I'm not trying to downplay the significance of a felony conviction, but it shouldn't be overplayed either.
Sure - 2% of people survived a fall from the Golden Gate bridge, so that means it's silly to focus on the death aspects of such a fall when reasoning about "if someone does fall".
Similarly people occasionally choke to death on food. So we should stop talking about eating without serious choking warnings all over the place, right?
Swartz wasn't like that. A felony conviction would have prevented him from working at IBM but he wasn't going to do that anyway. For all possible jobs he could have gotten before, a felony conviction would have been a badge of honor or irrelevant.
Swartz happened to work in one of the very few fields where a CFAA felony is not only not a big deal, but might even be considered a badge of honor. So IMHO the argument that a felony would have been some kind of death sentence for aaronsw definitely requires evidence.
We're in maybe the one field where it really, truly doesn't matter what your background is--if you make the test suite happy, if you delight the customers, then fuck man, join the team!
I think it's time to start setting precedent in our companies that we welcome folks with colorful backgrounds as long as they can ship good code or move product.
I worked with a business bro who had a multi-million dollar fine levied by the .gov; he was one of the kindest and sharpest business folks I've had the pleasure of being with, and if I ever have the revenue to justify it I'll try to hire him from my old company.
It's time to stop assuming that felons in the US are not worth working with or employing.
Why, I bet it's possible that one could even go on to great success in the tech field, even with (or especially with) a CFAA felony.
That's kind of besides the point, because a felony conviction would have been overkill here. But it still would have been much better than the alternative we ended up getting. Let's face it, many hackers have faced felony charges before without killing themselves, and few of them had as much potentially going for them after the trial as Aaron would have.
