Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2013 10:03 pm Post subject: 11Jan13 Internet activist on trial Aaron Swartz suicided?
Internet activist Aaron Swartz suicided while on trial?
Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz commits suicide in midst of controversial trial
Published: 12 January, 2013, 21:16
http://rt.com/news/aaron-swartz-suicide-reddit-858/
The co-founder of social news website Reddit committed suicide in New York City on Friday. Aaron Swartz was facing a controversial trial over the alleged violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He faced decades in prison and a $1 million fine.
“The tragic and heartbreaking information you received is, regrettably, true,” Swartz’ attorney, Elliot R. Peters, said in an email to The Tech.
The 26-year-old was the co-founder of Reddit and executive director of Demand Progress, a website that focuses on policy changes for civil liberties, civil rights, and government reform in the US.
Swartz was also a renowned programmer. By the age of 13, he created his first web application which was essentially the same idea as Wikipedia, according to his website.
In 2011, Swartz was charged with allegedly stealing more than four million academic journals from JSTOR, an archive of scientific journals and academic papers, via an open connection at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
He faced 13 felony charges, including breaching site terms and intending to share downloaded files through peer-to-peer networks, computer fraud, wire fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer, and criminal forfeiture. He was also accused of evading MIT’s attempts to kick his laptop off the network while downloading millions of documents from JSTOR.
Many say the lawsuit is unfounded because MIT allows guests access to JSTOR – and Swartz, who was undertaking a fellowship at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics at the time of downloading, was a guest.
The case has also been deemed highly controversial because it wasn’t JSTOR – the alleged victim in the case – which referred Swartz to the federal government, according to the company’s vice president of Marketing and Communications, Heidi McGregor. She says JSTOR was content once it reclaimed the works from Swartz.
“We stopped this downloading activity, and the individual responsible, Mr. Swartz, was identified. We secured from Mr. Swartz the content that was taken, and received confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed,” the company said in its statement on the prosecution.
The statement went on to say that the investigation was directed by the United States Attorney’s Office.
And while the US government was threatening Swartz with decades in prison and a hefty fine, some say the move was entirely unfounded.
“This makes no sense. It’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library,” Demand Progress Executive Director David Segar said in a statement, as quoted by Wired magazine.
“It’s even more strange because the alleged victim has settled any claims against Aaron, explained they’ve suffered no loss or damage, and asked the government not to prosecute,” Segal said.
Feeling he had no other choice, Swartz surrendered himself to authorities in July 2011 and was released on bond. In September 2012, he appeared at the hearing in court and pleaded not guilty. His trial was scheduled for February 2013.
Many of the charges stemmed from Swartz allegedly breaching JSTOR’s terms of service agreement.
“JSTOR authorizes users to download a limited number of journal articles at a time,” the latest indictment said. “Before being given access to JSTOR’s digital archive, each user must agree and acknowledge that they cannot download or export content from JSTOR’s computer servers with automated programs such as web robots, spiders, and scrapers.”
The case would have tested the reach of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was created to reduce the cracking of computer systems and federal domains-related offenses. The law, which was passed in 1984, enhances the government’s ability to prosecute hackers who accessed computers to steal information or disrupt computer functionality.
But according to plaintiff attorney Max Kennerly, Swartz may not have violated the law at all.
“It is by no means clear that Swartz has actually violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Recently, the Fourth Circuit joined the Ninth Circuit in alleging that violating the terms of service does not constitute a crime under the CFAA. In contrast, the Fifth, Seventh and Eleventh Circuits have held that it can be a crime. Swartz' case is in the First Circuit. This is the classic sort of Circuit Split that prompts Supreme Court review,” Kennerly said on his blog.
If he would have been convicted, Swartz would have faced up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine. _________________ www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org www.rethink911.org www.patriotsquestion911.com www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org www.mediafor911truth.org www.pilotsfor911truth.org www.mp911truth.org www.ae911truth.org www.rl911truth.org www.stj911.org www.v911t.org www.thisweek.org.uk www.abolishwar.org.uk www.elementary.org.uk www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149 http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
https://37.220.108.147/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/
Last edited by TonyGosling on Wed Dec 18, 2013 8:11 pm; edited 2 times in total
I did not know Aaron Swartz, unless you count having copies of a person’s entire digital life on your forensics server as knowing him. I did once meet his father, an intelligent and dedicated man who was clearly pouring his life into defending his son. My deepest condolences go out to him and the rest of Aaron’s family during what must be the hardest time of their lives.
