Showing posts with label Aaron Swartz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aaron Swartz. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
H.A. Goodman: BREAKING: KIM DOTCOM RELEASES DNC LEAK INFO. INTERNET PARTY SUZIE DAWSON GOES SILENT
".....My take is this: There are people who want to make an example out of whistleblowers, to intimidate and to stifle and to suppress future whistleblowers, which is why they're going after Assange, which is why they went after people like Thomas Drake, or Kim Dotcom, in terms of an entrepreneur that opens up different possibilities in terms of the internet....But these people want to attack and destroy the messenger and hide the message, because the message incriminates them.
There are people who are corrupt who engage in illegal activity on a grandiose scale and because they're able to hide behind bureaucracy, they feel that anybody from Aaron Schwartz, to Julian Assange, to Suzie Dawson, to Kim Dotcom, anybody, anybody who exposes the truth, or anybody who stands for freedom, or pushes the boundaries of free speech or freedom, or does something within the realm of technology, that isn't sanctioned by The Establishment... There are people who want to just crush that and destroy that, and hurt the individuals who are standing for truth, exposing corruption, the whistleblowers. The people like Aaron Schwartz and Kim Dotcom, and others... -and then some people might say, "Why did you put the two names together?" I''m just saying that weather it's Hillary Clinton or John McCain or Paul Ryan, or Nancy Pelosi, or some of the Hipster journalists who turned on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange because oh my God, oh my God, in some fabricated manner, they aligned themselves - or they DIDN'T, but they are said to have helped Trump in some way. The only person who helped Trump was Hillary Clinton. That's the only person, it wasn't Julian Assange it wasn't WikiLeaks. It wasn't anyone but Clinton.
But my long-winded point is just that, history will show, that the people who stood by Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, Truthtellers, at this moment in time, were on the right side, the correct side, of history, the side of Truth.
If you want to suppress the truth, or if you think the truth hurts your political side, then try to focus on reforming people like Hillary Clinton, or maybe utilize the euphemisms like white supremacy or fascism in all of these things, or labels...try to utilize them on the side that you feel is more just, or better than Trump.
Anyway, give me your thoughts below. Share this segment everywhere. There's something going on with historical record and Suzie Dawson is going to get to the bottom of it. Give me your thoughts. Thank you so much for listening. Suzie Dawson's article is below, I'll put Elizabeth Voss' article also.
If I said anything in this segment to offend anyone, regarding historical record, because this whole theme of this is.... you know, there are people who are trying to reshape history and the Legacy and memory of people for their own gain. If, for example, you find anything that I've said offensive, I didn't mean to offend anyone. But give me your thoughts below.
We need to make sure that Suzie Dawson is safe, and she's able to write this major project, or this major piece, and obviously future endeavors as well. Give me your thoughts. Thank you so much for listening." -H.A. Goodman
BREAKING: KIM DOTCOM RELEASES DNC LEAK INFO. INTERNET PARTY SUZIE DAWSON GOES SILENT
Monday, March 7, 2016
Why we should remember Aaron Swartz - the prodigy who wanted information to be free By Laurie Penny
I agree, as Swartz wrote in 2008, that "there is no justice in following unjust laws", and the movement to protect the free internet from corporate and political interests is urgent.
Why we should remember Aaron Swartz - the prodigy who wanted information to be free
By Laurie Penny
The young Mozart, according to legend, ended one of his earliest concerts by bursting into tears. The audience had erupted in rapturous applause at the spectacle of a tiny little boy playing sonatas with the proficiency of an adult master. So why was Mozart crying? “They were only applauding for me,” the boy told his father. “They weren’t listening to the music.”
I was reminded of this story while reading the collected writings of the campaigner and computer prodigy Aaron Swartz, published in January in paperback as The Boy Who Could Change the World (Verso). Urban legends follow child prodigies as reliably as the FBI follows young men who mess around with computers, and, to some of the finest minds in technology, Swartz will always be the brilliant teenager who started to design software and websites when he was still at school. The collection, along with a new biography of him, The Idealist by Justin Peters, cannot help romanticising Swartz’s early achievements and his early death.
Aaron Swartz was 26 years old and had been pursued by the FBI for two years when he hanged himself at his home in New York in 2013. He had been charged with the victimless crime of copying hundreds of thousands of articles from academic journals – usually restricted, at great cost, to members of universities – through the servers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Copying a document is not, as the prosecutors insisted, equivalent to stealing a wad of bills, for the simple reason that the original document can still be used. Nonetheless, Swartz was facing years in prison, a felony conviction and the end of his dreams of working in public policy.
