<story><title>Petition the Whitehouse to remove Carmen Ortiz from office</title><url>https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-states-district-attorney-carmen-ortiz-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danso</author><text>Some more context about the prosecutor:&lt;p&gt;She was named &quot;Bostonian of the Year&quot; for her successful cases against mob bosses and drug companies:
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mainjustice.com/2012/01/03/massachusetts-u-s-attorney-carmen-ortiz-is-bostonian-of-the-year/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.mainjustice.com/2012/01/03/massachusetts-u-s-atto...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Out of the 94 U.S. DA offices, her office alone collected ~67% of the total criminal and civil fines in 2012, mostly owing to the successful prosecution of drug companies. Her success led to speculation that she would run for higher office:
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mainjustice.com/2013/01/07/mass-u-s-attorney-carmen-ortiz-says-no-to-run-for-higher-office/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.mainjustice.com/2013/01/07/mass-u-s-attorney-carm...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;She is no stranger to being part of a disenfranchised group, as she was the first Hispanic and first woman to hold the position of U.S. attorney in Boston. Her first internship was with the DOJ&apos;s public integrity unit, created after Watergate:
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/12/30/bostonian_of_the_year_carmen_ortiz_2011/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;She&apos;s not of the &quot;evil prosecutor&quot; mold as is commonly thought and her background, particularly her history of fighting white-collar crime and corporations, doesn&apos;t strike me as someone who is intent on screwing the little guy over. That said, the seemingly-excessive charges could stem from a result of misconception and, let&apos;s face it, technological ignorance (hacking sounds bad, period). But in solving the overall problem in the justice system, let&apos;s not attribute to malice what can be attributed to other issues just yet.&lt;p&gt;--
One edit: a link to a piece by Aaron on yelling at the machine, rather than the person:
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/nummi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/nummi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;My intent is not to say that the petition is wrong, but to argue that if people are going to call for action, call it for the right and &lt;i&gt;productive&lt;/i&gt; reasons, rather than simplifying cause and effect to just one main person (even if the buck technically stops with her).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jordanb</author><text>Honestly I don&apos;t care if she spends her nights and weekends caring for orphans and war widows. She&apos;s a politician who treated Aaron Swartz as a pawn in the political game she is playing.&lt;p&gt;No doubt she intended for her campaign for governor to describe her as a &quot;staunch defender of intellectual property rights&quot; who, as prosecutor, put a &quot;dangerous hacker behind bars&quot; for &quot;breaking into MIT and stealing millions of dollars of federally funded research.&quot;&lt;p&gt;The Obama administration has thrown better people than her out the airlock because they became political liabilities. We need to add a new rule to the political rulebook that she&apos;s playing by. Ending her career is necessary to send a lesson to every other prosecutor who sees a guy like Aaron the way a housecat sees a cornered rat.</text></comment>
<story><title>Petition the Whitehouse to remove Carmen Ortiz from office</title><url>https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-states-district-attorney-carmen-ortiz-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danso</author><text>Some more context about the prosecutor:&lt;p&gt;She was named &quot;Bostonian of the Year&quot; for her successful cases against mob bosses and drug companies:
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mainjustice.com/2012/01/03/massachusetts-u-s-attorney-carmen-ortiz-is-bostonian-of-the-year/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.mainjustice.com/2012/01/03/massachusetts-u-s-atto...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Out of the 94 U.S. DA offices, her office alone collected ~67% of the total criminal and civil fines in 2012, mostly owing to the successful prosecution of drug companies. Her success led to speculation that she would run for higher office:
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mainjustice.com/2013/01/07/mass-u-s-attorney-carmen-ortiz-says-no-to-run-for-higher-office/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.mainjustice.com/2013/01/07/mass-u-s-attorney-carm...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;She is no stranger to being part of a disenfranchised group, as she was the first Hispanic and first woman to hold the position of U.S. attorney in Boston. Her first internship was with the DOJ&apos;s public integrity unit, created after Watergate:
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/12/30/bostonian_of_the_year_carmen_ortiz_2011/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;She&apos;s not of the &quot;evil prosecutor&quot; mold as is commonly thought and her background, particularly her history of fighting white-collar crime and corporations, doesn&apos;t strike me as someone who is intent on screwing the little guy over. That said, the seemingly-excessive charges could stem from a result of misconception and, let&apos;s face it, technological ignorance (hacking sounds bad, period). But in solving the overall problem in the justice system, let&apos;s not attribute to malice what can be attributed to other issues just yet.&lt;p&gt;--
One edit: a link to a piece by Aaron on yelling at the machine, rather than the person:
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/nummi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/nummi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;My intent is not to say that the petition is wrong, but to argue that if people are going to call for action, call it for the right and &lt;i&gt;productive&lt;/i&gt; reasons, rather than simplifying cause and effect to just one main person (even if the buck technically stops with her).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>My Grandfather, who was the US Attorney for west Memphis, once explained that prosecuting the law was messy. It was messy because there was rarely a case which hinged on exactly one part of the law or that had circumstances that nicely isolated the principle at stake. He was talking about pornography, and the difficulty of a general consensus that pornography was &quot;bad&quot; and should be outlawed, with the challenge of defining exactly what it was and the actual &quot;bad&quot; part of it.&lt;p&gt;I see a lot of parallels between his struggle to enforce pornography laws with the current struggle to enforce copyright laws. These situations seem to arise when there is a fundamental disconnect between what &quot;the people&quot; think and what &quot;the system&quot; thinks. &quot;The system&quot; is represented by a codified set of strictures that are put in place by a variety of people representing what they assert are the best interests of &quot;the people.&quot; Whereas the people themselves, act in what they consider a rational way given their understanding of or perhaps agreement to, the laws of the land. Finally our system of laws are a combination of written text, and argued cases, and the sum of those is an emergent thing thought of as public policy. When the rational acting people don&apos;t consent to the public policy, there is a rash of disobedience, and whether it is alcohol, porn, or copyright, the process of emerging to a consensus is challenging at best.&lt;p&gt;One possible explanation for the zeal in which this case was pursued may be the lack of confounding factors with respect to copyright infringement, as codified by law. I don&apos;t know of course so this is just speculation. Having a clear, published, decision on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of what Aaron was doing might have been seen as a way to clear up a confusing pile of statutes and other decisions. An unambiguous marker between fair use and infringement, or perhaps a litmus test for intent. We&apos;ll probably never know.</text></comment>