If the good that men do is oft interred with their bones, so be it, but in the meantime I feel a responsibility to correct some of the erroneous information being posted as comments to otherwise informative discussions at Reddit, Hacker News and Boing Boing. Apparently some people feel the need to self-aggrandize by opining on the guilt of the recently departed, and I wanted to take this chance to speak on behalf of a man who can no longer defend himself. I had hoped to ask Aaron to discuss these issues on the Defcon stage once he was acquitted, but now that he has passed it is important that his memory not be besmirched by the ignorant and uninformed. I have confirmed with Aaron’s attorneys that I am free to discuss these issues now that the criminal case is moot.
I was the expert witness on Aaron’s side of US vs Swartz, engaged by his attorneys last year to help prepare a defense for his April trial. Until Keker Van Nest called iSEC Partners I had very little knowledge of Aaron’s plight, and although we have spoken at or attended many of the same events we had never once met.
Should you doubt my neutrality, let me establish my bona fides. I have led the investigation of dozens of computer crimes, from Latvian hackers blackmailing a stock brokerage to Chinese government-backed attacks against dozens of American enterprises. I have investigated small insider violations of corporate policy to the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and have responded to break-ins at social networks, e-tailers and large banks. While we are no stranger to pro bono work, having served as experts on EFF vs Sony BMG and Sony vs Hotz, our reports have also been used in the prosecution of at least a half dozen attackers. In short, I am no long-haired-hippy-anarchist who believes that anything goes on the Internet. I am much closer to the stereotypical capitalist-white-hat sellout that the antisec people like to rant about (and steal mail spools from) in the weeks before BlackHat.
I know a criminal hack when I see it, and Aaron’s downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail.
The facts:
MIT operates an extraordinarily open network. Very few campus networks offer you a routable public IP address via unauthenticated DHCP and then lack even basic controls to prevent abuse. Very few captured portals on wired networks allow registration by any vistor, nor can they be easily bypassed by just assigning yourself an IP address. In fact, in my 12 years of professional security work I have never seen a network this open.
In the spirit of the MIT ethos, the Institute runs this open, unmonitored and unrestricted network on purpose. Their head of network security admitted as much in an interview Aaron’s attorneys and I conducted in December. MIT is aware of the controls they could put in place to prevent what they consider abuse, such as downloading too many PDFs from one website or utilizing too much bandwidth, but they choose not to.
MIT also chooses not to prompt users of their wireless network with terms of use or a definition of abusive practices.
At the time of Aaron’s actions, the JSTOR website allowed an unlimited number of downloads by anybody on MIT’s 18.x Class-A network. The JSTOR application lacked even the most basic controls to prevent what they might consider abusive behavior, such as CAPTCHAs triggered on multiple downloads, requiring accounts for bulk downloads, or even the ability to pop a box and warn a repeat downloader.
Aaron did not “hack” the JSTOR website for all reasonable definitions of “hack”. Aaron wrote a handful of basic python scripts that first discovered the URLs of journal articles and then used curl to request them. Aaron did not use parameter tampering, break a CAPTCHA, or do anything more complicated than call a basic command line tool that downloads a file in the same manner as right-clicking and choosing “Save As” from your favorite browser.
Aaron did nothing to cover his tracks or hide his activity, as evidenced by his very verbose .bash_history, his uncleared browser history and lack of any encryption of the laptop he used to download these files. Changing one’s MAC address (which the government inaccurately identified as equivalent to a car’s VIN number) or putting a mailinator email address into a captured portal are not crimes. If they were, you could arrest half of the people who have ever used airport wifi.
The government provided no evidence that these downloads caused a negative effect on JSTOR or MIT, except due to silly overreactions such as turning off all of MIT’s JSTOR access due to downloads from a pretty easily identified user agent.
