Within minutes of learning of the suicide of Aaron Swartz, the internet knew exactly what pushed a brilliant young man to the edge:  The government singled out Swartz, unique among all others because of his hacktivist politics, and a United States Attorney decided to destroy him to further her political career.

His family said so. Even Harvard lawprof Larry Lessig said so.  The myth was born, and grew to the size of a behemoth, in a flash.  Those of us who were so cruel as to suggest that the certainty of the hacktivists in their uniqueness were derided for not appreciating how Swartz was different.

But there remains a side of this tragedy that the geek community misses. Government overreaching, “bullying” as Lessig calls it, didn’t start on the day Aaron Swartz was arrested.  The eulogists, friends, watchers from the Hacktivist side seem to think this was an affliction that happened only to Swartz.

Hardly. Aaron Swartz was just today’s victim of government overreaching and abusive prosecution, largely undistinguishable from the multitudes who came before him. But you don’t know about them, as they weren’t 14-year-old RSS code writers. So you didn’t notice. You didn’t care. They didn’t exist to you, even as they faced 50 year sentences just like Swartz.

A documentary has now been released about Aaron Swartz, The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz.  Ken White at Popehat reviewed it, and in the course of doing so, recognized and expressed the failing of the hacktivists’ assumptions based on their chosen data point with far more clarity than I did.

Swartz wasn’t different because he was so smart; he was different because of what he did with his gifts. He questioned. Most of us think of government and private entities as being distinct, and even adverse to each other. Swartz questioned that premise and pointed out how private companies reap benefits from the public fisc, as in the case of private companies selling access to scholarly articles backed by public money.

What distinguished Aaron Swartz in his life similarly distinguished him in death. Ken provides a litany of where his friends and supporters, in their efforts to explain how this tragedy happened, demonstrated that they could not do with the legal system what Swartz did in other aspects of his world. They could not question premises.

But the movie shows that Swartz and his supporters failed to question premises when he encountered the criminal justice system. Most people make that mistake. When Swartz’s friend Quinn Norton talks about being interrogated by the FBI, she is outraged that they seem indifferent and bored when presented with facts that don’t fit their worldview. Norton accepted the premise that law enforcement is trying to find out what really happened, rather than gathering facts to support their version of events. She seems shocked that the FBI agents lied to her repeatedly as they questioned her; she did not appear to question the premise that the government tells the truth.

Swartz’s backers were enthused when JSTOR announced it was not pressing for charges against him; they did not question the premise that the criminal justice system acts based on what alleged victims need or want.

Swartz’s friends express disbelief that the federal government would spend resources to prosecute him rather than on far more worthy cases; they do not question the premise that the system makes rational decisions based on resource allocation.

Swartz’s allies are shocked that AUSA Stephen Heymann says things like “stealing is stealing” and “all hackers are alike”; they don’t question the premise that the government’s stated motives are its actual motives, or that the system cares whether it is right.

Swartz and his supporters are appalled that a federal prosecutor might have been motivated by animus towards Swartz’s political and social activism; they don’t question the premise that the system is made to protect citizens from the idiosyncrasies and petty malice of its component parts.

Swartz and his supporters are amazed that an outdated computer fraud law threatens harsh penalties for downloading scientific journals; they do not question the premise that the law forbids specified acts democratically selected.

They do not suspect that the law is a flexible tool made to empower prosecutors to charge whomever they want to charge. You don’t need to be particularly smart or creative to figure out a way to charge someone with a federal crime in America.

The criminal justice system is incredibly powerful, yet monumentally banal.  As Amy Bach captured the phrase, it’s just Ordinary Injustice.  Aaron Swartz was special. The criminal justice system is not.  In at least this way, it treats everyone equally, with ordinary indifference and callousness.

With this post, Ken adds the final piece of the puzzle that explains how so many very smart, very deeply concerned, people could reach such a misguided vision, create a myth around Aaron Swartz that confirmed their bias and explained, within their paradigm, why this one, individual, special, unique case went so horribly, disastrously wrong.

While Aaron Swartz questioned premises when it came to many aspects of technology, neither he nor his supporters ever questioned the fundamental premises of the criminal justice system, and thus crafted an explanation for what seems inexplicable to conform to the accepted premises that the system was not inherently broken, that it functioned at a level of ordinary injustice for everyone everyday.

They still believed that the system worked, the government was honest and well-intended, the participants were caring, intelligent people who would never knowingly cause absurd harm to others, unless there was a special malevolence toward a special person.  And Aaron Swartz was special. Evoking their anger, I told them they were wrong. Ken explains why. Maybe they will put their considerable genius to work changing things.