Aaron Swartz

[justdrew]

so... somebody has FOIAed everything related to him already I hope.

[justdrew]

Why Did The Secret Service Take Over Aaron Swartz's Case Two Days Before He Was Arrested
from the makes-no-sense dept by Mike Masnick | Mon, Jan 14th 2013 11:45am

Many have noted that the US Attorneys had made a new filing on the day that Aaron Swartz committed suicide. While the filing may look like just a standard procedural filing, some are pointing out that it highlights some highly unusual activity in the case. It had to do with Swartz's motion to get some of the evidence blocked from being used in the case, over questions concerning how it was collected. But one of the key things that come out is that, for unexplained reasons, the Secret Service took over the case just two days before Aaron was arrested:

MIT and JSTOR conferred regarding methods to prevent excessive downloading. Timeline at 3-4. On December 26, 2010, there was another episode of excessive downloading, which MIT personnel did not learn of until on or about January 3, 2011. On the morning of January 4, 2011, at approximately 8:00 am, MIT personnel located the netbook being used for the downloads and decided to leave it in place and institute a packet capture of the network traffic to and from the netbook. Timeline at 6. This was accomplished using the laptop of Dave Newman, MIT Senior Network Engineer, which was connected to the netbook and intercepted the communications coming to and from it. Id. Later that day, beginning at 11:00 am, the Secret Service assumed control of the investigation.

As Firedoglake points out, it doesn't make any sense for the Secret Service to be involved in such an issue:

According to the Secret Service, they get involved in investigations with:

Significant economic or community impact
Participation of organized criminal groups involving multiple districts or transnational organizations
Use of schemes involving new technology

Downloading scholarly articles is none of those things.

The same filing shows that MIT allowed all of this to happen despite no warrant, court order, or subpoena -- just handing over all sorts of info.

The disclosure took place only after the MIT General Counsel’s Office approved the disclosure of the information to law enforcement authorities even in the absence of a warrant or court order or subpoena – and at a time when MIT personnel were acting as government agents – and in contravention of MIT policy that such information, which exceeded that found in bank records or telephone toll records, would be disclosed only upon the receipt of lawful court orders or subpoenas, i.e., process complying with the Stored Communications Act, 18 U.S.C. §2701 et seq. See Section IV, infra. In a separate email from Halsall to S/A Picket on January 8, 2011, Halsall told Pickett that he “hop[ed] to have the pcap/flows/videos/logs all in by to me Monday, possibly sooner – if you don’t already have a copy of the video or pcap [packet capture], I’ll make sure you get one.” Exhibit 2. No warrant or court order has been provided to counsel which would evidence the government’s having, even post-interception, acquired the contents of the warrantless interceptions by seeking judicial authorization as required.

As more and more people are looking at the details of what went down in arresting and pressuring Aaron, the case just looks worse and worse.

[Twyla LaSarc]

Came here looking for this very thread, but I don't have anything to add. I thought it pretty strange that a thread on Aaron Schwartz is nowhere near prominence right now. Here's the corporate press article on Schwartz:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-a ... 4175.story

I heard about it before it was posted here, but wanted to see what others had to say as I didn't know who he was until I learned more.

I was saddened because he made it legal for me to give items I've received from JSTOR to other people.

He is not much older than my son and I see my son in him, the boy who could amaze adults at such an early age.





https://whyweprotest.net/community/thre ... os.108058/

A reverent thread with many photos...

On edit: Whether he killed himself or was 'pushed', it is a political statement. Which it is is left to our divination.

[parel]

Internet Activist's Prosecutor Linked To Another Hacker's Death
Prosecutor Stephen Heymann has been blamed for contributing to Swartz's suicide. Back in 2008, young hacker Jonathan James killed himself in the midst of a federal investigation led by the same prosecutor.

One of the prosecutors in the case of the online pioneer who killed himself this weekend, Aaron Swartz, was accused in 2008 of driving another hacker to suicide.

Some of Swartz's friends have accused Assistant United States Attorney Stephen Heymann of contributing to Swartz's suicide, with his unwillingness to compromise on the prosecution of Swartz in a case involving scholarly journal articles.

Back in 2008, another young hacker, Jonathan James, killed himself after being named a suspect in another Heymann case.

James, the first juvenile put into confinement for a federal cybercrime case, was found dead was two weeks after the Secret Service raided his house as part of its investigation of the TJX hacker case led by Heymann — the largest personal identity hack in history. He was thought to be "JJ," the unindicted co-conspirator named in the criminal complaints filed with the US District Court in Massachusetts. In his suicide note, James wrote that he was killing himself in response to the federal investigation and their attempts to tie him to a crime which he did not commit:
"I have no faith in the 'justice' system. Perhaps my actions today, and this letter, will send a stronger message to the public. Either way, I have lost control over this situation, and this is my only way to regain control."
...
"Remember," he wrote, "it's not whether you win or lose, it's whether I win or lose, and sitting in jail for 20, 10, or even 5 years for a crime I didn't commit is not me winning. I die free."

Heymann received the Attorney General's Award for Distinguished Service for "directing the largest and most successful identity theft and hacking investigation and prosecution ever conducted in the United States."

Swartz's family has accused Heymann, U.S. Attorneys Scott Garland who was the lead prosecutor, and Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz of contributing to their son's death, who was known to have suffered from depression. "Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. attorney's office and at M.I.T. contributed to his death."

While Ortiz ultimately holds the responsibility for the department, Heymann was the lawyer handling the negotiations with Swartz and his attorneys.

A petition has been put up online demanding that Heymann be fired because of his "overzealous prosecution of an allegedly minor and non-violent electronic crime led to the suicide of Aaron Swartz."

