Aaron Swartz

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: Aaron Swartz

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Feb 09, 2013 6:57 pm

jlaw172364 wrote:Ortiz is a disposable hack. Plenty of those in stock waiting to take her place. The efforts should not be around firing her, they should be around permanent (but wait, there's no such thing because of counter-revolutions), comprehensive reform of the system.


Disposable hack, true true, but comprehensive reform would include accountability and justice for the justice personnel when they commit egregious abuses of their power. Seeing her go down would be an important message to others contemplating similar abuses - deterrence - and a smallish victory in a longer struggle to change the system. There's no way to separate Ortiz from this issue.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Aaron Swartz

Postby jlaw172364 » Tue Feb 12, 2013 5:49 pm

@Jack

The amount of public effort an energy devoted to getting her fired hardly makes it worth it. The state will fight tooth and nail to drag out the proceedings. They get paid on the taxpayer dime to do so. It's their job. All these other people are volunteering their time.

With regard to sending a message: everyone knows that every job carries risks. If you're a public official, you know you risk being brought down. But you still go about your business, whatever it may be. If you are virtuous, you risk being brought down by the corrupt. When the corrupt rule, it is riskier to be virtuous. If you are corrupt, you're at risk from the virtuous, and others who are corrupt. The corrupt have no problem taking each other out. There are plenty of desperate hacks who would kill to take Ortiz's shoes. Some of them may even be involved in the effort to get her fired. They know that once this thing blows over, they'll be relatively safe. People are making a big stink about Swartz because he was a genius from an affluent family. Do they give a shit about all the other hapless losers that wind up unjustly prosecuted? Not so much. Or else, would we really have the system we have? I mean, if people find out about it, and they're not the 70% of the country that fall into the crypto-fascist-blood-drinking-satanist-in-denial or apathetic, they're outraged, but then something else comes along and outrages them, and then something else.
jlaw172364
 
Posts: 432
Joined: Mon Mar 30, 2009 4:28 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Aaron Swartz

Postby elfismiles » Wed Feb 20, 2013 5:08 pm

Aaron Swartz files reveal how FBI tracked internet activist
Firedoglake blogger Daniel Wright publishes once-classified FBI documents that show extent of agency's investigation into Swartz

Image
Aaron Swartz. The FBI also collected information from his Facebook and Linkedin profiles. Photograph: Noah Berger/Reuters
A blogger has published once-classified FBI files that show how the agency tracked and collected information on internet activist Aaron Swartz.

Swartz, who killed himself in January aged 26, had previously requested his files and posted them on his blog, but some new documents and redactions are included in the files published by Firedoglake blogger Daniel Wright.

Wright was given 21 of 23 declassified documents, thanks to a rule that declassifies FBI files on the deceased. Wright said that he was told the other two pages of documents were not provided because of freedom of information subsections concerning privacy, "sources and methods," and that can "put someone's life in danger."

The FBI's files concern Swartz's involvement in accessing the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (Pacer) documents. In pursuit of their investigation, the FBI had collected his personal information and was surveilling an Illinois address where he had his IP address registered.

Aaron H. Swartz FBI File by Daniel Wright
http://www.scribd.com/doc/126146785/Aar ... z-FBI-File

One page reads: "Washington Field Office requests that the North RA attempt to locate Aaron Swartz, his vehicles, drivers license information and picture, and others. Since Swartz is the potential subject of an ongoing investigation, it is requested that Swartz not be approached by agents."

The FBI also collected information from his social networking profiles, including Facebook and Linkedin. The latter proved to be a catalog of his many notable accomplishments, which include being a co-founder of Reddit, a founder of a website to improve the government, watchdog.net and as metadata adviser at Creative Commons.

Information from a New York Times article about his Pacer hack was also included in the files, though strangely, since the article can still be read online, the name of the article's other subject, Carl Malamud, was blocked out.

Hacking collective Anonymous released a State Department database Monday in memory of Swartz. The files included employees' personal information such as addresses, phone number and emails.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... -documents
User avatar
elfismiles
 
Posts: 8511
Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:46 pm
Blog: View Blog (4)

Re: Aaron Swartz

Postby LilyPatToo » Sat Feb 23, 2013 2:06 pm

Found this in my email InBox this AM: Alan Grayson on Aaron Swartz

LilyPat
User avatar
LilyPatToo
 
Posts: 1474
Joined: Sun Jul 02, 2006 3:08 pm
Location: Oakland, CA USA
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Aaron Swartz

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Feb 23, 2013 2:52 pm

Thanks for that, Lily!


http://view.exacttarget.com/?j=fe5e1770 ... 7c1d77&r=0

"How You Tried To Set Them Free"

Dear Patricia:

Aaron Swartz was an internet leader and free-speech advocate. He helped organize the worldwide movement to keep the internet free from censorship and corporate control. After Aaron downloaded a large number of scholarly articles from the JSTOR website without JSTOR's permission, he was indicted for violating JSTOR's terms of service. Facing long years in prison, Aaron committed suicide last month, at the age of 26. At a recent memorial service for Aaron in Washington, DC, Congressman Alan Grayson was invited to speak. Here is what he said:

CONGRESSMAN GRAYSON: Aaron worked in my office as an intern. He had a quality that I found unnerving. He could come up with better things for him to do than I could come up with for him to do. Time and time again, I would give him something to do, and he'd say, "Is it okay if I also work on this other thing?" And "this other thing" turned out to be much more important than anything that I could come up with.

