Aaron Swartz

[JackRiddler]

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Democracy Now! on Monday devoted the full hour to the life and death of Aaron Swartz. Extremely worthwhile and important viewing/listening.

In the first part, an interview with a grieving Lawrence Lessig... who in a just and rational world, by the way, would be Secretary of Commerce.

Video: http://dncdn.dvlabs.com/ipod/dn2013-0114.mp4

Audio: http://traffic.libsyn.com/democracynow/ ... 0114-1.mp3 (actually my preference with DN)

Main link - go give them a hit!!! Also many links to prior stories about SOPA-PIPA, Lessig's blog, and so on.
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/1/14/a ... _remembers

Monday, January 14, 2013
"An Incredible Soul": Larry Lessig Remembers Aaron Swartz After Cyberactivist’s Suicide Before Trial; Parents Blame Prosecutor

Guest: Lawrence Lessig, Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. He was a longtime mentor and friend of Aaron Swartz, whom he knew for 12 years.

AMY GOODMAN: We spend today’s broadcast remembering the life and work of cyber activist, computer programmer, social justice activist and writer, Aaron Swartz. At the age of 14, he co-developed the Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, web protocol, the key component of much of the web’s entire publishing infrastructure. By the time he was 19, he had co-founded a company that would merge with Reddit, now one of the world’s most popular sites. He also helped develop the architecture for the Creative Commons licensing system and built the online architecture for the Open Library. Aaron Swartz committed suicide on Friday. He hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment. He was 26 years old.

His death occurred just weeks before he was to go on trial for using computers at MIT—that’s the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—to download millions of copyrighted academic articles from JSTOR, a subscription database of scholarly papers. JSTOR declined to press charges, but prosecutors moved the case forward. Aaron Swartz faced up to 35 years in prison and a million dollars in fines for allegedly violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. When the case first came to light, the United States attorney for the District of Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz, said, quote, "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars."

In a statement, Swartz’s family criticized federal prosecutors pursuing the case against him. They said, quote, "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 MIT contributed to his death," they said. On Sunday, MIT President Rafael Reif said the university will conduct an internal investigation into the school’s role in Swartz’s death.

Aaron Swartz was a longtime champion of an open Internet. Last year, he helped organize a grassroots movement to defeat a House bill called SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and a Senate bill called PIPA, the PROTECT IP Act. During a speech he delivered last May in Washington D.C., he explained the challenges he saw the Internet facing.

AARON SWARTZ: There’s a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands. Is sharing a video on BitTorrent like shoplifting from a movie store? Or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend? Is reloading a webpage over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in or a violent smashing of shop windows? Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech or like the freedom to murder?

AMY GOODMAN: Later in the broadcast, we’ll play that full speech. That was Aaron Swartz speaking in May of last year. Well, he took his own life on Friday. A funeral will be held in Chicago on Tuesday.

For more, we now go to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Harvard Kennedy School of Government to speak with Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, the director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. He knew Aaron for 12 years. He was a friend and mentor. Lawrence Lessig is a founding board member of Creative Commons.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Professor Lessig. Tell us about Aaron.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Well, thank you. Thank you, Amy, for having me here to talk about this incredible, incredible soul.

You know, I think the thing to remember about Aaron is that from the youngest age, from the age of 12, his work has been—his work was dedicated solely to making the world a better place for the ideas that he had. He started with the idea that maybe we needed to make the Internet easier to share information, so that’s what led to RSS. And then, with Creative Commons, it was: How do we license people to make the freedom to share legally protected? And then, after that, it was with the public library: How do we make books available? And when that wasn’t enough, he started pushing in the social activist and progressive space, first with working with Stephanie Taylor and Adam Green at the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and then with his own Demand Progress with David Segal. In all of these areas, what he was doing was advancing ideals. He was an idealist who believed we had to live up to something better, and he was an incredible soul, an incredible soul who inspired millions who now weep, as we’ve seen across the Internet, in outrage and devastation that he would have been driven to the cliff that he stepped over.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what the case against Aaron was? Explain what happened.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Well, I have to be very careful, because when Aaron was arrested, he came to me, and I—there was a period of time where I acted as his lawyer. So, I know more about the case than I’m able to talk about.

But here’s what was alleged. Aaron was stopped as he left MIT. He had a computer in his possession, which there was tape that indicated that he had connected the computer to a server—to a closet in MIT, and the allegation was he had downloaded a significant portion of JSTOR. Now, JSTOR is a nonprofit website that has been for—since about 1996, has been trying to build an archive of online—giving online access to academic journal articles, you know, like the Harvard Law Review or journal articles from geography from the 1900s. It’s an extraordinary library of information. And the claim was Aaron had downloaded a significant portion of that. And the question, the obvious question that was in everybody’s mind, was: Why? What was he doing this for? And so, the Cambridge police arrested Aaron.

JSTOR said, "We don’t want to prosecute. We don’t want to civilly prosecute. We don’t want you to criminally prosecute." But MIT was not as clear. And the federal government—remember, at the time, there was the Bradley Manning and the WikiLeaks issue going on. The federal government thought it was really important to make—make an example. And so, they brought this incredibly ridiculous prosecution that had multiple—you know, I think it was something like more than—more than a dozen counts claiming felony violations against Aaron, threatening, you know, scores of years in prison. But, you know, it’s not the theoretical claims about what he might have gotten; it was the practical burden that for the last two years, you know, his wealth was bled dry as he had to negotiate to try to finally settle this matter, because the government was not going to stop before he admitted that he was a felon, which I think, you know, in a world where the architects of the financial crisis dine regularly at the White House, it’s ridiculous to think Aaron Swartz was a felon.

AMY GOODMAN: What was the scene where he was arrested? He was riding his bicycle?

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Yeah. You know, this is part of the incredibly ridiculous propaganda that the government put out. They released these, you know, badly taken—because it was basically just a security camera—images of Aaron and suggested that what Aaron was doing was hiding his face and he was trying to evade—to evade detection. All he was doing was walking out of MIT with his bike helmet attached to his backpack. And the image was, you know, just of the guy who had just previously been in MIT, using their network, leaving.

Now, you know, we have to keep this in context. MIT, for most of its history, has been a celebrator of open access to information. Indeed, the policy of MIT, at least most people thought, allowed anybody who was on the campus to have access to information on the campus. MIT houses Richard Stallman, the founder of the free software movement, who has celebrated and defended MIT many, many times for their beliefs. And so, you know, a lot of people just wondered, what was MIT doing here?

Now, you know, I think we have to—we have to say—I criticized MIT very strongly in a blog post that I posted called "Prosecutor as Bully," because of what they did before Aaron died, because of their refusal to recognize the craziness of what the federal government was doing and to stop it by saying, "We don’t prosecution here, and you should stop prosecution." MIT should have done that, and they didn’t. But what MIT has done on Sunday, I think, is extraordinarily important. By appointing Hal Abelson, who I think is the best possible person in the world to look at what MIT did and to report back about whether it was right or wrong, I think MIT has taken an important step to acknowledge—to acknowledge the wrong in what happened here. And we’ll see what Hal Abelson says when he looks at it and reports back.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break, and when we come back, we’re going to read that statement of MIT and also the statement of JSTOR, that didn’t want Aaron Swartz prosecuted, the company, the nonprofit, that ran this document archive that he was downloading, that ultimately is releasing it all to the public anyway. And we’ll read the comments of his parents. Ultimately today, we’ll play the speech that Aaron Swartz gave last year about freedom to connect. This is Democracy Now! Back in a moment.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We are doing today’s broadcast about the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old cyber activist, social justice activist, co-founder of Reddit. He developed RSS when he was 14 years old. Our guest today is Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, his mentor, his friend for many years, speaking to us from Harvard. I’m Amy Godman.

Over the weekend, Aaron’s family released this statement. They said, quote, "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 MIT contributed to his death."

MIT also released a statement, and I’d like to read that here. On Sunday, we reached out to MIT for comment. This is part of the statement the MIT president, Rafael Reif, sent to the MIT community regarding Aaron’s death. He wrote, quote, "I will not attempt to summarize here the complex events of the past two years. Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT. I have asked Professor Hal Abelson to lead a thorough analysis of MIT’s involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present. I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made, in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took. I will share the report with the MIT community when I receive it."

I also want to read the statement of JSTOR. That’s the nonprofit that is the archive of all of the documents that Aaron was downloading. Over the weekend, JSTOR expressed deep condolences to the Swartz family and maintained the case had been instigated by the U.S. attorney’s office. They wrote, quote, "The case is one that we ourselves had regretted being drawn into from the outset, since JSTOR’s mission is to foster widespread access to the world’s body of scholarly knowledge. At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in the world, we must be careful stewards of the information entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that content. To that end, Aaron returned the data he had in his possession and JSTOR settled any civil claims we might have had against him in June 2011."

