No. No, no, no, no, no. I will miss Aaron more than I can say -- he was a great guy, an excellent developer, and one hell of an activist -- but a pardon does not do <i>anything</i> valuable. It doesn't bring him back, it doesn't make the world a better place, and most importantly, it doesn't <i>stop this shit from happening in the future</i>. We need to make sure that no one is ever in a position like this again, and make some serious changes. Being exonerated feels great when you're alive, but Aaron won't feel that now; let's follow in his footsteps and make this world a better place.
<i>President Obama has the power to issue a posthumous pardon of Mr. Swartz (even though he was never tried or convicted).</i><p>This kinda says it all. He <i>can't</i> be pardoned, having never been convicted. While there are many good and beneficial things that can be done, this one is impossible.
The Obama Administration is the one needing a pardon -- not Swartz.<p>They shouldn't be placed in the position of having the opportunity to "excuse" his activity.<p>Rather, they should have to explain their own.
This petition seems more appropriate: <a href="https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-states-district-attorney-carmen-ortiz-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck" rel="nofollow">https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-stat...</a>
How about if instead we have 11 January as "Aaron Swartz Freedom to Connect" day, or something like that, dedicated to free speech and free expression. Stuff Aaron would have done himself, even if the federal prosecution had never happened. Combined with a formal apology from President Obama and the AG, and removal of Ortiz and several other prosecutors within the Boston office.
He does not need a pardon. A pardon means that you did the crime, you are guilty -- also, it is usually conditional on your confession and statement of regret.<p>Martin Luther King never asked to be pardoned for his acts of civil disobedience.<p>The truth to be trumpeted is that he is "guilty" -- Aaron violated some very minor rules, and that we should admire him for that.
Obama is not friendly to our point of view. He has been an enemy of free information. He goes after whistle blowers with full force. He has threatened reporters with espionage. He wants Bradley Manning to die in jail.
Zero percent change of happening: <i>you cannot pardon someone who was not adjudicated guilty of a crime (by conviction or by a guilty plea).</i><p>Aaron died before his case was finally adjudicated (i.e, until all appeals were exhausted), so like the Enron guy, in the eyes of the law, he is not and never can be guilty of the crimes he was charged with.<p>Again, for emphasis: you cannot pardon someone without a conviction.
Many people don't realize that programmers are far more sensitive than the average person. We ran away from people, and escaped into the wonderful world of computing because everything synchronizes, there is harmony and greatness in mathematics. And when we deal with the slightest form of human offence, it's as if the other person is our own mind, telling us that we are a burden to society, and it is our time to be killed, as simply as the body tells cells out-of-place to die.<p>Programmers need to disconnect and not let the external environment become part of us. Sometimes I let other people's minds become part of my mind. I think it's a profound glimpse into how programmers can use our motor neurons to actually "be" a compiler in software, and to anticipate how it works.<p>Unconsciously we do the same things with other humans, and there are ways that humans can take over that process and their disapproval of us is like our own mind finding disapproval for a system inside it that must be destroyed. With the proper scenarios, make programmers suicidal, when they can utter the proper dark magic incantation, we do a cost benefit analysis and decide that suicide does remove the defective systems. rm -rf /<p>I think the takeaway here is that some of the best programmers tend to have serious problems separating the directives of self from the directives of others. You have to learn that we are not computers, and the good of the many is not always preferable to the good of the few.