I learned to live with that. I learned to live with that shortcoming, which I took to be a shortcoming of my own, not one of his.

The other unnerving quality that I found in him was the fact that when he would conjure these assignments, they actually came to fruition — an unusual phenomenon here on Capitol Hill. [Laughter.] He'd give himself something to do, I would recognize that it was very worthwhile, I let him do it, and it got done! He was a remarkable human being.

Another thing that I found unnerving — but also very endearing — about Aaron was that Aaron wanted to rock the boat. Now, we all hear from a very, very young age, "Don't rock the boat." I would venture to say that of the 2000 languages spoken on this planet, probably every single one of them has an idiom in that language for that term: "Don't rock the boat." And yet Aaron wanted to rock the boat. Not just for the sake of boat-rocking, but for the sake of improving the lives of ordinary people. And that's a beautiful, a wonderful quality.

We're talking about somebody here who helped to create Reddit, an important world-wide service, at the age of nineteen. Honestly, somebody who probably could have spent the rest of his life in bed, ordering pizzas, and left it at that. And yet he didn't. He continued to strive to do good — good as he saw it. And that's a rare quality in people. Many of us, we just have to do our best to get through the day. That's the way it is. Many of us struggle to do just that. Very few of us actually can think big thoughts, and make them happen. But Aaron was one of those rare people.

And he was willing to take the heat for rocking the boat. Now, you know, sometimes when you rock the boat, the boat tries to rock you. That is exactly what he encountered, right up until the end.

And it's a sad thing, that that's the price you have to pay. For some of us who rock the boat, we end up losing our property. For some of us who rock the boat, we end up losing our freedom. For some of us who rock the boat, we end up losing our families. And in Aaron's case, his life.

And yet, he was willing to face the facts, and to let that happen. To keep striving, to keep struggling, to keep trying to shake things up.

Aaron's life reminded me about a different life that came to the same end. It's the life of Alan Turing, a brilliant mathematician. He lived in England, and was born one hundred years ago. Alan Turing was the greatest mathematician of the 20th Century. He not only invented the Turing Machine, which is the basis for all modern computing, but Alan Turing also broke the Nazi codes during World War II, and allowed the English and the Americans to defeat the Nazis.

You would think that someone like that would be cherished. Someone like that who, if he had managed to have a full life, might have won one, or two, or even three, Nobel Prizes. But in fact he was vilified, because he was a homosexual, which, at that point in England, in those days, was illegal. And I'm sure that at that point in England, in those days, there were people who said, "Well, the law is the law. And if you disobey the law, then you should go to prison." Because of that, because his boyfriend turned him in, Alan Turing was convicted of perversity, and sentenced to prison.

Given the choice between spending hard time — years and years of his life — instead of doing the mathematics that he loved, or alternatively, to accept estrogen injections, well, Turing took the estrogen injection choice. And that broke not only his body, but his mind. He found that he could not do the thing he loved the most, mathematics, any longer. So after two years of this, Alan Turing committed suicide.

And who lost, out of that? Well, Alan Turing lost. But so did all of we. We lost as well. All of us who would have benefitted from that first, and second, and the third Nobel Prizes that Alan Turing had in him. And that Aaron Swartz had in him.

We're the ones who lose.

If we let our prejudices, our desires to restrain those with creativity — if we let that lead us to the point where that creativity is restrained, then going back all the way to the time of Socrates, what we engage in is human sacrifice. We sacrifice their lives, out of the misguided sense that we need to protect ourselves from them, when in fact it's the opposite.

Our lives have meaning, our lives have greater meaning, from the things that they create. So we're here today to remember Aaron — and also to try to learn from the experience. To understand that prosecution should not be persecution.

This morning I reached into the closet, randomly took out this tie [showing necktie], and wore it. And I have a sense that sometimes, things are connected in ways that are not exactly obvious. It happens that this tie is a painting of "Starry Night" by Vincent Van Gogh, someone else whose life ended all too soon.

In a Don McLean song about Vincent Van Gogh, it ends this way: "They would not listen. They're not listening still. Perhaps they never will."

It's time to listen.

SEE THE VIDEO

"And when no hope was left in sight,
On that starry, starry night,
You took your life, as lovers often do.
But I could have told you, Vincent,
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you."


-Don McLean, "Starry, Starry Night" (1971).

Paid for and Authorized by the Committee to Elect Alan Grayson
8419 Oak Park Road, Orlando, FL 32819
If you do not wish to receive further email from Congressman Grayson, please click here to unsubscribe.