Christina DiIorio-Sterling, spokesperson for the United States Attorney Office said neither Heymann nor Ortiz would comment. "It is not appropriate to make a public comment," she said. "We want to respect the family's privacy at this time."
In 1998, Heymann also helped bring the first federal prosecution of a juvenile hacker, who brought down air traffic control communications at a Worcester Massachusetts airport. The unidentified teen plead guilty in return for two years probation, a fine, community service and was banned from using a computer with a modem for two years.

Heymann created one of the first computer-crime units in the country. Back in 1996, he prosecuted and supervised the electronic surveillance of the first case using a court-ordered wiretap on a computer network. "Harvard balked at the request," according to an article in Network World magazine (May 6, 1996). "We don't monitor the network, and we respect the privacy of our users," Franklin Steen, the Harvard network director told the magazine. To tap into the system, the DOJ had to get a court order, which came with a gag rule to keep anyone from tipping off the suspect.

The case found Argentinian Julio Cesar Ardita guilty of breaking into the Harvard University computer system, which he then used to break into numerous government sites, including the Department of Defense and NASA.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock ... -another-h

[jlaw172364]

Another thing to note is the over 95% conviction rate of federal prosecutors, due mostly to plea-bargaining derived from the fear of a lengthy prison sentence.

[semper occultus]

.....that should go some to way to assuage their dismay at not bagging Gary McKinnon....

[LilyPatToo]

From Think Progress:

Aaron Swartz Faced A More Severe Prison Term Than Killers, Slave Dealers And Bank Robbers

By Ian Millhiser on Jan 14, 2013 at 9:00 am

On Friday, Internet pioneer and open information activist Aaron Swartz took his own life at the age of 26. At the time of his death, Swartz was under indictment for logging into JSTOR, a database of scholarly articles, and rapidly downloading those articles with the intent to make them public. If Swartz had lived to be convicted of the charges against him, he faced 50 years or more in a federal prison.

To put these charges in perspective, here are ten examples of federal crimes that carry lesser prison sentences than Swartz’ alleged crime of downloading academic articles in an effort to make knowledge widely available to the public:

Manslaughter: Federal law provides that someone who kills another human being “[u]pon a sudden quarrel or heat of passion” faces a maximum of 10 years in prison if subject to federal jurisdiction. The lesser crime of involuntary manslaughter carries a maximum sentence of only six years.

Bank Robbery: A person who “by force and violence, or by intimidation” robs a bank faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. If the criminal “assaults any person, or puts in jeopardy the life of any person by the use of a dangerous weapon or device,” this sentence is upped to a maximum of 25 years.

Selling Child Pornography: The maximum prison sentence for a first-time offender who “knowingly sells or possesses with intent to sell” child pornography in interstate commerce is 20 years. Significantly, the only way to produce child porn is to sexually molest a child, which means that such a criminal is literally profiting off of child rape or sexual abuse.

Knowingly Spreading AIDS: A person who “after testing positive for the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and receiving actual notice of that fact, knowingly donates or sells, or knowingly attempts to donate or sell, blood, semen, tissues, organs, or other bodily fluids for use by another, except as determined necessary for medical research or testing” faces a maximum of 10 years in prison.

Selling Slaves: Under federal law, a person who willfully sells another person “into any condition of involuntary servitude” faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years, although the penalty can be much higher if the slaver’s actions involve kidnapping, sexual abuse or an attempt to kill.

Genocidal Eugenics: A person who “imposes measures intended to prevent births” within a particular racial, ethnic or religious group or who “subjects the group to conditions of life that are intended to cause the physical destruction of the group in whole or in part” faces a maximum prison term of 20 years, provided their actions did not result in a death.

Helping al-Qaeda Develop A Nuclear Weapon: A person who “willfully participates in or knowingly provides material support or resources . . . to a nuclear weapons program or other weapons of mass destruction program of a foreign terrorist power, or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be imprisoned for not more than 20 years.”

Violence At International Airports: Someone who uses a weapon to “perform[] an act of violence against a person at an airport serving international civil aviation that causes or is likely to cause serious bodily injury” faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years if their actions do not result in a death.

Threatening The President: A person who threatens to kill the President, the President-elect, the Vice President or the Vice President-elect faces a maximum prison term of 5 years.

Assaulting A Supreme Court Justice: Assaults against very senior government officials, including Members of Congress, cabinet secretaries or Supreme Court justices are punished by a maximum prison sentence of just one year. If the assault “involved the use of a dangerous weapon, or personal injury results,” the maximum prison term is 10 years.

It should be noted that Swartz faced such a stiff sentence because prosecutors charged him with multiple federal crimes arising out of his efforts to download and distribute academic papers. Similarly, a person who robbed a bank, sold a slave, and then rounded out their day by breaking Justice Scalia’s nose would also risk spending the next 50 years in prison, just like Aaron Swartz did.

Indeed, if Swartz’s story reveals anything, it is the power of prosecutors to pressure defendants into plea bargains by stringing multiple criminal charges together and threatening outlandish prison sentences. Whatever one thinks of Swartz’s actions, which were likely illegal and probably should be illegal, it is difficult to justify treating him as if he were a more dangerous criminal than someone who flies into a rage and kills their own brother.

This case sickens and saddens me. I have a feeling that prosecutorial zeal for justice played little part in this case. It looks a lot more like bullying by power-mad sociopaths bent on forcing genius into submission and disgrace.

LilyPat

[Project Willow]

^^ Yes, our country does quite horrific things to its gifted youth. I think of the thousands of high IQ kids who were ruined or killed in the programs. This case was another proto-fascist state attack on the intellectual class.