I cannot speak as to the criminal implications of accessing an unlocked closet on an open campus, one which was also used to store personal effects by a homeless man. I would note that trespassing charges were dropped against Aaron and were not part of the Federal case.
In short, Aaron Swartz was not the super hacker breathlessly described in the Government’s indictment and forensic reports, and his actions did not pose a real danger to JSTOR, MIT or the public. He was an intelligent young man who found a loophole that would allow him to download a lot of documents quickly. This loophole was created intentionally by MIT and JSTOR, and was codified contractually in the piles of paperwork turned over during discovery.
If I had taken the stand as planned and had been asked by the prosecutor whether Aaron’s actions were “wrong”, I would probably have replied that what Aaron did would better be described as “inconsiderate”. In the same way it is inconsiderate to write a check at the supermarket while a dozen people queue up behind you or to check out every book at the library needed for a History 101 paper. It is inconsiderate to download lots of files on shared wifi or to spider Wikipedia too quickly, but none of these actions should lead to a young person being hounded for years and haunted by the possibility of a 35 year sentence.
Professor Lessig will always write more eloquently than I can on prosecutorial discretion and responsibility, but I certainly agree that Aaron’s death demands a great deal of soul searching by the US Attorney who decided to massively overcharge this young man and the MIT administrators who decided to involve Federal law enforcement.
I cannot speak as to all of the problems that contributed to Aaron’s death, but I do strongly believe that he did not deserve the treatment he received while he was alive. It is incumbent on all of us to figure out how to create some positive change out of this unnecessary tragedy. I’ll write more on that later. First I need to spend some time hugging my kids.
Aaron Swartz is the founder of Demand Progress, which launched the campaign against the Internet censorship bills (SOPA/PIPA) and now has over a million members. He is also a Contributing Editor to The Baffler and on the Council of Advisors to The Rules.
He is a frequent television commentator and the author of numerous articles on a variety of topics, especially the corrupting influence of big money on institutions including nonprofits, the media, politics, and public opinion. From 2010-11, he researched these topics as a Fellow at the Harvard Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption. He also served on the board of Change Congress, a good government nonprofit.
He has also developed the site theinfo.org. His landmark analysis of Wikipedia, Who Writes Wikipedia?, has been widely cited. Working with Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee at MIT, he helped develop and popularize standards for sharing data on the Web. He also coauthored the RSS 1.0 specification, now widely used for publishing news stories.
His piece with photographer Taryn Simon, Image Atlas (2012), is has been featured in the New Museum. In 2007, he led the development of the nonprofit Open Library, an ambitious project to collect information about every book ever published. He also cofounded the online news site Reddit, where he released as free software the web framework he developed, web.py.
In a series of tweets, WikiLeaks disclosed that deceased Internet activist and Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz may have contributed to the organization and had even been in contact with Julian Assange.
WikiLeaks said it was divulging this information “due to the investigation into the Secret Service involvement with #AaronSwartz.”
Swartz, who committed a suicide on Jan. 11, was arrested two years ago for breaking and entering into an MIT storage closet and accessing an Acer laptop that he programmed to download millions of scholarly articles from the JSTOR database. The Secret Service took charge of the Swartz investigation two days before his arrest and provided the prosecution with information that led to its harsh pursuit of the 26-year-old.
While it is unclear why WikiLeaks decided to disclose Swartz’s involvement with the document archive organization, some have suggested that the alliance may have prompted the US Attorney’s Office and the Secret Service to pursue Swartz more harshly.
WikiLeaks confirmed that Swartz was in contact with its founder, Julian Assange, and indicated that he might have been one of their sources.
“Aaron Swartz assisted WikiLeaks #aaronwartz,” read the first tweet.
“Aaron Swartz was in communication with Julian Assange, including during 2010 and 2011,” the second one said.
“We have strong reasons to believe, but cannot prove, that Aaron Swartz was a WikiLeaks source. #aaronswartz”
The Verge’s Tim Carmody published an article in which he suggested that Swartz may have killed himself while defending WikiLeaks, but the organization called that position “a little far-fetched.”