We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Aaron Swartz

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Mar 07, 2013 5:59 pm


http://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/7/headlines#373

Holder Defends Prosecution of Internet Freedom Activist Aaron Swartz


During his testimony, Attorney General Eric Holder also publicly defended the federal prosecution of Aaron Swartz, the Internet freedom activist who took his own life in January. Swartz was weeks before a trial date for downloading millions of articles provided by the nonprofit research service JSTOR. He was facing 35 years in prison, a penalty supporters called excessively harsh. Appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Holder told Republican Senator John Cornyn he thinks prosecutors acted appropriately.

Eric Holder: "There was never an intention for him to go to jail for longer than a three-, four-, potentially five-month range. That was what the government said specifically to Mr. Swartz. Those — those offers were rejected."

Sen. John Cornyn: "Does it strike you as odd that the government would indict someone for crimes that would carry penalties of up to 35 years in prison and million-dollar fines and then offer him a three- or four-month prison sentence?"

Eric Holder: "Well, I think that’s a good use of prosecutorial discretion to look at the conduct, regardless of what the statutory maximums were, and to fashion a sentence that was consistent with what the nature of the conduct was. And I think that what those prosecutors did in offering three, four, zero to six was consistent with that conduct."

Sen. John Cornyn: "So you don’t consider this a case of prosecutorial overreach or misconduct?"

Eric Holder: "No, I don’t look at what necessarily was charged as much as what was offered in terms of how the case might have been resolved."

Holder’s comments were his most extensive on the Swartz case to date. In response, Sen. Cornyn told Holder he thinks Swartz was unfairly targeted.

Sen. John Cornyn: "I would suggest to you if you’re an individual American citizen and you’re looking at criminal charges being brought by the United States government, with all of the vast resources available to the government, it strikes me as disproportionate and one that is basically being used inappropriately to try to bully someone into pleading guilty to something that strikes me as rather minor."

We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Aaron Swartz

Postby FourthBase » Thu Mar 07, 2013 7:08 pm

Rand Paul and now John Cornyn. Go figure. Broken clocks, etc.
Still, among the only ones pressing two issues directly to the power.
Black is white, up is down. Until the next election. And then...
White is black, down is up. Sigh, lol. Gotta laugh.
“Joy is a current of energy in your body, like chlorophyll or sunlight,
that fills you up and makes you naturally want to do your best.” - Bill Russell
User avatar
FourthBase
 
Posts: 7057
Joined: Thu May 05, 2005 4:41 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Aaron Swartz

Postby FourthBase » Thu Mar 07, 2013 8:17 pm

Interesting personal coincidence re: Swartz.

As anyone who read my "For Old Time's Sake" thread knows, I was homeless once. For about two months. Not too long ago, actually. 2010. Instead of resorting to a shelter (I tried one for a week, carefully picked it out of all the shitty options, managed my way to Western Mass. just to get to it, and it was still the most miserable place I've ever been -- edit: with even the psych ward coming in second as far as an environment, although situationally the psych ward was the worst ever by far) I bounced my way around any friends and family who hadn't yet disowned me (it isn't easy being an asshole who had surrounded himself with other assholes and comes from a long line of assholes, lol) throughout August, and then spent nearly the entire month of September on the streets. But, not really on the streets. Because, you know, I'm smart, or at least not retarded...not that retarded anyway. What I did was haunt the campuses of just about every major college in Boston/Cambridge/Newton. Normal days of book window-shopping, hitting up the Hare Krishnas for free food and the opportunity to subtly fuck with the mind of a "guru" for fun, lots and lots and lots of walking (I lost about 30 pounds, and were it not for being a bum-in-exile, I was in the best shape of my life), had an iPod shuffle I'd charge in restaurants and libraries, got some pocket money via Western Union from a lionhearted high school buddy who lived hundreds of miles away so that helped immensely, regularly did the whole Starbucks whore's bath (but don't worry I was immaculate about leaving things as they were and not getting pubes and stubble anywhere), discovered every single publicly-accessible useable free internet portal I could find, and generally conducted myself like a normal post-grad out for an urban hike, every day. The biggest pain in the ass was sleep. I wish I hadn't needed to sleep. I found a few spots. Even though you'd think there'd be shitloads in a college town, there are actually very few places open for coffee or whatever all-night. Boston does kind of suck, in that regard. Might even only be one such spot, if I remember correctly, other than a sketchy diner near South Station. And I found it, in Harvard Square, and I would drink some soda and whip out a book and catch some winks just like any exhausted Harvard student. Eventually, I had to resort to just burying my head in my backpack on the Red Line once the first train came, riding like that for a couple hours in the midst of the increasing rush-hour bustle. That sucked. Again, inconspicuous and, so, dignified. Still fucking sucked. I much preferred the few nights I made my bed so to speak in Newton in a BC student lounge couch, sitting, sleeping, open book in lap, just like any other student who drifts offs mid-cram, albeit a little older.