And now I want to play a comment of Aaron Swartz himself about JSTOR, about these documents. This was a comment made by Aaron Swartz at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in October of 2010. He spoke about JSTOR.

AARON SWARTZ: I am going to give you one example of something not as big as saving Congress, but something important that you can do right here at your own school. It just requires you willing to get your shoes a little bit muddy. By virtue of being students at a major U.S. university, I assume that you have access to a wide variety of scholarly journals. Pretty much every major university in the United States pays these sort of licensing fees to organizations like JSTOR and Thomson and ISI to get access to scholarly journals that the rest of the world can’t read. And these licensing fees are substantial. And they’re so substantial that people who are studying in India, instead of studying in the United States, don’t have this kind of access. They’re locked out from all of these journals. They’re locked out from our entire scientific legacy. I mean, a lot of these journal articles, they go back to the Enlightenment. Every time someone has written down a scientific paper, it’s been scanned and digitized and put in these collections.

That is a legacy that has been brought to us by the history of people doing interesting work, the history of scientists. It’s a legacy that should belong to us as a commons, as a people, but instead it’s been locked up and put online by a handful of for-profit corporations who then try and get the maximum profit they can out of it. Now, there are people, good people, trying to change this with the open access movement. So, all journals, going forward, they’re encouraging them to publish their work as open access, so open on the Internet, available for download by everybody, available for free copying, and perhaps even modification with attribution and notice.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Aaron Swartz speaking, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, October 2010, about JSTOR. That was before he was arrested. Professor Lawrence Lessig, the significance of what Aaron was dedicating his life to, before we move on to the speech that he gave last year to play in full?

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Yeah, he was dedicating his life to building a world, a nation at least, but a world that was as idealistic as he was. And he was impatient with us, and he was disappointed with us, with all of us, as we moved through this fight. And he—as he grew impatient, he called on people to do more. And it is incredibly hard for all of us who were close to him to accept the recognition that maybe if we had done more, maybe if we had done more, this wouldn’t have seemed so bleak to him, maybe if we had stopped this prosecution.

I received an email from JSTOR four days before Aaron died, from the president of JSTOR, announcing, celebrating that JSTOR was going to release all of these journal articles to anybody around the world who wanted access—exactly what Aaron was fighting for. And I didn’t have time to send it to Aaron; I was on—I was traveling. But I looked forward to seeing him again—I had just seen him the week before—and celebrating that this is what had happened. So, all of us think there are a thousand things we could have done, a thousand things we could have done, and we have to do, because Aaron Swartz is now an icon, an ideal. He is what we will be fighting for, all of us, for the rest of our lives.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Lessig, on November 27, 2007, Aaron blogged about his depressed mood. He said, "Surely there have been times when you’ve been sad. Perhaps a loved one has abandoned you or a plan has gone horribly awry. Your face falls. Perhaps you cry. You feel worthless. You wonder whether it’s worth going on. Everything you think about seems bleak—the things you’ve done, the things you hope to do, the people around you. You want to lie in bed and keep the lights off. Depressed mood is like that, only it doesn’t come for any reason and it doesn’t go for any either." What about Aaron’s state of mind, how he kept up his spirits, especially during this very, very difficult time, also struggling with depression?

LAWRENCE LESSIG: Yeah, Aaron was depressed. He was rationally depressed. You know, he was losing everything, because his government was overreaching in the most ridiculous way to persecute him, not just because of this, but because of what he had done before, liberating government documents that were supposed to be in the public domain. Of course he was depressed. He wasn’t depressed because he had no loving parents—he did have loving parents who did everything they could for him—or because he didn’t have loving friends. Every time you saw Aaron, he was surrounded by five or 10 different people who loved and respected and worked with him. He was depressed because he was increasingly recognizing that the idealism he brought to this fight maybe wasn’t enough. When he saw all of his wealth gone, and he recognized his parents were going to have to mortgage their house so he could afford a lawyer to fight a government that treated him as if he were a 9/11 terrorist, as if what he was doing was threatening the infrastructure of the United States, when he saw that and he recognized how—how incredibly difficult that fight was going to be, of course he was depressed.

Now, you know, I’m not a psychiatrist. I don’t know whether there was something wrong with him because of—you know, beyond the rational reason he had to be depressed, but I don’t—I don’t—I don’t have patience for people who want to say, "Oh, this was just a crazy person; this was just a person with a psychological problem who killed himself." No. This was somebody—this was somebody who was pushed to the edge by what I think of as a kind of bullying by our government. A bullying by our government. And just as we hold people responsible when their bullying leads to tragedy, I hope Carmen Ortiz does what MIT did and hold—

AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. attorney.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: The U.S. attorney—and lead an investigation, ask somebody independent to look at what happened here and explain to America: Is this what the United States government is?

[JackRiddler]

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The second part of Monday's DN broadcast was the full record of a speech about the anti-SOPA campaign delivered by Aaron Swartz at last year's Freedom to Connect conference in Washington, DC.

Video http://dncdn.dvlabs.com/ipod/dn2013-0114.mp4
Audio http://traffic.libsyn.com/democracynow/ ... 0114-1.mp3
Transcript http://www.democracynow.org/2013/1/14/f ... wartz_1986

Freedom to Connect: Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) on Victory to Save Open Internet, Fight Online Censors

Guest:

Aaron Swartz, cyber activist who took his own life on Friday at the age of 26, speaking in May 2012 at the Freedom to Connect conference in Washington, D.C.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Lessig, we want to end with the words of Aaron himself. And we’re not going to go to our second break—I want to warn all our stations—because—in order to fit in this whole speech. This is a speech that Aaron Swartz gave, the cyber activist, computer programmer, who took his life on Friday, speaking last May about the battle to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA.

AARON SWARTZ: So, for me, it all started with a phone call. It was September—not last year, but the year before that, September 2010. And I got a phone call from my friend Peter. "Aaron," he said, "there’s an amazing bill that you have to take a look at." "What is it?" I said. "It’s called COICA, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeiting Act." "But, Peter," I said, "I don’t care about copyright law. Maybe you’re right. Maybe Hollywood is right. But either way, what’s the big deal? I’m not going to waste my life fighting over a little issue like copyright. Healthcare, financial reform—those are the issues that I work on, not something obscure like copyright law." I could hear Peter grumbling in the background. "Look, I don’t have time to argue with you," he said, "but it doesn’t matter for right now, because this isn’t a bill about copyright." "It’s not?" "No," he said. "It’s a bill about the freedom to connect." Now I was listening.

Peter explained what you’ve all probably long since learned, that this bill would let the government devise a list of websites that Americans weren’t allowed to visit. On the next day, I came up with lots of ways to try to explain this to people. I said it was a great firewall of America. I said it was an Internet black list. I said it was online censorship. But I think it’s worth taking a step back, putting aside all the rhetoric and just thinking for a moment about how radical this bill really was. Sure, there are lots of times when the government makes rules about speech. If you slander a private figure, if you buy a television ad that lies to people, if you have a wild party that plays booming music all night, in all these cases, the government can come stop you. But this was something radically different. It wasn’t the government went to people and asked them to take down particular material that was illegal; it shut down whole websites. Essentially, it stopped Americans from communicating entirely with certain groups. There’s nothing really like it in U.S. law. If you play loud music all night, the government doesn’t slap you with an order requiring you be mute for the next couple weeks. They don’t say nobody can make any more noise inside your house. There’s a specific complaint, which they ask you to specifically remedy, and then your life goes on.

The closest example I could find was a case where the government was at war with an adult bookstore. The place kept selling pornography; the government kept getting the porn declared illegal. And then, frustrated, they decided to shut the whole bookstore down. But even that was eventually declared unconstitutional, a violation of the First Amendment.

So, you might say, surely COICA would get declared unconstitutional, as well. But I knew that the Supreme Court had a blind spot around the First Amendment, more than anything else, more than slander or libel, more than pornography, more even than child pornography. Their blind spot was copyright. When it came to copyright, it was like the part of the justices’ brains shut off, and they just totally forgot about the First Amendment. You got the sense that, deep down, they didn’t even think the First Amendment applied when copyright was at issue, which means that if you did want to censor the Internet, if you wanted to come up with some way that the government could shut down access to particular websites, this bill might be the only way to do it. If it was about pornography, it probably would get overturned by courts, just like the adult bookstore case. But if you claimed it was about copyright, it might just sneak through.

