Aaron Swartz

[divideandconquer]

. I strongly feel that one day another Swartz will find a way to light a really big fire and make these motherfuckers pay.

Unfortunately, I don't think that'll happen. If they even get the suspicion of someone like Swartz coming to light, they'll eliminate him before they allow him to accomplish half of what Swartz accomplished. The motherfuckers have too much at stake to risk it.

[undead]

. I strongly feel that one day another Swartz will find a way to light a really big fire and make these motherfuckers pay.

Unfortunately, I don't think that'll happen. If they even get the suspicion of someone like Swartz coming to light, they'll eliminate him before they allow him to accomplish half of what Swartz accomplished. The motherfuckers have too much at stake to risk it.

I disagree. When you look at "everything Swartz accomplished", it would never be possible to preemptively eliminate a person like that because for most of his life he was totally unknown to practically everyone. It was only in the last couple of years that he became a high profile character and even then only to people following anti-piracy legislation. I still have doubts that he was that threatening to the government to warrant being assassinated anyway. I think they are smart enough to do a basic cost-benefit analysis and would have anticipated that his martyrdom would draw more attention to an issue that they would rather not have the public's attention on.

People will continue doing whatever the fuck they want on the internet as long as there is an internet. Look at Anonymous. What makes Swartz unusual is his desire to step out of his role as a computer programmer and get involved seriously in politics, which is a highly unfashionable move for just about anyone. This field is full of people who are very empowered. Really when you think about it they are the most empowered people in the United States - overwhelmingly white, male, middle to upper class with good jobs, and highly intelligent. The entire field is immersed in an elitist libertarian perspective that is socially and politically blind, but there will always be a possibility for someone to step out of that environment and do something different if they feel moved to. For example, there is the Pirate Party, which elected a candidate to the national government of the Czech Republic last year. That's a lot more successful than I would have ever expected it to be. Hopefully this thing will catch on.

The internet is really that last place that is out of the reach of the elite controllers in our society, because it is continuously reinvented to the point that nobody can keep track of it all. Filesharing will continue regardless of whatever stupid laws they pass trying to prevent it - people can invent new protocols faster than they can make laws, never mind how long it takes them to actually figure out what is happening. Personally I hope that the public will realize that you shouldn't be consuming media that's made by people who will sue you for downloading it off the internet. That way we could just stop feeding brains to the giant slobbering monster of mainstream media and let it die of starvation, which is happening already anyway. And they won't ever turn off the internet, because they need it just as much as everyone else does.

Oh yeah, and this guy is the man - everyone should watch this film and support The Pirate Bay.

[jlaw172364]

@undead

Okay, let's unpack some of what you've said:

"When you look at "everything Swartz accomplished", it would never be possible to preemptively eliminate a person like that because for most of his life he was totally unknown to practically everyone."

Was Swartz enrolled in a school? Yes, I believe he was. One of the functions of a school is behavior modification, surveillance, and evaluation of the people who are being processed by it. "Gifted" students are carefully channeled into picking studies that will make the valuable corporate servants some day, mainly through psychological manipulation such as rewards, appeals to pride, etc. "Troubled" students are punished, drugged, and set up to go to prison. "Gifted" students who rebel, on the other hand, are given very delicate handling. Nobody wants to lose a return on an investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars, but to say they aren't watched is not in tune with reality. What do you think a "report card" and a "permanent record" are for? It took me years before I understood the significance of "displays a cooperative and positive attitude" on my report card. What if I hadnt'? I might have been marked for some behavior modification. I spoke with an African American lady who told me she got her hands on her school files and discovered that the school officials were watching her closely and creating a psychological profile. School is part of the dossier-generating industry, similar to credit companies and taxing agencies. All of this information is ultimately centralized into a database.

Now, I don't care how much of a genius someone is. It's highly unlikely that they will be able to ferret out all of these control and surveillance methods, or understand their significance. Growing up, I had some inklings, but they were only suspicions, and there was no internet yet.