But my favorite spot was MIT. There was something reassuring and pride-preserving about wandering around MIT's campus, roaming corridors, reading bulletin boards, soaking in the atmosphere, feeling like I somehow fit right in, even though I was a fucking hobo, lol. My favorite time was attending a Korean student group's screening of the movie "Like a Virgin", which I highly recommend, as well as the rice goodies they served. I slept in one spot there, at MIT, several times. A mini-cafe section of their architecture department, adjacent to their SIGUS program, which I have to praise as a fountain of world-class ideas for sustainable living that one day may save the world, based on the presentations lining the walls. Check it out online. So, I would saunter in late at night, when the place was almost empty, sit at a cafe table, open my bookbag, rest my head on a notebook of my own geodesic dome drawings that I imagined an MIT architecture student would plausibly draw, as a sort of disguise, a sort of "cover", and sleep. The best rest I had that month. I later made the mistake of trying out a busy all-night officially-designated MIT student lounge elsewhere, from which I was unceremoniously kicked out.

At almost exactly the same time, late September of 2010, Aaron Swartz was also sneaking around MIT, also trespassing. Somewhere in the MIT security office archives, probably in close proximity time-wise to a report on Swartz, is a report of a Harvard punk who arrogantly slept like a slob in an MIT student lounge and had to be woken up by a security guard and removed. See, they thought I was a Harvard student because I had a bunch of Harvard pamphlets on me from wandering around that campus also, and they figured I was just disrespecting MIT by hoisting my feet up on their student lounge couch, a little like Rick James in that Dave Chappelle sketch.

Anyway, nothing relevant to note. Never saw him, that I know of, or anything suspicious. Had no clue who Swartz was until he died. Just my story of how I happened to be an unwitting comrade of sorts of Swartz's, in so far as trespassing on the exact same campus at the exact same time. Felt like sharing, for whatever it's worth.
Last edited by FourthBase on Thu Mar 07, 2013 11:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
“Joy is a current of energy in your body, like chlorophyll or sunlight,
that fills you up and makes you naturally want to do your best.” - Bill Russell
User avatar
FourthBase
 
Posts: 7057
Joined: Thu May 05, 2005 4:41 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Aaron Swartz

Postby JackRiddler » Thu Mar 07, 2013 8:55 pm

Very impressive story, Home Plate.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Aaron Swartz

Postby Belligerent Savant » Mon Mar 25, 2013 3:35 pm

justdrew wrote:
"Andrew Auernheimer doesn't appear suicidal, no thanks to U.S. prosecutors, yet he has been under attack for his act of altering an API URL that revealed a set of user data and posting details of same. 'In June of 2010 there was an AT&T webserver on the open Internet. There was an API on this server, a URL with a number at the end. If you incremented this number, you saw the next iPad 3G user email address. I thought it was egregiously negligent for AT&T to be publishing a complete target list of iPad 3G owners, and I took a sample of the API output to a journalist at Gawker.' Auernheimer has been under investigation from that point onward, with restrictions on his freedom and ability to earn a living that are grossly disproportionate to any perceived crime. This is just as much a case of legislative overreach and the unfettered power of prosecutors as was Swartz's case."


If anyone should be prosecuted here, it's AT&T for being grossly negligent with their customers' private data. The data was openly exposed to the internet - all Auemheimer did was demonstrate how to manipulate the url to get it.


Obnoxious self-promoting hipster techies diluting the message with their own hubris:

http://gawker.com/5991737/the-best-fuck ... to-freedom

"America is in a cultural decline," the internet troll and 27-year-old hacker Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer said into a microphone on Monday morning outside Newark's Martin Luther King Courthouse. Bearded, in a black hoodie with pockets that bulged with his omnipresent 3G-enabled tablet computer and a neckerchief, the stocky Auernheimer was dressed for hurling chunks of sidewalk through storefronts in a European street protest. He was speaking to a pack of cameras in the shadow of the enormous High Modernist bust of Lady Justice that dominates the plaza. "In my country there's a problem and that problem is the Feds. They take everybody's freedom and they never give it back."

Auernheimer's freedom was scheduled to be taken away in about an hour, at the sentencing hearing following his conviction for computer fraud and hacking. In November he was convicted for his role in a 2010 hack of the AT&T website for iPad subscribers, when he and a codefendant exploited a security flaw to harvest more than 110,000 of the subscribers' account information. To embarrass AT&T for its lax security, the hackers shared the information with Gawker, which published an account of how the breach worked.

Many tech bloggers will tell you that the charges are stupidly overblown and actually make the internet less safe. Auernheimer is basically going to prison for being an unrepentant asshole.

So he has become a cause celebre within a nebulous culture at the intersection of technology, social activism, and libertarianism—hackers, Occupy Wall Streeters, artists, tech bloggers, and even venture capitalists who are connected by a shared sense of being in a precarious position on the furthest edges of information technology. Auernheimer is to them a fellow pioneer who is now being punished for his ingenuity by a government that wants to control the world's flow of information.