His life was shaped, as Benjamin Mako Hill and Seth Schoen observe in the collection, “by an ethical belief that information should be shared freely and openly”. Swartz was a leader in the “free culture” movement, a polymath who had already led and won a global battle to prevent the privatisation of swaths of the internet under the terms of the Stop Online Piracy Act in the United States. He could have chosen an easy life of influence and affluence in Silicon Valley or, perhaps, in academia. But Swartz could not live with, or in, systems that were inefficient and unfair. And he was punished for it.
In his short life, Aaron Swartz appears never to have met an institution that could hold his respect and patience. He dropped out of high school and Stanford University and walked out of projects and start-ups that did not meet his standards of efficiency and clarity of purpose. He had a horror of systems that did not work as they should on any scale; an obvious impatience with inefficiency, bureaucracy and slowness of thought seeps through both his words and others’ words about him.
We know how to handle very clever children who do as they are told. The problem comes when prodigies start to question the systems in which they are asked to operate. In a blog entry that is not included in the new collection, Swartz quotes Martin Luther King’s speech about being proud to be “maladjusted” to a system that was unjust. The same traits that made him an inspired computer programmer and thinker – his refusal to accept broken and archaic systems of thought, infrastructure and government – were the reason he was pursued by the forces of law and order.
I never met Swartz, but I am close to a number of people who knew him well and feel his absence keenly. I believe that communication should not be hampered by states or bartered by corporations. I believe that the early web’s promise of open and easy access to information, whether it be government records, academic journals or creative works, is something to treasure and protect against what Swartz called the “private theft of public culture”. I agree, as Swartz wrote in 2008, that “there is no justice in following unjust laws”. Information is power and, accordingly, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.
You do not have to have a particular interest in copyright law to recognise the pettiness of the US government’s hounding of a vulnerable young man who happened to believe passionately that information should be free. In generations to come, Swartz will doubtless be remembered as an early martyr of the free culture and transparency movements, along with Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and many others.
After spending 48 hours immersed in writing by and about Swartz, I found myself shaken and angry: full of rage at the US government’s small-minded crusade against the changes brought about by the information age, a crusade as doggedly pointless as the 16th-century Catholic Church’s efforts to quash the printing press.
These books are not perfect; you can see the sainthood of Aaron Swartz being written in real time, excising the difficulties and inconsistencies of his personality. Peters’s biography strips his story of its most contentious political implications. Likewise, Verso’s decision to put his age at the time of writing at the head of every piece cheapens the work, drawing repeated attention to the phenomenon of his youth.
The dawn of the Information Age is not just about new ideas but about new paradigms of communication and control, and the movement to protect the free internet from the interests of governments and corporations is urgent and ongoing. Martyrs have a way of clarifying the purpose of a movement. For this reason, if no other, Swartz might not have been upset by this particular use of his life’s work.
To honour properly what Swartz and others like him stand for, it is not enough for us to applaud the prodigy cut down too soon. We must also make sure we are listening to the music.
~
Laurie Penny is a contributing editor to the New Statesman. She is the author of five books, most recently Unspeakable Things.
Thursday, June 26, 2014
WORDVIRUS: “The Internet’s Own Boy”: How the government destroyed Aaron Swartz By Andrew O’Hehir for Salon
I very seldom go to the movies, but for Free Internet advocates, this film is not to be missed, especially here in Boston. <3 RIP Aaron. Your efforts were not in vain. Ultimately, We the People will win. <3 ~PB
[photo: Aaron Swartz (Credit: TakePart/Noah Berger)]
A film tells the story of the coder-activist who fought corporate power and corruption — and paid a cruel price.
“The Internet’s Own Boy”: How the government destroyed Aaron Swartz
By Andrew O’Hehir for Salon
posted Jun25 by DJ Apollohttp://kielarowski.net/2014/06/25/the-internets-own-boy-how-the-government-destroyed-aaron-swartz/
Brian Knappenberger’s Kickstarter-funded documentary “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz,” which premiered at Sundance barely a year after the legendary hacker, programmer and information activist took his own life in January 2013, feels like the beginning of a conversation about Swartz and his legacy rather than the final word. This week it will be released in theaters, arriving in the middle of an evolving debate about what the Internet is, whose interests it serves and how best to manage it, now that the techno-utopian dreams that sounded so great in Wired magazine circa 1996 have begun to ring distinctly hollow.
