• deweydecibel@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Look, the kid was a hero, but this is also patently false.

    He was not sentenced to 35 years. The trial hadn’t started. 35 years was the maximum possible sentence. He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected.

    We don’t need to spin lies to make his story more tragic than it already is.

    • GluWu@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      35 years max, plea for 1/2 that was rejected. He was going to get the book thrown at him to make an example. 5 years minimum but I wouldn’t doubt 10-20.

      The rapist traitor that headed a insurrection on Jan 6 2021 has never spent a day in jail and is still the frontrunner for president to be legally elected in 2024.

    • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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      4 months ago

      He committed the idealist’s perennial sin: He thought that because the system is bullshit, it’s okay not to play ball with it.

      “Hey this is a bunch of crap. I can be guilty or innocent, and the right move is always to plead guilty even if I didn’t do a damn thing wrong, because if I try to fight the case they’re gonna tack on a ton of new charges and they almost always win and I might go away for most of my life.”

      “Preach.”

      “I’m gonna plead not guilty because I didn’t do anything wrong.”

      “No no no no no that is not the way to reform the system no no no that is a bad mistake”

      Aaron Swartz was a fuckin hero. Read his posthumous book, it is wonderful. But the same idealism and faith that led him to the good things he did in his painfully short time here, also led him not to understand how to engage with the US federal government and keep your skin.

    • xor@infosec.pub
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      4 months ago

      also he worked with wikileaks… i think he was named as a source posthumously…

      he also wrote an open source system of servers that function exactly like wikileaks submission system (actually i think it is, given clues as to how it operates… like the manning chat logs)
      dead drop is now called “open drop” and powers every major newspaper’s leak submission system…

      he was murdered.

      not only the did it make no sense, given the 6 month plea bargain option, but he was an outspoken activist and would’ve at least left a note… in the form of some post online…