Which leads me to the second point, about the internet. The internet was developed by the military as ARPANET. They built the infrastructure. Everything on it is monitored, mostly by software and computers, but there are humans that use the software and computers as a sieve, looking for potential trouble-makers.

For every Aaron Swartz, there are almost certainly hundreds of people who wind up in jail, mental institutions, or otherwise thwarted by all the psychological baggage dumped on them, not to mention economic baggage.

[The Consul]

From last week's edition of The Economist

SMALL, dark, cluttered places were important in the life of Aaron Swartz. His days were spent hunched in his bedroom over his MacBook Pro, his short-sighted eyes nearly grazing the screen (why, he asked himself, weren’t laptop screens at eye level?), in a litter of snaking cables and hard drives. In the heady days of 2005 when he was developing Reddit, now the web’s most popular bulletin board, he and his three co-founders shared a house in Somerville, Massachusetts, where he slept in a cupboard. And it was in a cupboard—an unlocked wiring cupboard, where a homeless man kept stuff—that in November 2010 he surreptitiously placed a laptop, hidden under a box, and plugged it directly into the computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His aim was to download as many pages as possible from an archive of academic journals called JSTOR, which was available by paid subscription only to libraries and institutions. That was morally wrong, he thought; the knowledge contained in it (often obtained with public funding, after all) had to be made available, free, to everyone. And it was absurdly simple to do that. He already had access to the library network; no need to hack into the system. He just ran a script, called keepgrabbing.py, which liberated 4.8m articles at almost dangerous speed. MIT tried to block him, but time after time he outwitted them; and then, as a last resort, he plugged in the laptop in the cupboard.

He had form on this; lots of form. In 2006 he got hold of the book cataloguing data kept by the Library of Congress, usually steeply charged for, and posted them free in the Open Library. In 2009 he wormed his way into a free-access trial of the PACER system, which contains all electronic federal court records, in certain public libraries; he downloaded 19.9m pages of it, then uploaded them to the cloud, before anyone could stop him. Again, it was easy: using a small, elegant language called perl, the documents fell into his hands.

He seemed to have been doing this for ever, writing programs to liberate information. At 12 or 13—a plump, bookish boy with a computer-company executive for a father and a very early Mac in the den—he set up theinfo.org, a sort of Wikipedia before the fact, which was going to contain all the world’s knowledge on one website. A mere year or so later he was working with Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the world wide web, to launch the Semantic Web to improve data-sharing, and developing RSS 1.0 to distribute videos and news stories. He helped set up Creative Commons, too, which made copyright licensing simpler (as, for example, to get this photo of him).

All this could have made him a fortune, but he had no interest in that. He wanted a world that was better, freer and more progressive. He dropped out of high school, then out of Stanford, educating himself instead by reading prodigious numbers of books, mostly philosophy. He made friends and fell loudly out with them because they couldn’t be as perfectionist as he was. At gatherings he would turn up messy-haired and half-shaven, the shy nerd’s look, but with the intense dark gaze and sudden, confident grin of a young man out to turn society on its head.

A lot of money came his way when Reddit was sold to Condé Nast in 2006, but relocation to an office made him miserable. Google offered him jobs, but he turned them down as unexciting. Political campaigning became his passion. He wanted to see everything available online, free, with nothing held back by elites or big money, and nothing censored. Information was power, as he proclaimed in his Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto of 2008, and war was needed “by stealth”, “in the dark”, “underground”, for the freedom to connect. In 2011 there was no fiercer voice against the Stop Online Piracy Act, and in 2012 no one prouder to proclaim it dead.

The JSTOR business, however, got him into deep trouble. When he went back to the cupboard for his laptop, police arrested him. He was charged on 13 counts, including wire fraud and theft of information, and was to go on trial in the spring, facing up to 35 years of jail. The charges, brought by a federal prosecutor, were hugely disproportionate to what he had done; MIT and JSTOR had both settled with him, and JSTOR, as if chastened by him, had even opened some of its public-domain archive. But theft was theft, said the prosecution.

