a guy called aaron swartz

JC29856

Aaron H. Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, writer, archivist, political organizer, and Internet activist.

Swartz was a member of the RSS-DEV Working Group that co-authored the "RSS 1.0" specification of RSS,[2] and built the website framework web.py and the architecture for the Open Library. He also built Infogami, a company that merged with Reddit in its early days, through which he became an equal owner of the merged company. Swartz also focused on sociology, civic awareness and activism. In 2010 he was a member of the Harvard University Center for Ethics. He cofounded the online group Demand Progress (known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act) and later worked with U.S. and international activist groups Rootstrikers and Avaaz.

On January 6, 2011, as a result of a federal investigation, Swartz was arrested in connection with systematic downloading of academic journal articles from JSTOR.[3][4] Swartz opposed JSTOR's practice of compensating publishers, rather than authors, out of the fees it charges for access to articles. Swartz contended that JSTOR's fees limited access to academic work produced at American colleges and universities.[5][6]

On the morning of January 11, 2013, Swartz was found dead in his Crown Heights, Brooklyn apartment, where he had hanged himself.[7][8][9]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

JC29856

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/ ... itics.html

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.

JC29856

Official statement from family and partner of Aaron Swartz

Our beloved brother, son, friend, and partner Aaron Swartz hanged himself on Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. We are in shock, and have not yet come to terms with his passing.

Aaron’s insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitable—these gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter. We’re grateful for our time with him, to those who loved him and stood with him, and to all of those who continue his work for a better world.

Aaron’s commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life. He was instrumental to the defeat of an Internet censorship bill; he fought for a more democratic, open, and accountable political system; and he helped to create, build, and preserve a dizzying range of scholarly projects that extended the scope and accessibility of human knowledge. He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place. His deeply humane writing touched minds and hearts across generations and continents. He earned the friendship of thousands and the respect and support of millions more.

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.

Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.
12 Jan 2013

polaris_x

something else i find interesting in this case is the aggressive pursuant nature of the justice dept despite recommendations that the case not be pursued ...

i suspect (based on very little actual knowledge of the case) that this was meant to set a precedent as it relates to intellectual property and what should or shouldn't be made available to the masses ... from music to movies and other digital content ...

is this the same justice dept that decided to drop its case against lance armstrong despite having good evidence that he a) perjured himself and b) lead a gov't funded doping scandal??

JC29856

I don’t have the right word for the way that the rentier state zeroed in on Swartz until he cracked: How it piled a rentier-directed health care system on top of a rentier-optimized technical ecology on top of a rentier-driven justice system. But perhaps I have a metaphor: The Salem Witch trials, where those convicted by the justice system of that time were “pressed” to death with stone after stone after stone:

Depression.

Oppression.

Repression.

Simple, direct, neat.

However, I am hopeful because I believe that our state acts as it does because it is weak, not strong. And I expect to have a way to use the cold and burning anger I too feel in the service of justice.

NOTE *,** If you or anyone you know is considering suicide, do, please, seek help (for example). Multiple asterisks for emphasis!

NOTE *** Ortiz was a leader in collecting fines for lawbreaking:

Ortiz and her office have won attention for taking on a number of high-profile cases, including the ongoing murder prosecution of notorious mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger. Her office also announced in December that it was the largest contributor to the $13.1 billion in criminal and civil fines recovered in 2012 by the nation’s 94 U.S. Attorney’s offices. Ortiz’s office collected $8.8 billion during the fiscal year, accounting for almost 67 percent of the total collection.

These cost-of-doing-business fines are corrupt, as Yves points out. They are the precise equivalent of shell game operators passing the cop on the beat a fiver while they continue to rope in the shills. Ortiz is, as one would expect, a rising star in the Democratic party, and she’s not spending more time with her family. Yet.

NOTE *** One very, very obvious thing the left should be seeking to redress is the different life expectancies shown in Chart 1. Single payer health care would be of great help to the Aaron Swartz’s of this world who are still alive. And we shouldn’t be fighting merely to “save” Social Security, but to make the benefits age neutral. How the elites must laugh among themselves for having inveigled us into selling out our own children!

Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/ ... tHkAcR1.99

JC29856

polaris_x wrote:

something else i find interesting in this case is the aggressive pursuant nature of the justice dept despite recommendations that the case not be pursued ...

i suspect (based on very little actual knowledge of the case) that this was meant to set a precedent as it relates to intellectual property and what should or shouldn't be made available to the masses ... from music to movies and other digital content ...

is this the same justice dept that decided to drop its case against lance armstrong despite having good evidence that he a) perjured himself and b) lead a gov't funded doping scandal??

good point! check out a guy called jonathan james

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JC29856

and dont forget to add this:

According to the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations in a report issued in July 2012, the bank “exposed the U.S. financial system to a wide array of money laundering, drug trafficking, and terrorist financing risks due to poor anti-money laundering controls.” The banks’ conduct enabled Mexican drug cartels to launder tainted money through the American financial system, and the bank worked closely with Saudi Arabian banks linked to terrorists.

viewtopic.php?f=13&t=200769

JC29856

conspiracy theorists love this shizz:

Jonathan Joseph James (December 12, 1983 – May 18, 2008), was an American hacker who was the first juvenile incarcerated for cybercrime in the United States.[1] The South Florida native was 15 years old at the time of the first offense and 16 years old on the date of his sentencing. He died on May 18, 2008, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.[2][3]

The prosecutor who is being accused of acting 'over zealously' in his pursuit of online pioneer Aaron Swartz, who killed himself at the weekend, played a role in another young hacker's suicide in 2008, it was claimed today.

Assistant United States Attorney Stephen Heymann had reportedly been insisting on jail time for Swartz and was refusing to negotiate a plea deal on the 30 years in jail he faced for stealing academic papers.

In 2008, another young hacker also committed suicide after being named in a case Heymann was leading.

Jonathan James killed himself aged 24 two weeks after the Secret Service raided his house as part of its investigation into the TJX Hacker case - which is known as the largest identity hack in history.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z2I4XdG0fL
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

polaris_x

JC29856 wrote:

and dont forget to add this:

According to the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations in a report issued in July 2012, the bank “exposed the U.S. financial system to a wide array of money laundering, drug trafficking, and terrorist financing risks due to poor anti-money laundering controls.” The banks’ conduct enabled Mexican drug cartels to launder tainted money through the American financial system, and the bank worked closely with Saudi Arabian banks linked to terrorists.

http://community.pearljam.com/viewtopic ... 3&t=200769

ya ... what's the common theme?

i would say who the justice department is really aimed at protecting ... corporations ... not the people ...

JC29856

Advocates of open access argue that information should be free, especially when public dollars and public consent, however torturously that consent is extracted, lie at the root of the creation of that information. Yet we live in an age of mounting government secrecy and a relentless push to privatization: of not just our public schools, our public health clinics and a host of other taxpayer-funded civic goods, but of our court proceedings, publicly funded research, and the contortions and conversations that go into creating government policy that our tax dollars bankroll but of which we are denied knowledge. That reality, that great corporate-supported push to hide essential, publicly funded information behind private firewalls and government secrecy, represents a breathtaking breach of the basic tenets of democracy. It is this breach above all else that information freedom activist Aaron Swartz sought to subvert.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/15/ ... formation/

polaris_x

well ... knowledge is power ... and the people have less of it every day ...

JC29856

great article: emails from 2009

http://www.fastcompany.com/3004769/my-e ... al-thinker

Right now I am working on fixing US politics. This has three parts. The first is working for Prof. Lawrence Lessig's group Change Congress, which is trying to get the US Congress to pass a bill so that every major political candidate has the same amount of money to run their campaign with. The second is a site I started called watchdog.net, which let's you look through all sorts of different kinds of political data (what representatives voted on, who they got money from, who is lobbying them, and so on) to try to find patterns and corruption. The third is a group called the PCCC. It tries to make it easier for good people to run for Congress in the US. Right now, if you wanted to run for Congress, you really wouldn't know where to start. Nobody in politics will talk to you unless you've raised a lot of money, and once you have raised a lot of money then they take most of it and give you really bad advice. So we try to seek out really good candidates, help them raise money over the Internet, and show them how to run a campaign powered by volunteers instead of television ads and expensive consultants. As for the future, I'm not sure. I want to do more writing, so I'm thinking of taking some time off and writing a book. Lawrence Lessig is taking of the Harvard Center on Ethics and I think it would be fun to do some writing there.

JC29856

husband of prosecutor defending wife...takes to the internet

http://betabeat.com/2013/01/tom-dolan-d ... z-twitter/

dancepartner

Uh...this is a good thread. I need to take more time to read it though.
Calling it a night for now.

