# 19 Jul 2011
3 notes
Federal Government Indicts Former Demand Progress Executive Director For Downloading Too Many Journal Articles
Moments ago, Aaron Swartz, former executive director and founder of Demand Progress, was indicted by the US government. As best as we can tell, he is being charged with allegedly downloading too many scholarly journal articles from the Web. The government contends that downloading said articles is actually felony computer hacking and should be punished with time in prison.
Demand Progress is a prominent organizer of civil opposition to US government efforts to curtail freedom of information on the internet, including the kill switch and blacklist bills. They are political threat to a paranoid, cynical, and technologically ignorant worldview—and nothing else. If a member of their leadership has indeed been arrested on trumped up charges, it is disturbing to say the least.
Update: here’s what JSTOR says happened:
Last fall and winter, JSTOR experienced a significant misuse of our database. A substantial portion of our publisher partners’ content was downloaded in an unauthorized fashion using the network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of our participating institutions. The content taken was systematically downloaded using an approach designed to avoid detection by our monitoring systems.
So that’s their side of the story. What constitutes “unauthorized” here, and what legal penalties apply for accessing data in a way that was not anticipated remains to be seen. It’s hard to know if this aggressive prosecution is targeted, since aggressive prosecution of anything computer related is the norm. But the laws that enable such disproportionate use of government power are of course exactly the ones Demand Progress organizes democratic opposition to.
# 05 May 2011
1 note
Homeland Security Request to Take Down MafiaaFire Add-on
Longterm, the challenge is to find better mechanisms that provide both real due process and transparency without infringing upon developer and user freedoms traditionally associated with the Internet.
Lately it’s open source organizations who are the grownups in the room, and government the rampaging adolescent with no concern for tradition or respect for the law. A legacy system gone haywire?
# 16 Feb 2011
8 notes
“As part of ‘Operation Save Our Children’ ICE’s Cyber Crimes Center has again seized several domain names, but not without making a huge error” — U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’
# 22 Jan 2011
1 note
Applying U.S. principles on Internet freedom
The U.S. has spent years warning that cyber warfare is the New Terrorism of the 21st Century; former DNI Michael McConnell even demanded in The Washington Post that the Internet be re-engineered to vest government and the private sector much greater surveillance controls to combat it (without disclosing the huge profits his Booz Allen clients stand to gain from such measures). All the while, the U.S. was collaborating with the Israelis to engineer the most sophisticated and destructive cyber warfare weapon the world has ever known, one it secretly unleashed last year [Stuxnet]
The hypocrisy of the US State Department on “internet freedom” and “cyber attacks” is something to behold. There’s no need to translate Hillary Clinton’s speech on the topic from PR-speak to English; just intersperse it with everyday press reports of what the same government has been up to lately, and howl.
“On balance, the Register concludes that when one jailbreaks a smartphone in order to make the operating system on that phone interoperable with an independently created application that has not been approved by the maker of the smartphone or the maker of its operating system, the modifications that are made purely for the purpose of such interoperability are fair uses.”
“Internet Freedom is about sustaining the era of permissionless innovation that has characterized the first fifteen years of the commercial Internet in this country and brought us thousands of new big profitable companies, millions of jobs, and a vast array of new services and devices that have changed our lives and made them better.”
