Aaron Swartz

[undead]

I don't think he was killed. It seems understandable that someone facing 35 years would do something like that. Can't be sure, but considering that they had him in court already, what would be the motivation to kill him? It doesn't help them to make him a martyr. In fact this will make them look bad, drawing attention to their absurdly vindictive prosecution of him. What they wanted was to make an example of him in order to make people afraid to continue this struggle over information freedom. The Wikileaks ordeal shows that they are in fact stupid, impotent neanderthals who can not understand the world they live in, and now they are lashing out. I was not aware of this guy's court case, but now that I look at it I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot more overzealous prosecutions of information crimes in the coming years.

[Plutonia]

There's also the possibility that they were squeezing him to turn informer/snitch or that he knew he wouldn't be able to withstand the kind of treatment that Bradley Manning was subjected to without rolling over - so he may have chosen to fall on his sword...?

[undead]

^^^^^

Yes, this too. Although the actual confrontation and propositioning would likely come after his conviction, I'm sure he could see it coming. Why else hit him with such an absurd punishment? If I was going to be subjected to the treatment they're giving to Manning I would certainly be looking for a way out.

[Plutonia]

Not necessarily. The prosecutor was apparently attempting to negotiate a plea deal with him but it stalled on Swartz's refusal to accept a felony conviction - which would carry various automatic restrictions on his freedoms? Is it possible that as a felon, he might be vulnerable to being controlled?

[wordspeak2]

Yeah... he called their bluff, and didn't accept their plea bargain. On to plan B, that's my theory.
I'm totally open-minded, but I'm having a hard time believing suicide is likely here. There are accounts of depression, but that would probably be true of almost any of us. Where's the evidence that he was suicidal? I read a bunch of his blog. He looks like an activist on a mission. And am I missing something, or did the prosecution actually have a chance of locking this kid up for years? Based on what? It seems they had such a flimsy case. He had access to the files legally, JSTOR itself wasn't following up on the case, so it was just the feds... he hadn't even distributed the files. You're meaning to tell me that they had a real chance of getting a long prison sentence for trespassing at MIT? If he really were facing decades in prison, I could see suicide being more believable, but to me it looks like they were mostly trying to scare him with the charges, but he wouldn't plead guilty. One thing for sure: He was a real threat to some very powerful people, and they wanted him out of the equation one way or another.
I think this is about SOPA, and we're going to see a more bald-faced attack on the open internet around the corner.
Either way, R.I.P. Aaron, and justdrew is right, at the very least we can make an attempt at damaging the career of the prosecutor woman, so I'm not sure we have any real chance/recourse.

[undead]

Yeah... I did read his recent blog posts and they did not strike me as the musings of a suicidal person. And he was well known on the national scale with friends in high places (Lawrence Lessig, for one) which is to say that he would have had support from a lot of people if he needed it. Considering that he was such a dedicated activist, it is really strange that he would take his own life. That would require a nihilism and apathy that he didn't seem to have. I wonder what friends and family say. Did he have a girlfriend (or boyfriend)? It seems like he was a much loved member of a very large and positive community, so considering that it is suspicious.

edit: Also, I agree that the prosecutors should be personally ruined. Hopefully they will get the Anonymous treatment spilling their private shit all over the internet and exposing the little kids they are raping in their spare time, or whatever they do for guilty pleasures.

[DrEvil]

edit: Also, I agree that the prosecutors should be personally ruined. Hopefully they will get the Anonymous treatment spilling their private shit all over the internet and exposing the little kids they are raping in their spare time, or whatever they do for guilty pleasures.

The archive itself is already available at the naughty bay. Just search for jstor. it's about 35 GB.

Last time I checked the Whitehouse petition to remove the prosecutors needed 18000 more sigs.

There's also this:

Academics share copyrighted journal articles on Twitter to honor Aaron Swartz
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/13/38726 ... ron-swartz

[MinM]

@YourAnonNews: Sometimes suicide is murder. #JusticeForAaronSwartz
Retweeted by Amber Lyon

https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews/status ... 4574366720

[slimmouse]

Swartz knew all of this. But he forged ahead anyway. He could have easily opted for a life of great personal wealth, status, prestige and comfort. He chose instead to fight - selflessly, with conviction and purpose, and at great risk to himself - for noble causes to which he was passionately devoted. That, to me, isn't an example of heroism; it's the embodiment of it, its purest expression.