What surprised me when I wrote about “The Internet’s Own Boy” from Sundance was the snarky, dismissive and downright hostile tone struck by at least a few commenters. There was a certain dark symmetry to it, I thought at the time: A tragic story about the downfall, destruction and death of an Internet idealist calls up all of the medium’s most distasteful qualities, including its unique ability to transform all discourse into binary and ill-considered nastiness, and its empowerment of the chorus of belittlers and begrudgers collectively known as trolls. In retrospect, I think the symbolism ran even deeper. Aaron Swartz’s life and career exemplified a central conflict within Internet culture, and one whose ramifications make many denizens of the Web highly uncomfortable.
For many of its pioneers, loyalists and self-professed deep thinkers, the Internet was conceived as a digital demi-paradise, a zone of total freedom and democracy. But when it comes to specifics things get a bit dicey. Paradise for whom, exactly, and what do we mean by democracy? In one enduringly popular version of this fantasy, the Internet is the ultimate libertarian free market, a zone of perfect entrepreneurial capitalism untrammeled by any government, any regulation or any taxation. As a teenage programming prodigy with an unusually deep understanding of the Internet’s underlying architecture, Swartz certainly participated in the private-sector, junior-millionaire version of the Internet. He founded his first software company following his freshman year at Stanford, and became a partner in the development of Reddit in 2006, which was sold to Condé Nast later that year.
That libertarian vision of the Internet – and of society too, for that matter – rests on an unacknowledged contradiction, in that some form of state power or authority is presumably required to enforce private property rights, including copyrights, patents and other forms of intellectual property. Indeed, this is one of the principal contradictions embedded within our current form of capitalism, as the Marxist scholar David Harvey notes: Those who claim to venerate private property above all else actually depend on an increasingly militarized and autocratic state. And from the beginning of Swartz’s career he also partook of the alternate vision of the Internet, the one with a more anarchistic or anarcho-socialist character. When he was 15 years old he participated in the launch of Creative Commons, the immensely important content-sharing nonprofit, and at age 17 he helped design Markdown, an open-source, newbie-friendly markup format that remains in widespread use.
One can certainly construct an argument that these ideas about the character of the Internet are not fundamentally incompatible, and may coexist peaceably enough. In the physical world we have public parks and privately owned supermarkets, and we all understand that different rules (backed of course by militarized state power) govern our conduct in each space. But there is still an ideological contest between the two, and the logic of the private sector has increasingly invaded the public sphere and undermined the ancient notion of the public commons. (Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani once proposed that city parks should charge admission fees.) As an adult Aaron Swartz took sides in this contest, moving away from the libertarian Silicon Valley model of the Internet and toward a more radical and social conception of the meaning of freedom and equality in the digital age. It seems possible and even likely that the “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” Swartz wrote in 2008, at age 21, led directly to his exaggerated federal prosecution for what was by any standard a minor hacking offense.
Swartz’s manifesto didn’t just call for the widespread illegal downloading and sharing of copyrighted scientific and academic material, which was already a dangerous idea. It explained why. Much of the academic research held under lock and key by large institutional publishers like Reed Elsevier had been largely funded at public expense, but was now being treated as private property – and as Swartz understood, that was just one example of a massive ideological victory for corporate interests that had penetrated almost every aspect of society. The actual data theft for which Swartz was prosecuted, the download of a large volume of journal articles from the academic database called JSTOR, was largely symbolic and arguably almost pointless. (As a Harvard graduate student at the time, Swartz was entitled to read anything on JSTOR.)
But the symbolism was important: Swartz posed a direct challenge to the private-sector creep that has eaten away at any notion of the public commons or the public good, whether in the digital or physical worlds, and he also sought to expose the fact that in our age state power is primarily the proxy or servant of corporate power. He had already embarrassed the government twice previously. In 2006, he downloaded and released the entire bibliographic dataset of the Library of Congress, a public document for which the library had charged an access fee. In 2008, he downloaded and released about 2.7 million federal court documents stored in the government database called PACER, which charged 8 cents a page for public records that by definition had no copyright. In both cases, law enforcement ultimately concluded Swartz had committed no crime: Dispensing public information to the public turns out to be legal, even if the government would rather you didn’t. The JSTOR case was different, and the government saw its chance (one could argue) to punish him at last.