“The aim of these tweets could be to imply that the US Attorney’s Office and the Secret Service targeted Swartz in order to get at WikiLeaks, and that Swartz died still defending his contacts’ anonymity,” wrote Carmody.
But because WikiLeaks has an anonymous user base, the organization only suspects that Swartz was a source, but does not know for certain. The reasons behind WikiLeaks’ disclosure of a possible source are still unclear. The organization does not usually reveal any of its sources, but when questioned by a CNET reporter, WikiLeaks representative Kristinn Hrafnsson confirmed that the tweets were authentic.
The disclosure of Swartz’s potential involvement might have been the first time that the organization revealed one of its sources.
“We can not provide details about the security of our media organisation or its anonymous drop box for sources because to do so would help those who would like to compromise the security of our organisation and its sources,” the organization states on its website. “What we can say is that we operate a number of servers across multiple international jurisdictions and we we do not keep logs. Hence these logs can not be seized. Anonymization occurs early in the WikiLeaks network, long before information passes to our web servers. Without specialized global internet traffic analysis, multiple parts of our organisation must conspire with each other to strip submitters of their anonymity.”
Posted: Fri Mar 01, 2013 2:09 pm Post subject: Aaron Swartz facing trumped up charges - suicide
Aaron Swartz was fighting against the curtailing of the internet by Government. He was found dead January, 11th, 2013. Wikipedia reports:
Quote:
On the morning of January 11, 2013, Swartz was found dead in his Crown Heights, Brooklyn apartment by his partner.[97][98] A spokeswoman for New York’s Medical Examiner reported that he had hanged himself.[69][97][98][99] No suicide note was found.[100]
Aaron Swartz, internet freedom activist, dies aged 26
Aaron Swartz Swartz developed RSS at an early age
Aaron Swartz, a celebrated internet freedom activist and early developer of the website Reddit, has died at 26.
The activist and programmer took his life in his New York apartment, a relative and the state medical examiner said. His body was found on Friday.
Mr Swartz began computer programming as a child, and at 14 co-authored an early version of the RSS specification.
Leading internet figures and friends paid tribute to Mr Swartz via tweets or blogs.
After leaving Reddit, Mr Swartz became an advocate of internet freedom, and was facing hacking charges at the time of his death.
He was among the founders of the Demand Progress campaign group, which lobbies against internet censorship.
The hacking charges relate to the downloading of millions of academic papers from online archive JSTOR, which prosecutors say he intended to distribute for free.
He denied charges of computer fraud at an initial hearing last year, but his federal trial was due to begin next month.
...
A spokeswoman for New York's medical examiner later confirmed to Associated Press news agency that Mr Swartz had hanged himself.
In a statement later on Saturday, Mr Swartz's family praised his "brilliance" and "profound" commitment to social justice and also expressed bitterness toward the prosecutors pursuing the case against him.
"Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach," the statement said.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee - the British inventor of the world wide web - commemorated Mr Swartz in a Twitter post: "Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep."
Many people suspect foul play. Aaron despite his acknowledge fights with depressions could have easily been "suicided" especially when considering no suicide note was found and that he was a monumental pain-in-the-backside to US Goverment and Big Business. Aaron was part of the group that had blocked... SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, ACTA, and TPP!
Scott Creighton wrote
Quote:
Aaron Swartz did not take his own life. He was murdered in order to save the state the embarrassment of losing their trumped up trial against him. He faced a maximum of 6 months in jail, reduced to 3 for good behavior as is the law, not 35 years as the complicit press will tell you. (50 years mentioned in some papers).
Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman spoke for others, saying "Aaron wanted so badly to change the world. He wanted it more than money. He wanted it more than fame. When things are hard - and he said it is the important things that are hard - you have to lean into the pain."
NEW YORK — After reports of Aaron Swartz’s apparent suicide circulated around the Internet this weekend, investigators found evidence of foul play. A former architect of Reddit, the online forum scandalized earlier this year by child pornography and “creepshots,” Aaron Swartz was widely known for his contributions to anti-copyright activism after stealing millions of files from MIT.
