TECH PRODIGY AND INTERNET ACTIVIST AARON SWARTZ FOUND DEAD AT 26, WAS HE ASSASSINATED?
The Unhived Mind [UHM]
Aaron Swartz, Tech Prodigy and Internet Activist, Is Dead at 26
By Sam Gustin
Jan. 13, 2013
http://business.time.com/2013/01/13/tech-prodigy-and-internet-activist-aaron-swartz-commits-suicide/
Aaron Swartz, the brilliant young software programmer and Internet activist who inspired awe and reverence from leading figures in the technology world, died in his Brooklyn apartment on Friday, his family said in a statement. New York City’s chief medical examiner ruled the death a suicide by hanging. Swartz was 26 years old.
A computer prodigy, Swartz co-authored an early version of the popular Internet tool RSS at age 14 and would later become an early leader of Reddit, the social website that has become a locus of Internet activism.
A passionate advocate for social justice, Swartz founded the group Demand Progress, which played a crucial role in persuading the U.S. Congress to back down from controversial antipiracy legislation last year.
“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,” his family said in a statement. “Aaron’s commitment to social justice was profound and defined his life. 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.”
Swartz believed deeply that information — particularly that which might benefit society — should be made available for free to the public. In 2011, Swartz was indicted on federal data-theft charges for breaking into the MIT computer system and allegedly downloading 4.8 million documents from the subscription-based academic research database JSTOR.
Swartz was facing up to 35 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million. He pleaded not guilty. His trial was set to begin this April.
(MORE: Reddit Co-Founder Aaron Swartz Indicted for Data Theft, Could Face 35 Years in Prison)
In 2008, Swartz wrote a program to download some 20 million pages of legal documents from PACER, the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, which charges 10 cents per page for access. Working with other activists, Swartz sought to make the documents available to the public at no charge. The government cracked down on this effort but did not file charges.
Swartz’s efforts to “liberate” information from JSTOR and PACER made him a hero — indeed a legend — among Internet activists. Swartz was an early leader at Reddit, the giant online activist hub that has become a potent force in Internet politics. Reddit was sold to publishing giant Condé Nast in 2006. He later founded the group Demand Progress, which would play a key role in the epic 2011–12 battle between Internet activists and the entertainment industry over controversial antipiracy legislation. (TIME Warner, parent company of TIME, supported the legislation, which was ultimately defeated.)
Swartz, who studied at Stanford University for one year before dropping out, would later become a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, where he worked with Lawrence Lessig, the renowned law professor and activist. Over the years, Swartz worked with Lessig on several major projects, including Creative Commons and Rootstrikers.
“He was brilliant and funny,” Lessig wrote in a blog post Saturday. “A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think?”
(MORE: SOPA Protests Gain Steam as Web Activists Flex Growing Clout)
Swartz wrote candidly and movingly about his struggles with depression and other illnesses. In a 2007 blog post, he described lying in bed for weeks at a time. “Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel,” Swartz wrote. “Everything gets colored by the sadness.”
In a statement, Swartz’s family criticized the way the federal government has handled the JSTOR case. “Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy,” his family wrote. “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.”
News of Swartz’s passing prompted an outpouring of grief from those who knew him well, as well as from the broader technology and Internet community. “Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill and intelligence about people and issues,” Cory Doctorow, co-founder of the technology site BoingBoing, wrote in a heartfelt tribute to Swartz. “I think he could have revolutionized American (and worldwide) politics. His legacy may still yet do so.”
Tim Berners-Lee, who is considered the founder of the World Wide Web, wrote on Twitter: “Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep.”
Swartz’s family and friends have set up a memorial page here.
http://theunhivedmind.com/wordpress2/?p=15021
TheUnhivedMind on January 14, 2013 at 1:58 pm said:
Its highly likely that The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists have had this guy assassinated and veiled it with supposed depression which would have been very easy to do. They then get Tim Berners-Lee to flap his gums to aid the cover-up. Why? Tim Berners-Lee is a Mason within The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists. The pirates of the Livery are masters of assassination like the Jesuit Order who now control them. Notice Swartz’s past connection to the Nazi (Deutsche Verteidigungs Dienst) Stanford University the home of the American branch of thought reform specialists tied to the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations mastered by the Livery.
