Worldwide Aaron Swartz Day Memorial Hackathons This Weekend

New submitter sterlingcrispin writes: There are hackathons taking place all over the world in memory of Aaron Swartz this weekend, November 8th and 9th. The goal is to "bring together the varied communities that Aaron touched to figure out how the important problems of the world connect, and to share the load of working on those problems." If you are interested in open access, privacy, free speech, transparency, citizen activism, human rights, and information ethics please attend, promote this event, and contribute to its growth.

I'm organizing the Los Angeles meet up and would love to see you there! Here are the other cities hosting one.

Comments

Ideally

[rmdingler]

Some group would make public the government's abuse of surveillance

and the public outcry would break the decibel record set at a college football game.

Dream big, right?

Re:Ideally

[PRMan]

He stole documents that were supposed to be public domain that the government had put behind a paywall and made them public. He used MIT's license and free-to-the-public internet to do this.

He got caught because he put his downloader in one of their closets. None of this should have been technically illegal, and even MIT didn't want to prosecute, but the government decided they didn't like him.

Re:Ideally

[theArtificial]

Broke into an open network eh?

Re:Ideally

[BitZtream]

And that has exactly dick to do with Aarpm Swartz.

He didn't expose you to some massive cover up. He was a common criminal who couldn't handle the fact that he got caught. Any 'good' he did was by dumb luck and coincidental, not intentional.

He was not a hero. Stop pretending he was or bullshitting about what he did, you just cheapen the actions of those who have done heroic deeds.

Do you even know what he did and why he got in trouble? I don't think you do.

Re:Ideally

[BitZtream]

That would still be theft of service, its still theft even if you don't want to recognize it as such.

Re: Ideally

[oldgunpraa]

A little tough talk? From Wikipedia, and I quote: "federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment adding nine more felony counts, which increased Swartz's maximum criminal exposure to 50 years of imprisonment and $1 million in fines." Anyone could be crushed by this sort of injust lawsuit.

Re:Ideally

[lucm]

Absolutely this. "Oh, boo hoo. I'm such an activist, but I can't take the heat when the feds do a little tough talk."

Mitnick, Manning, and Snowden piss on this crybaby from great height.

Those other individuals you mention are an anarchist and two people who published confidential information that they stole from their employer - and one of those individuals conveniently discovered "her" true nature after being sent to military prison. I don't know what great height your refer to.

Anyways as an AC your opinion as to who can take heat or not is beyond ludicrous. Why don't you go back to jerking off on 4chan animated gifs and pwning Facebook accounts of 14 years old girls.

Re: Ideally

[russotto]

The same Wikipedia article also says that he was offered a plea.

Including a felony conviction, so suicide by slow torture.

Re:Ideally

[TrollstonButterbeans]

This.

He could have spent 6 months in jail in a low security prison.

He wasn't Robin Hood, just immature. Instead of spending 6 months in a low-security prison, he killed himself.

Fair or not fair, he didn't accept the consequences of his actions.

All-in-all, a pretty poor reason to commit suicide.

And this guy was fortunate enough to go to HARVARD. This guy got to live a dream and had wealthy parents.

Re:Ideally

[SuricouRaven]

The accusation levied is that the prosecutors overdid the intimidation in their efforts to get to to accept a not-very-good plea bargain. It's a standard procedure: Inform someone that they could go to jail for decades, their life effectively owner, unemployable when they do get out, financially ruined, reputation in shreds. Throw in some scary talk about how dangerous prison is to leave them wondering how they'll survive in a place filled with violent criminals. If all goes to plan the subject will be so terrified they'll accept any plea offered. Prosecutor gets a good politically-advantageous outcome and the taxpayer is saved the cost of a drawn-out and expensive trial. There are downsides though - innocent people may be pressured into pleading guilty this way, and occasionally someone just can't take the pressure and has a breakdown, which is what happened here.

Re:Ideally

[TrollstonButterbeans]

And thank you for the interesting conversation.

Re:Ideally

[camg188]

to make a bunch of research data free

Does JSTOR also offer indexing services for these research papers? If so, that may be data that JSTOR creates and not necessarily free.

Re:Ideally

[Pseudonym]

While I have a lot of sympathy for what Schwartz was trying to do, what he was doing was clearly illegal [...]

There is nothing that Schwartz did which should be a criminal matter, let alone a felony.

Even JSTOR didn't want to pursue. All they cared about was that someone was DoSing their system. As soon as that stopped, that was the end of it as far as they were concerned.