And that was especially terrifying, because, as you know, because copyright is everywhere. If you want to shut down WikiLeaks, it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that you’re doing it because they have too much pornography, but it’s not hard at all to claim that WikiLeaks is violating copyright, because everything is copyrighted. This speech, you know, the thing I’m giving right now, these words are copyrighted. And it’s so easy to accidentally copy something, so easy, in fact, that the leading Republican supporter of COICA, Orrin Hatch, had illegally copied a bunch of code into his own Senate website. So if even Orrin Hatch’s Senate website was found to be violating copyright law, what’s the chance that they wouldn’t find something they could pin on any of us?

There’s a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands. Is sharing a video on BitTorrent like shoplifting from a movie store? Or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend? Is reloading a webpage over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in or a violent smashing of shop windows? Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech or like the freedom to murder?

This bill would be a huge, potentially permanent, loss. If we lost the ability to communicate with each other over the Internet, it would be a change to the Bill of Rights. The freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution, the freedoms our country had been built on, would be suddenly deleted. New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out fundamental rights we had always taken for granted. And I realized that day, talking to Peter, that I couldn’t let that happen.

But it was going to happen. The bill, COICA, was introduced on September 20th, 2010, a Monday, and in the press release heralding the introduction of this bill, way at the bottom, it was scheduled for a vote on September 23rd, just three days later. And while, of course, there had to be a vote—you can’t pass a bill without a vote—the results of that vote were already a foregone conclusion, because if you looked at the introduction of the law, it wasn’t just introduced by one rogue eccentric member of Congress; it was introduced by the chair of the Judiciary Committee and co-sponsored by nearly all the other members, Republicans and Democrats. So, yes, there’d be a vote, but it wouldn’t be much of a surprise, because nearly everyone who was voting had signed their name to the bill before it was even introduced.

Now, I can’t stress how unusual this is. This is emphatically not how Congress works. I’m not talking about how Congress should work, the way you see on Schoolhouse Rock. I mean, this is not the way Congress actually works. I mean, I think we all know Congress is a dead zone of deadlock and dysfunction. There are months of debates and horse trading and hearings and stall tactics. I mean, you know, first you’re supposed to announce that you’re going to hold hearings on a problem, and then days of experts talking about the issue, and then you propose a possible solution, you bring the experts back for their thoughts on that, and then other members have different solutions, and they propose those, and you spend of bunch of time debating, and there’s a bunch of trading, they get members over to your cause. And finally, you spend hours talking one on one with the different people in the debate, try and come back with some sort of compromise, which you hash out in endless backroom meetings. And then, when that’s all done, you take that, and you go through it line by line in public to see if anyone has any objections or wants to make any changes. And then you have the vote. It’s a painful, arduous process. You don’t just introduce a bill on Monday and then pass it unanimously a couple days later. That just doesn’t happen in Congress.

But this time, it was going to happen. And it wasn’t because there were no disagreements on the issue. There are always disagreements. Some senators thought the bill was much too weak and needed to be stronger: As it was introduced, the bill only allowed the government to shut down websites, and these senators, they wanted any company in the world to have the power to get a website shut down. Other senators thought it was a drop too strong. But somehow, in the kind of thing you never see in Washington, they had all managed to put their personal differences aside to come together and support one bill they were persuaded they could all live with: a bill that would censor the Internet. And when I saw this, I realized: Whoever was behind this was good.

Now, the typical way you make good things happen in Washington is you find a bunch of wealthy companies who agree with you. Social Security didn’t get passed because some brave politicians decided their good conscience couldn’t possibly let old people die starving in the streets. I mean, are you kidding me? Social Security got passed because John D. Rockefeller was sick of having to take money out of his profits to pay for his workers’ pension funds. Why do that, when you can just let the government take money from the workers? Now, my point is not that Social Security is a bad thing—I think it’s fantastic. It’s just that the way you get the government to do fantastic things is you find a big company willing to back them. The problem is, of course, that big companies aren’t really huge fans of civil liberties. You know, it’s not that they’re against them; it’s just there’s not much money in it.

Now, if you’ve been reading the press, you probably didn’t hear this part of the story. As Hollywood has been telling it, the great, good copyright bill they were pushing was stopped by the evil Internet companies who make millions of dollars off of copyright infringement. But it just—it really wasn’t true. I mean, I was in there, in the meetings with the Internet companies—actually probably all here today. And, you know, if all their profits depended on copyright infringement, they would have put a lot more money into changing copyright law. The fact is, the big Internet companies, they would do just fine if this bill passed. I mean, they wouldn’t be thrilled about it, but I doubt they would even have a noticeable dip in their stock price. So they were against it, but they were against it, like the rest of us, on grounds primarily of principle. And principle doesn’t have a lot of money in the budget to spend on lobbyists. So they were practical about it. "Look," they said, "this bill is going to pass. In fact, it’s probably going to pass unanimously. As much as we try, this is not a train we’re going to be able to stop. So, we’re not going to support it—we couldn’t support it. But in opposition, let’s just try and make it better." So that was the strategy: lobby to make the bill better. They had lists of changes that would make the bill less obnoxious or less expensive for them, or whatever. But the fact remained at the end of the day, it was going to be a bill that was going to censor the Internet, and there was nothing we could do to stop it.

So I did what you always do when you’re a little guy facing a terrible future with long odds and little hope of success: I started an online petition. I called all my friends, and we stayed up all night setting up a website for this new group, Demand Progress, with an online petition opposing this noxious bill, and I sent it to a few friends. Now, I’ve done a few online petitions before. I’ve worked at some of the biggest groups in the world that do online petitions. I’ve written a ton of them and read even more. But I’ve never seen anything like this. Starting from literally nothing, we went to 10,000 signers, then 100,000 signers, and then 200,000 signers and 300,000 signers, in just a couple of weeks. And it wasn’t just signing a name. We asked those people to call Congress, to call urgently. There was a vote coming up this week, in just a couple days, and we had to stop it. And at the same time, we told the press about it, about this incredible online petition that was taking off. And we met with the staff of members of Congress and pleaded with them to withdraw their support for the bill. I mean, it was amazing. It was huge. The power of the Internet rose up in force against this bill. And then it passed unanimously.

Now, to be fair, several of the members gave nice speeches before casting their vote, and in their speeches they said their office had been overwhelmed with comments about the First Amendment concerns behind this bill, comments that had them very worried, so worried, in fact, they weren’t sure that they still supported the bill. But even though they didn’t support it, they were going to vote for it anyway, they said, because they needed to keep the process moving, and they were sure any problems that were had with it could be fixed later. So, I’m going to ask you, does this sound like Washington, D.C., to you? Since when do members of Congress vote for things that they oppose just to keep the process moving? I mean, whoever was behind this was good.

And then, suddenly, the process stopped. Senator Ron Wyden, the Democrat from Oregon, put a hold on the bill. Giving a speech in which he called it a nuclear bunker-buster bomb aimed at the Internet, he announced he would not allow it to pass without changes. And as you may know, a single senator can’t actually stop a bill by themselves, but they can delay it. By objecting to a bill, they can demand Congress spend a bunch of time debating it before getting it passed. And Senator Wyden did. He bought us time—a lot of time, as it turned out. His delay held all the way through the end of that session of Congress, so that when the bill came back, it had to start all over again. And since they were starting all over again, they figured, why not give it a new name? And that’s when it began being called PIPA, and eventually SOPA.

So there was probably a year or two of delay there. And in retrospect, we used that time to lay the groundwork for what came later. But that’s not what it felt like at the time. At the time, it felt like we were going around telling people that these bills were awful, and in return, they told us that they thought we were crazy. I mean, we were kids wandering around waving our arms about how the government was going to censor the Internet. It does sound a little crazy. You can ask Larry tomorrow. I was constantly telling him what was going on, trying to get him involved, and I’m pretty sure he just thought I was exaggerating. Even I began to doubt myself. It was a rough period. But when the bill came back and started moving again, suddenly all the work we had done started coming together. All the folks we talked to about it suddenly began getting really involved and getting others involved. Everything started snowballing. It happened so fast.

I remember there was one week where I was having dinner with a friend in the technology industry, and he asked what I worked on, and I told him about this bill. And he said, "Wow! You need to tell people about that." And I just groaned. And then, just a few weeks later, I remember I was chatting with this cute girl on the subway, and she wasn’t in technology at all, but when she heard that I was, she turned to me very seriously and said, "You know, we have to stop 'SOAP.'" So, progress, right?