Nuff said really. First time Ive heard of the fella. Even sounds like the kind whose motive for suicide might have been based upon a concern for humanity due to the nature of those whom he quicky came to understand, control things.

These people probably arent shapeshifting reptiles, who profit freely from the toil and fear of the 99.999999%. But they might as well be.

May the force be with you Aaron. I can only possibly imagine that it is.

[divideandconquer]

Yeah... I did read his recent blog posts and they did not strike me as the musings of a suicidal person. And he was well known on the national scale with friends in high places (Lawrence Lessig, for one) which is to say that he would have had support from a lot of people if he needed it. Considering that he was such a dedicated activist, it is really strange that he would take his own life. That would require a nihilism and apathy that he didn't seem to have. I wonder what friends and family say. Did he have a girlfriend (or boyfriend)? It seems like he was a much loved member of a very large and positive community, so considering that it is suspicious.

I totally agree. It's very rare that people with that kind of passion and purpose commit suicide. He was a man on a mission, and I'm sure he, as well as those in power, understood the chances of him getting 35 years was slim to none.

I think young computer geniuses who can't be bought off, and who have an activist spirit, are in real danger at present because controlling the flow of information is of utmost importance to the ruling class.

[compared2what?]

Yeah... I did read his recent blog posts and they did not strike me as the musings of a suicidal person.

I think that if I were asking myself whether I'd expect a person who seriously intended to kill himself to be more or less likely to sound like it on his blog, I'd probably answer: Less, though I don't really know.

That's hardly conclusive. But you see my point, right? If it was something he was committed to doing, that kind of exposure would have been must-to-avoid. Painful as the thought is.

You could also construe it other ways, though.

I totally agree. It's very rare that people with that kind of passion and purpose commit suicide. He was a man on a mission, and I'm sure he, as well as those in power, understood the chances of him getting 35 years was slim to none.

It sounds to me like they had a case, but outcome-wise, I have no idea how to calculate the odds, other than that "none" is probably too low. Likewise, I think you're right that idealists are rare. But I'm not sure whether idealist suicides are. The criteria are kind of difficult to match.

So....FWIW, for some reason I though of Tom Forcade as soon as I read about this. It's not exactly the same story. And maybe not even that close. But it would really be such a sad, grim business to sit around trying to come up with more examples that I just can't confront it, I don't think. Abbie Hoffman, maybe. Age makes a difference though.

[IanEye]

*



*

*****

Transcript: Aaron Swartz keynote – “How we stopped SOPA” at F2C: Freedom to Connect 2012, Washington DC on May 21, 2012

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. And he said, “There’s an amazing bill that you have to take a look at.”

“Well, what is it?” I said.

“It’s called COICA, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeiting Act.”

“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. Health care! 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 deal 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. And the next day I came up with lots of ways to try to explain to people. I said it was a great firewall of America. I said it was an Internet block 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. They 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 of 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 that part of the justices’ brain 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 an 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 the 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 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 of 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’d 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 cosponsored 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.

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 theirs, and you spend a bunch of time debating, and there’s a bunch of trading to get members over to your cause. And finally you spend hours talking one on one with the different people and that they try and come back with some sort of compromise that 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. It just doesn’t happen in Congress. But this time, it was going to happen.

But 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’d 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, 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 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, and 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 these 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, some of the members gave nice speeches before casting their vote. And in their speeches they said their office had been overwhelmed with comments about 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’ve got 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, a Democrat from Oregon, put a hold on the bill. Giving a speech in which he called it a nuclear bunker buster bomb armed at the Internet, he announced he would not allow it to pass without changes.

Now, 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 to 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 SOPA.”

(laughter)

So, progress, right?

But, you know, I think that story illustrates what happened during those couple of 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 in 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 the 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 founder in the room and go like, what are you going to do, and what are you going to do? And everyone was trying to one-up each other.

