Barrett Brown is speaking at this year’s Evening Event on November 4th (Tickets).
He is also launching his new Pursuance Software, and teaching, both days at the San Francisco Hackathon (RSVP)
A new documentary about Barrett, “ Accidental Warrior,” looks really great!
Check out the trailer here.
Come to the Fifth Annual Aaron Swartz Day Evening Event! Only 75 tickets left :)
“I’m afraid of my own government targeting me for surveillance because I make fun of the President for a living, and while I do it, I’m also black. I need government transparency and accountability. I need Freedom of Speech. I need quality journalism by journalists who feel safe to do their jobs. Because, without them, I can’t do my job.”
– Ashley Nicole Black, September 14, 2017
Ashley Nicole Black is an American comedian, actress, and writer from Los Angeles, California. In 2016, she became a writer and correspondent for Full Frontal w/ Samantha Bee. She was the Keynote Speaker for the 2017 EFF Pioneer Awards.
Jason Leopold, who is speaking Saturday at the San Francisco hackathon, and also that night at the evening event, wrote about Aaron’s FOIA requests, immediately following his death.
We will be going through the articles referenced in this excerpt below, one by one.
Aaron Swartz’s FOIA Requests Shed Light on His Struggle
From the Truthout article:
Swartz filed his first FOIA request in December 2010, more than two years after he landed on the government’s radar. He was seeking information about himself.
In 2008, Swartz’s friend and fellow open government activist Carl Malamud, the founder of the nonprofit public.resource.org, wanted to make federal court documents housed on the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system (PACER) available to the public for free. Using $600,000 he raised from supporters, Malamud purchased 50 years worth of appellate court documents and posted them on his website.
Then, the government started a pilot program in which access to federal court documents on PACER would be made available to users at no cost at 17 libraries around the country. Malamud urged activists like Swartz to visit the libraries, download the documents and send it over to him so he could make it availble to the public via his website.
“So Aaron went to one of them and installed a small PERL script he had written that cycled sequentially through case numbers, requesting a new document from Pacer every three seconds, and uploading it to” Amazon’s Elastic Compute (EC2) Cloud server, Wired reported. “Aaron pulled nearly 20 million pages of public court documents, which are now available for free on the Internet Archive.”
The court documents Swartz legally accessed were worth $1.5 million. The government shut down the PACER pilot program and the FBI launched an investigtation. Malamud has since published on his website emails he exchanged with Swartz about the incident.
On December 10, 2010, Swartz filed a FOIA request with the Justice Department’s Criminal Division seeking “documents related to me, Aaron Swartz, as well as any documents related to any associated PACER investigation.” The Justice Department said responded by stating it could not locate any records. He also filed an identical FOIA request that day with the Executive Office of United States Attorneys. The office identified 72 documents that were withheld in full.
Editor’s Note: we will be writing a lot about this in the weeks to come, re: how the PACER system in the United States is highly questionable, as it actually forces members of the public to pay, page by the page (and only if they have a credit card) to view the law.
Theodore D’Apuzzo received a favorable opinion, denying the U.S. Government’s Motion to Dismiss in his case against PACER.
In a nutshell:
Last week’s Pioneer Awards were absolutely amazing. I will be posting video soon, but here are some photos.
Come to this year’s Aaron Swartz Day evening event!
See Caroline Sinders at this year’s Aaron Swartz Day International Hackathon, at the San Francisco Hackathon‘s Ethical Algorithm Panel, Saturday at 2pm, and at the evening event, Saturday night, November 4, 7:30 pm.
8 AI Designers That You Need To Know by Adelyn Zhou for Forbes.
Caroline Sinders – Machine Learning Designer and Researcher, former Interaction Designer for IBM Watson
Caroline Sinders
Caroline is an artist, designer, and activist who also loves writing codes. She helped design and market IBM Watson, a billion-dollar artificial intelligence system built on advanced natural language processing, automated reasoning, machine learning, and other technologies. Sinders’ work on Watson focused on user flows and the impact of human decision-making in the development of robotics software. She recently left her dream job at IBM to pursue an equally challenging fellowship at Open Labs. A passionate crusader against online harassment, Caroline probes the different ways design can influence and shape digital conversations, with the ultimate goal of using machine learning to address online harassment. You can weigh her strong opinions on Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn, and her personal website.