Knappenberger could only have made this film with the cooperation of Swartz’s family, which was dealing with a devastating recent loss. In that context, it’s more than understandable that he does not inquire into the circumstances of Swartz’s suicide in “Inside Edition”-level detail. It’s impossible to know anything about Swartz’s mental condition from the outside – for example, whether he suffered from undiagnosed depressive illness – but it seems clear that he grew increasingly disheartened over the government’s insistence that he serve prison time as part of any potential plea bargain. Such an outcome would have left him a convicted felon and, he believed, would have doomed his political aspirations; one can speculate that was the point. Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. attorney for Boston, along with her deputy Stephen Heymann, did more than throw the book at Swartz. They pretty much had to write it first, concocting an imaginative list of 13 felony indictments that carried a potential total of 50 years in federal prison.
As Knappenberger explained in a Q&A session at Sundance, that’s the correct context in which to understand Robert Swartz’s public remark that the government had killed his son. He didn’t mean that Aaron had actually been assassinated by the CIA, but rather that he was a fragile young man who had been targeted as an enemy of the state, held up as a public whipping boy, and hounded into severe psychological distress. Of course that cannot entirely explain what happened; Ortiz and Heymann, along with whoever above them in the Justice Department signed off on their display of prosecutorial energy, had no reason to expect that Swartz would kill himself. There’s more than enough pain and blame to go around, and purely on a human level it’s difficult to imagine what agony Swartz’s family and friends have put themselves through.
One of the most painful moments in “The Internet’s Own Boy” arrives when Quinn Norton, Swartz’s ex-girlfriend, struggles to explain how and why she wound up accepting immunity from prosecution in exchange for information about her former lover. Norton’s role in the sequence of events that led to Swartz hanging himself in his Brooklyn apartment 18 months ago has been much discussed by those who have followed this tragic story. I think the first thing to say is that Norton has been very forthright in talking about what happened, and clearly feels torn up about it.
Norton was a single mom living on a freelance writer’s income, who had been threatened with an indictment that could have cost her both her child and her livelihood. When prosecutors offered her an immunity deal, her lawyer insisted she should take it. For his part, Swartz’s attorney says he doesn’t think Norton told the feds anything that made Swartz’s legal predicament worse, but she herself does not agree. It was apparently Norton who told the government that Swartz had written the 2008 manifesto, which had spread far and wide in hacktivist circles. Not only did the manifesto explain why Swartz had wanted to download hundreds of thousands of copyrighted journal articles on JSTOR, it suggested what he wanted to do with them and framed it as an act of resistance to the private-property knowledge industry.
Amid her grief and guilt, Norton also expresses an even more appropriate emotion: the rage of wondering how in hell we got here. How did we wind up with a country where an activist is prosecuted like a major criminal for downloading articles from a database for noncommercial purposes, while no one goes to prison for the immense financial fraud of 2008 that bankrupted millions? As a person who has made a living as an Internet “content provider” for almost 20 years, I’m well aware that we can’t simply do away with the concept of copyright or intellectual property. I never download pirated movies, not because I care so much about the bottom line at Sony or Warner Bros., but because it just doesn’t feel right, and because you can never be sure who’s getting hurt. We’re not going to settle the debate about intellectual property rights in the digital age in a movie review, but we can say this: Aaron Swartz had chosen his targets carefully, and so did the government when it fixed its sights on him. (In fact, JSTOR suffered no financial loss, and urged the feds to drop the charges. They refused.)
A clean and straightforward work of advocacy cinema, blending archival footage and contemporary talking-head interviews, Knappenberger’s film makes clear that Swartz was always interested in the social and political consequences of technology. By the time he reached adulthood he began to see political power, in effect, as another system of control that could be hacked, subverted and turned to unintended purposes. In the late 2000s, Swartz moved rapidly through a variety of politically minded ventures, including a good-government site and several different progressive advocacy groups. He didn’t live long enough to learn about Edward Snowden or the NSA spy campaigns he exposed, but Swartz frequently spoke out against the hidden and dangerous nature of the security state, and played a key role in the 2011-12 campaign to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a far-reaching government-oversight bill that began with wide bipartisan support and appeared certain to sail through Congress. That campaign, and the Internet-wide protest of American Censorship Day in November 2011, looks in retrospect like the digital world’s political coming of age.