Darkness to light

All this added to a weight that had oppressed him for many years. “Look up, not down,” he urged readers of his weblog; “Embrace your failings.” “Lean into the pain.” It was hard to take that advice himself. He kept getting ill, several illnesses at once. Migraines sliced into his scalp; his body burned. And he was sad most of the time, a sadness like streaks of pain running through him. Books, friends, philosophy, even blogs didn’t help. He just wanted to lie in bed and keep the lights off.

In 2002 he posted instructions for after his death (though I’m not dead yet! he added). To be in a grave would be all right, as long as he had access to oxygen and no dirt on top of him; and as long as all the contents of his hard drives were made publicly available, nothing deleted, nothing withheld, nothing secret, nothing charged for; all information out in the light of day, as everything should be.

[undead]

Jlaw -

You miss my point, though. They for sure would have automatically monitored him like you said, but I was pointing out that for most of his life he did nothing to warrant being labelled as anything but another computer wiz kid, never mind being targeted for assassination. He had barely cut his teeth in actual political activism. So there are plenty of other computer wiz kids just like him out there, and the spooks are not going to go around offing them pre-empitvely. Usually they just buy them.

And I will repeat my point that it does not make sense at all for the government to assassinate Swartz in this situation. They wanted to make an example of him by putting him in jail. His martyrdom makes them look bad and draws attention to an issue that they would rather keep secret. Swartz probably committed suicide with this outcome in mind, if he did commit suicide. I don't really know, but I doubt that this kid was such a huge threat that they would call in the black ops hit squad.

[JackRiddler]

Givens:

- his record with Pacer and other data liberation - a serial perpetrator, in the eyes of the copyright totalitarians

- his proclaimed philosophy of data liberation

- the context of Manning, Wikileaks, Drake, cyberwar and copyright war.

A paranoid state upholds secrecy as the highest value (the only guy in the torture program who goes to prison is the one who talked about it, etc.) and believes it's only one incident away from having all the data made available (a Manning times 1000 incident).

I can see prosecutors deciding that Aaron is on a mission and will never stop liberating data from all institutions keeping it. So they want to punish him in part on that presumption of future danger, though obviously they don't say so.

The biggest threat it seems to me is the mission. He's exceptional, but there are others like him, and thousands or millions of people who don't need the same skill level to perform similar data dump actions. He's working hard to be an inspiration.

So I can see the prosecutors (and their supporters higher on the food chain) wanting to make a horrifying example of Swartz.

Destroying his life and throwing him behind bars for 35 years has didactic value, as a warning to thousands or millions of others. Anyone can think, "if they can catch someone as good as him, they'll catch me and I'll be fucked."

Killing him and making it look like suicide seems to have a lot less didactic value. It admits the law does not have enough general force against this kind of activity to sufficiently deter the entire class of people who could engage in it.

Surreptitious murder in a deniable fashion does not really create a general scare. First they'll have to think it was a murder, which they cannot prove. And very few will think, "it can happen to me." (To compare, death squads shooting people and dumping the dead in public are examples of engendering general terror and deterrence by murder. Sneaky assassinations that most people think are suicides encourage paranoia among some, but not general terror and deterrence.)

He's a martyr, everyone thinks he could have won his case. So murder as I see it would need more of a motive than making an example. Swartz would be the target.

Which sticks us firmly in speculative, evidence-free land. We can devise more or less plausible scenarios. For example, while still free he might have been preparing an action in the same vein as the actions he had already done, and thereby posed a danger to the wrong people, who killed him. (This is why I found the Wikileaks claim about Swartz to be very interesting - maybe he was on top of a huge store of data?)

But what do these scenarios serve if one can't then devise means of falsification and confirmation, and if we're not all prepared to admit what evidence is just missing to us, what's indicated, what's weak? One of us will say suicide because that's what he wants to believe anyway, and think themselves smart. Another will say murder because that's what he wants to believe. The one who says "I can't possibly know for sure" will be hit by accusations from both sides, of gatekeeping and collaboration of enabling moral depravity. And we'll be no closer to justice, unless we can devise means of falsification and confirmation.