[kelley]

leaving this here for any comment:

The Criminal Charges Against Aaron Swartz (Part 1: The Law)
Orin Kerr • January 14, 2013 2:50 am

The Internet activist Aaron Swartz has died from an apparent suicide. Swartz was facing a criminal trial in April on charges arising from his effort to “liberate” the JSTOR database, and there has been a lot of commentary accusing the prosecutors in his case of having abused their role in ways that contributed to Swartz’s tragic death. Swartz’s friend Larry Lessig led the way by angrily condemning the prosecutors who charged Swartz as “bullies” who acted like they “had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.” According to Lessig, the prosecutors acted in an “the most absurd or extreme way” and “don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government.” A lot of people seem to agree, and today’s media has picked up the story. The New York Times is running a headline, “A Data Crusader, a Defendant and Now, a Cause.” The Associated Press has a somewhat similar story, “Swartz’ Death Fuels Debate Over Computer Crime”.

The criticisms of the Swartz prosecution concern two different questions. The first question is the law. Were the charges against Swartz based on a fair reading of the laws? Or was the prosecution being overly aggressive or relying on strained theories in charging Swartz as it did? The second question is discretion and judgment. The DOJ has the discretion to charge cases or not, and prosecutors can agree to different plea deals or even agree to have charges dismissed. Were the prosecutors in this case unfair in how they exercised discretion, or did they act irresponsibly in the case in how they exercised the discretion that the law grants them?

I hope to answer these questions in two posts. In the first post, I’m going to try and answer the first question — the law — as informed by my background as a specialist in this particular area of law who has testified on these statutes before Congress, defended computer crime cases involving these statutes, and helped prosecute them, too. In a subsequent post, I’ll try to answer the second question, the exercise of prosecutorial discretion.

This is going to be a long post, so here’s the summary of my conclusion on the first question: I think the charges against Swartz were based on a fair reading of the law. None of the charges involved aggressive readings of the law or any apparent prosecutorial overreach. All of the charges were based on established caselaw. Indeed, once the decision to charge the case had been made, the charges brought here were pretty much what any good federal prosecutor would have charged. This is different from what a lot of people are hearing on the Internets, so I realize this post isn’t going to be popular. But I’ll explain my position in some detail, starting with the facts and then turning to the law, and then I’ll open it up for comments. And in a subsequent post, I’ll take on the second question of whether prosecutors properly exercised their discretion in the decision to charge the case and during plea negotiations.

I. The Facts Alleged in the Indictment

Here’s the indictment filed in Swartz’ case. Based on the indictment and news coverage of the case, the following is my current understanding of the facts:

JSTOR is an organization that sells universities, libraries, and publishers access to a database of over 1,000 academic journals. For a large research unversity, JSTOR charges as much as $50,000 a year for an annual subscription fee, at least parts of which go to pay copyright fees to the owners of the articles in the databases. The JSTOR database is not freely available: Normally, a username and password are required to access it. But if you access the site from a computer network owned by a university that has purchased a subscription, you can access the site without a username and password from their network. Users of the service then have to agree to use JSTOR in a particular way when they log in to the site; they generally can download one article at a time, but the JSTOR software is configured to block efforts to download large groups of articles.

Aaron Swartz decided to “liberate” the entire JSTOR database. He wanted everyone to have access to all of the journals in the database, so he came up with a plan to gain access to the database and copy it so he could make it publicly available to everyone via filesharing networks. Swartz lived in the Boston area, and he had legitimate access to the JSTOR database using Harvard’s network, where he was a fellow. But Swartz decided not to use Harvard’s network for what he had planned. Instead, he used MIT’s network across town. Swartz did not have an account or formal relationship with MIT, but MIT is known for having relatively open account practices.

In Swartz’ first attempt, he purchased a laptop, went into a building at MIT, and used the MIT wireless network to create a guest account on MIT’s network. He then accessed JSTOR and executed a program called “keepgrabbing” that circumvented JSTOR’s limits on how many articles a person could download — thus enabling Swartz to start to download a massive number of articles. MIT and JSTOR eventually caught on to what was happening, and they blocked Swartz’s computer from being able to access the MIT network by banning the IP address that he had been assigned.

Swartz responded by changing his IP address, and it took a few hours before JSTOR noticed and blocked his new IP address. To try to stop Swartz from just changing IP addresses again, JSTOR then blocked a range of IP addresses from MIT and contacted MIT for more help. MIT responded by canceling the new account and blocking Swartz’ computer from accessing the MIT address by banning his MAC address, a unique identifier associated with his laptop.

Undeterred, Swartz tried again. This time he brought a new laptop and also spoofed the MAC address from his old one to circumvent the ban. Using the two latops and the program designed to circumvent JSTOR’s limits on downloading articles, he started to download a significant chunk of JSTOR’s database. A day or two later, JSTOR responded by blocking all of MIT’s access to JSTOR for a few days.

Again undeterred, Swartz came up with a different plan. Instead of trying to connect to the MIT network wirelessly, Swartz broke into a closet in the basement of a building at MIT and connected his computer directly to the network — hiding his computer under a box so no one would see it. Over a month or two period, he succeeded in downloading a major portion of JSTOR’s database.

Investigators were on to Swartz at this point, however. They installed a video camera in the closet to catch Swartz when he accessed the closet to swap out storage devices or retrieve his computer. Swartz was caught on camera, and he even seems to have realized that he was being filmed; at one point he was filmed entering the closet using his bicycle helmet as a mask to avoid being identified. (Here’s the picture.) Swartz was spotted on MIT’s campus soon after by the police and tried to run away, but he was then caught and arrested. Federal charges followed.