His case has become all the more resonant with them since information activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide while being prosecuted under the same overly-expansive computer crime law as Auernheimer, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. (Columbia law professor Tim Wu calls it calls "the worst law in technology.") Plus, they like the guy. Weev is a terrible person on the internet, a self-styled pioneer of internet trolling, i.e. harassing and offending people for laughs. (You can read about his exploits in my November profile.) But he is endlessly charming once you get to know him personally. And his case drives home the vital point that an unjust law is unjust whether it targets a saint or an asshole.

About two dozen of his most ardent supporters had turned up, huddling in the cold, as Auernheimer—who has an almost chlorophyllic relationship to camera lights—delivered yet another rambling statement about how his case represents the downfall of Western Civilization. They stood bleary-eyed, some reeking of booze and cigarettes in yesterday's clothes. The hearing was at the start of a government work week, but in Weev's world, it was the tail end of an all-night party celebrating his last stretch of freedom. His backers were powering straight through.

***
There would be "pretty much no media," Auernheimer had told me on Saturday afternoon, when I tried without success to get him to share the details of the party. That was obvious bullshit. There would sooner be no party than no media. Luckily, finding the directions to Weev's party turned out to be even easier than harvesting tens of thousands of iPad owner account details: A rival internet troll posted the address to Twitter.

It was in Newark, hosted by the prankster-artist Clark Stoeckly, whose best-known project is driving around New York in a truck painted to look like a "Wikileaks Mobile Collection Unit." Stoeckley had attended Weev's November trial, been impressed by his hilarious bombast in court, and offered to host his going-to-jail party at the immense, colorful loft he shares with a bunch of other artists.

I got there around 10:30. A sign outside said "Weev's Party, 4th floor," and the door was open, so I went upstairs. There were about 30 people there, and the crowd would grow to around 40, including an Esquire reporter and his photographer, a documentary crew from Los Angeles, a reporter from Russia Today, and the livestreamer Tim Pool, who made his name documenting the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011. Pretty much no media.

Auernheimer spotted me, smiled, and slapped me on the shoulder. He told me I could stay as long as I promised not to mention the presence of two friends he hoped would attend—their own legal troubles could be complicated if the authorities knew they were associating with him. Neither showed up.

Various digital misfits and cyberpunks drank booze from plastic cups, played pool and ping pong on tables next to an indoor garden fashioned from a bathtub, and sang along to Queen. Someone had a theremin.

In the crowd was Bobcat, a bearded veteran of the New York City hacker scene, his aging-hippie aesthetic betrayed by a leather jacket sporting the logo of the legendary hacker conference DEFCON. Bobcat was demonstrating a minor bug he'd just discovered in the URL shortening system used by the U.S. government. On a small tablet computer, he explained that he had added a plus sign to a .gov URL, which redirected it to a photo he'd uploaded of Barack Obama staring wistfully into the gaping maw of Goatse. Bobcat pointed out that what he had done was not all that different than Weev's trick.

"Weev did what I do every day!" Bobcat said. The problem was, he said, that there was no safe place enlightened geeks could report to if they spotted something amiss, without fearing the wrath of the Feds. "There should be like a council of elders who you go to when you find a problem like this," he said

By a table littered with bags of chips and Chinese takeout stood the internet troll Jaime Cochran, aka "AsshurtMacFags." Cochran is a 20-something transgender woman who had taken the train from her home in the Chicago suburbs to be at the hearing. Until recently she was a member of the Rustle League, an upstart trolling group which aspires to be the "Andy Kaufman of trolling." I was vaguely familiar with Cochran and the Rustle League because I had received an anguished email late last year from one of its victims, complaining of death threats, defamatory tweets, and "a horrendous hate-filled anti-Semitic Twitter account using my name and pics." Cochran has appeared on Australian television, explaining to a puzzled host why she spends her free time harassing users of jam band music boards.

Naturally Cochran is a big fan of Auernheimer's. With the AT&T hack, he took trolling out of the internet backwater and threw it onto the national stage. Most trolls are "still focused on trolling bloggers, " she said. "But I think trolling should have higher aspirations. That's what Weev did." He trolled one of the biggest technology companies on the planet.

The atmosphere was one of happy and increasingly inebriated defiance. Clark Stoekley relished his role as host in a purple smoking jacket and top hat, smoking cigarettes from a holder he had orginally bought for a Hunter S. Thompson Halloween costume.

To a circle of rapt supporters, Weev explained how his imprisonment was a blessing in disguise.

"This is the best fucking thing that could possibly happen to me," he said. "My trolls are ideological, but they also impact markets. I have eyes on me that are worth billions of dollars. I've already got offers that are like, Hey, I'll give you $5 million when you get out."

Jeffrey Paul, the German-based American hacker who put up Auernheimer's $50,000 bail, sported an absurd futuristic visor in a winking nod to hacker stereotypes. "The real story here is that Andrew is such an asshole but he has this popular support," he said.

As morning drew near, the party moved to an apartment in the back of the loft. It was so spacious and beautiful that posting a photo of it to Twitter would prompt most of New York City to ford the Hudson River to start a new life in Newark. A swing hung from the rafter, and many people narrowly missed having their teeth knocked out by hackers hurtling through the smoky air. Weev took a turn: "Freedom!" he shouted, soaring above his supporters.