[Luther Blissett]

He's a martyr, everyone thinks he could have won his case. So murder as I see it would need more of a motive than making an example. Swartz would be the target.

My peer group seems to think he would not and should not have won the case. They believe in the letter of the law, but also that he would have simply appealed the decision. They claim that he was no hero, just an intelligent, troubled criminal. They say that the federal prosecutors were only doing their job, and that the ways in which they themselves have managed to avoid the attention of federal prosecutors in the 30-odd years of their own lives have been to avoid breaking federal laws.

The people fighting with me about Aaron Swartz are all intelligent in their own right, many of them creative professionals and musicians, and almost all were intensely involved in punk, hardcore, and graffiti communities. They remind me of the born-again Christians that I've known who were addicts and philanderers in their pasts; instead, they now think that Propaghandi lyrics are without value simply because they listened to Propaghandi as children, as if corporatizing one's self is an example of a way to "grow up". They are myopic evangelists for normalcy and the new gatekeepers for the upper class.

This has less to do about Aaron Swartz and more to do about what I view as what is likely a vast swath of society's opinion of him and his actions. This class of people are not the power elite of tomorrow, but represent a rung about two levels down of privileged, white, educated, urban, liberal and neoliberal hipster that are to some degree an important cog in maintenance of the status quo. This position has a lot of access to popular media and in some ways a controlling stake in it. This is what we have to look forward to.

Right now, opinions like this are like a "third way." Not discussed because they don't care, and will only talk about it if confronted by someone who believes that: a) this is an event of significant importance on the timeline of global cyber war for information freedom, and b) that Swartz is a hero. They like reddit, so it's sad and stupid that a co-founder committed suicide. Nothing more. But this whole way of thinking is omnipresent, at least in my world. As more of them start having children in their 40's, owning property, and creating new kinds of class conflict in the country's urban centers, this style of neoliberal anti-progress will come to the fore.

[hanshan]

He's a martyr, everyone thinks he could have won his case. So murder as I see it would need more of a motive than making an example. Swartz would be the target.

My peer group seems to think he would not and should not have won the case. They believe in the letter of the law, but also that he would have simply appealed the decision. They claim that he was no hero, just an intelligent, troubled criminal. They say that the federal prosecutors were only doing their job, and that the ways in which they themselves have managed to avoid the attention of federal prosecutors in the 30-odd years of their own lives have been to avoid breaking federal laws.

The people fighting with me about Aaron Swartz are all intelligent in their own right, many of them creative professionals and musicians, and almost all were intensely involved in punk, hardcore, and graffiti communities. They remind me of the born-again Christians that I've known who were addicts and philanderers in their pasts; instead, they now think that Propaghandi lyrics are without value simply because they listened to Propaghandi as children, as if corporatizing one's self is an example of a way to "grow up". They are myopic evangelists for normalcy and the new gatekeepers for the upper class.

This has less to do about Aaron Swartz and more to do about what I view as what is likely a vast swath of society's opinion of him and his actions. This class of people are not the power elite of tomorrow, but represent a rung about two levels down of privileged, white, educated, urban, liberal and neoliberal hipster that are to some degree an important cog in maintenance of the status quo. This position has a lot of access to popular media and in some ways a controlling stake in it. This is what we have to look forward to.

Right now, opinions like this are like a "third way." Not discussed because they don't care, and will only talk about it if confronted by someone who believes that: a) this is an event of significant importance on the timeline of global cyber war for information freedom, and b) that Swartz is a hero. They like reddit, so it's sad and stupid that a co-founder committed suicide. Nothing more. But this whole way of thinking is omnipresent, at least in my world. As more of them start having children in their 40's, owning property, and creating new kinds of class conflict in the country's urban centers, this style of neoliberal anti-progress will come to the fore.

An amazing analysis of your peer group; & a troubling one, at that (drones). How very sad.