But, you know, I think that story illustrates what happened during those couple weeks, because the reason we won wasn’t because I was working on it or Reddit was working on it or Google was working on it or Tumblr or any other particular person. It was because there was this enormous mental shift in our industry. Everyone was thinking of ways they could help, often really clever, ingenious ways. People made videos. They made infographics. They started PACs. They designed ads. They bought billboards. They wrote news stories. They held meetings. Everybody saw it as their responsibility to help. I remember at one point during this period I held a meeting with a bunch of startups in New York, trying to encourage everyone to get involved, and I felt a bit like I was hosting one of these Clinton Global Initiative meetings, where I got to turn to every startup in the—every startup founder in the room and be like, "What are you going to do? And what are you going to do?" And everyone was trying to one-up each other.

If there was one day the shift crystallized, I think it was the day of the hearings on SOPA in the House, the day we got that phrase, "It’s no longer OK not to understand how the Internet works." There was just something about watching those clueless members of Congress debate the bill, watching them insist they could regulate the Internet and a bunch of nerds couldn’t possibly stop them. They really brought it home for people that this was happening, that Congress was going to break the Internet, and it just didn’t care.

I remember when this moment first hit me. I was at an event, and I was talking, and I got introduced to a U.S. senator, one of the strongest proponents of the original COICA bill, in fact. And I asked him why, despite being such a progressive, despite giving a speech in favor of civil liberties, why he was supporting a bill that would censor the Internet. And, you know, that typical politician smile he had suddenly faded from his face, and his eyes started burning this fiery red. And he started shouting at me, said, "Those people on the Internet, they think they can get away with anything! They think they can just put anything up there, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them! They put up everything! They put up our nuclear missiles, and they just laugh at us! Well, we’re going to show them! There’s got to be laws on the Internet! It’s got to be under control!"

Now, as far as I know, nobody has ever put up the U.S.'s nuclear missiles on the Internet. I mean, it's not something I’ve heard about. But that’s sort of the point. He wasn’t having a rational concern, right? It was this irrational fear that things were out of control. Here was this man, a United States senator, and those people on the Internet, they were just mocking him. They had to be brought under control. Things had to be under control. And I think that was the attitude of Congress. And just as seeing that fire in that senator’s eyes scared me, I think those hearings scared a lot of people. They saw this wasn’t the attitude of a thoughtful government trying to resolve trade-offs in order to best represent its citizens. This was more like the attitude of a tyrant. And so the citizens fought back.

The wheels came off the bus pretty quickly after that hearing. First the Republican senators pulled out, and then the White House issued a statement opposing the bill, and then the Democrats, left all alone out there, announced they were putting the bill on hold so they could have a few further discussions before the official vote. And that was when, as hard as it was for me to believe, after all this, we had won. The thing that everyone said was impossible, that some of the biggest companies in the world had written off as kind of a pipe dream, had happened. We did it. We won.

And then we started rubbing it in. You all know what happened next. Wikipedia went black. Reddit went black. Craigslist went black. The phone lines on Capitol Hill flat-out melted. Members of Congress started rushing to issue statements retracting their support for the bill that they were promoting just a couple days ago. And it was just ridiculous. I mean, there’s a chart from the time that captures it pretty well. It says something like "January 14th" on one side and has this big, long list of names supporting the bill, and then just a few lonely people opposing it; and on the other side, it says "January 15th," and now it’s totally reversed—everyone is opposing it, just a few lonely names still hanging on in support.

I mean, this really was unprecedented. Don’t take my word for it, but ask former Senator Chris Dodd, now the chief lobbyist for Hollywood. He admitted, after he lost, that he had masterminded the whole evil plan. And he told The New York Times he had never seen anything like it during his many years in Congress. And everyone I’ve spoken to agrees. The people rose up, and they caused a sea change in Washington—not the press, which refused to cover the story—just coincidentally, their parent companies all happened to be lobbying for the bill; not the politicians, who were pretty much unanimously in favor of it; and not the companies, who had all but given up trying to stop it and decided it was inevitable. It was really stopped by the people, the people themselves. They killed the bill dead, so dead that when members of Congress propose something now that even touches the Internet, they have to give a long speech beforehand about how it is definitely not like SOPA; so dead that when you ask congressional staffers about it, they groan and shake their heads like it’s all a bad dream they’re trying really hard to forget; so dead that it’s kind of hard to believe this story, hard to remember how close it all came to actually passing, hard to remember how this could have gone any other way. But it wasn’t a dream or a nightmare; it was all very real.

And it will happen again. Sure, it will have yet another name, and maybe a different excuse, and probably do its damage in a different way. But make no mistake: The enemies of the freedom to connect have not disappeared. The fire in those politicians’ eyes hasn’t been put out. There are a lot of people, a lot of powerful people, who want to clamp down on the Internet. And to be honest, there aren’t a whole lot who have a vested interest in protecting it from all of that. Even some of the biggest companies, some of the biggest Internet companies, to put it frankly, would benefit from a world in which their little competitors could get censored. We can’t let that happen.

Now, I’ve told this as a personal story, partly because I think big stories like this one are just more interesting at human scale. The director J.D. Walsh says good stories should be like the poster for Transformers. There’s a huge evil robot on the left side of the poster and a huge, big army on the right side of the poster. And in the middle, at the bottom, there’s just a small family trapped in the middle. Big stories need human stakes. But mostly, it’s a personal story, because I didn’t have time to research any of the other part of it. But that’s kind of the point. We won this fight because everyone made themselves the hero of their own story. Everyone took it as their job to save this crucial freedom. They threw themselves into it. They did whatever they could think of to do. They didn’t stop to ask anyone for permission. You remember how Hacker News readers spontaneously organized this boycott of GoDaddy over their support of SOPA? Nobody told them they could do that. A few people even thought it was a bad idea. It didn’t matter. The senators were right: The Internet really is out of control. But if we forget that, if we let Hollywood rewrite the story so it was just big company Google who stopped the bill, if we let them persuade us we didn’t actually make a difference, if we start seeing it as someone else’s responsibility to do this work and it’s our job just to go home and pop some popcorn and curl up on the couch to watch Transformers, well, then next time they might just win. Let’s not let that happen.

AMY GOODMAN: Cyber social justice activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide Friday. He was 26 years old.

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This morning's DN (Thursday) followed up with the most heartbreaking segment, an interview with Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Aaron Swartz’s partner and founder and executive director of SumOfUs.org. She's the one who found him last week. Also Alex Stamos, the computer security and forensics expert who had planned to testify on Aaron Swartz’s behalf during his upcoming trial.

Audio http://dncdn.dvlabs.com/ipod/dn2013-0117.mp4
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Transcript http://www.democracynow.org/2013/1/17/e ... rt_witness

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Exclusive: Aaron Swartz’s Partner, Expert Witness Say Prosecutors Unfairly Targeted Dead Activist

Guests:

Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Aaron Swartz’s partner; founder and executive director of SumOfUs.org, a global movement for corporate accountability.

Alex Stamos, chief technology officer of Artemis Internet. He is a computer security and forensics expert who had planned to testify on Aaron Swartz’s behalf during his upcoming trial.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today’s show with more on the death and prosecution of Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz, who killed himself last Friday. At the time of his death, he was facing up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine, if convicted at trial, for using computers at MIT to download millions of academic articles provided by the nonprofit research service JSTOR.

Aaron Swartz was 26 years old. At the age of 14, he co-developed Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, the key component of much of the web’s entire publishing infrastructure. By the time he was 19, he had co-founded a company that would merge with Reddit, now one of the country’s most popular websites. He also helped develop the architecture for the Creative Commons licensing system and built the Open Library.

Aaron Swartz’s death has prompted an outpouring of frustration and anger at U.S. prosecutors. On Capitol Hill, Democratic Representative Zoe Lofgren of California has introduced a bill dubbed "Aaron’s Law" to modify the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by decriminalizing violations of "terms of service" agreements. Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, chair of the House Oversight Committee, is launching a probe into the possible prosecutorial overreach in his case. At Aaron’s funeral, his father blamed prosecutors for his son’s death, saying he was, quote, "killed by the government." Earlier, his family released a statement saying, quote, "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 MIT contributed to his death."

AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday night, the United States attorney for the District of Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz, broke her silence about the case. In a written statement, she wrote, quote, "[T]his office’s conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case. The career prosecutors handling this matter took on the difficult task of enforcing a law they had taken an oath to uphold, and did so reasonably," unquote. Ortiz said her office offered Aaron a plea bargain of six months in prison. When the case first came to light, Ortiz was quoted saying, "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars."

Ortiz issued the statement a day after her husband used Twitter to fire back at his wife’s critics. Tom Dolan, an executive with IBM, wrote, quote, "Truly incredible that in their own son’s obit they blame others for his death and make no mention of the 6-month offer," he tweeted.