Hackers from Anonymous released a statement on Sunday, “Heavy-handed prosecutors raped the beautiful mind of Aaron Swartz. He later ‘killed himself.’ Are the draconian copyright laws selectively applied to those who threaten the inertia of entrenched power? Certainly. Will they use their sockpuppets and judicial torture system to make YOU kill yourself too? Of course. Will they kill you if you go too far?”
Chronicle Reporters also questioned Julian Assange, sick from months of exile in the Ecuadorean embassy, about the death of Aaron Swartz. “I am not convinced that Aaron Swartz was such a coward he committed suicide due to fear of prison,” said Mr. Assange. “Read his words, and decide for yourself, but I believe Swartz was murdered by a team of copyright assassins who made it all look like a simple suicide. Watch what you say, or you may end up like Aaron Swartz.”
Swartz gave a talk in 2008, mentioning his intention to “ download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks.”
Quote:
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.
“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
Aaron Swartz
July 2008, Eremo, Italy
In the meantime... US Government makes research freely available online...
U.S. Department Of Justice Acknowledges Aaron Swartz Was Prosecuted Over His Political Views http://t.co/JSZyBkt0Qg _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
U.S. Department Of Justice Acknowledges Aaron Swartz Was Prosecuted Over His Political Views http://t.co/JSZyBkt0Qg
This is huffington Post article. It states that Aaron's manifesto demonstrated his "malicious intent". So this puts Aaron in the same category as Bradley Manning and Wikileaks as being a "target" for US Government interest.
A Justice Department representative told congressional staffers during a recent briefing on the computer fraud prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz that Swartz's "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" played a role in the prosecution, sources told The Huffington Post.
Swartz's 2008 manifesto said sharing information was a "moral imperative" and advocated for "civil disobedience" against copyright laws pushed by corporations "blinded by greed" that led to the "privatization of knowledge."
"We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive," Swartz wrote in the manifesto. "We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access."
The "Manifesto," Justice Department representatives told congressional staffers, demonstrated Swartz's malicious intent in downloading documents on a massive scale.
Bad news, Facebook users. U.S. employers may soon be able to require employees to fork over their social media passwords.
A last-minute amendment to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act -- known as CISPA -- banning such a practice was blocked by members of the U.S. House of Representatives, despite the passage of the broad cybersecurity bill overall.
The "Internet Blackout" by Anonymous on Monday failed.
Andrew Auernheimer
...
Now he stands up. Judge Wigenton asks him if he has anything to say. "I didn't come here today to ask for forgiveness," he begins. "The court should be making amends to me for the harm and the violence inflicted on my life. Many governments that have tried to restrict the freedom of the internet have ended up toppled."
...
"...I'd been known as a troll and a hacker and a target since 2001, when I was 15. So, apparently, I was being surveilled when I was a * child."
...
Kim Dotcom, by contrast, has more assets than practically any human alive. For years, this massively wealthy filesharing mogul
Kim Dotcom: 'Prosecuting me is like putting a hand in a river. You can’t stop a river with your bare hands. Water just flows around them.'
...
he had created a file-sharing site – Megaupload – beloved of pirates everywhere. It was a safe house for pirates, a secure site for them to share files too large to be email attachments.
...
In retaliation for Dotcom's arrest, members of hacktivist collective Anonymous took down websites belonging to the US Department of Justice and the FBI.
...
In Sweden, the founders of the Pirate Bay website have each been imprisoned for a year. There are scores of others sharing people's data for different reasons – sometimes ideological, sometimes just for pranks, sometimes a mix of the two. There's Jeremy Hammond, facing life for hacking into Stratfor – a global intelligence company – and releasing millions of their private email exchanges. He was caught because another hacker, Sabu, the co-founder of the Anonymous offshoot LulzSec, had secretly been informing for the FBI since his arrest 10 months earlier. Sabu – whose real name is Hector Xavier Monsegur – was unemployed and caring full-time for his two young nieces from a housing project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. When he was told he could face 124 years in prison, and that his nieces would go into care, he turned informant.
...
In Shetland, another Anonymous/LulzSec hacker, Topiary – real name Jake Davis – was arrested in July 2011. A Daily Mail profile called him an autistic teen who was "so badly bullied [at school] that he left and retreated into a computer fantasy world". A few hours before his arrest, Davis deleted all his tweets except one: "You cannot arrest an idea."