Then there was one day when the shit 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 okay 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. He 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 missile 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 seeing that fire in that senator’s eyes scared me. I think those hearings scared a lot of people. They said this wasn’t the attitude of a thoughtful government trying to resolve tradeoffs 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 a 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. I mean 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 then on the other side it says January 15th. And now it’s totally reversed. Everyone is opposed to 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’d 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 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.

And 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 then 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 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 newsreaders 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, and 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.

*****

transcript found here.


.

[wetland]

http://susiebright.blogs.com/susie_brights_journal_/2013/01/i-have-something-to-say-about-aaron-swartzs-suicide-and-the-special-way-the-us-justice-dept-hounds-p.html

I Have Something to Say about Aaron Swartz's Suicide and the Special Way the US Justice Dept Hounds People to Death

by Susie Bright

Twice in my career I've been asked to serve as an expert witness on the defense team of an obscenity trial, where the prosecution was spearheaded by the U.S. Justice Department.

I was naive enough— both times— to think that I had a chance to further the cause of the First Amendment. I hoped to bring some objective sex information to bear on the puritanical overreach of US pornography laws.

Well, that's pretty high-minded stuff compared to the details of each case. The prosecution's strategy was beneath contempt— and had nothing to do with even the simplest understanding of law or ethics.

In my cases, the defendant were low-hanging fruit, who were targetted because of their helplessness and vulnerabilty— not because of their "crimes" or "victims."

I remember the day, on my last case, where the Defense team showed me all their files that they'd been shy to show me before. I dropped their papers to the floor halfway through my review: "What are we talking about here? This defendant is developmentally disabled... ISN'T HE? He can't even talk on the stand because he sounds like a disoriented three-year-old!"

The attorneys stared at me— that's when I realized they were inured to this. The Justice Department was bagging obscenity law trophies by going after the poor, the suicidal, the insane, the cognitively impaired— because that's the way they rack up numbers and status. That's the way their fuel their careers at the Justice Department— not by taking on constitutional issues, or injustice, or fat cats who believe they're above the law.

Oh no, they've got a different plan: They find someone who's drooling, or depressed, or friendless— and then throw the book at them. It doesn't take long because the "defendant-target" is overmatched.

These cases were so upsetting to me— in the second instance, I withdrew in time and had a bit of a meltdown with the Defense. "How can you look in the mirror and call in an "obscenity" expert! You need a doctor, not a scholar— If you don't bring in a psychiatrist's evaluation and get this case pulled, you're essentially killing a man for being mentally retarded."

Yeah, and that's how mad I was at the Defense team... for even playing along with this charade. If I'd ever gotten close enough to the Prosecutor, I would've spat green bile. It was the same feeling I've had concerning death penalty cases for defendant whose IQ wouldn't admit them to kindergarten but is plenty good enough for the electric chair.

Upon hearing of Aaron Swartz's suicide, on the even of his trial, facing 40+ years in prison— for what would be called "nothing" in some circles and " peerless heroism" in others— I crumpled. Like many of us, I feel in debt to this young man's genius and activism, his stake in democracy.

Now we know that Swartz battled depression— he was open about it, eloquent even. Clinical depression affects people no matter whether the sun is shining or not, at any stage of life, hopeful or dim. But when life takes a threatening turn and you face the rest of your life in prison, in brutal circumstances— treatable depression takes a perilous dive.

And here's what I have to say to the prosecuting federal attorneys in the Case: you have blood on your hands and I bet you KNEW it was a possibility all along.

I wager the Justice Department understood Aaron's suicidal and depression vulnerabilities better than ANYONE— because they make a living, a strategy, going after the weakest links, exploiting psychological deficit and isolation at EVERY TURN. Aaron had more to give the world than their whole "Just-Us"department wrapped up in a bow, but that's the least of their concerns.

You've done enough, you shitheads. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

[wetland]

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/aaron-swartzs-politics.html

Aaron Swartz’s Politics

by Matt Stoller

Aaron Swartz was my friend, and I will always miss him. I think it’s important that, as we remember him, we remember that Aaron had a much broader agenda than the information freedom fights for which he had become known. Most people have focused on Aaron’s work as an advocate for more open information systems, because that’s what the Feds went after him for, and because he’s well-understood as a technologist who founded Reddit and invented RSS. But I knew a different side of him. I knew Aaron as a political activist interested in health care, financial corruption, and the drug war (we were working on a project on that just before he died). He was a great technologist, for sure, but when we were working together that was not all I saw.