Swartz was a co-author and editor of the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. It's controversial, but there is quite a bit of evidence to support the claim that if it wasn't for this, there would have been no felony charges.

What's uncontroversial is that like many defendants, he was being punished for not accepting a plea bargain. Note that while most common law jurisdictions have a limited form of plea bargaining, plea bargaining as it is practiced in the United States, where a defendant is threatened with a large number of tenuous charges in order to coerce or manipulate them into pleading guilty on a few of them, would be grounds for suing the prosecutors for malicious prosecution or abuse of process in most places, allowing the defendant to recover costs.

(It should be noted that most common law jurisdictions have also abolished grand juries because they archaic and barbaric, along with elected judges and prosecutors.)

Re:Ideally

[tehcyder]

The point is that he was never actually going to face fifty years in jail.

Someone (like his lawyer) should have explained this to him.

Ob. spaceballs ref.

[BarbaraHudson]

"And may the Swartz be with you."

Suicide awareness

[Anonymous Coward]

INSERT SNIDE COMMENT HERE

He is not my hero. He shouldn't be yours either.

full surveillance for free

[turkeydance]

expect your pic to be posted. forever.

Command Line

[linuxrunner]

> yum update

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

[sterlingcrispin]

FACT: Downloading JSTOR articles was one minor footnote among the many amazing projects Aaron was working on at the time. From the fall of 2010 until his death in 2013, Aaronâ(TM)s projects included, but were not limited to: SecureDrop, the leak-protecting technology for journalists now implemented by outlets ranging from The New Yorker to Forbes to The Guardian; the SOPA/PIPA fight, The Flaming Sword of Justice (now The Good Fight), a podcast about activism which went on to reach the top of the iTunes charts; VictoryKit, an online campaigning toolset still mobilizing activists around the world; and co-founding Demand Progress. FACT: Aaron implemented a piece of software that downloaded articles from the JSTOR website faster than JSTOR originally intended. Aaronâ(TM)s software downloaded articles from the JSTOR website to Aaronâ(TM)s laptop, just like a live person would have downloaded them, but without his having to sit there and click through each of the steps manually. Source: Alex Stamos, http://unhandled.com/2013/01/1... FACT: Aaron did not hack into any of MITâ(TM)s computers. The CFAA requires that a person gain access to a computer that they werenâ(TM)t authorized to access. Aaron was obviously authorized to access his own laptop. FACT: Aaron did not hack into MITâ(TM)s network. Aaron connected his laptop to MITâ(TM)s open network by walking into an open computer closet on MITs open campus and simply plugging into an unused ethernet port. Source: Alex Stamos, http://unhandled.com/2013/01/1... FACT: Aaron was a âoeFellowâ at the Harvard University Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at the time. Aaron was exactly the type of academic researcher that MIT meant to have downloading articles from the JSTOR database over its open network. Aaronâ(TM)s past research in this regard was the basis of a Stanford Law Review Article where he found troubling connections between corporations and their funding of legal research. Source: Stanford Law Review http://www.stanfordlawreview.o... FACT: Aaron wasnâ(TM)t even violating JSTORâ(TM)s Terms of Service at the time. JSTOR and MIT had contractual agreements allowing unlimited downloads to any computers on MITs network. Source: Alex Stamos, http://unhandled.com/2013/01/1...

Re:SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

[GNious]

Only thing I got from this was that there is some girl called Aaronâ(TM) doing stuff.

Re:Wow 12 whole cities

[lucm]

This is not a horrible legacy. Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 was a horrible legacy.

Re:a better idea:

[lucm]

Suicide-murder would be a lot more impressive than murder-suicide.

Re:SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT with paragraphs

[Anonymous Coward]

FACT: Downloading JSTOR articles was one minor footnote among the many amazing projects Aaron was working on at the time. From the fall of 2010 until his death in 2013, Aaronâ(TM)s projects included, but were not limited to: SecureDrop, the leak-protecting technology for journalists now implemented by outlets ranging from The New Yorker to Forbes to The Guardian; the SOPA/PIPA fight, The Flaming Sword of Justice (now The Good Fight), a podcast about activism which went on to reach the top of the iTunes charts; VictoryKit, an online campaigning toolset still mobilizing activists around the world; and co-founding Demand Progress.