In a moment, we’ll be joined by Aaron Swartz’s girlfriend, but first let’s turn to Aaron Swartz in his own words. This is part of a speech he delivered last May in Washington D.C., when he explained the challenges he sees the Internet facing.

AARON SWARTZ: There’s a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands. Is sharing a video on BitTorrent like shoplifting from a movie store? Or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend? Is reloading a webpage over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in or a violent smashing of shop windows? Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech or like the freedom to murder?

AMY GOODMAN: Aaron Swartz, speaking last May. To watch the full speech, you can go to our website at democracynow.org.

For more we’re joined by Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman. She’s Aaron Swartz’s partner, as well as the founder and executive director of SumOfUs.org. That’s S-U-M-of-Us.org, a global movement for corporate accountability. This is her first television interview since Aaron’s death.

We’ll also be speaking with Alex Stamos in California at Stanford University, chief technology officer of Artemis Internet, a computer security and forensics expert. He planned to testify at Aaron Swartz’s trial. During the upcoming trial, he would have been the chief defense witness.

And we did invite representatives from the U.S. attorney’s office and MIT to join us, but they declined.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Taren, let us begin with you. First of all, our condolences on the loss of Aaron. Aaron committed suicide last Friday. The funeral was just two days ago. And, Taren, it was you who found him. He hung himself in the—your Brooklyn apartment that you shared. Taren, talk about Aaron. Talk about what Aaron—who he was and what he wanted and the effect of this upcoming trial.

TAREN STINEBRICKNER-KAUFFMAN: Well, Aaron was the most—person most dedicated to fighting social injustice of anyone I’ve ever met in my life, and I loved him for it. He used to say—I used to say, "Why don’t you—why we do this thing? It will make you happy." And he would say, "I don’t want to be happy. I just want to change the world."

Open access to information was one of the causes that he believed in, but it was far from the only one. He fought for—during the course of this two-year ordeal, he led the fight against SOPA, the Internet censorship bill, which no one thought could be defeated when it was first introduced and which Aaron and millions of others, together, managed to fight back. And he did that all while under the burden of this—this bullying and false charges.

He was just the funniest, most lovely person. He—sorry. He—he loved children. He loved reading out loud. That was one of his favorite things. He loved David Foster Wallace. He started trying to read me Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson out loud from the first volume. We didn’t get that far because it’s very, very long. One of his favorite—favorite books was Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a fanfic. We would read it to each other as chapters came out online.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk a little about what he went through, his initial reaction to the arrest and this zeal of the prosecutors in Massachusetts to go after him on the downloading of these JSTOR research articles?

TAREN STINEBRICKNER-KAUFFMAN: Yeah, I mean, I wasn’t with him; we didn’t start dating until a few weeks before the indictment was announced publicly, which was several months after his initial arrest. He tried really hard to wall it off. It was obviously very stressful for him, but he tried to keep his friends and family, as much as possible, sort of isolated from—from this. He was very good at protecting other people. He was very distressed by the fact that the prosecution had called two of his closest friends as witnesses at the grand jury, and so he tried to protect everyone else by not giving us any information that would warrant being called as witnesses.

He—he felt, you know, the whole thing was just this big mistake, and he hoped that the prosecutor’s office would realize it, that—you know, that they didn’t—he had done nothing illegal. I mean, as he put it in his press—you know, in the very few press releases and work that he did around this, he likened it to arresting—charging somebody for borrowing too many books from the library, which—you know, all of the articles, he had the right to access individually. The only—the only confusion here was that he had just accessed a lot of them. And he hoped the prosecutors would see the injustice and the unfairness of what they were doing. But they weren’t interested in that. They weren’t—Steve Heymann and Carmen Ortiz’s office were interested in winning; they were interested in a notch on their belt; they were interested in taking a scalp. But they weren’t interested in justice; they weren’t interested in does it actually makes sense for this young man to be labeled a felon for the rest of his life and to go to prison for years and years.

AMY GOODMAN: Taren, we’re going to break, and when we come back, we’ll also be joined by the person who would have been the chief defense witness in this case. Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman is our guest, Aaron’s partner, head of SumOfUs.org. And we’ll be joined by Alex Stamos, who would have testified at the trial, to explain what it is that Aaron did and was fighting for. Usually, our next guest is a consultant for corporations, protecting them from break-ins on the Internet. Today, he will talk about what that means in Aaron’s case. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking about the life and the suicide of Aaron Swartz, 26-year-old cyber activist, social justice activist, who committed suicide last Friday. I want to turn to Aaron’s comments made at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in October 2010. He was talking about the nonprofit subscription service that so many college students and others use around the country called JSTOR.

AARON SWARTZ: I am going to give you one example of something not as big as saving Congress, but something important that you can do right here at your own school. It just requires you willing to get your shoes a little bit muddy. By virtue of being students at a major U.S. university, I assume that you have access to a wide variety of scholarly journals. Pretty much every major university in the United States pays these sort of licensing fees to organizations like JSTOR and Thomson and ISI to get access to scholarly journals that the rest of the world can’t read. And these licensing fees are substantial. And they’re so substantial that people who are studying in India, instead of studying in the United States, don’t have this kind of access. They’re locked out from all of these journals. They’re locked out from our entire scientific legacy. I mean, a lot of these journal articles, they go back to the Enlightenment. Every time someone has written down a scientific paper, it’s been scanned and digitized and put in these collections.

That is a legacy that has been brought to us by the history of people doing interesting work, the history of scientists. It’s a legacy that should belong to us as a commons, as a people, but instead it’s been locked up and put online by a handful of for-profit corporations who then try and get the maximum profit they can out of it. Now, there are people, good people, trying to change this with the open access movement. So, all journals, going forward, they’re encouraging them to publish their work as open access, so open on the Internet, available for download by everybody, available for free copying, and perhaps even modification with attribution and notice.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Aaron Swartz in 2010, speaking at the University of Illinois. Our guests are Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Aaron’s partner, head of SumOfUs.org; and Alex Stamos, Artemis Internet, planned to testify on Aaron’s behalf during his trial, would have been the chief defense witness. Alex, talk about the significance of what Aaron was saying two years ago.

ALEX STAMOS: Well, Aaron believed very strongly, as he said, that the scientific and cultural background that has been built over the centuries belong to everyone. And obviously, he was willing to risk a lot to test that and to test the walls that had been put up around this continent, he called them.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how you came to be involved in this case. I mean, usually, you’re working for companies like Goldman Sachs, protecting them. Talk about why you were going to be the chief defense witness.

ALEX STAMOS: I actually knew very little about Aaron’s case other than what I had read online casually, until I was contacted last fall by his new attorneys that were here in San Francisco. As you said, we mostly do corporate work. Aaron was actually our first criminal defendant. And generally, this is not the kind of work that interests us or has an interesting computer security aspect. But when we were contacted by the lawyers, it did intrigue us that he was facing such serious charges for—even if you believe all the facts in the government indictment—actions that are very difficult to really qualify as computer hacking. And so, we decided to join the case as expert witnesses. And as the case went on, that belief that what he did is very hard to fit into that box that they tried to fit it in of criminal hacking activity, you know, that feeling grew as we saw the evidence and went to MIT, talked to witnesses, and saw the case the government was laying out against him.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And again, what exactly was it that he did that you would say does not qualify as computer hacking? And why would you say the—what would be the line that you would draw on this? And also, your speculation as to why the government even pursued this case, if you have a theory, why they felt so strongly that they had to pursue him?

ALEX STAMOS: So, Aaron was accused of, as been discussed a couple times, downloading too many files, or checking too many books out of the library. He found a loophole that he—that was a convenient way for him to get access to a lot of the JSTOR documents. And that loophole is the fact that MIT made two interesting decisions. First, MIT decided to license the JSTOR database in a way where access was provided to the entire MIT network without asking for any kind of individual authentication. That’s often not true with JSTOR databases. At a lot of universities, and actually today at MIT, if you want to access JSTOR and you have that affiliation, you have to say, "I’m Bob Smith. I’m a student. I’m" — and the university authenticates that you are, and so now you have an identity with JSTOR where they can monitor what you’re doing and see how many downloads you have. MIT didn’t have that setup. They wanted a setup that was completely open for people just to go to the JSTOR website, be able to click on a document and read it. And that’s the deal they made with JSTOR.

The other decision that MIT made was that they decided to run an extremely open, unmonitored network, and in a method that allowed people to jump on from wireless or wired access points all over the campus and take on the identity of somebody affiliated with MIT. This is an intentional decision. They allow visitors, they allow people who just happen to be on campus this access. And they do so with very little need to authenticate or say who you are. And so, those things combined, Aaron realized, would allow him to go onto campus and to download articles from a variety of locations.

