What matters now is to push back on as many fronts as possible. If people feel comfortable pushing back on the abuse of prosecution power in ordinary criminal cases, but not in national security cases (or vice versa), I don’t think they should see a problem in getting support from those who want to take a broader views.

It’s the “Gosh, that includes Milton Friedmann!” that makes the piece work for me. That and the One Million Dollars Point Zero Zero Cents.

What are the Facts ?
An idealistic young man goes to great lengths (see todays N Y Times) to hack into a computer at MIT and download private property – the JSTOR data base (in shorthand – the lawyers may describe the property differently)
The young man had, at least in the past, clearly expressed intentions to use the stolen database in a manner e contrary to the desires of the property owner, and injurious to the owner’s financial interest.

It is very difficult to value the JSTOR database, but inasmuch as it has 4,000,000 plus articles (or the rights to those articles, or the right to download them as pdfs) including many seminal papers by titans like Milton Friedmann, and inasmuch as many people pay $10 or more for one article, a market value of $1,000,000.00 seems like a fair minimum (not to mention the hefty site license collected from universitys)
Given all this, what is an appropriate sentence ?
We all have views here, but does 6 months, probably in one of those country club min security federal prisons, really seem so out of line ?
This is why I don’t understand peoples reactions: you are as smart as AS, you steal close to a million dollars, you should know that in prev cases very stiff penalties have been bruited about, and you should not be surprised if the cops take a dim view of your activities – it is a universal truism that whistle blowers are never rewarded; they wind up on the trash heap of history. Reality is a harsh mistress
In any event, 6 months isn’t harsh
Being kidnapped by Islamist terrorists, and forced to sit blindfolded, hours on end, with a bomb aroundyour neck, that’s harsh
Days of solitary confinement, like Manning, that’s harsh.

Most of the arguments of AS supporters depend on one thing – that 6 months was so harsh it shocks the conscious.
Like the idea that loss of voting rights was a terrible burden.
Get real; are you really going to tell me that a computer genius of AS level couldn’t do 100 times more with his skills then with his single solitary vote ?
The idea that Aaron’s suicide is somehow the fault of the prosecuter – maybe, maybe not; I don’t know how this sort of thing is handled.
But, either Aaron was an adult, able to manage his own affairs, or he wasn’t; that may be harsh, but that is how our society works – for better or worse, you are free to choose; he choose, and *he should have known* that crimminal charges might be brought.
And why on earth is 6months so bad ? Lots of people who do civil disobediance wear their prison terms as a badge of honor – you all know what Thoreau said to Emerson, don’t you ?

There is just this weird sense of faux naivete about this; you do all these criminal acts, how can you be surprised at a criminal charge ? in the real world ?
As for all this crocodile tear stuff about how the prosecutor coerced him by charging him with crimes that carry horrendous penalties – get real; that is completely, totally SOP in the US today.
If you want to take the AS case (and ignore all the poor people without friends) as an example of prosecutorial over reach, fine – but if AS was 1/20th as smart as they say, he shouldn’t have been so surprised.

Harold @ 131: You’re indulging in hyperbolic nonsense. Arguing with you obviously is pointless. I’m done.

Either way, the fish usually stinks from the head. It is rather unlikely that some good president standing above the law can fix a broken legal system by just pardoning away the problem without anybody within the legal system being prosecuted. Indead when presidents can grant pardons, we can observe the opposite behaviour. Last case in point Václav Klaus.