...

[Luther Blissett]

I tease my friends about drones pretty often, ha. At least some of them think that drones are a legal lifesaver for U.S. soldiers. I ask them when drones should start being used on black teenaged boys so that they stop growing up to mug their friends.

[The Consul]

For What It's Worth

Ortiz on the Hot Seat (Boston Herald)

The Justice Department is scrambling to answer pointed inquiries from a congressional committee about U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz’s prosecution of Internet whiz Aaron Swartz, raising the specter of a brutal Beltway hearing that could call her judgment into question as she pursues high-profile cases, including her Probation 
Department probe.

The Justice Department yesterday met a deadline to set a briefing date with the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform — the same bipartisan panel that held Ortiz’s boss, Attorney General Eric Holder, in contempt of Congress last year for what it said was failure to comply with its probe of the “Fast and Furious” gun-tracking fiasco.

“We have been in discussions with the committee and plan to conduct a briefing,” a DOJ official told the Herald yesterday.

Congressional scrutiny will likely raise the heat on Ortiz after the Swartz tragedy and as she looks to bring Beacon Hill power brokers to trial on patronage hiring in the Probation Department.

“She’s going to have to be very careful that she and the prosecutors in her office start to exercise better judgment. It’s really that simple: They can’t afford another case of overreach,” civil rights attorney Harvey Silverglate said.

“She’s lost a lot of credibility, and she’s going to have to defend the cases on their merits, rather than saying, ‘I’m the U.S. attorney and we’re sending a message.’ The age of the message is over,” Silverglate added.

In a letter last week, the committee asked why and how hard Ortiz’s office turned the screws on Swartz, the 26-year-old Web wunderkind who killed himself last month while awaiting trial on charges he hacked into Massachusetts Institute of Technologoy networks and stole a mother lode of scholarly articles.

Specifically, the panel’s letter asks:

• why Swartz was charged;

• whether federal prosecutors went after him because he opposed the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act;

• how the charges and penalties against Swartz compared to their prosecution of other hackers;

• what plea deals they offered Swartz; and

• why they replaced the original July 2011 indictment with another in September 2012 that pumped up the charges and left him facing decades in prison and $1 million in fines.

Ortiz’s office referred questions to the Department of Justice.

Swartz’s death under duress set off sweeping attacks on Ortiz — specifically, that her prosecutors ignored concerns that he was suicidal and pressed on with the case even as the owners of the stolen documents backed off.

A congressional probe could put Ortiz on shaky ground as she pursues top Democratic lawmakers in the Probation Department inquiry that has resulted in indictments against former commissioner John O’Brien and two deputies.

“The DOJ’s invulnerability has been breached by an exceedingly bad judgment by the US attorney’s office in Boston,” Silverglate said. “Carmen Ortiz is simply the next one who came along who did something the Congress could get its teeth into.”

This may have more to do with raw political calculations than any wringing of the hands over the demise of Swartz. Still, it keeps an important issue in the broader public eye.

[8bitagent]

My peer group seems to think he would not and should not have won the case. They believe in the letter of the law, but also that he would have simply appealed the decision. They claim that he was no hero, just an intelligent, troubled criminal. They say that the federal prosecutors were only doing their job, and that the ways in which they themselves have managed to avoid the attention of federal prosecutors in the 30-odd years of their own lives have been to avoid breaking federal laws.

The people fighting with me about Aaron Swartz are all intelligent in their own right, many of them creative professionals and musicians, and almost all were intensely involved in punk, hardcore, and graffiti communities. They remind me of the born-again Christians that I've known who were addicts and philanderers in their pasts; instead, they now think that Propaghandi lyrics are without value simply because they listened to Propaghandi as children, as if corporatizing one's self is an example of a way to "grow up". They are myopic evangelists for normalcy and the new gatekeepers for the upper class.