In 2009, I was working in Rep. Alan Grayson’s office as a policy advisor. We were engaged in fights around the health care bill that eventually became Obamacare, as well as a much narrower but significant fight on auditing the Federal Reserve that eventually became a provision in Dodd-Frank. Aaron came into our office to intern for a few weeks to learn about Congress and how bills were put together. He worked with me on organizing the campaign within the Financial Services Committee to pass the amendment sponsored by Ron Paul and Alan Grayson on transparency at the Fed. He helped with the website NamesOfTheDead.com, a site dedicated to publicizing the 44,000 Americans that die every year because they don’t have health insurance. Aaron learned about Congress by just spending time there, which seems like an obvious thing to do. Many activists prefer to keep their distance from policymakers, because they are afraid of the complexity of the system and believe that it is inherently corrupting. Aaron, as with much of his endeavors, simply let his curiosity, which he saw as synonymous with brilliance, drive him.

Aaron also spent a lot of time learning how advocacy and electoral politics works from outside of Congress. He helped found the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a group that sought to replace existing political consulting machinery in the Democratic Party. At the PCCC, he worked on stopping Ben Bernanke’s reconfirmation (the email Aaron wrote called him “Bailout Ben”), auditing the Fed and passing health care reform. I remember he sent me this video of Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, on Reddit, offering his support to Grayson’s provision. A very small piece of the victory on Fed openness belongs to Aaron.

By the time I met and became friends with Aaron, he had already helped create RSS and co-founded and sold Reddit. He didn’t have to act with intellectual humility when confronting the political system, but he did. Rather than approach politics as so many successful entrepreneurs do, which is to say, try to meet top politicians and befriend them, Aaron sought to understand the system itself. He read political blogs, what I can only presume are gobs of history books (like Tom Ferguson’s Golden Rule, one of the most important books on politics that almost no one under 40 has read), and began talking to organizers and political advocates. He wanted, first and foremost, to know. He learned about elections, political advertising, the data behind voting, and grassroots organizing. He began understanding policy, by learning about Congressional process, its intersection with politics, and how staff and influence networks work on the Hill and through agencies. He analyzed money. He analyzed corruption.

And he understood how it worked. In November of 2008, Aaron emailed me the following: “apologies if you’ve already seen it, but check out this mash note to Rubin from Lay. ahh, politics.” This was attached to the message.

This note, from Enron CEO Ken Lay to Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, perfectly encapsulates the closed and corroded nature of our political system – two corporate good ole boys, one running Treasury and one running Enron, passing mash notes. This was everything Aaron hated, and fought against. What I respected about Aaron is that he burned with a desire for justice, but also felt a profound desire to understand the system he was attempting to reorganize. He didn’t throw up his hands lazily and curse at corruption, he spent enormous amounts of time and energy learning about and working the political system. From founding Reddit, to fighting the Fed. That was Aaron.

Aaron approached politics like he approached technology. His method was as follows - (1) Learn (2) Try (3) Gab (4) Build. He was methodical about his work, and his approach to life - this essay on procrastination will give you a good window into his mind. Aaron liked to “lean in” to difficult problems, work at them until he could break them down and solve them. He had no illusions about politics, which is why he eventually became so good at it. He didn’t disdain the political process the way so many choose to, but he also didn’t engage in flowery lazy thoughts about the glory of checks and balances. He broke politics down and systematically attempted to understand the system. Aaron learned, tried, gabbed, and then built.

This is a note I got from him years ago, when we were trying to put together flow charts of corporate PAC money and where it went.

“Been playing around with the numbers tonight. Turns out corporate PAC money explains 45% of the variance in ProgressivePunch scores among Dems. Scatterplot attached. Right is progressive, down is no corporate PAC money. So you can see how all the people with less than 80% progressive punch scores get more than 20% of their money from PACs.”