II. The Legal Charges Brought Against Swartz

The indictment against Swartz alleged several different crimes. A bunch of the crimes overlap, but that doesn’t mean that they are really treated separately: At sentencing the general practice is to take the most serious of the crimes as the basis for the sentence and to mostly ignore the rest. But the ordinary practice is to charge all the possible offenses committed in the indictment, even if they overlap, and then let the jury sort them out at trial or else drop some of the charges in a plea deal. Here are the different offenses charged, with a legal analysis of each.

(a) Wire Fraud. The Wire Fraud statute, 18 U.S.C. 1343, prohibits a scheme to gain “property” by false pretenses. This strikes me as a pretty strong charge here. The false pretenses are provided by the false identification and spoofing of Swartz’ IP address and MAC address. Swartz was trying to trick JSTOR into giving him access to their database after they had specifically tried their best to ban him from doing so. And the “property” was the contents of the JSTOR database itself.

Some might argue that the contents of the JSTOR database should not be considered “property.” But I think that’s a hard argument to make in light of United States v. Seidlitz, 589 F.2d 152 (4th Cir. 1978). In Seiditz, a former employee of a company named OSI used the username and passowrd of another employee of the company to login and try to download a text-editing program named WYLBUR used for business applications. Seidlitz argued that the program was not “property” because the WYLBUR program was widely used by different companies. But the court disagreed:

Even though software systems similar to OSI’s WYLBUR were in use at non-OSI facilities, the evidence that OSI invested substantial sums to modify the system to suit its peculiar needs, that OSI enjoyed a multi-million dollar competitive advantage because of WYLBUR, and that OSI took steps to prevent persons other than clients and employees from using the system permitted a finding that the pilfered data was the property of OSI and not, as the defendant contends, property in the public domain subject to appropriation by persons such as himself.

That reasoning seems to apply reasonably well to the JSTOR database, too. See also Carpenter v. United States, 484 U.S. 19 (1987) (recognizing a property right for purposes of federal fraud statutes for a business in confidentiality and use of information to appear in a forthcoming publication). It’s possible to argue that Seidlitz is distinguishable, but I think it’s an uphill battle.

(b) Computer Fraud. The next charges were brought under the Computer Fraud statute, 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(4), which is a close cousin of the Wire Fraud statute. The two are usually charged together in computer crime cases, and there isn’t really all that much that separates them that we need to dwell on here. So let’s move on to the next crime.

(c) Unauthorized Access. The next charge was unauthorized access to a computer to obtain information valued more than $5,000, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(2)(C) and 18 U.S.C. 1030(c)(2)(B)(iii). I think this charge was a fair one. There are two notable legal issues here. First, was the information valued at more than $5,000? The answer is clearly yes under the leading case of United States v. Batti, 631 F.3d 371 (6th Cir. 2011). Batti dealt with the $5,000 requirement in the context of a video that was difficult to value. The Sixth Circuit concluded that the $5,000 refers to the value of the information obtained, not any loss or harm to the alleged victim in the case. Further, the court authorized the following methodology when “information obtained by a violation of § 1030(c)(2)(B)(iii) does not have a readily ascertainable market value.” In such cases, the court held, “it is reasonable to use the cost of production as a means to determine the value of the information obtained.” Creating thousands of journals over many years obviously costs more than $5,000, so that element is easily satisfied.

The second issue is whether Swartz exceeded authorized access to the JSTOR computer. As regular readers know, I have been fighting overly broad readings of “unauthorized access” for well over a decade as a scholar, defense attorney, and op-ed writer. But I think it’s pretty clear that Swartz exceeded his authorized access here. JSTOR has a password-protected database that Swartz was trying to copy by circumventing code-based barriers to large-scale acces, and Swartz was playing a cat-and-mouse game in which he kept trying to gain access to the database and JSTOR kept trying to block him. They blocked his IP address; he changed it. They blocked his MAC address; he spoofed it. They blocked access and he broke into a restricted closet and connected directly to MIT’s network. This is not merely a case of breaching a written policy. Rather, this is a case of circumventing code-based restrictions by circumventing identification restrictions. I don’t see how that is particularly different from using someone else’s password, which is the quintessential access without authorization. So I think unauthorized access is established here, too.

(d) Computer Damage. The final charge brought was exceeding authorized access and thereby impairing the availability or integrity of information in ways that cause more than $5,000 or loss or involve more than 10 computers, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(5)(B) and 1030(c)(4)(A)(i)(I) & (VI). This is a plausible charge, although we’d need to know more details about the case to know if it is fully merited. I’ve already covered the elements of authorized access, so we can adopt that analysis above here and move on to the other elements.

To get to $5,000 in a 1030(a)(5) case, the easiest and most widely-accepted methodology in the caselaw is to focus on the time spent responding to the unauthorized access. Courts would generally just consider the hours spent by MIT and JSTOR in responding to Swartz and multiply those hours to get to an overall dollar figure. See, e.g., United States v. Middleton, 231 F.3d 1207 (9th Cir. 2000); United States v. Millot, 433 F.3d 1057 (8th Cir. 2006). It sounds like MIT and JSTOR spent a lot of dealing with Swartz. If so, the time alone should pretty quickly get up to and over the $5,000 threshold. So while we don’t know the facts in detail, that was probably enough.