-= The Unhived Mind
WAS LLYA ZHITOMIRSKIY THE CO-FOUNDER OF DIASPORA ASSASSINATED? [Video]
http://theunhivedmind.com/wordpress/?p=11027
TheUnhivedMind on January 14, 2013 at 2:12 pm said:
Obama Regime Orders Computer Genius Aaron Swartz Suicided
By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers
January 13, 2013
http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1646.htm
A new Foreign Military Intelligence Main Directorate (GRU) report circulating in the Kremlin today is saying that one of the United States top computer geniuses, named Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) [photo 2nd left], was, “in all probability,” suicided by forces loyal to the Obama regime seeking to “set an example” for other dissident forces opposed to the American governments continued crackdown on leakers of US secrets.
According to this report, GRU intelligence analysts tracking the Obama “death squads,” that in the past fortnight have assassinated two prominent American gun support activists, indentified one of these VIPER teams “operating” in the Crown Heights, Brooklyn, section of New York City this past week where shortly afterwards Swartz was discovered dead of an apparent hanging.
Swartz, this report continues, fits the profile of computer dissidents long targeted by the US; which include Gary McKinnon [photo bottom left], the Scottish systems administrator and hacker who was accused by the US, in 2002, of perpetrating the “biggest military computer hack of all time,” but whose extradition to America was blocked by the UK, and US Army Private Bradley Manning, who stands accused of being the whistle blower behind what is called the WikiLeaks Scandal and whose confinement by the Obama regime prompted Juan E. Mendez, a United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture, to publish a report saying that Manning’s detention conditions had been “cruel, inhuman and degrading.”
The “crimes” Swartz was being accused of committing by the Obama regime, this report says, were wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer, in relation to downloading roughly 4 million academic journal articles from JSTOR (short for Journal Storage) which is a digital library for American academics founded in 1995.
The “reality,” however, behind the crimes Swartz was accused of by the Obama regime, and which the US Department of Justice (DOJ) was seeking a 50 year prison sentence and $4 million fine for, according to GRU analysts in this report, was nothing more than this young computer genius putting a computer in a broom closet he neither sought to hide, nor did the owner of the computers he accessed, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) wish to prosecute him for.
To why Swartz was so feared by the Obama regime can be glimpsed in the writing about him by one of his closest mates, Cory Doctorow, the famous Canadian journalist and co-editor of the weblog Boing Boing, who wrote, “Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill, and intelligence about people and issues. I think he could have revolutionized American (and worldwide) politics. His legacy may still yet do so.”
Doctorow further noted in his article about Swartz, titled RIP, Aaron Swartz, that this young computer genius may have, also, been targeted by the Obama regime who have been furiously hunting for computer hackers linked in any way whatsoever to Manning.
Seemingly unbeknownst to the community of American computer experts mourning Swartz today is that his death, should it have, indeed, been orchestrated by the Obama regime as this GRU report suggests, under US law it is completely legal as their President has the right to assassinate anyone he so chooses, in any manner he chooses, all without either charges or trial.
In fact, in 2010, the Obama regime drafted a secret legal memorandum claiming that the President had the power to order the killing of an American citizen without a trial. Several US officials described this secret memo as a 50-page document drafted by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. This is the same government agency, the WSWS news service reports, that drafted the notorious “torture memos” during the Bush administration, justifying waterboarding and other abuses of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other US military and CIA-run prisons.
So frightening has the Obama regime become that the Bloomberg news service reported this past October (2012) that, “Eric Holder, attorney general under President Barack Obama, has prosecuted more government officials for alleged leaks under the World War I-era Espionage Act than all his predecessors combined, including law-and-order Republicans John Mitchell, Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft.”
Even worse, and as reported by the Examiner news service, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi last month advocating giving Obama “dictatorial powers” and the highly influential American progressive political blog Daily Kos is now openly calling for a “benevolent” Obama dictatorship.
Falling on deaf ears, however, were President Putin’s warnings to the American people in 2009 wherein he said the US should take a lesson from the pages of Russian history and not exercise “excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state’s omnipotence”.