This is a chart of power, one of many Aaron put together to educate himself (and in this case, me). Most geeks hate the political system, and are at the same time awed by it. They don’t actually approach it with any respect for the underlying architecture of power, but at the same time, they are impressed by political figures with titles. Aaron recognized that politics is a corrupt money driven system, but also that it could be cracked if you spent the time to understand the moving parts. He figured out that business alliances, grassroots organizing, and direct lobbying to build coalitions was powerful, whereas access alone was a mirage. He worked very hard to understand how policy changes work, which ultimately culminated in his successful campaign to stop SOPA in 2011. This took many years of work and a remarkable amount of humility on his part.

But he was driven by a desire for justice, and not just for open information. He wanted an end to the drug war, he wanted a financial system not dominated by Bob Rubin, and he wanted monetary policy run to help ordinary people. Some of his last tweets are on monetary policy, and the platinum coin option for raising the debt ceiling (which is a round-about way of preventing cuts to social welfare programs for the elderly). Aaron was a liberal who saw class and race as core driving forces in American politics. In a lovely essay on how he organized his career, he made this clear in a very charming but pointed way.

So how did I get a job like mine? Undoubtedly, the first step is to choose the right genes: I was born white, male, American. My family was fairly well-off and my father worked in the computer industry. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any way of choosing these things, so that probably isn’t much help to you.

But, on the other hand, when I started I was a very young kid stuck in a small town in the middle of the country. So I did have to figure out some tricks for getting out of that. In the hopes of making life a little less unfair, I thought I’d share them with you.

Making “life a little less unfair.” Those aren’t the words of a techno-utopianist, those are the words of a liberal political organizer. They remind me of how Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has described her own work. Aaron knew life would always be unfair, but that was no reason not to try to make society better. He had no illusions about power but maintained hope for our society if, I suppose, not always for himself. This is a very difficult way to approach the world, but it’s why he was so heroic in how he acted. I want people to understand that Aaron sought not open information systems, but justice. Aaron believed passionately in the scientific method as a guide for organizing our society, and in that open-minded but powerful critique, he was a technocratic liberal. His leanings sometimes moved him towards more radical postures because he recognized that our governing institutions had become malevolent, but he was not an anarchist.

I am very angry Aaron is dead. I’ve been crying off and on for a few days, as it hits me that he’s gone forever. Aaron accomplished more in 13 than nearly everyone I know will get done in their entire lives, and his breadth of knowledge and creativity in politics were stunning, all the more so since he was equally well-versed in many other fields. But what I respected was his curiosity and open-mindedness. He truly loved knowledge, and loved people who would share it. We used to argue about politics, him a hopeful and intellectually honest technocratic liberal and me as someone who had lost faith in our social institutions. We made each other really angry sometimes, because I thought he was too sympathetic to establishment norms, and he thought I couldn’t emotionally acknowledge when technocrats had useful things to say. But I respected him, and he frequently changed my mind. I saw that what looked like stubbornness was just intellectual honesty and a deep thirst for evidence. He wanted to understand politics, because he thought that understanding, and then action, was the key to justice.

As I said, I am very angry that he is dead. I don’t want to get into the specifics of his case, because others have discussed it and the political elements of it more eloquently than I ever could. His family and partner have put out a powerful statement placing blame appropriately.

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. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

I want to make a few points about why it’s not just sad that he is gone, but a tragedy, a symbol for all of us, and a call to action.

Aaron suffered from depression, but that is not why he died. Aaron is dead because the institutions that govern our society have decided that it is more important to target geniuses like Aaron than nurture them, because the values he sought – openness, justice, curiosity – are values these institutions now oppose. In previous generations, people like Aaron would have been treasured and recognized as the remarkable gifts they are. We do not live in a world like that today. And Aaron would be the first to point out, if he could observe the discussion happening now, that the pressure he felt from the an oppressive government is felt by millions of people, every year. I’m glad his family have not let the justice system off the hook, and have not allowed this suicide to be medicalized, or the fault of one prosecutor. What happened to Aaron is not isolated to Aaron, but is the flip side of the corruption he hated.