There are civil actions, too. For example, the publisher of the For Dummies books, John Wiley & Sons, is suing BitTorrent users for illegally downloading its book, BitTorrent For Dummies.
...
Troy gives me a history lesson on Anonymous's endearingly ridiculous conception. In January 2008, a secret in-house Scientology promotional video starring Tom Cruise was leaked on to the internet. In it, Cruise announced that Scientologists were "the authorities on the mind" and only they were truly qualified to help car crash victims. The video went viral. Scientology lawyers swiftly sent take-down notices to every site they could, including the bulletin board 4chan.
...
That night, a bunch of 4chan users decided to form Anonymous. They instigated protests outside Scientology buildings and "DDoS actions" against their websites, taking them down: "Imagine sitting at a website and manually pressing refresh a few hundred thousand times," Troy says, explaining DDoS attacks. "People have made tools that do the same thing. You can set the refresh rate at, say, 800,000 times in a minute. Go off, have a cup of coffee, have a cigarette, two hours later the FBI's watching you. And all you did was press a button."
...
Fourteen people are currently facing up to 15 years in prison each for the PayPal DDoS attack, including a 21-year-old woman called Mercedes Haefer, whose Facebook pictures have her wearing bunny ears and a comedy false moustache.
"Good people are going to jail for ridiculous things," Troy says. "People who get their kicks watching a meme of a cat are going away for 24 months, 26 months."
...
This all happens a few weeks before the Boston Marathon bombings – which turns out to be an enormously important moment for Anonymous. On 18 April, the police have the alleged attackers surrounded in Watertown, Massachusetts. Anonymous's Twitter feed – @youranonnews – is at least 20 minutes ahead of the mainstream media with the news of the ambush. With its access to police scanners and eyewitness reports, Anonymous is scooping the networks in terms of timing and accuracy. Great numbers of people are turning to them before they turn to CNN that night. I wonder whether actions such as Andrew's will become redundant as the group grows in credibility and maturity.
A few days after Andrew is sentenced, I ask Paul Fishman, the US attorney for New Jersey, how he ended up with 41 months. "His accepting no responsibility," he replies, "his attempt to tweet from a mobile device between his legs in the courtroom during sentencing, and then pushing away the marshal who was trying to get the device – none of that helped him." Forty-one months was the maximum sentence for a hack such as his, ...
For the US attorney's office all this is, of course, black and white: "It's about stopping him, punishing him, and telling other people, 'You could be next,'" the justice department official tells me.
...
Back in the court in Walnut Street, just after the judge passes sentence, Andrew is led away in shackles. Before he vanishes, he shoots a grin to his friends and calls out: "All hail Discordia!"
Back in White-wash City, MIT declare that they were not responsible - even though they were the supposed "victim" and they did nothing.
Quote:
MIT did not target Aaron Swartz before federal prosecution, review finds
School did not request federal punishment of Swartz for alleged hacking offences but did not intervene in court proceedings
Amanda Holpuch in New York
theguardian.com, Tuesday 30 July 2013 19.47 BST
MIT president L Rafael Reif said: 'I am confident that MIT's decisions were reasonable, appropriate and made in good faith.'
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has released a long-awaited review of its involvement in the prosecution of Aaron Swartz, who was facing charges for hacking into the university's computers when he killed himself in January.
The 182-page report finds that school officials did not request federal prosecution of Swartz, and that MIT was not consulted about the charges or punishment, but it also questions the school's decision not to intervene in court proceedings.
Swartz had been federally indicted on 13 felony charges at the time of his death and was facing up to $1m in fines and 35 years in jail for downloading several million academic articles from the JSTOR database through the MIT computer network. The aggressive prosecution was roundly criticized following his death.
...
According to the report, prior to his death, "the MIT community paid scant attention" to Swartz's prosecution and few people expressed concerns to the administration about the case. However, Swartz's father, a consultant to the MIT lab and former student there, asked MIT to aid efforts to have the charges dropped or to get a plea deal that would not have jail time. Two faculty members advocated a similar appeal.