The impairment of availability or integrity element would probably be satisfied, as well, although again we don’t have much in the way of needed detail to know for sure. The leading case here is Pulte Homes, Inc. v. Laborers’ International Union of North America, 648 F.3d 295 (6th Cir. 2011), which adopted a broad view of this requirement, holding that this is satisfied by “a transmission that weakens a sound computer system — or, similarly, one that diminishes a plaintiff’s ability to use data or a system.” The indictment alleges that Swartz’s conduct impaired the working of the JSTOR database but doesn’t give us much detail, so it’s hard to be sure. Also, DOJ might be able to use JSTOR’s decision to cut off access to JSTOR on MIT’s network as an impairment of availability on the network. But I think this is a bit of a stretch, for two reasons. First, it’s hard to know exactly where to place the responsibility for the impairment. Did Swartz cause it, or did JSTOR? And more significantly, does access to a particular service from some users really constitute an impairment of availability of the JSTOR computer itself? I’m not sure, but I’m wary of that argument. So the 1030(a)(5) charges are plausible, but we would need to know more facts to know for sure if they were justified.

III. Conclusion

My conclusion, at least based on what we know so far, is that the legal charges against Swartz were pretty much legit. Three of them are pretty strong; one is plausible but we would need to know more facts to be sure. Of course, there may have been reasons not to charge Swartz even though he had violated these statutes or to offer him a lenient plea. I’ll take on those questions in my next post. But to the extent we’re focused on just what the law is, I think that what Swartz was alleged to have done fits pretty well with the charges that were brought.

http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/

. . . .

is this a seemingly legitimate chronology of swartz's actions?

apparently a second post will follow at the site above.

[JackRiddler]

This case sickens and saddens me. I have a feeling that prosecutorial zeal for justice played little part in this case. It looks a lot more like bullying by power-mad sociopaths bent on forcing genius into submission and disgrace.

LilyPat

Yeah.

[parel]

Aaron Swartz on misogyny in technology

Phillip Lenssen: Can you give some examples of misogyny or racism?

Aaron Swartz: If you talk to any woman in the tech community, it won’t be long before they start telling you stories about disgusting, sexist things guys have said to them. It freaks them out; and rightly so. As a result, the only women you see in tech are those who are willing to put up with all the abuse. I really noticed this when I was at foo camp once, Tim O’Reilly’s exclusive gathering for the elite of the tech community. The executive guys there, when they thought nobody else was around, talked about how they always held important business meetings at strip clubs and the deficiencies of programmers from various countries. Meanwhile, foo camp itself had a session on discrimination in which it was explained to us that the real problem was not racism or sexism, but simply the fact that people like to hang out with others who are like themselves. The denial about this in the tech community is so great that sometimes I despair of it ever getting fixed. And I should be clear, it’s not that there are just some bad people out there who are being prejudiced and offensive. Many of these people that I’m thinking of are some of my best friends in the community. It’s an institutional problem, not a personal one.


Source:blogoscoped

[82_28]

^^ Yes, our country does quite horrific things to its gifted youth. I think of the thousands of high IQ kids who were ruined or killed in the programs. This case was another proto-fascist state attack on the intellectual class.

Yep. And we're still here. And will always be. Sorry ancient empire. The knowledge abides. We are just fucking vessels carrying something forward to one day, one day, destroy you and not become you. It could take billions of years. But we are just the contemporary iteration of what you are up against. We do not want to fight, we want to be. That's really fucking it, assholes.

[divideandconquer]

After reading the article at Naked Capitalism, I wonder if the powers that be were concerned about what might come out at trial, because it seems that Aaron was the consummate political activist. He was studying the current elitist power structure in order to bring it down. I read where he criticized Obama's "kill list" as well as other issues he was very vocal about.

[justdrew]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/westboro-baptist-church-aaron-swartz-anonymous_n_2479019.html

After the tragic suicide of Reddit co-founder and Internet activist Aaron Swartz, hacktivist group Anonymous vowed to derail picketing efforts by the hate-mongering members of the Westboro Baptist Church, who threatened to protest Swartz's funeral on Tuesday. When members of Anonymous and supporters showed up to block the WBC's picket line, the quasi-religious group was nowhere to be seen.

Westboro Baptist Church on Sunday announced plans to protest Swarz's open funeral in a press release titled "GOD H8S Cyber Criminal THUGS."

"Cyber criminals are the latest face of this nation's and this world's raging at God and His Servants at WBC," reads the Westboro press release, via Twitter account @WBCSays. "Now the gloves are off, cyber rebels! ... We will picket the funeral, the LORD willing, so that in that Great Day of His Wrath, your blood is not on our hands."

A crowd showed up to the funeral home in Highland Park, Ill., on Tuesday, willing to stand in the way of Westboro members to prevent them from getting close to the procession, according to a tweet sent from Anon-affiliated account @Anon2World. According to a tweet from Anonymous mouthpiece account @YourAnonNews, the WBC's lawyer contacted police to say that WBC would not be attending the funeral.

( more at link)

[divideandconquer]

This has got to be disinfo, right

I mean, I know Rense isn't to be trusted, but I will have to say this author asks some good questions, and the charges are absurd especially when you consider Aaron Swartz and MIT seemed to hold similar beliefs about open access on the Internet.

Was Aaron Swartz Killed By An MIT Satanic Child Porn Ring? By Yoichi Shimatsu
1-15-12

Let us start by dismissing the prosecution’s ludicrous charge that any programmer as talented as Aaron Swartz would dedicate his life to stealing an archive that dispenses its academic papers for a few dollars apiece to the public or for free to students under department accounts. MIT professors, who are so full of themselves, are the only ones who might take seriously such a fool’s errand as a worthy objective for the brilliant and rebellious Swartz or the law suit as the cause of his so-called “suicidal depression.”

The mass media have been fed, and eagerly swallowed, the unpalatable lies hurled against a courageous young man whose guilt lies solely in his disgust at the online filth from “respectable” Internet paragons who have deviously corrupted the morals of his generation. America’s leading center for computer science has unleashed a campaign of slander against Swartz, who cannot defend himself through the media or in the docket now that he is dead.