“In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state’s role absolute,” Putin said during a speech at the opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated.”
The death of Aaron Swartz, however, shows that once again these Americans, who continually fail to remember the past, are doomed to repeat it.
January 13, 2012 © EU and US all rights reserved. Permission to use this report in its entirety is granted under the condition it is linked back to its original source at WhatDoesItMean.Com. Freebase content licensed under CC-BY and GFDL.
TheUnhivedMind on January 14, 2013 at 2:14 pm said:
The people behind this article above are based in the intelligence arena in Virginia and most likely the Office of Naval Intelligence. Eat the meat and spit out the bones because these types usually try to the lay the blame away from the real culprits. There is far more to the story of Gary McKinnon’s hacking than meets the eye and we have to ask who was it for? Notice how Privy Councilor, Theresa May has protected McKinnon and guess who this Mason belongs to? Yes she’s a Mason within The Worshipful Company of Marketers. Birds of a feather, flock together and all wearing white gloves and gowns.
-= The Unhived Mind
TheUnhivedMind on January 14, 2013 at 2:19 pm said:
The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
November 21, 2012
Presidential Memorandum — National Insider Threat Policy and Minimum Standards for Executive Branch Insider Threat Programs
MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES
SUBJECT: National Insider Threat Policy and Minimum Standards for Executive Branch Insider Threat Programs
This Presidential Memorandum transmits the National Insider Threat Policy and Minimum Standards for Executive Branch Insider Threat Programs (Minimum Standards) to provide direction and guidance to promote the development of effective insider threat programs within departments and agencies to deter, detect, and mitigate actions by employees who may represent a threat to national security. These threats encompass potential espionage, violent acts against the Government or the Nation, and unauthorized disclosure of classified information, including the vast amounts of classified data available on interconnected United States Government computer networks and systems.
The Minimum Standards provide departments and agencies with the minimum elements necessary to establish effective insider threat programs. These elements include the capability to gather, integrate, and centrally analyze and respond to key threat-related information; monitor employee use of classified networks; provide the workforce with insider threat awareness training; and protect the civil liberties and privacy of all personnel.
The resulting insider threat capabilities will strengthen the protection of classified information across the executive branch and reinforce our defenses against both adversaries and insiders who misuse their access and endanger our national security.
BARACK OBAMA
TheUnhivedMind on January 14, 2013 at 6:54 pm said:
14 January 2013 Last updated at 11:31
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21011663
Aaron Swartz investigation ordered by MIT
By Zoe Kleinman
Technology reporter, BBC News
The president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has asked for an internal investigation into its role in Aaron Swartz’s prosecution.
Web activist and developer Mr Swartz, who killed himself on Friday, was facing hacking charges in the US.
He was accused of illegally downloading research documents from academic service JSTOR, using MIT networks.
If found guilty, he could have faced up to 35 years in prison following his trial, scheduled to start next month.
He could also have had to pay a fine of more than $1m for downloading material from the subscription-only research archive.
Mr Swartz had intended to plead not guilty to charges of computer fraud and wire fraud.
Mr Swartz’s family issued a statement stating the actions of both MIT and the Massachusetts US Attorney’s office had contributed to his death.
“Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach,” they said.
When Mr Swartz was charged, Massachusetts US Attorney Carmen Ortiz had said: “Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.”
On Monday, MIT president L Rafael Reif praised the “brilliant creativity and idealism” of Mr Swartz, 26, who had been an early developer of the Reddit community.
“It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy,” he said in a statement to staff.
“Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT.”
He said he had asked his colleague, Prof Hal Abelson, to analyse how MIT had behaved when it had first discovered “unusual activity” on its network in 2010, what decisions it had made and what its options had been at the time.
“I want to express very clearly that I and all of us at MIT are extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many,” he said.
Many people have said that the penalties facing Mr Swartz were unfair.
However, in a blog post, Orin Kerr, a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School, wrote the actions of the prosecutors had been “based on a fair reading of the law”.
“None of the charges involved aggressive readings of the law or any apparent prosecutorial overreach,” he said.
“All of the charges were based on established case law.”
Academics have since taken to Twitter to release their research free in tribute to Mr Swartz, using the hashtag “PDFtribute”.