...
No Easy Way Out: Remembering Aaron Swartz on the One Year Anniversary of his Murder
Posted on January 11, 2014 by willyloman
by Scott Creighton
What exactly was Aaron Swartz’ crime? Was it really that he “liberated” some academic papers from MIT in order to make them available without cost on the internet? Is that why the prosecution hit him with 14 felony charges facing 35 years in prison or was it something else?
Aaron Swartz was found hanged in his Brooklyn apartment a year ago today. Many, including those who profess to honor his memory and his activism, parrot the official talking points about Mr. Swartz saying he took his own life rather than face the possibility of going to prison.
That story is bs and anyone repeating it, ANYONE, is NOT to be believed in any fashion. Lest we forget:
“During plea talks held in the months before his death, federal prosecutors told Aaron Swartz and his attorney that the computer prodigy must spend six months behind bars and plead guilty to 13 federal crimes in order to resolve the criminal case short of a trial.” Boston.com article from 1/14/13
....
“They told me over and over again that the offer had been on the table,” Peters says. “And any future offer would be less attractive.” Daily Beast 1/15/13
Granted, that is the defense attorney’s statements on the matter of the deal offered to Aaron Swartz prior to his “suicide”. Here is what the prosecutor herself said:
“… That is why in the discussions with his counsel about a resolution of the case this office sought an appropriate sentence that matched the alleged conduct – a sentence that we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low security setting. While at the same time, his defense counsel would have been free to recommend a sentence of probation. Ultimately, any sentence imposed would have been up to the judge. At no time did this office ever seek – or ever tell Mr. Swartz’s attorneys that it intended to seek – maximum penalties under the law.” Attorney Carmen Ortiz 1/16/13
Are we to believe this young man who stood up against SOPA and PIPA and won, took his own life rather than spend 6 months max in a minimum security facility (a.k.a. Club Fed)? Is this the level of discourse being offered up by various “alternative” sites across the nation and the globe on this, the anniversary of his murder?
Yes, Aaron Swartz was murdered. But there is a larger lesson here today for us to ponder.
His courage is proven by the fact that he expressly rejected the 6 month offer, choosing instead to go to trial where he would have faced 35 years. That’s courage folks. The story of him taking his own life makes no sense whatsoever.
Why did they kill him?
Aaron Swartz was murdered for two reasons.
First, the prosecution knew that they were going to lose in the trial against Aaron. MIT didn’t have the stomach for the fight and since it was basically their property he “liberated”, Carmen Ortiz knew she was ham-stringed from the start. MIT’s official position is they “didn’t do themselves proud” during the prosecution’s early stages of their case against Aaron. Aaron’s father Robert said they didn’t “advocate” for Aaron like they should have considering their policies regarding the files he took are vague at best and also considering Robert worked for MIT. You can read all about MIT’s tenuous position in this Boston Globe article.
MIT claimed in a report filed after Aaron’s death that they didn’t stand opposed to the plea deal offered to him. Robert says that wasn’t enough. Fact is, MIT knew they were in a bad situation. They were being used by the Obama Justice Department to bring charges against Aaron right before the roll-out of their new CISPA plan which is being backed by 800 major corporations and considering the fact that Swartz had been instrumental in helping bring about the demise of SOPA and PIPA in the past, getting him out of the way via a stay in Club Fed would certainly help matters.
CISPA was barely defeated back in 2012. It was said to be SOPA and PIPA on steroids. One writer said it didn’t harken to the totalitarian state, that it WAS the totalitarian state.
The main focus of CISPA is the privatization of the security state, something Chris Hedges and William Binney recently called corporate totalitarianism during a Real News interview.
Barack Obama is expected to unveil his suggestions for fixing the Snowden crisis which will be based on the work done by his own research group headed by Cass Sunstein.
Primary to the 40-something suggestions they put forward is the continuation of blanket collection of data and the retention of that information by corporate entities, some that collect it and some that are simply contracted to store it.
As Hedges and Binney both point out, this is not a fix. In fact it’s much much worse than what we have now.