As we think about what happened to Aaron, we need to recognize that it was not just prosecutorial overreach that killed him. That’s too easy, because that implies it’s one bad apple. We know that’s not true. What killed him was corruption. Corruption isn’t just people profiting from betraying the public interest. It’s also people being punished for upholding the public interest. In our institutions of power, when you do the right thing and challenge abusive power, you end up destroying a job prospect, an economic opportunity, a political or social connection, or an opportunity for media. Or if you are truly dangerous and brilliantly subversive, as Aaron was, you are bankrupted and destroyed. There’s a reason whistleblowers get fired. There’s a reason Bradley Manning is in jail. There’s a reason the only CIA official who has gone to jail for torture is the person – John Kiriako - who told the world it was going on. There’s a reason those who destroyed the financial system “dine at the White House”, as Lawrence Lessig put it. There’s a reason former Senator Russ Feingold is a college professor whereas former Senator Chris Dodd is now a multi-millionaire. There’s a reason DOJ officials do not go after bankers who illegally foreclose, and then get jobs as partners in white collar criminal defense. There’s a reason no one has been held accountable for decisions leading to the financial crisis, or the war in Iraq. This reason is the modern ethic in American society that defines success as climbing up the ladder, consequences be damned. Corrupt self-interest, when it goes systemwide, demands that it protect rentiers from people like Aaron, that it intimidate, co-opt, humiliate, fire, destroy, and/or bankrupt those who stand for justice.

More prosaically, the person who warned about the downside in a meeting gets cut out of the loop, or the former politician who tries to reform an industry sector finds his or her job opportunities sparse and unappealing next to his soon to be millionaire go along get along colleagues. I’ve seen this happen to high level former officials who have done good, and among students who challenge power as their colleagues go to become junior analysts on Wall Street. And now we’ve seen these same forces kill our friend.

It’s important for us to recognize that Aaron is just an extreme example of a force that targets all of us. He eschewed the traditional paths to wealth and power, dropping out of college after a year because it wasn’t intellectually stimulating. After co-founding and selling Reddit, and establishing his own financial security, he wandered and acted, calling himself an “applied sociologist.” He helped in small personal ways, offering encouragement to journalists like Mike Elk after Elk had broken a significant story and gotten pushback from colleagues. In my inbox, every birthday, I got a lovely note from Aaron offering me encouragement and telling me how much he admired my voice. He was a profoundly kind man, and I will now never be able to repay him for the love and kindness he showed me. There’s no medal of honor for someone like this, no Oscar, no institutional way of saying “here’s someone who did a lot of good for a lot of people.” This is because our institutions are corrupt, and wanted to quelch the Aaron Swartz’s of the world. Ultimately, they killed him. I hope that we remember Aaron in the way he should be remembered, as a hero and an inspiration.

In six days, on January 18th, it’s the one year anniversary of the blackout of Wikipedia, and some have discussed celebrating it as Internet Freedom Day. Maybe we should call this Aaron Swartz Day, in honor of this heroic figure. While what happened that day was technically about the internet, it should be remembered, and Aaron should be remembered, in the context of social justice. That day was about a call for a different world, not just protecting our ability to access web sites. And we should remember these underlying values. It would help people understand that justice can be extremely costly, and that we risk much when we allow those who do the right thing to be punished. Somehow, we need to rebuild a culture that respects people like Aaron and turns away from the greed and rent-extraction that he hated. There’s a cycle in American history, of religious “Great Awakenings”, where new cultural systems emerge in the form of religion, often sweeping through communities of young people dissatisfied with the society they see around them. Perhaps that is what we see in the Slow Food movement, or gay rights movement, or the spread of walkable communities and decline of vehicle miles, or maker movement, or the increasing acceptance of meditation and therapy, or any number of other cultural changes in our society. I don’t know. I’m sure many of these can be subverted. What I do know is that if we are to honor Aaron’s life, we will recognize him as a broad social justice activist who cared about transforming our society, and acted to do so. And we will take up his fight as our own.

Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/ ... VaB8d0l.99

[DrEvil]

Here's the White House petition to remove Ortiz:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petiti ... z/RQNrG1Ck
Still needs a few thousand signatures. (Edit: No, it doesn't. Yay!)

Westboro is also getting in on the action, along with Anonymous:

The infamous Westboro Baptist Church issued a press release stating the church’s intent to picket the Jan. 15 funeral of Reddit builder Aaron Swartz in suburban Chicago.
http://chicagoist.com/2013/01/14/westbo ... tens_t.php

Anonymous will defend Swartz’s funeral from Westboro Baptists
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/14/anonymo ... _baptists/