provides a range of options to protect society, he says. “It would be horrible if they started repealing laws and taking those options away.”

One wonders if Howard believes 77-year-old race-car legend Bobby Unser deserves to have a criminal record “for accidentally driving a snowmobile onto protected federal land, violating the Wilderness Act, while lost in a snowstorm.” Or whether a Pennsylvania woman who violated a 1998 federal chemical-weapons law tied to an international arms-control treaty should spend six years in prison. The woman spread some chemicals that burned her husband’s paramour on the thumb.

The woman has challenged the law’s constitutionality and the Supreme Court is sympathetic.

During oral arguments in the case, Justice Samuel Alito expressed concern about the law’s “breadth” by laying out a hypothetical example. Simply pouring a bottle of vinegar into a bowl to kill someone’s goldfish, Justice Alito said, could be “potentially punishable by life imprisonment.”

And this is today’s justice system? Darrow wrote in 1902,

the state furnishes no machinery for arriving at justice. [It] has no way of arriving at the facts. If the state pretends to administer justice this should be its highest concern. It should not be interested in convicting men or punishing crime, but administering justice between men. It is obvious to the most casual observer that the state furnishes no machinery to accomplish this result.

as times change, so do the laws... i don't think they were really worried about wiretapping in the 1700's, because there were no wires to tap. as criminals find new ways around the existing laws, more laws have to be made to cover it.

some of those Federal Laws are really designed to just create Criminals!
THey are exceedingly stupid!

They could have made a Law about Eavesdropping back in around 1800 or so!

It is time for people to stop thinking that UCC regulations are laws. They are not. They are corporate regulations.

The rule of law has been forgotten and it needs to be remembered. We need to return to the real rule of law.

Screw the UCC regulations, they are not laws.

i will agree with JB on the fact almost 99% of laws are just to make money, no matter what...one of the many reasons lobbying should be banned...

again, you only see what you wanna see... the UN's saying internet is a right is based on countries stopping the internet completely for it's citizens, not stopping a college from charging people for documents that it owns... since when has hacking been legal? no one is stopping anyone from accessing the internet over here, and you can get any information you want, some for a price. when you don't pay for it and take it, is called stealing, which IS AGAINST THE LAW...

You are still confusing two completely separate things.

The college files have nothing to do with the battle against law makers who are trying to control and sensor the Internet.

Second, as far as I am concerned he is innocent until proven guilty on the trumped up charges, and he was being targeted. You have convicted him before he has even gone to trial by claiming that he "broke federal laws." No, he didn't. That has not been proven and it is doubtful that it would have been.

So why would he kill himself? I am not convinced he did. It could have been murder or an accident, but without any details it is difficult to know.[\b]

The fact that you don't understand what it is all about just shows that you did not read the links and show that you don't understand activism.

I will make it simple.

Some idiotic ignorant politicians who don't understand the concept of freedom of speech were convinced they should support a bill that would allow our government to block any website they didn't like under the excuse of copyright infringement.

Most everything is copyright protected. People quote others, post articles, etc. The rules of fair use are vague.

But this bill was about controlling the Internet, not about copyrights. That was just the excuse they were using.

Anyway, because Aaron was the main person who rallied the public to object to this bill and prevented this bill from passing, he became unpopular with certain people.

The alleged crimes he was charged with did not deserve 35 years in prison and that was trumped up by a prosecutor who targeted him to use him as an example. This is wrong.

RIGHT AND WRONG.

Freedom of speech is the issue. This is the first amendment.

Because Aaron was fighting for freedom of speech and freedom of the Internet, he became a target of unfair prosecution for the files he downloaded and made available to everyone. What he did does not warrant prison. Nobody lost anything and he did not hurt anyone!! There were no victims.

That is the rule of law.

Information should be free. Education could be totally free, and it should be.

I thank God for anonymous and for hackers like him who are on the front lines defending the Internet from idiot politicians and tyranny.

The U.N. has declared that Internet access is a right.

We and everyone in the world has a right to Internet access and a free flow of information.