JC29856

Like all truth-tellers, Swartz was branded an enemy by the system. For the act of downloading thousands of academic articles from MIT (yes, academic papers), he was hounded by the FBI, arrested and charged with crimes that could have earned him up to 50 years in prison.

From the charges that were leveled against him for the relatively mild offense of downloading academic papers, it's very clear that somebody powerful was out to destroy him.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/038650_Aaron ... z2I9Aun7Zu

JC29856

Larry Lesig, a Harvard University professor, Internet law expert and friend of Swartz's, also blamed the federal prosecutor, calling him a "bully" on his blog and writing that Swartz, who hinted previously at having a history of depression, had been "driven to the edge" by the government's disproportionate and overly aggressive handling of his case.

50 years for hacking?

"Our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed," wrote Lessig.

"A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don't get both, you don't deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you," he said.

Swartz, a gifted programmer, helped develop the RSS at age 14, and went on to help found Demand Progress [http://demandprogress.org/], a political action organization that campaigns against Internet censorship, reported Britain's Daily Mail newspaper.

Swartz spent the last two years fighting federal hacking charges. In July 2011, prosecutor Scott Garland working under U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, a politician with her eye on the governor's mansion, charged Swartz with four counts of felony misconduct - charges that were deemed outrageous by internet experts who understood the case, and wholly unnecessary by the parties Swartz was accused of wronging. Swartz repeatedly sought to reduce the charges to a level below felony status, but prosecutors pressed on, adding additional charges so that by September 2012 Swartz faced 13 felony counts and up to half a century in prison.

In the end, federal prosecutors' zealous pursuit of Swartz and unwillingness to negotiate on charges undoubtedly led him to choose death. They may not have physically strung him up by his neck, but they cannot credibly claim they had no role whatsoever in his death.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/038705_Aaron ... z2I9BkjDf7

JC29856

http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/ ... o-suicide/

EZ1221C

Good bit in today's NY Times about MIT's role Swartz's arrest and subsequent death, as well as the culture at MIT. Let me see if I can dig it up online.

EDIT: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/techn ... =1&_r=0&hp

JimmyV

Sign the petition to remove Carmen Ortiz here:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petiti ... z/RQNrG1Ck

polaris_x

http://www.hotdocs.ca/film/title/internets_own_boy_the_story_of_aaron_swartz

this film opened the 2014 hot docs festival here in toronto ... great film for anyone wanting some commentary from the people closest to aaron ...

hopefully, this film can protect the next aaron swartz ...

Jason P

I see your Schwartz is as big as mine ...

JC29856

http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/virunga-internets-own-boy-oscars-short-list/

The other documentary on Oscar’s short list is The Internet’s Own Boy, from Luminant Media. The film tells the story of Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz, who was a prominent social and political activist campaigning for internet freedom before his untimely passing. Written, directed, and produced by Brian Knappenberger, the documentary initially screened at Sundance and South by Southwest. FilmBuff and Participant Media partnered to release the film on Vimeo in June.

The full list of potential nominees are bulleted below. Final nominees will be announced on Jan. 15. The 87th Academy Awards will take place on Feb. 22.

Art and Craft (Purple Parrot Films)
The Case Against 8 (Day in Court)
Citizen Koch (Elsewhere Films)
CitizenFour (Praxis Films)
Finding Vivian Maier (Ravine Pictures)
The Internet’s Own Boy (Luminant Media)
Jodorowsky’s Dune (City Film)
Keep On Keepin’ On (Absolute Clay Productions)
The Kill Team (f/8 filmworks)
Last Days in Vietnam (Moxie Firecracker Films)
Life Itself (Kartemquin Films and Film Rites)
The Overnighters (Mile End Films West)
The Salt of the Earth (Decia Films)
Tales of the Grim Sleeper (Lafayette Film)
Virunga (Grain Media)

JC29856

AS...RIP!

benjs

JC29856 said:

AS...RIP!

Missed the anniversary, but amen to this. What an absolutely tragic and avoidable loss.

PJPOWER

benjs said:

JC29856 said:

AS...RIP!

Missed the anniversary, but amen to this. What an absolutely tragic and avoidable loss.

For sure, am I the only person that thinks "Killswitch" should be a mandatory watch in our education system? If you guys haven't seen it yet, you should...everyone should. It's on Netflix...go watch it!