Are you just saying that not everyone is the sort of person who commits suicide? Because that’s actually not relevant to whether Swartz’ legal troubles drove him to it. Thousands or even millions of depressed people don’t commit suicide, so by your own argument depression can’t be the cause of suicide.

it doesn’t really make sense for issues of social justice.

JFK – during his speech launching the USA’s effort to put a man on the moon

Every day of Aaron’s teen and adult life was a day of community service.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-states-district-attorney-carmen-ortiz-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck

While justice is perhaps too much to expect, enough signatures would at least require to government to come out and make a public statement.

What I’m saying is that there are steps MIT could have taken if they didn’t want this kind of thing to happen in the first place, and it might be a good idea to take those steps if you, as a network administrator, don’t want to be put in the position of having to decide whether to contact the authorities, prior to it actually happening.

Once you “turn someone in” to the authorities, you don’t have much, if any, control over how they handle the situation.

But I will say that even if I had closed things down further, Mr. Swartz could still have gone in (he had the know how) and I would STILL want to know that that authorities would not use more legal muscle than necessary. 

“Chances are that you can tell the difference between someone downloading copies of documents, vs. someone “cleaning out people’s bank accounts” or “relaying kiddie porn.”"

Actually, these days no. Not before catching him. 

>The post-Reddit era in Aaron’s life was really his coming of age. His stunts were breathtaking. At one point, he singlehandedly liberated 20 percent of US law. PACER, the system that gives Americans access to their own (public domain) case-law, charged a fee for each such access. After activists built RECAP (which allowed its users to put any caselaw they paid for into a free/public repository), Aaron spent a small fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into the public domain.

MIT operates an extraordinarily open network. Very few campus networks offer you a routable public IP address via unauthenticated DHCP and then lack even basic controls to prevent abuse. Very few captured portals on wired networks allow registration by any visitor, nor can they be easily bypassed by just assigning yourself an IP address. In fact, in my 12 years of professional security work I have never seen a network this open.

More from the article:

In the spirit of the MIT ethos, the Institute runs this open, unmonitored and unrestricted network on purpose. Their head of network security admitted as much in an interview Aaron’s attorneys and I conducted in December. MIT is aware of the controls they could put in place to prevent what they consider abuse, such as downloading too many PDFs from one website or utilizing too much bandwidth, but they choose not to.

Yet even more from the article:

I cannot speak as to the criminal implications of accessing an unlocked closet on an open campus, one which was also used to store personal effects by a homeless man. I would note that trespassing charges were dropped against Aaron and were not part of the Federal case.

I’ve never been a network administrator, but it seems obvious that MIT (and you) could prevent people from what you consider unauthorized access to your network by implementing policies and controls against said unauthorized access in the first place. And by keeping your utility closets locked.

In other words, instead of wringing your hands over the possibility of ruining someone’s life, why don’t you do the equivalent of locking the barn door before the horse is gone.

[Edit] Not to mention, you could also stop to analyse what your “intruder” was doing on your network. Chances are that you can tell the difference between someone downloading copies of documents, vs. someone “cleaning out people’s bank accounts” or “relaying kiddie porn.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some ‘we’ll show this little fucker’ attitude coming from the DOJ, you yourself claim he pushed back and mention “blind arrogance… telling the investigators to fuck off.” which I have not read anywhere, but if that’s the case, the egos and arrogance I’ve seen from some higher ups in the ‘justice’ system tells me they wouldn’t take kindly to that.

Things start to make a lot more sense once you realize just how senseless this all is. Looking for logic just delays that realization.

And if you think that a suicide by a man in his twenties suffering from depression and being unjustly persecuted by a powerful government agency with a history of unjustly persecuting people, “isn’t a tragedy,” well, talk about repugnant.

“You’re essentially arguing that one white guy with money should really get as much leniency as other white guys with money, which I find a pretty repugnant argument.” What the hell are you smoking? In no way did I say anything remotely like that, please explain how you reached that absurd conclusion.