Hackathons are being planned for November 4th in San Francisco, New York, and even Cairo!
So far, the projects are the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s SecureDrop and these topics:
Send an email to lisa@lisarein.com if you are planning a hackathon :-)
We are putting together new “Hackathon 101” materials too!
So, if you have good “how to have a hackathon” resources, please email them too! :-)
Seems like a good time for a reminder. (This content is from our “Setting the Record Straight” page that has been up since October 2014.)
FACT: Aaron implemented a piece of software that downloaded articles from the JSTOR website faster than JSTOR originally intended. Aaron’s software downloaded articles from the JSTOR website to Aaron’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/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron-swartzs-crime/
FACT: Aaron did not hack into any of MIT’s computers. The CFAA requires that a person gain access to a computer that they weren’t authorized to access. Aaron was obviously authorized to access his own laptop.
FACT: Aaron did not hack into MIT’s network. Aaron connected his laptop to MIT’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/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron-swartzs-crime/
FACT: Aaron was a “Fellow” 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. Aaron’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.org/print/article/punitive-damages-remunerated-research-and-legal-profession
FACT: Aaron wasn’t even violating JSTOR’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/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron-swartzs-crime/
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, Aaron’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.
Republished from 2014
By Dan Purcell for BoingBoing.
From the article:
You might ask, like I did, what Aaron’s actions had to do with “computer crimes.” Aaron hadn’t broken into a secure network and stolen credit card numbers. He hadn’t stolen anyone’s healthcare data. He hadn’t violated anyone’s privacy. He hadn’t caused anybody to lose any money. There are things that are “computer crimes” that we all recognize are invasive and dangerous, and this was not one of them.
But Steve Heymann did what bureaucrats and functionaries often choose to do. He wanted make a big case to justify his existence and justify his budget. The casualties be damned.
..He had the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is an over broad federal statute that has been made more broad by federal prosecutors trying to stretch its terms. But under the indictment in Aaron’s case, the government still had to prove that Aaron had gained unauthorized access to a computer system. Our defense was really pretty simple. There were going to be other nuances, and we were going to talk a lot about Aaron’s motivations and the type of person Aaron was, but our bottom line was going to be that Aaron had done only what MIT permitted him to do. He hadn’t gained unauthorized access to anything. He had gained access to JSTOR with full authorization from MIT. Just like anyone in the jury pool, anyone reading Boing Boing, or anyone in the country could have done.
We hoped that the jury would understand that and would acquit Aaron, and it quickly became obvious to us that there really wasn’t going to be opportunity to resolve the case short of trial because Steve Heymann was unreasonable.
Of course, after Aaron’s passing, it’s really easy for them to say “35 years. That was a bluff. It was never gonna happen.” That was not what they were telling us. Heymann always insisted on a sentence of hard time in Federal Prison. We said, “this is really a very trivial thing. Can’t we resolve it with probation or some other thing that made a little more sense and would make it possible for Aaron to go on with his life?”
He said “no.” He insisted that Aaron plead to a felony and serve prison time. And of course, what he said, as prosecutors often do, is that if we go to trial, it won’t be so easy, and if we lose, well, this is a tough judge, and the prosecution is going to recommend a very difficult sentence. Aaron may end up having a term of years.
Imagine how incredible this must have been; the first time someone “transformed” one object into another, like magic, with editing! :-)
A bat transforms into Mephistopheles in ‘The Devil’s Castle’ (1896) Considered the First Vampire Movie, directed by Georges Méliès pic.twitter.com/AHf0tgvcpC
— 41 Strange (@41Strange) August 26, 2017