Eeep, what went wrong with your friends? I kid... Not that I know your friends..and heck, not a single one of my friends knows about this case or keeps up with news/parapolitics/history/etc.
I guess I've always been a hard lefter. I think Obama is a war criminal in terms of the drone situation, I think Bradley Manning should get Obama's nobel medal and released, yet I also think that Julian Assange
is a cult leader jackass as much as I applaud and appreciate his work. Aaron Swartz to me is definitely a hero...with all the RSS feed/Reddit users/people who went apeshit over the "STOP SOPA!" thing...surprised more people
arent going super viral with his story and the whole DOJ thing.

[undead]

[chump]

Nice article about Aaron Schwartz:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technolog ... mself.html

... Though he called himself an “applied sociologist,” Swartz was best known as a computer programmer. His current project, a piece of software he called Victory Kit, was going well. Victory Kit would be an open-source, free version of the expensive community-organizing software used by groups like MoveOn—the sort of thing grassroots activists from around the world might use.

Some of those activists came to hear Swartz give a presentation on Victory Kit at a conference in upstate New York on Jan. 9. At the last minute, though, Swartz decided not to speak. His friend Ben Wikler says Swartz’s talk depended on someone else committing to join him in making their code open source. When he couldn’t secure that commitment in time, Swartz decided he wasn’t talking. “I remember being annoyed at him for being a stick-in-the-mud,” Wikler says.

Swartz had his principles, and he held to them forcefully. “Aaron generally felt like being a stickler about that stuff made the world better, because it actually pushed people to do the right thing,” says Wikler. He wouldn’t sign any contracts that might encourage patent trolling. He was finicky about his wardrobe, wearing T-shirts whenever possible. “Suits,” he wrote on his blog, “are the physical evidence of power distance, the entrenchment of a particular form of inequality.”

He wasn’t dogmatic about everything. He’d always been opposed to marriage, but he was starting to think he’d gotten that wrong. On Friday, Jan. 11, Stinebrickner-Kauffman stopped over at Wikler’s house. She and Swartz were coming over for dinner later that night, but she came by herself beforehand. As she played with Wikler’s new baby, she mentioned that Swartz had told her that, after the case was resolved, he might consider getting married. If that was possible, anything was possible.

But less than two miles away, in a small and dark studio apartment, Aaron Swartz was already dead...



... Aaron Swartz is a difficult puzzle. He was a programmer who resisted the description, a dot-com millionaire who lived in a rented one-room studio. He could be a troublesome collaborator but an effective troubleshooter. He had a talent for making powerful friends, and for driving them away. He had scores of interests, and he indulged them all. In August 2007, he noted on his blog that he’d “signed up to build a comprehensive catalog of every book, write three books of my own (since largely abandoned), consult on a not-for-profit project, help build an encyclopedia of jobs, get a new weblog off the ground, found a startup, mentor two ambitious Google Summer of Code projects (stay tuned), build a Gmail clone, write a new online bookreader, start a career in journalism, appear in a documentary, and research and co-author a paper.” Also, his productivity had been hampered because he’d fallen in love, which “takes a shockingly huge amount of time!”...



... Aaron was a precocious child, and an early reader. At 3 years old, his father recalls, he read a note on the refrigerator and then turned to his flabbergasted mother, asking, “What’s this free family entertainment in downtown Highland Park?” When Aaron was of school age, he entered the North Shore Country Day School, a picturesque private school in Winnetka, Ill. The school was 6 miles from his house, which made it difficult for friends to come over and play. Aaron, though, found ways to entertain himself—playing the piano, reading books, joking with his brothers...



... “You meet these people in text originally,” remembers Dan Connolly, a software engineer who spent 15 years affiliated with W3C. “The guy’s writing code, making intelligent comments; as far as you know, he's your peer. Then you find out he's 14, and you’re like, ‘Oh!’ ”

...

[jlaw172364]

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

[wintler2]

.. Victory Kit would be an open-source, free version of the expensive community-organizing software used by groups like MoveOn—the sort of thing grassroots activists from around the world might use.
..

https://github.com/victorykit/victorykit
Not muggle-ready yet, it seems.