There should be no mass collection of your data period, by anyone. But a fool or a complicit liar would suggest that handing over this data (which DOES include, by the way, the recordings of your calls and the contents of your text centered communications) to the corporate world is in any way a solution to this manufactured crisis.
As Binney points out in the interview, the real way to reform this broken system is to stop the mass data collection altogether and to use systems which target only those who are suspected of terrorism after a court order showing cause is produced.
Binney states makes it quite clear that the intention of the Bush administration, Cheney in particular, was NEVER to use this system to fight the Global War on Terror, but rather to spy on U.S. citizens and citizens in countries friendly to the United States and her “interests”, in support of their corrupt policies and even more corrupt governments.
As Hedges pointed out, the BEST reform of this program is to hold those who created it accountable for the illegal and unconstitutional nature of it. Without accountability, it will simply continue as is, no matter what anyone claims they are doing to fix the crisis.
These are absolutely some of the best points being brought up these days about this situation we find ourselves in since Mr. Greenwald started selling his advocacy.
....
This kind of intrusion isn’t about stopping criminals. Aaron Swartz was NOT a criminal. Yet he was murdered by the state or actors working on behalf of this transition, just the same.
You may not be a criminal now, but when thoughts, feelings, expressions are criminalized, who is to say your actions, your feelings, in the future won’t make you into an enemy of the state?
....
What stands before us in the stark reality of this morning’s light is what we conspiracy theorists have been warning about for years. It is the manifestation of decades of effort by those who truly hate you for your freedom. People born to bring about the Meritocracy of America.
Today, in memory of a young man who dedicated his life, and gave it, defending our freedoms as much as any patriot did 200 years ago, I submit, humbly, that we attempt to recommit ourselves anew to this fight.
To honor him we must honor ourselves by not settling for a safer road home. There is none at this point. Aaron knew that. Today we should remember that about him.
There is no easy way out. He didn’t take it. Neither should we.
Aaron Swartz, Internet, Protest, USA
On February 11, a broad coalition of internet-involved organizations will go online to protest massive electronic surveillance by various governments. The action hopes to repeat the successful beating of SOPA/PIPA bills in 2012.
The protest was announced on the anniversary of Aaron Swartz’s suicide and is dedicated to his memory. The software engineer and online freedom activist took his life in 2013 amid prosecution over alleged illegal downloading of a large number of academic journal articles, the charges which could have landed him in jail for up to 35 years.
“If Aaron were alive, he'd be on the front lines, fighting against a world in which governments observe, collect, and analyze our every digital action,” the protest coordination website said.
Similar to the SOPA/PIPA protest in 2012, the new day of action will aim at raising public awareness of government online surveillance and pressuring US lawmakers to act against it. Thousands of participating websites will host banners calling on Americans to bombard members of Congress with email and phone calls. And all concerned Internet users will be asked to participate in other ways.
from thedaywefightback.org
The protest coalition includes organizations holding high stakes on online freedoms, like the open-source software developer Mozilla Foundation, link aggregator Reddit and the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"Since the first revelations last summer, hundreds of thousands of Internet users have come together online and offline to protest the NSA's unconstitutional surveillance programs," said Josh Levy of the Free Press, another member of the coalition.
"These programs attack our basic rights to connect and communicate in private, and strike at the foundations of democracy itself."
The organizers hope to repeat the success of the internet blackout against SOPA/PIPA bills. In January 2012 thousands of websites, including Wikipedia, Reddit, Flickr and others, went dark in a symbolic gesture to demonstrate, that the bills debated at the time in the US Congress would ruin the internet as we know it.
Something I didn't know 19 US states have passed laws to stop individuals building their own connections to the internet - only corporations are allowed to do this! Wow!
The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
by Brian Knappenberger
Published June 27, 2014
Usage Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
Topics Aaron Swartz, documentary, hacktivism, suicide, jstor, MIT, CFAA, Cory Doctorow, Tim Berners-Lee, Larry Lessig, internet, activism
The Internet's Own Boy depicts the life of American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz. It features interviews with his family and friends as well as the internet luminaries who worked with him. The film tells his story up to his eventual suicide after a legal battle, and explores the questions of access to information and civil liberties that drove his work.
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