My personal regret is that he had to act alone without the guidance and support of those faraway people including myself who have been fighting against the same vile pedophile elite. In American society where tens of thousands of children disappear every year without any serious investigation or public concern, the young man assumed the burden of justice on his own and paid the ultimate price for it. Using the JSTOR issue as a mere cover for his covert investigation into MIT wrongdoing was an immature tactic, which now undercuts his reputation postmortem.

As a traditional journalist and editor, I have never before supported Anonymous and their hacking activity, but the untimely death of Swartz changes the rules of engagement. Striking at the nerve center of the military-corporate-pharmaco-porno complex is an ethical duty not a crime, one of few available means to defend constitutional law. To the morally reprobate professors and administrators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I say unequivocally: You have started a war that will end when you fall on your swords.

The Culprit is MIT not Swartz

No, it is not Aaron Swartz who should be on trial but that lofty institution of hired learning, MIT, which is responsible for the heinous crimes that led to his death. The risks taken on by Swartz, which so have threatened MIT, can be understood only through the issue of child porn as orchestrated and produced by its acclaimed professors and distributed to their wealthy and powerful sponsors. The MIT cyber-pimps cater to a clientele that includes the highest echelon of the State Department, major corporations, intelligence agencies, the military brass, and the White House.

Every element in the Swartz case indicates that he died in a heroic attempt to expose the perversion that has corrupted the hearts and minds of the global elite, a heinous and often murderous vice that traumatizes innocent children and threatens every family on this planet.

This exposition of the facts is a torturous path that leads from the hallowed ivy halls in Boston to the outskirts of Phnom Penh, where a world-famous professor arranged underage sexual services for visiting dignitaries and sent encrypted child porn via satellite to illicit databases on the MIT campus.

Nicholas Negroponte, you have no place to hide in Southeast Asia or Africa, not any longer. You are under watch and will be relentlessly tracked down, not just for child porn and pimping children but now as an accomplice to murder. Your only way out is to turn over the video files along with the entire list of names, and you had better do it sooner than later because the powerful pedophiles on that list are going to silence you to cover their own tracks.

A Telltale Security Tape

The security video that triggered hacker Aaron Swartz’s indictment, to the contrary, exposes the criminal activities of his adversaries at MIT in the events that led to his death by hanging.

Some highlights from that video clip include:

- his slim physique, a waist size of no more than 30 inches, a short length that makes it practically impossible to hang himself with a belt, as reported by the Brooklyn police.

- a bicycle helmet held up to cover his face, meaning Swartz was cognizant of the surveillance camera inside the computer-routing and wiring closet on the MIT campus. On an earlier entry into the closet he was videotaped without the helmet and must have noticed the hidden camera at that time.

- the steel rack stacked with routers and at least one server into which he had plugged a laptop for a download, which required an extraordinary amount of time, indicating that the content was high-quality video and not documents.

- his trespass was a physical “break in” or walk in, which indicates the targeted server could be accessed only via a dedicated line and not with a hack. A dedicated line indicates the transfer of illegal content to strong encryption.

MIT Has No Proprietary Right to JSTOR

The videotape of Swartz’s download led to the MIT complaint that spurred a federal prosecutor in Boston to indict him for pirating online journals distributed by JSTOR, a subscription-based electronic archive of scholarly papers. The charges are patently absurd.

Why would a so-called notorious hacker bother with redistributing journal articles that can be purchased at nominal cost or gained for free by students with a department account?

Unlike the Wikileaks trove of diplomatic cables, none of the papers are classified or contain state secrets.

Why didn’t he simply hack into the main JSTOR archive, whose files are accessible in bulk online from dozens of universities?

Swartz was a research fellow with the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, which also has an institutional account with JSTOR. Given his street cred and past associations, he could have easily found a webmaster with the password to the JSTOR server.

How can MIT, which is not the owner of the allegedly accessed material, file theft charges against him?

The JSTOR archive is not owned or based at MIT, as media reports suggest, but is registered at the Network Connections server farm in Herndon, Maryland. JSTOR is under the control of a nonprofit organization called ITHAKA, whose board of directors includes top university administrators and the W.W. Norton book publisher. The trespass (into a tiny closet) was done at MIT, but ITHAKA, the party with proprietary rights over the JSTOR intellectual property, does not appear as the chief plaintiff. (Analogy: Whenever a car is stolen from a parking lot, the car owner and not the car hop is supposed to file charges against the thief.)

MIT obviously has something to hide.

When Internet Vigilantism Becomes Necessary

The mass media attributes the alleged “suicide” by short belt to “depression” without conducting any investigation into why Swartz might have been depressed. Article after article also describes him as a “co-founder of reddit”, as if he was one of the principle partners who owned the bulletin board, which was later sold to Conde Nast and operated by its subsidiary Wired magazine. His employee stock option in the company is a normal practice in the tech start-up field.

Swartz complained about relocating to the San Francisco offices of Wired for a routine job that he dreaded. There was obviously more to his bleak mood at the corporate-run reddit. Since he was not estranged from his parents and had an intelligent and attractive girlfriend, his foul mood seems to have arisen from professional concerns.

What would a decent family-oriented youth find so disturbing about working at corporate-controlled reddit? The bulletin board had gained profitable notoriety for its sub-edit groups that promoted discussion and images on underage sex, snuff porn, violent rape of adolescent girls, incest and abusive language. The crudest reddit posts came from the Internet’s most disgusting troll, Violentacrez, who was later exposed as then 49-year-old Texas-based programmer Michael Brutsch, a former soldier with a wife and children.