Earlier that year, Swartz had been arrested by MIT campus police, after they noticed that someone had plugged a laptop into a network switch in a server closet. He was clearly violating some campus rules and likely trespassing, but as the New York Times observed at the time, the arrest and subsequent indictment seemed to defy logic: Could downloading articles that he was legally entitled to read really be considered hacking? Wasn’t this the digital equivalent of ordering 250 pancakes at an all-you-can-eat breakfast? The whole incident seemed like a momentary blip in Swartz’s blossoming career – a terms-of-service violation that might result in academic censure, or at worst a misdemeanor conviction.
Instead, for reasons that have never been clear, Ortiz and Heymann insisted on a plea deal that would have sent Swartz to prison for six months, an unusually onerous sentence for an offense with no definable victim and no financial motive. Was he specifically singled out as a political scapegoat by Eric Holder or someone else in the Justice Department? Or was he simply bulldozed by a prosecutorial bureaucracy eager to justify its own existence? We will almost certainly never know for sure, but as numerous people in “The Internet’s Own Boy” observe, the former scenario cannot be dismissed easily. Young computer geniuses who embrace the logic of private property and corporate power, who launch start-ups and seek to join the 1 percent before they’re 25, are the heroes of our culture. Those who use technology to empower the public commons and to challenge the intertwined forces of corporate greed and state corruption, however, are the enemies of progress and must be crushed.
~~~
”The Internet’s Own Boy” opens this week in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Toronto, Washington and Columbus, Ohio. It opens June 30 in Vancouver, Canada; July 4 in Phoenix, San Francisco and San Jose, Calif.; and July 11 in Seattle, with other cities to follow. It’s also available on-demand from Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vimeo, Vudu and other providers.
Source:
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/24/the_internets_own_boy_how_the_government_destroyed_aaron_swartz/?source=newsletter
My tags: "Enemy" of the State, Aaron Swartz, Cabals, Freedom, Hacktivist, Information Wars, Internet, Politics, Scapegoat, Sundance, Whistleblowers
Thursday, May 8, 2014
FREE PRESS: Call Congress: Demand REAL Net Neutrality! + DEMAND PROGRESS Net Neutrality just got gutted - but we can still save it. Please urge your friends to take action:
FREE PRESS:
Call Congress: Demand REAL Net Neutrality!
http://act.freepress.net/call/internet_congress_nn/?t=1&referring_akid=4742.8909772.MhdcwM
This is what happens when you mess with the Internet.
Reports of the FCC's proposal to kill Net Neutrality have led to an online uproar. And the pressure is working. Two FCC commissioners recently raised doubts about Chairman Tom Wheeler's plan. And hundreds of Internet companies and organizations — including Amazon, Consumers Union, Facebook, Free Press, Google, MoveOn and Twitter — also came out against the FCC's plans.
Chairman Wheeler is feeling the heat, but we need to keep the pressure on. And Congress can help.
Please call your members of Congress and urge them to support real Net Neutrality. It's easy and takes only a few minutes.
We need to make sure the FCC hears from everyone about how disastrous its new proposal is.
So grab your phone, call Congress and let us know how it goes.
We've got a week to turn this around and our members of Congress need to be part of this fight.
Thanks so much—
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DEMAND PROGRESS
http://act.demandprogress.org/sign/fcc_net_neutrality/?source=demandprogress_website
Yesterday, 3 judges dismantled the open Internet by deciding that big companies should be able to determine what we see online.
They struck down “Net Neutrality” – the principle that no corporation or state authority can censor, slow down, block, or privilege certain content on the web. It's the basis for what has made the Internet a place for creativity, free speech, and innovation.
Without Net Neutrality, the very startups that make the Internet a force of innovation will be throttled – unable to compete with incumbent businesses that can pay to provide their access faster than any startup could.
Carriers can now charge content providers to make sure their content works well – something that privileges companies already dominating the market at the expense of the startups that have made the Internet great. Facebook or Google might be able to afford preferential treatment – but what about the startup that otherwise could replace them?
It’s incredibly insidious, and it threatens to take away the level playing field that’s made the Internet such an incredible boon for society.
The FCC, however, has the power to protect Net Neutrality – if they classify broadband as a communications service, something we all know it is with all the time we spend communicating with friends and loved ones via e-mail and social media, they’ll have the power to reinstate Net Neutrality rules.
PETITION TO THE FCC: We urge you to assert your authority and restore your Net Neutrality rules now!
We’ve fought to save Net Neutrality before, and we’re going to save it this time, too. Together we will protect the Internet.
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FCC: Protect Net Neutrality and the Open Internet
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