You know, I can’t actually condone everything Aaron did. I think—as I have written online, I think what he did was perhaps, you know, discourteous or inconsiderate of taking advantage of the, you know, library privileges that he was basically granted. But at no time did he actually do any actions that I would consider hacking. What Aaron did is he went to MIT, and he started downloading documents. And JSTOR, at some point, noticed a lot of documents were being downloaded from one address at MIT, and so they would cut off that address. Aaron would notice and then just ask the MIT network to give him a new one. That’s a pretty common thing. That’s something that people do, you know, all day at university and corporate or even like on a Starbucks Wi-Fi network. And it’s that action, though, of going and requesting a new identity that the government seems to consider wire fraud or computer fraud.

And probably one of the things that he did that brought it to a head was, in the end, Aaron—I believe this was his motivation—wanted to find a place that he could leave his laptop for several days to continue downloading without him having to be there, and so he opened up and went into an unlocked wiring closet and plugged his computer into a switch. That, MIT was calling trespassing. And that’s kind of the activity that allowed them to catch him, and seems to be where they believe he massively overstepped the line. But at no time even during that would he do anything that I would consider hacking.

AMY GOODMAN: We should say that JSTOR refused to endorse any prosecution of Aaron Swartz—the not-for-profit service, member of the Internet community—and said, "Aaron returned the data he had in his possession and JSTOR settled any civil claims we might have had against him in June 2011." And earlier this week, before Aaron died, they announced—JSTOR announced that 1,200 journals from its archive had been opened for limited reading by the public. Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Aaron’s partner, still with us from Washington, D.C., just flew back from Chicago, where she attended Aaron’s funeral. Can you talk about the broader issues here?

TAREN STINEBRICKNER-KAUFFMAN: I think that there are a couple of broader issues that Aaron’s, you know, senseless prosecution and death highlight. And one is, of course, this freedom of information issue and open access issue, that the—as the clip you played of Aaron says, you know, the scientific legacy of academics and researchers from over the centuries, often most of it funded in one way or another by taxpayers and by the government, ought to be available to everybody in the world. It ought to be available. And that’s one of the things that—you know, that I think—that I hope will someday—not just research going forward, but all research ever in history ought to be put up for open access online.

The second is this issue of how the law addresses computer crimes or alleged computer crimes, and that, you know, the law, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, is so broadly written and so ambiguous that prosecutors, like Steve Heymann, who just want—as I said earlier, just want notches on their belt, can throw the book—can charge somebody like Aaron with 35 years in prison for mildly inconsiderate behavior.

And the third issue is the broader problems in our criminal justice system. Why does someone like Steve Heymann have the power to do this, unbridled power? Why would you charge somebody with up to 35 years in prison if you actually think that all they deserve is six months, as the plea deal suggested that? And this happens to people every day in our system, and most of them have many fewer resources than Aaron and much less support, and don’t have the option necessarily even of considering hiring a lawyer and going to trial over the course of two years, and are forced to take the plea deals when they’re not guilty or when the plea deals are completely unjust. And I think that we need—we need broad criminal justice reform in this country. We incarcerate more people per capita than any other country in the world, and we don’t see lower crime rates because of it. There’s—there’s justice, and then there’s justice. And right now, we’re not—our system does not promote justice. Our system is punitive. Our system is Kafkaesque. Our system is unfair. And Aaron and millions of other people suffer because of it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I wanted to—following up on that, wanted to refer to comments of the House Oversight Committee chairman, Darrell Issa, who’s a Republican of California, who says he wants to launch into an investigation into how the U.S. attorney’s office pressed charges against Aaron for downloading these articles. He told The Huffington Post, quote, "Had [Aaron] been a journalist and taken that same material that he gained from MIT, he would have been praised for it. It would have been like the Pentagon Papers." And this whole issue of prosecutorial overreach on computer crimes, I’m wondering if, Alex—Alex Stamos, you might want to comment on that.

ALEX STAMOS: Yeah, Taren’s got a good point. One of the key problems here are the definitions in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. And there’s this one word that is very difficult for even those of us who work professionally in this area to understand, and that word is "authorized." Multiple of counts in the indictment against Aaron existed because they said that he had exceeded what he was authorized to do either on the MIT network or the JSTOR network. And the term "authorized" in an Internet context, it makes a lot less sense than it does in the real world. You know, for example, I’m sure there are thousands of people right now going to democracynow.org watching the live stream. Did you authorize any of those people to do that, to interact with your computer, to take on the cost that you are taking of streaming that video to them? No, you didn’t. And of course they’re allowed to, and you want them to, but how you express that authorization to them is a very difficult thing.

And at what point does somebody doing something that is allowed become in excess of authorization? What Aaron was doing was exactly the same activity that thousands of people do at MIT every year: He was going and looking at documents. Now, he was doing it at a much wider scale. He did it more than they seemed to want. But at what point does he exceed authorization? And by having these incredibly broad definitions and a word that doesn’t really mean anything, like "authorized," we end up in a situation where if a prosecutor doesn’t like you or doesn’t like what you did, if it happened to use a computer, they can find a way to call it "hacking" and an abuse of that system.

AMY GOODMAN: Just as we went to broadcast today, the grassroots organization Demand Progress, which Aaron Swartz helped found, launched a new campaign calling on Congress to end prosecutorial abuses and to pass Congressmember Zoe Lofgren’s bill amending computer fraud law. The group sent a letter to members, reading, quote, "We are sad. We’re tired. We’re frustrated and we’re angry at a system that let this happen to Aaron. We and Aaron’s friends and family have been in touch with lawmakers to ask for help. We’re asking them to help rein in a criminal justice system run amok. Authorities are encouraged to bring frivolous charges and hold decades of jail time over the heads of people accused of victimless crimes," unquote. More information on the campaign is at DemandProgress.org.

And as we wrap up, Taren, what your plans are, what this campaign will mean? I know there will be a memorial service for Aaron Swartz at Cooper Union at 4:00 on Saturday here in New York City. Where this campaign is headed?

TAREN STINEBRICKNER-KAUFFMAN: Well, look, I think that the best legacy that—the best tribute we can pay to Aaron’s legacy is to continue to fight as hard as we can to make this world a more just, fairer place. That’s the thing that he cared most about. And I’m going to keep doing that. I think that, you know, that Aaron’s Law, we’ve yet to sort of look at all of the details of the law, and I want to make sure that it covers—that it’s as sweeping an amendment as possible, but clearly, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act must be amended.

And I also hope that this can serve as a wake-up call for the broader issues in the criminal justice system. It’s not just this one act. Our system is deeply, deeply unfair. And as I said earlier, millions of people suffer because of it needlessly. And I hope that—you know, in this country, it’s very hard for people to—for politicians to look weak on crime, but that’s not what this is. This is—this is about justice, and nobody should have to face what Aaron faced. And I hope we can help save people in the future.

AMY GOODMAN: Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Again, our condolences on the death of your partner, Aaron Swartz. Taren is head of SumOfUs.org. Alex Stamos, thanks for joining us from Stanford University, head of Artemis Internet, was going to be one of the chief witnesses, defense witnesses, at Aaron’s trial. Of course, after his death, the U.S. prosecutor announced all the charges were dropped. And by the way, if you’d like to go to our website, we authorize all of you to go to democracynow.org. Read, watch, listen to our shows, read the transcripts. On Monday, we devoted the whole show to Aaron’s case. As well, we played the speech he just recently gave in Washington, D.C., at the Freedom to Connect conference. And you can to democracynow.org.

So if you've made it through all of the above and I'm allowed some cynicism, the above is also chance for you Sandy Hook Hoax Cowboys & Cowgirls to assess the genuineness of her grief.

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[JackRiddler]

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Democracy Now! is the most important news show we have. Who else would have performed the vital and indispensable service of organizing the above reports and getting them out on video, audio and broadcast on a news-show timetable? And they do it every damn day. I wish people on RI would post more stuff from DN instead of Alex Jones. You got a problem with Amy Goodman? I probably have similar problems, relating to the failure to give proper coverage to 9/11. An hour of such powerful researchers as the Loose Change boys vs. Chip Fucking Berlet is more worthy of Anderson Cooper, is it not? And she's popular front, so to speak, so there will occasionally be humanitarian interventionists on as well as proper anti-war, anti-imperialists. But you know what? There are other outlets for you to get the information that DN will not or does not cover. There are no other US outlets that do what DN does, deliver a real news show with real journalism every day. And that's a serious problem. She's no "gatekeeper" or slave of the Bilderberg foundations. She's also not a petty merchant pimping hate and confusionism to sensation-seeking consumers of conspiratainment.