One of my last clear memories is of Weev and Bobcat filming video of the party on Bobcat's tablet computer, gazing down into the screen where they saw themselves saying: "Weev did what I do every day!" "You're all committing three felonies a day!" "I will see you all in my cell block!"

***
The trip through security into the courthouse was uneasy. Weev's supporters were bristling with electronics and piercings, their necks swaddled in black bandanas emblazoned with tactical tips for protesters ("DO NOT RESIST ARREST. DO NOT CONSENT TO SEARCH"). And they were naturally disinclined to do anything that someone with a badge might ask them to do. One supporter wore a Guy Fawkes mask sitting on top of his head, and a guard told him to remove it. Mocking murmurs went through the crowd.

"It's for national security," said Jamie Cochran, lowering her voice into a mock-official baritone. "National security."

The Auernheimer enthusiasts crammed into the courtroom, filling both sides of the aisle. As the proceeding unfolded, they heckled and whispered, like the audience at a punk show confronted with an excruciatingly uncool opening act. Snorts of indignation and derisive laughs erupted when the prosecutor referred to the computer security organization Auernheimer started, Goatse Security, as a "security organization, so-called."

Phone use was forbidden in the courtroom, and various Free Weevers kept getting kicked out for attempting to tweet. This included Cochran, who subsequently stood outside by the door and loudly fought, or maybe pretended to fight, with a security guard. Her protestations wafted in, comically disjointed, every time the door opened:

"Ow, you monster."

"Ow. Ow. Ow."

"You people are great Americans."

But two of Auernheimer's supporters sat quietly throughout the hearing. Andrew's mother Alyse Auernheimer and her husband, Mark, had flown from Richmond, Virginia for the hearing. Alyse made eye contact with Andrew and blew him a kiss, but he made no acknowledgement of her presence. It was the first time she had seen her son in over six years.

After some procedural stuff, Auernheimer gave a statement, repeating much of what he'd said outside. "I don't come here to ask forgiveness," he said. "This court's decision is wrong and if you people understood what you were doing to the rule of law and the Constitution, you would feel shame!"

A phalanx of enormous U.S. Marshals sat in the jury box, unimpressed by the measly physical threat presented by Auernheimer and his supporters. One of them could have subdued the entire audience. But during the prosecutor's closing statements, Auernheimer surreptitiously reached for his tablet, and the whole squad bore down at once: They pried the tablet out of his hands before he could do whatever he was trying to do—tweet, presumably—pressed his body into the table, then cuffed him and hustled him out of the courtroom.

The spectators erupted in cries and gasps. A woman began weeping loudly. "Sickos!" yelled an Anonymous supporter who goes by the name Subverzo, "This government is in contempt!"

"This is why Aaron killed himself!" said another guy.

Five minutes later Auernheimer was back, in shackles. He mouthed "don't cry" to the crying woman, a few members of the crowd flashed him thumbs up, and the hearing began again. Now the supporters were subdued.

The prosecutor's closing statement suggested a tip for those about to be sentenced for a crime: Do not, mere hours before your hearing, give an interview on the internet claiming you'd commit the crime again. Auernheimer had kicked off his going-to-jail party by taking part in a livestreamed "Ask Me Anything" thread on Reddit. Did he have any regrets about the iPad hack, one user asked.

"My regret is being nice enough to give AT&T a chance to patch before dropping the dataset to Gawker," he replled. "I won't nearly be as nice next time."

(Later, Auernheimer's lawyer, Tor Ekelund, said he had told him not to do the interview. "He will write what he wants," Ekelund said.)

Assistant U.S. Attorney Zach Intrater cited this response in his argument for a harsher term, as it showed Auernheimer was at an "atypical" risk for recidivism. "Less than 24 hours before sentencing, he said he was going to reoffend," Intrater said. "The threat is clear."

Intrater continued, in a tone that said he did not relish in what he was about to say but was compelled by its profound truth to say it. "This was not a one-off," Intrater said. "His entire history puts his own advancement—financial, social, reputational—above the interests of others."

Intrater quoted an email exchange between Auernheimer and one of the victims of his trolling, pausing between each exchange for great effect. The guy, whom Intrater called "M.G.," had emailed Auernheimer begging him to remove a post about him on the troll knowledgebase Encyclopedia Dramatica, where Auernheimer was once an administrator. The post had slanderous material and nude photos and, M.G. claimed, had already caused him to lose his job.

Auernheimer had responded simply: "$500."

"Are you saying it would cost $500 to take the page down? Do you know me? Do you know anything about me," pleaded M.G.

"I know many people who came here today think the defendant is very funny," Intrater said, sparking giggles in the crowd. "But M.G. didn't."

Auernheimer was sentenced to a 41-month term, near the maximum of the sentencing guidelines, plus a $73,000 fine. As Judge Susan D. Wigenton explained how she was disappointed that Auernheimer had not used his skills and charisma toward better ends, his mother watched without emotion. Her husband tapped her softly on the knee each time the judge stressed a point.