FACT: Aaron implemented a piece of software that downloaded articles from the JSTOR website faster than JSTOR originally intended. Aaronâ(TM)s software downloaded articles from the JSTOR website to Aaronâ(TM)s laptop, just like a live person would have downloaded them, but without his having to sit there and click through each of the steps manually. Source: Alex Stamos, http://unhandled.com/2013/01/1...

FACT: Aaron did not hack into any of MITâ(TM)s computers. The CFAA requires that a person gain access to a computer that they werenâ(TM)t authorized to access. Aaron was obviously authorized to access his own laptop.

FACT: Aaron did not hack into MITâ(TM)s network. Aaron connected his laptop to MITâ(TM)s open network by walking into an open computer closet on MITs open campus and simply plugging into an unused ethernet port. Source: Alex Stamos, http://unhandled.com/2013/01/1...

FACT: Aaron was a âoeFellowâ at the Harvard University Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at the time. Aaron was exactly the type of academic researcher that MIT meant to have downloading articles from the JSTOR database over its open network. Aaronâ(TM)s past research in this regard was the basis of a Stanford Law Review Article where he found troubling connections between corporations and their funding of legal research. Source: Stanford Law Review
http://www.stanfordlawreview.o...

FACT: Aaron wasnâ(TM)t even violating JSTORâ(TM)s Terms of Service at the time. JSTOR and MIT had contractual agreements allowing unlimited downloads to any computers on MITs network.
Source: Alex Stamos, http://unhandled.com/2013/01/1...

Slashdot knows nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

... open access, privacy, free speech, transparency, citizen activism, human rights, and information ethics ...

So far, no-one on this thread is addressing these issues. For those who don't know, which is most of you, Aaron got Google Inc. involved in the "Stop SOPA" campaign. So don't bitch about the one thing he did wrong, we owe him.

Paid government trolls all over this thread

[Rujiel]

Some agency is very afraid of Aaron becoming a martyr, and their paid trolls are here to throw out talking points someone else wrote for the purpose of trashing Aaron's character.

They don't even try to hide it. Giant paragraphs of garbage, shitposting, you name it. The fact of trolls indicates the truth: Aaron was ultimately victimized by his government, not MIT or JSTOR.

He put himself in the situation

[TrollstonButterbeans]

He put himself in the situation. And he got caught. It wasn't the first time he did it either. Prosecutors are always big-time jerks --- it is part of the job description.

If anything, the problem is hackers are usually caught up in a very juvenile culture where they decide right and wrong are decided by their social circle and social approval.

Self-pity in adults is the first sign of evil. And the opposite of being an adult. Adults make their own choices.

Self-pity is the concept that you don't create your own circumstances and a rejection of responsibility. He had the world on a silver-platter even if he did a little jail time.

Faced with the choice of growing into an adult and acknowledging there is a world outside his social circle that does not approve of his behavior, he did the childish thing and rejected this and committed suicide.

Nothing noble about this. Not one bit.

Trolls blaming the victim for prosecutorial overre

[Rujiel]

Your entire premise is that the government went after him for enabling JSTOR privacy , but the feds actually went after him on principle and used JSTOR as an excuse. The feds has raided his apartment over a year earlier for his correspondence with wikileaks.

But you shills are just here to trash his character, anyway.

Generic smear #15377: "He's rich!"

[Rujiel]

Funny how all these emotional arguments for JSTOR appear whenever there's an Aaron Schwartz thread, as if anyone on slashdot really feels that strongly about piracy.

Re:Generic smear #15377: "He's rich!"

[TrollstonButterbeans]

I don't have any opinion at all about the specifics.

I dislike cowards. Especially suicide over trivial circumstances.

My heroes are ones that overcome adversity. Not ones that cry over themselves and then take their own lives, for no legitimate reason because they engaged in a legally frowned-on behavior one time too many.

Re:Generic smear #15377: "He's rich!"

[Rujiel]

"He was a common criminal who couldn't handle the fact that he got caught."
Your deception lies in the word "caught". Aaron wasn't caught, he was specifically targeted by the government. It wasn't MIT pursuing charges against him--it was the FBI.

Re:Generic smear #15377: "He's rich!"

[TrollstonButterbeans]

Where did I say he was a common criminal?

Your need to fabricate what I said is weak. If you have something worth saying that is both a valid point and stands on its own, you wouldn't need to fabricate a quote.

He got in trouble for his involvement with wikilea

[Rujiel]

I doubt you're so naiive as to think that the fed prosecuted him purely over JSTOR when both JSTOR and MIT didn't care to continue with the charges. He was targeted by the government as an activist. That's how he was martyred, not over JSTOR.