Back on-topic:

Poor Aaron Swartz. One way or another, they did kill him. And trivial me. I know seven seasons of The Sopranos but I didn't even know this kid, although he was the one who started an avalanche in which we all participated last year to stop SOPA-PIPA. This crime against him must not be let go.

ARE YOU IN NEW YORK?

LET'S ALL GO TO THE MEMORIAL SERVICE ON SATURDAY!!!

See also here:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=35969

[8bitagent]

So will the left finally wake up that whistleblowers and political activists are being hunted down even more under Obama than fascist Bush?
The way the Obama regime has gone after whistleblowers, medical marijuana, and people like Swartz is bizarre to me. Sickening how Obama used Reddit for a publicity stunt yet his DOJ pretty
much killed the co-founder. Nice.

[8bitagent]

.

Democracy Now! is the most important news show we have. Who else would have performed the vital and indispensable service of organizing the above reports and getting them out on video, audio and broadcast on a news-show timetable? And they do it every damn day. I wish people on RI would post more stuff from DN instead of Alex Jones. You got a problem with Amy Goodman? I probably have similar problems, relating to the failure to give proper coverage to 9/11. An hour of such powerful researchers as the Loose Change boys vs. Chip Fucking Berlet is more worthy of Anderson Cooper, is it not? And she's popular front, so to speak, so there will occasionally be humanitarian interventionists on as well as proper anti-war, anti-imperialists. But you know what? There are other outlets for you to get the information that DN will not or does not cover. There are no other US outlets that do what DN does, deliver a real news show with real journalism every day. And that's a serious problem. She's no "gatekeeper" or slave of the Bilderberg foundations. She's also not a petty merchant pimping hate and confusionism to sensation-seeking consumers of conspiratainment.

Back on-topic:

Poor Aaron Swartz. One way or another, they did kill him. And trivial me. I know seven seasons of The Sopranos but I didn't even know this kid, although he was the one who started an avalanche in which we all participated last year to stop SOPA-PIPA. This crime against him must not be let go.

ARE YOU IN NEW YORK?

LET'S ALL GO TO THE MEMORIAL SERVICE ON SATURDAY!!!

See also here:
http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/view ... =8&t=35969

I love Amy Goodman. So she didnt want to give airtime to WTC7 bullhorners, on all other fronts she's been stellar in my view. Every time I lose faith in mainstream "liberal" networks my hope is brought right back
when I see Jeremy Scahill, Cenk, Goodman, etc. Scahill to me is like Alex Jones without the right wing/stupidity/half baked red herrings, but no less the intensity.
I mean shit, this is so golden and ballsy

[JackRiddler]

So NONE of you answered. Oh well. One time is happenstance.

I was at the memorial service and... much more tomorrow. It hope they'll devote two hours of DN to it this week, not just one.

[DrEvil]

So NONE of you answered. Oh well. One time is happenstance.

I was at the memorial service and... much more tomorrow. It hope they'll devote two hours of DN to it this week, not just one.

Looking forward to it. If I had been on the correct continent I would have been there.

[justdrew]

glad we were able to send one "representative" at least

[JackRiddler]

http://www.democracynow.org/live/democr ... ron_swartz

SPECIAL LIVESTREAM Saturday, January 19, 2013
Aaron Swartz Public Memorial Service at Cooper Union

Saturday, January 19, 2013 4:00–6:00pm ET

On Saturday, January 19, 2013 Democracy Now! provided a special livestream as family and friends of Aaron Swartz gather at Cooper Union’s Great Hall in New York City to celebrate his life and remember their beloved friend, sibling, child, and partner.

Speakers included Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, David Segal, Ben Wikler, Roy Singham, Doc Searls, Edward Tufte, David Isenberg, Holden Karnofsky and Tom Chiarella and other friends. OK Go’s Damian Kush performed at the service.

The video runs two hours - it's worth it.

This was a very powerful event. Taryn Stinebrickner-Kauffman killed me. She was among several firebreathers calling for justice against the prosecution, but she was also the one person who expressed her anger at Aaron Swartz for killing himself. (No one questioned that.) The whole event was explicitly and unapologetically political. The hall was packed, 500 or 600 people. It brought together a large part of the New York tech as well as activist communities and they were angry and ready for action. By no means is this ending with a memorial.

Over and over two particular points were made about the injustice of this case: The bankers who defrauded and burned the whole world went free and were richly rewarded, while Aaron faced 35 years. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg all bent or broke the law while privatizing the data commons in pursuit of their personal fortunes, but suffered no penalty and are celebrated as demigods by a servile press; Aaron bent or broke the law in the pursuit of making data public, and was treated as though he had committed unpardonable crimes.

The demands that were raised again and again were related, compelling, and broad ranging:

- The US attorney Carmen Ortiz and prosecutor Steve Heymann must be held accountable for their extreme abuse of prosecutorial discretion.

- New laws must put an end to prosecutorial abuse in this sector (several House members led by Zoe Loftgren are backing a bill to revise the computer fraud act with that in mind).

- There must be an end to abuse of prosecutorial discretion in general, which has played a role in making the US the country with the highest prison population in the world; 5 percent of the world population, 25 percent of the world's prisoners are here.

- There must be an end to the prison industrial complex.

- All of the world's academic work from all history must be made available to all people, and not be kept behind a paywall. JSTOR - a "non-profit"? - doesn't pay authors. The work there is produced generally by salaried academics at public expense.

Again, the talent, outrage and resources gathered at Cooper Union yesterday were enormous. This is not the end of the story.

I had no idea how active this kid was in a huge range of causes, as a scholar, as an all-around political troublemaker.

The next day I heard from someone who works at Thoughtworks, the founder of which spoke at the memorial and was probably the most fire-breathing of them all. My informant said she only recently started working there, and barely knew Swartz, but when she came in on Monday, everyone was crying.

Seeing Tufte at the memorial was a surprise. I also had no idea he was such a radical on the question of data freedom. He said in the early 1970s at school he and his roommate (who may have been Steve Jobs, based on the story) built one of the first "blue boxes" allowing unlimited long-distance calling. They did it for the research and the kick of making the world's longest long distance call (from SF to NY via Honolulu). Having accomplished this, they stopped using their invention. Three months later the head of AT&T security approached them, asking why they had stopped. Tufte said he was grateful that the company in this case chose not to destroy their lives, unlike MIT's actions with Aaron.

In case you needed a reminder that the New York Times is evil, today (Monday) they went with a story that included a single picture from the memorial:



The speaker is David Isenberg of Freedom to Connect.

But other than the picture the Times has no coverage of the memorial. Rather, they have chosen this moment to be the mouthpiece in defense of MIT, to a ridiculous degree:

January 20, 2013

How M.I.T. Ensnared a Hacker, Bucking a Freewheeling Culture

By NOAM COHEN

In the early days of 2011, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology learned that it had an intruder. Worse, it believed the intruder had been there before.

Months earlier, the mysterious visitor had used the school’s computer network to begin copying millions of research articles belonging to Jstor, the nonprofit organization that sells subscription access to universities.

Those articles do not belong to Jstor, motherfuckers. Jstor is a distribution platform for the works of others.

The visitor was clever — switching identifications to avoid being blocked by M.I.T.’s security system — but eventually the university believed it had shut down the intrusion, then spent weeks reassuring furious officials at Jstor that the downloading had been stopped.

However, on Jan. 3, 2011, according to internal M.I.T. documents obtained by The New York Times, the university was informed that the intruder was back — this time downloading documents very slowly, with a new method of access, so as not to alert the university’s security experts.

“The user was now not using any of the typical methods to access MITnet to avoid all usual methods of being disabled,” concluded Mike Halsall, a senior security analyst at M.I.T., referring to the university’s computer network.

What the university officials did not know at the time was that the intruder was Aaron Swartz, one of the shining lights of the technology world and a leading advocate for open access to information, with a fellowship down the road at Harvard.

Mr. Swartz’s actions presented M.I.T. with a crucial choice: the university could try to plug the weak spot in its network or it could try to catch the hacker, then unknown.

The decision — to treat the downloading as a continuing crime to be investigated rather than a security threat that had been stopped — led to a two-day cat-and-mouse game with Mr. Swartz and, ultimately, to charges of computer and wire fraud. Mr. Swartz, 26, who faced a potentially lengthy prison term and whose trial was to begin in April, was found dead of an apparent suicide in his Brooklyn apartment on Jan. 11.

Mr. Swartz’s supporters called M.I.T.’s decision a striking step for an institution that prides itself on operating an open computer network and open campus — the home of a freewheeling programming culture. M.I.T.’s defenders viewed the intrusion as a computer crime that needed to be taken seriously.