"Hail Eris!" were Auernheimer's last words, a shout-out to the Greek goddess of chaos before he disappeared into the Essex County Jail.

***
Outside the courtroom, Weev's supporters consoled each other, cried, and fumed.

"I'm disgusted, this is in contempt," said Subverzo. "This is the sort of animalistic behavior we'd expect from the government."

Auernheimer's lawyers plan to appeal. Now that he has become a symbol for the unfairness of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a group of heavy hitters has come on board to help, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the cyberlaw expert Orin Kerr. The case may go all the way to the Supreme Court.

Alyse Auernheimer and her husband left without speaking to any of her son's friends and supporters. When I called her later she told me that she was also disgusted by the proceedings, but mainly by the displays of the supporters.

"I thought the circus atmosphere was disrespectful to the court, to the law," she said. "It was disrespectful to Andrew because he was a part of it. I just hate that sort of mad, mad world scenario."

She said she understood that Auernheimer's punishment was too harsh and that AT&T should share part of the blame for its lax security. But, she said, the supporters represented part of Andrew's problem, not its solution. "A group of people surrounding him, encouraging his bad behavior—that's not love for Andrew," she said. "When all those people fall away we'll still be there. That's part of being a family. And tough love is part of being a family."

"We love our son and while obviously we completely didn't approve of anything that transpired, we still want to be there to support him," she said. "I hope someday that he'll say that maybe this is a chance for him to do something different."
User avatar
Belligerent Savant
 
Posts: 5216
Joined: Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:58 pm
Location: North Atlantic.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Aaron Swartz

Postby FourthBase » Mon Mar 25, 2013 4:10 pm

Mmm-hmm.

"Hail Eris"?

Maybe, if the chaos is directed at the right places.
Trolling the CIA, Goldman Sachs, the Singularity Institute, Koch and Scaife, etc.?
Then sure, why not, Hail Eris.

But no, they love them some all-purpose discord too much, religiously even.
When you're trolling Phishheads or the families of "an heroes", you're just an asshole.
And in that case: Fuck Eris.
“Joy is a current of energy in your body, like chlorophyll or sunlight,
that fills you up and makes you naturally want to do your best.” - Bill Russell
User avatar
FourthBase
 
Posts: 7057
Joined: Thu May 05, 2005 4:41 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Aaron Swartz

Postby FourthBase » Thu Apr 25, 2013 6:43 pm

September 2010.

The month of my...errr...walkabout. Every day, every night, back and forth, shuffling between and within the campuses of Harvard and MIT. I must have been quite a sight, "that husky unshaven white dude in sandals wearing the Sox cap with the backpack and a wild thousand-yard stare", is how I imagine being seen. But, thousand-year stare is more like it. I haunted a few other campuses around town, too, and a multitude of other neighborhoods. But it was at Harvard and MIT where my hours and miles added up the most, where I endlessly paced the sidewalks and corridors, where I conspicuously read Camus and Weil for attention I never got, where I used the few publicly-accessible computers with an internet connection and many a publicly-accessible restroom, where I pestered a few professors and loitered in several bookstores, where I crashed a Hare Krishna Q&A and a Korean student film festival for the free vegetarian grub, where I even found a couch or chair to sleep some nights and where I occasionally stole brief naps in the daytime, one of which was interrupted by a gathering of world-class black-history scholars, whom I still owe a gratitude for introducing me to a now-forgotten hero named Julian Mayfield. I even bumped into a BLS classmate on one of those afternoons.

There were two other people, though, whose paths I now wish would've intersected with mine that month. Actually, we might have inadvertently crossed paths at some point, and I would never know because I passed thousands and thousands and thousands of people that month, and none of the three of us were recognizable people then, and only one is now, and the other seems only barely-known to a subset of philosophy-junkies, and I am still a total nobody, lol. On the bright side, though, I'm still alive. And those two aren't. I think about it now, what might have been.

Maybe I see Mitchell Heisman walking across Harvard Yard that morning in late September, on Yom Kippur, all dressed in white, and I say, "Hey dude, looking sharp!" and maybe we strike up a conversation, and after several uninterrupted hours of hardcore philosophizing, after finally persuading him, "No dude, you're wrong, and that is a terrible idea", I head back out to Mass. Ave. to pound the pavement all night, and maybe he heads home to write a new chapter and re-title his book to something a shade more uplifting than Suicide Note.

Maybe one night that late September in the wee hours I notice Aaron Swartz sneaking around MIT, and maybe I follow him inconspicuously, and maybe he notices me because I suck at spying, and he asks me what the hell my deal is, and I tell him, and I ask him what his deal is, and maybe he tells me because I'm both thoroughly harmless and hip enough to his agenda to share his plan with, and after an hour of trading ideas I finally persuade him, "Yes dude, you're right, but that is a terrible idea", and then I depart to take the scenic route back to Central Square, and maybe he rides home to re-think his strategy and to imagine a less-illegal way to unlock the world's secret knowledge.