Paid shills on slashdot: the obvious tells

[Rujiel]

Hates Aaron Schwartz? check.
Hates Manning, Assange, Snowden and Greenwald? Quadruple check.
An undying yet unspkoken loyalty to endless spying and the liars that enable it? You bet your ass.

You shills are so bad at this, it blows my mind. I hope for your employer's sake that you're an unpaid intern, else our tax money is going to waste twice over.

Re:Paid shills on slashdot: the obvious tells

[lucm]

If you really think that people who disagree with you are paid by a mysterious "employer", your life must be full of suspense and mystery. I envy you.

Re:Paid shills on slashdot: the obvious tells

[Rujiel]

A bit late to the party, bud? The fact of paid shills has become evident from many angles. GHCQ (and the NSA by extension) have already been shown to employ paid trolls. https://firstlook.org/theinter... (Here's where you call Greenwald a libertarian or bitch about Omidyar Pierre.)
Even telecoms employ pay trolls. http://www.vice.com/read/troll...
Oil companies? You bet. http://www.dailykos.com/story/...

So of course the government does as well--are you daft? In another message I'm arguing against a guy named Trollston, for fuck's sake.

Paranoid morons on slashdot: the obvious tells

[lucm]

You obviously have no experience working in the public sector. "The government" is not an organized entity with a secret agenda. It's a tapestry of independent organizations with conflicting interests managed by people with little or no incentive to implement the short term policy established by whoever is temporarily in charge as dictated by the random lobbies that got them elected.

The fact that you mention GCHQ leads me to believe that you are from the UK, because nobody outside that tiny island gives a shit about your local, watered-down version of an intelligence service. I wasn't even sure about the right order of the letters in that acronym, I had to double-check your post. That should tell you how meaningless they are. If it was not for James Bond movies nobody in the world would even know that you have spies. It's like if some dude from Italy was to come here and start spewing paranoid garbage about AISE hiring people to brag about spaghetti on Yahoo Answers. (Yeah, I had to google "italy intelligence agency" to find the name for that one).

In any event, I guess believing that "the government" is posting on Slashdot to shape public opinion is a security blanket for you. So keep up denouncing random people as shills of The System if that makes you happy. In the meantime I'll definitely look up that other conversation you mention because that's immensely fascinating; if you don't see me replying in that thread it will be because your points are too strong and convincing.

Re:Paranoid morons on slashdot: the obvious tells

[Rujiel]

"The government" is not an organized entity with a secret agenda.

In this case some agency is paying shills to post nonsense on the internet, and which agency--be it the FBI, the originators of COINTELPRO, or the CIA, or any other alphabet soup entity--isn't relevant to the fact of those trolls existing. Hence, "the government". If I said it was the NSA, you'd be busy telling me how incompetent the NSA is. Instead you've chosen to conveniently overlook the cooperation of the NSA and its pet, the GCHQ.

But I'll go ahead and tear about your stupid shit about there not being web propaganda, because why not.

Leon Panetta publicly admits to web propaganda efforts by the Pentagon. However, it's a contractor performing the propaganda, which would confuse your poor mind into wanting to associate it with some government agency, since "the government" after all is too much of a summary for you. http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

USA TODAY found that the owners of the top propaganda contractor in Afghanistan, Leonie Industries, had failed to pay $4 million in federal taxes on time despite earning more than $200 million in contracts from the government. Their tax bills were paid after the story was published.

Shortly after USA TODAY made inquiries about the tax bills, fake Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as phony fan club websites, were set up to disparage USA TODAY reporters. The co-owner of the company, Camille Chidiac, admitted to setting up some of the sites but said he did not use company resources in doing so. He had been suspended from receiving federal contracts because of the campaign, but the military lifted the suspension late last year.

Domestic propaganda legalized in 2013, for the first time since the cold war: http://rt.com/usa/propaganda-u...
Military Announces New Social Media Policy: http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com...
Many months behind schedule, the Department of Defense on Friday issued a new policy that, on the surface, seems likely to expand access to popular social networking sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter by troops using military computers.

And most importantly: Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media: Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda http://www.guardian.co.uk/tech...

In summary, you're bad at this, and should feel bad.

Re:Paranoid morons on slashdot: the obvious tells

[lucm]

In summary, you're bad at this, and should feel bad.

You should put this kind of summary at the beginning of your posts. Readers would immediately know that whatever comes next is garbage. As it stands, one has to read 2-3 sentences before giving up, that's not as efficient.