M.I.T. declined to confirm any of these details or comment on its actions during the investigation. The university’s president, L. Rafael Reif, said last week, “It pains me to think that M.I.T. played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.” He appointed a professor, Hal Abelson, to analyze M.I.T.’s conduct in the investigation. To comment now, a spokeswoman for the university said, would be “to get ahead of that analysis.”

Early on Jan. 4, at 8:08 a.m., according to Mr. Halsall’s detailed internal timeline of the events, a security expert was able to locate that new method of access precisely — the wiring in a network closet in the basement of Building 16, a nondescript rectangular structure full of classrooms and labs that, like many buildings on campus, is kept unlocked.

In the closet, Mr. Halsall wrote, there was a netbook, or small portable computer, “hidden under a box,” connected to an external hard drive that was receiving the downloaded documents.

At 9:44 a.m. the M.I.T. police were called in; by 10:30 a.m., the Cambridge police were en route, and by 11 a.m., Michael Pickett, a Secret Service agent and expert on computer crime, was on the scene. On his recommendation, a surveillance camera was installed in the closet and a second laptop was connected to the network switch to track the traffic.

There may have been a reason for the university’s response. According to the timeline, the tech team detected brief activity from China on the netbook — something that occurs all the time but still represents potential trouble.

Red China! Alert, alert.

E-mails among M.I.T. officials that Tuesday in January 2011 highlight the pressures university officials felt over a problem they thought they had solved. Ann J. Wolpert, the director of libraries, wrote to Ellen Finnie Duranceau, the official who was receiving Jstor’s complaints: “Has there ever been a situation similar to this when we brought in campus police? The magnitude, systematic and careful nature of the abuses could be construed as approaching criminal action. Certainly, that’s how Jstor views it.”

Jstor later backed off, but MIT didn't, so don't shift the blame, fuckers.

Some of Mr. Swartz’s defenders argue that collecting and providing evidence to the government without a warrant may have violated federal and state wiretapping statutes.

“This was a pivotal moment,” said Elliot Peters, Mr. Swartz’s lawyer. “They could have decided, we’re going to unplug this computer, take it off the network and tell the police to get a warrant.”

Mr. Peters had persuaded a judge to hear his arguments that the evidence collected from the netbook be excluded from the trial, asserting that Mr. Swartz’s Fourth Amendment protections from unlawful search and seizure had been violated. (All charges against Mr. Swartz were dropped after his death.)

Investigators first caught sight of Mr. Swartz on camera the day it was installed. At 3:26 p.m., the timeline notes, the “suspect is seen on camera entering network closet, noticeably unaware of what had occurred all morning.”

But Mr. Swartz managed to leave before the police could arrive. Also, “on his way out, the suspect shuts off the lights,” the timeline reports, which “will hurt video quality and possibly work against the motion activation of the camera.” A technician quickly turned them back on.

On his way out, the miscreant flicked the light switch! Insidious. A heroic technician bravely lunged for the light switch, in an effort to stanch the bleeding. Thank god, he was unharmed.

This is the kind of detail we need to understand the case!

Mr. Swartz certainly knew his way around the M.I.T. campus — as his defense pointed out in court, he had given a guest lecture there, he had many friends on campus, and his father, Bob Swartz, remains as a consultant at the university’s Media Lab.

Two days later, the timeline notes that Aaron Swartz “enters network closet while covering his face with bike helmet, presumably thinking video cameras may be in hallway.” More seriously for the M.I.T. investigation, “once inside and with the door closed, he hurriedly removes his netbook, hard drive and network cable and stows them in his backpack.” He was gone within two minutes, too quickly for the police to catch him.

Perhaps suspecting he was being watched, Mr. Swartz moved the computer. But M.I.T.’s tech team believed it had tracked it to the fourth floor of the same Building 16. The university called for “police presence.”

A little after 2 p.m., according to the government, Mr. Swartz was spotted heading down Massachusetts Avenue within a mile of M.I.T. After being questioned by an M.I.T. police officer, he dropped his bike and ran (according to the M.I.T. timeline, he was stopped by an M.I.T. police captain and Mr. Pickett). He was carrying a data storage device with a program on it, the government says, that tied him to the netbook.

The arrest shocked friends of Mr. Swartz, as well as M.I.T. alumni. Brewster Kahle, an M.I.T. graduate and founder of the digital library Internet Archive, where Mr. Swartz gave programming assistance, wrote: “When I was at M.I.T., if someone went to hack the system, say by downloading databases to play with them, might be called a hero, get a degree, and start a company. But they called the cops on him. Cops.”

Mr. Swartz turned over his hard drives with 4.8 million documents, and Jstor declined to pursue the case. But Carmen M. Ortiz, the United States attorney in Boston, decided to press on. The government has defended M.I.T.’s decision to “collaborate” with the federal investigation and argued there was no need for a warrant because, as a trespasser on M.I.T.’s campus, Mr. Swartz had no reasonable expectation of privacy for his netbook. And M.I.T.’s officials were rightfully concerned, the government argued, by the threat they faced.

“M.I.T. had to identify the hacker and assist with his apprehension in order to prevent further abuse,” the government argued in court.

Michael Sussmann, a Washington lawyer and a former federal prosecutor of computer crime, said that M.I.T. was the victim and that, without more information, it had to assume any hackers were “the Chinese,

Red China! Everywhere! Eating our data. (Because how else will the Chinese government ever get access to the secrets JSTOR? Subscribe?!)

even though it’s a 16-year-old with acne.”

Simply would not have been complete without that. Fuckers.

Once the police were called in, the university could not back away from the investigation. “After there’s a referral, victims don’t have the opportunity to change their mind.”

Mr. Swartz’s father, in a telephone interview, described himself as “devastated” by M.I.T.’s conduct during the investigation of his son. “M.I.T. claimed they were neutral — but we don’t believe they acted in a neutral way,” he said, adding, “My belief is they put their institutional concerns first.”

He described attending two meetings with the chancellor of M.I.T., Eric Grimson. Each time there also was a representative of the general counsel’s office. At both meetings, he said, members of M.I.T.’s legal team assured him and the chancellor that the government had compelled M.I.T. to collect and hand over the material. In that first meeting, he recalled, “I said to the chancellor, ‘Why are you destroying my son?’ He said, ‘We are not.’ ”

John Schwartz contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 21, 2013
An earlier version of this article misquoted part of statement by a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Referring to a review of M.I.T.’s conduct that was commissioned by the university’s president, she said to comment now on the events surrounding Aaron Swartz’s arrest would be “to get ahead of that analysis,” not “to get ahead of that investigation.”

That's a pretty incredible correction - a nicety of such minor import (except to those who already fear they are guilty) that it takes a very faithful servant to bother granting it.

Jesus Christ, investigation, no no no, there's nothing to investigate! Analysis only!

Motherfuckers. I am counting on this article to stoke the fire among the techies.

.

[JackRiddler]

?

There was a post here by wetland?

Why deleted?

?

[Luther Blissett]

Wow, Tufte. His wife wasn't taught by the surviving members of the White Rose but I believe she was friends with them.

[wetland]

Jack, I deleted the comment.

[justdrew]

"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.

[seemslikeadream]

Hackers take over gov't website to avenge Swartz

This screenshot shows the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission after it was hijacked by the hacker-activist group Anonymous, early Saturday, Jan. 26, 2013, to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide. The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch, was replaced with a message warning that when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago "a line was crossed." / AP PHOTO
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WASHINGTON The hacker-activist group Anonymous says it hijacked the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide.

The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch, was taken over early Saturday and replaced with a message warning that when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago "a line was crossed."

The message read in part:

Citizens of the world,
Anonymous has observed for some time now the trajectory of justice in the United States with growing concern. We have marked the departure of this system from the noble ideals in which it was born and enshrined. We have seen the erosion of due process, the dilution of constitutional rights, the usurpation of the rightful authority of courts by the "discretion" or prosecutors. We have seen how the law is wielded less and less to uphold justice, and more and more to exercise control, authority and power in the interests of oppression or personal gain."
The hackers say they've infiltrated several government computer systems and copied secret information that they now threaten to make public.

Family and friends of Swartz, who helped create Reddit and RSS, say he killed himself after he was hounded by federal prosecutors.

Hundreds honor activist Aaron Swartz in NYC
U.S. Attorney defends office's conduct in Aaron Swartz case
Reddit co-founder's death fuels debate over computer crime
Online activist, programmer Aaron Swartz dies
Officials say he helped post millions of court documents for free online and that he illegally downloaded millions of academic articles from an online clearinghouse.

By mid-morning Saturday the website was offline.