Maybe I also get each of their numbers and, once my walkabout is over, I call them up, and maybe later that fall, in some shabby apartment, sitting around a bong, there would be the trio of Paul Chandler, Mitchell Heisman, and Aaron Swartz enjoying life and trying to figure out how to maybe make it even easier, even better, even freer.


[Someone asks if Heisman's book is worth reading.]

He concludes that life is meaningless. So, no: Not worth reading. At all. Not saying it's rubbish, he seems to have been an excellent thinker. Just an atrocious judge. It's funny, I think I might be the exact mirror image of Heisman. I, too, have probably written about 2000-3000 pages' worth of intense, life-evaluating thought. But poor Mitchell wrote his million words secretly, for himself only, sinking deeper and deeper into a life-negating pessimism. I've written my million words publicly, for the sole purpose of communicating with others, rising higher and higher out of a long-term existential crisis into a life-affirming optimism. He punctuated his moment of trespassing on elite college grounds with a gunshot to his head. I punctuated mine by filling a chalkboard at the front of an architectural school's auditorium with a rant explaining why it was unethical for the budding architects present to construct useless prototypes of theoretical housing when just 50 feet away homeless folks slept on granite.
“Joy is a current of energy in your body, like chlorophyll or sunlight,
that fills you up and makes you naturally want to do your best.” - Bill Russell
User avatar
FourthBase
 
Posts: 7057
Joined: Thu May 05, 2005 4:41 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Aaron Swartz

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jul 10, 2013 12:11 am

Judge Orders Secret Service to Release Aaron Swartz Files


BY LORENZO FRANCESCHI-BICCHIERAI
9 HOURS AGO
A judge ordered the Secret Service to start releasing "thousands" of pages pertaining to its file on Aaron Swartz, the Internet freedom activist and hacker who committed suicide in January.

U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued the order following a lawsuit brought forth by Wired's investigations editor Kevin Poulsen, who requested Swartz's Secret Service file earlier this year. When his initial FOIA request was denied by the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service's parent agency, Poulsen filed suit.


SEE ALSO: Is Strongbox the New Wikileaks?
"Defendant shall promptly release to Plaintiff all responsive documents that it has gathered thus far and shall continue to produce additional responsive documents that it locates on a rolling basis," wrote Kollar-Kotelly in the order, according to Poulsen's coverage in Wired.

The Secret Service investigated Aaron Swartz after he downloaded millions of scholarly articles from the JSTOR database in January of 2011. For this action, Swartz was later charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and was about to face trial, when he committed suicide.

Poulsen, who worked with Swartz on Strongbox, the New Yorker's WikiLeaks-style secure document submission system, is not the only one who had his request denied. Others saw their own separate requests dismissed, with the Secret Service citing a FOIA exception used when there's a criminal investigation ongoing. Swartz's charges were dropped when he died, however, and his case was filed away.

Poulsen's request has been delayed repeatedly. In May, the government admitted the exception didn't apply anymore, but didn't release the file. And then the government also missed a May 23 deadline to respond to the lawsuit. Finally, last Wednesday, they asked for more time, arguing that they have just found new documents.

The new deadline is August 5, but the Secret Service has to start releasing the documents it has already found. Poulsen promised he'll share them. "You’ll see them here when I get them," he wrote.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Aaron Swartz

Postby 8bitagent » Wed Jul 10, 2013 6:08 am

Interesting choice to put Swartz with Manning and Snowden on the cover of Time...

Image
"Do you know who I am? I am the arm, and I sound like this..."-man from another place, twin peaks fire walk with me
User avatar
8bitagent
 
Posts: 12243
Joined: Fri Aug 24, 2007 6:49 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Aaron Swartz

Postby MinM » Fri Jul 19, 2013 10:56 am

Image @onthemedia: MIT objects to release of Aaron Swartz' Secret Service file. http://wny.cc/15Rfg5x

...MIT claims it’s afraid the release of Swartz’s file will identify the names of MIT people who helped the Secret Service and federal prosecutors pursue felony charges against Swartz for his bulk downloading of academic articles from MIT’s network in 2011.

MIT argues that those people might face threats and harassment if their names become public. But it’s worth noting that names of third parties are already redacted from documents produced under FOIA.

I’ll post MIT’s motion here once it’s filed.

I have never, in fifteen years of reporting, seen a non-governmental party argue for the right to interfere in a Freedom of Information Act release of government documents. My lawyer has been litigating FOIA for decades, and he’s never encountered it either. It’s saddening to see an academic institution set this precedent.

We’ll be in court to oppose MIT being granted any right to redact the documents, and to oppose any further delay in filling this seven-month-old FOIA request.

Update: MIT just filed seven documents in the case. You can read the entire collection below...

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/0 ... vene/all/1

Image @BoingBoing: MIT and Aaron Swartz's Secret Service files: what has MIT got to hide? http://dlvr.it/3gt7yJ
Earth-704509
User avatar
MinM
 
Posts: 3286
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2008 2:16 pm
Location: Mont Saint-Michel
Blog: View Blog (0)

PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 54 guests