Whenever a person of sound mind and intact morality tries to go against the child-porn rings that are hiding in plain sight on the Web, he or she learns hard lessons fast. The child-porn pimps are well-organized, highly maneuverable into new websites, massively funded and deeply connected to regulators and law enforcement. These demented monsters are capable of making vicious threats and meting out brutal revenge against their critics. Invariably, the child-porn providers get away to start up again. Only insignificant subscribers are ever arrested in FBI and police round-ups, indicating higher-up protection for the pedophile crime bosses.

Pedophiles at MIT Media Lab

The road from Boston ends outside Phnom Penh. From 2003 till 2009, I worked on-and-off in Cambodia with an international team of anti-pedophilia activists, who were volunteers and all of them fathers. The team came to Cambodia following up on a slew of leads, including photos of naked infants taken by Newsweek Tokyo bureau chief Bernard Krisher on display at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Hong Kong, a den of pedophiles connected with the Jimmy Savile case. Former British Governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patton is now widely suspected as a high-level protector of the satanic BBC rapist and his old-boy circle. The FCCHK canceled a rented room for an anti-pedophile seminar for which I was one of the invited speakers.

Lionized by CNN and TIME, Krisher is the publisher of the English-language Cambodia Daily, whose staff was hostile to our presence in Phnom Penh. Earlier, I had known of Krisher’s visits to North Korea, supposedly to provide food relief, when in fact he was visiting orphanages in the secretive dictatorship to select children for overseas “education”. In that same period, from the late 1980s throughout the 1990s, “Chinese” orphans were arriving at Boys Town in Nebraska, which became entangled in a scandal involving Senate pages supplied for underage sex services.

Foreign NGOs, including “child-protection” groups, were rabidly opposed to our team’s direct-action methods, which included supplying night-vision videocams to the Cambodian police for nighttime stakeouts outside the premises of known child-sex brothels. Anyone who thinks that habitual pedophiles can be stopped with billboards and television commercials has not a clue. On several occasions, I came close to fist fights to prevent foreign men from taking the motorcycle ride to the countryside outside Phnom Penh, where Vietnamese girls as young as 7 were being dolled up with make-up and offered to the highest bidder.

When two of our team members, Caucasian fellows, tried to walk up a road that led to an orphanage “helped” by Krisher (according to staff pocketed the donations), they were blocked by Cambodian policemen wielding submachine guns. We then met with American-educated parliamentarians, who supported our campaign but said our effort was near hopeless since Southeast Asian refugee children are preyed upon back in the USA, where law enforcement was supposedly less corrupt than in Cambodia.

A Royal Decree

After several foreign pedophiles were arrested and convicted on the basis of videotape evidence, the foreign community in Cambodia turned against our team in rage. Alarmed, diplomats at the embassies of the United States, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand and Japan launched investigations against our team members on any minor charge they could dig up in their home countries.

Meanwhile, the pedophile community was panicked because some of their members agreed to have a beer with our teammates to discuss the impact of the arrests. One employee of an NGO was murdered, and the blame was pinned on our resident team member, who later was brutally injured and nearly killed in a staged accident. The local politicians were starting to worry about the war inside the expat community.

Then, finally, the big break came, like the first storm that ends a dry season. Queen Monica, the wife of the late King Sihanouk, put the troubled orphanage under her royal protection. The Cambodian police shut down the orphanage’s satellite-link tower, which was being used to uplink child-porn videos and connect American pedophiles to their little sweethearts.

The teachers told me that computers and satellite communication system were installed and maintained by Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the MIT Media Lab. “Nick was a frequent visitor and one of the orphanage sponsors who arranged the weekend pajama parties in the city whenever foreign VIPs arrived,” a teacher told me. “Since he gave us the computer equipment, our staff was in no position to say no. The average age of the abused orphans was 10 years old.”

Following the royal intervention, Bernie Krisher flew into Thailand to attend the opening of another orphanage, where he got a tap on the shoulder from the national chief of police. He was told to leave on the next plane out of Cambodia. Professor Emeritus Negroponte, however, continues his duplicitous role in Asia and Africa due to his connections in the Ivy League and his wealthy donors. He lives on embezzled money and borrowed time. He’s due for permanent retirement.

One Laptop, One Child Abuse

The “One Laptop per Child” project was initiated by the MIT Media Lab founder, who is the brother of former UN ambassador and intelligence official John Negroponte. The Zionist brothers have family origins in the Jewish community of Greece.

A quick look at MIT Media Lab reveals some questionable characters at the helm.

- Negroponte’s major promoter and sidekick has been Steward Brand, who evolved from being a back-to-nature founder of the Whole Earth Catalog to a raving advocate of “nuclear power, genetic modification and geoengineering”. (Let’s hope he relocates to Fukushima where he can personally enjoy all three wondrous advances.)

- Walter Bender, founder of Sugar Labs, which developed the One Laptop per Child project’s XO-1 Children’s Machine, the communication tool of choice for pedophiles to communicate with their little brown lovers.

- Frank Moss, who was trained at the Technion Institute in Haifa, a center for the Israeli Defense Force’s cyberwarfare R&D projects. The Media Lab itself is heavily involved in military-related projects with the US Air Force, the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, the Army Research Office and Google, which is a high-tech contractor in artificial intelligence for DARPA.

- Joi Ito, who once ran a nightclub in Roppongi, Tokyo’s drug-peddling and prostitution district run by a yakuza boss whose interest lies in Caucasian models performing coprophilia and bondage, increasingly favorite video themes besides child porn among the American university technocrati. Since he never earned a higher degree, Ito’s main qualification is apparently his status as godson of Timothy Leary. For those who were/are too stoned to comprehend political reality, Leary began his drug experimentation as a psychologist for the MK-ULTRA mind-control program and became a proselytizer of hallucinogens under a CIA psy-op campaign to disable the antiwar movement.

MIT Media Lab is yet another spin-off from the all-powerful MK-ULTRA and DARPA. No wonder it’s been producing child porn and involved in overseas pedophilia. The One Laptop program is a clever vehicle to provide early sex education to children across impoverished Asia and Africa who have yet to reach pubescence.

A Disturbing Pattern

As in the campaign of character assassination that led to the downfall of Eliot Spitzer, the assault on Aaron Swartz is another example of a crusading American Jewish individual being persecuted, punished and likely executed by their Zionist “brethren”. Swartz’s death by hanging is a microcosm of the sort of brutal mafia enforcement within the Jewish “community”, which unfortunately has gone nearly unreported in the Zionist-controlled media.

Swartz was a research fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, which is based at Harvard and in Israel. This much-needed program was organized by Lily Safra, the plucky spouse of a Syrian Jewish banker who died in a mysterious arson on his mansion in Monaco. The Brazilian-born widow later survived her own ordeal of false accusations of murder from a transsexual novelist, writing apparently on behalf of the actual perpetrators.

Edmond Safra was a banker for the Aleppo Jewish community, which over the millennia has been renowned for scholarship and good relations with Muslim and Christian neighbors. The Aleppo synagogue, until its destruction by Arab rioters enraged at the declaration of Israeli statehood in 1949, was the center of traditionalist Sephardic moral resistance to the secular, authoritarian and Eurocentric Zionists led by the Rothschild clan.

The Zionist killing of dissenting Jews was a policy of the Haganah militia. The newborn Israeli state, under President Yitzak Ben-Zvi, a leader of the Rothschild-backed Haganah, ordered the extrajudicial execution of outspoken Dutch Jewish activist Jacob de Haan, who proposed that Jews should support a non-religious state of Palestine shared with Arabs, instead of endorsing the bigotry of a separatist entity. The Israeli propagandists have since vilified the victim’s anti-Zionist views as arising from a homosexual attraction to Arab men. How low into the gutter can they stoop?

To conduct ethnological studies on Near Eastern Jews with the aim of gaining their submission to Zionist authority, Ben-Zvi ordered the Aleppo community, which was one of the longest established Jewish cultural centers, to surrender its Aleppo Codex, the most accurate manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. Despite opposition from the scholars of Aleppo, the Codex was delivered to Tel Aviv. The teachings of Moses, known as the Torah, were missing, however, and probably for good reason.

The Aleppo Torah is critically important to the traditionalists because the Mosaic perspective affirms the God-ordained role of the Jews as a stateless people guided by prophets and not subjects of worldly rulers, especially their own. Obviously, the Syrian Jewish scholars were worried about the possibility of an alteration of the text to support the statehood claims of modern Zionism. The fact that the ancient city of Aleppo is now being leveled to the ground is no fluke of history, it is the inevitable consequence of the systematic destruction of the Mideast by Zionist ambitions.

There is a moral parallel between the resistance of the Aleppo scholars with the life and death of Aaron Swartz, a young American Jew who dared to stand against the degraded and dumbed-down mass culture of corporate-controlled Internet, which should have been a realm of free inquiry and serious thinking. It is recurrent tragedy that the Jewish people so rarely stand by their prophets and instead bow down before tycoons and tyrants. Then and now, from the Egyptian tribulations to the destruction of the peaceful Sephardic Jewish communities and today’s fabrications from MIT, truth is being trampled on while decadence, deceit and corruption thrive.

In Memory of Sean Parlaman

One does not have to be a Jewish scapegoat to suffer character assassination and false charges. Another young American, Sean Parlaman, who “fell” from a high-rise window in Pattaya, Thailand, in 2002, was the leading anti-pedophile activist of his generation. Like Swartz, he was falsely accused by his foes, in his case with the preposterous charge of engaging in sex with an underage police informer he had met in a jail cell. Soon thereafter, the notoriously corrupt Pattaya police came to serve him with an arrest warrant, and it was they who reported that he had leapt out a window to his death.

While facing death threats and vilification from the entrenched foreign pedophile network in Thailand (his Wikipedia biography is pure slander written by the perverts), Parlaman started investigating child-trafficking across the Burma border. Along that militarized frontier, the Mossad and CIA under the cover of refugee aid programs have continuously smuggled in weapons and explosives, used for killing civilians in Myanmar, in exchange for opium and children. It is an injustice indeed that Sean did not live to see the 2009 police arrest of the politically connected second-generation Baptist missionary Robert Moss, aka Bobby Morse, on charges of sex with preteen tribal girls. At least, Parlaman is vindicated.

The pedophiles have been able to abduct, abuse and sometimes murder children across Southeast Asia because of protection from U.S. embassies in the region. The unofficial but widely recognized dean of the criminalized diplomats is Ralph “Skip” Boyce, former ambassador to Jakarta and later to Bangkok. It was during his tenure in Thailand that Negroponte and Krisher set up shop in neighboring Cambodia. It was earlier during his years in Indonesia that the skeletal remains of more 50 boys were discovered inside a cave in Bali. Anti-pedophile activist call him Ralphie Boyz. This sorry excuse for an ambassador later left diplomatic service to head Boeing in Southeast Asia, a region known for kickbacks in military and civilian aircraft sales.

Once upon a time a dedicated American activist in Thailand and now a bright kid on the East Coast, it is always the decent idealists who die too young, their legacy disparaged. Even though the culprits find shelter behind the ivory tower of MIT or the protective gates of a permissive State Department, the pedophiles will be brought to justice, one way or the other. For the children to live, the predators must be destroyed.

Yoichi Shimatsu, former editor of the Japan Times Weekly, is a science journalist based in Hong Kong.

http://rense.com/general95/swartz.html