Five Great Injustices

Like many in our community I am experiencing some very powerful emotions right now. Grief over Aaron, compassion for the survivors who loved him, but also a great deal of rage at the system that allowed this to happen. Aaron was a freedom fighter. It's up to us to carry his fight forward.

I believe there are five great injustices that Aaron was battling. I'd like us to unify to combat those injustices:

1: Prosecutorial Overreach

Carmen Ortiz is one of the very few female Hispanic US Attorneys. No doubt she's had to fight hard her whole life to get where she was.

She must be held accountable for her actions, however just suppose for a moment that Carmen is a regular person, who took up her position never intending to destroy the life of a young genius. How do you suppose she came to this? What motivated her? What was she thinking to herself when she got up in the morning to go to work?

If we can find answers to these questions we can start to address the real cause of the problem with the system.

2: The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

The CFAA is clearly in need of reform. What changes should be made to this law, and how can we contribute to its reform? We can sign and publicise its petition, but can we do more? Can we assist people like Weev who are currently facing charges?


Demand Progress is already mobilising on 1 & 2, with a single petition covering both.

Over 40,000 people (as at Jan 19) have called for the removal of US Attorney Carmen Ortiz at Remove United States District Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office for overreach in the case of Aaron Swartz. | We the People: Your Voice in Our Government

Reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to reflect the realities of computing and networks in 2013. | We the People: Your Voice in Our Government has fewer than 3,500 signatures.

3: Guilty Until Proven Rich

Aaron's wealth was drained dry by the ludicrous amounts of money required for his defence. How can justice be served when only the rich can afford good legal representation?
How can the USA return to the ideal of "liberty and justice for all"? What can we do to help those who can't afford to defend themselves?

4: Sequestration of Public Domain Knowledge

Aaron's motivation for liberating information from JSTOR and PACER was to ensure that all people, whether rich or poor, in first world nations or in the global south, had access to our global body of knowledge. Only then can everyone have the same opportunity to contribute to the growth of that knowledge. What can we do to make public domain information freely available to all?

5: Persecution of Copyright Violators

The current mechanisms for managing copyright content are clearly inadequate. What can we do to move the world towards better systems for rewarding artists for their talents, like Creative Commons? Is law reform needed here, or do we just need better tools? And how can we help those who are currently being persecuted?

I would love to see us unite under a common symbol or banner, so we can identify who in our local community is also fighting for freedom. Maybe scales symbolising justice inside a five pointed star, with a circle around it.

What do you think?

There's Going to be a Revolution

That's what I said to myself (and indeed on Facebook) yesterday morning.

Yesterday afternoon I encountered this article, which seemed to back me up.

I realise now, however, that I was wrong. There's not going to be a revolution; we're already in the middle of one.

It's a revolution of the people, using information as a weapon, against corrupt and self-serving governments all over the world.

I'm not talking about the Arab Spring or the Occupy movement. These movements used the internet for communication and mobilisation of their people, but were primarily driven by economic inequality, combined with rebellion against autocratic governments in the case of the Arab Spring.

I'm talking about revolution driven by the desire for free access to information and creative content. I'm talking about the Internet Freedom Revolution.

It's Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. It's Weev. It's Gary McKinnon. It's Kim Dotcom. It's ACTA, SOPA and PIPA.
And of course, it's Aaron Swartz.

So where are we heading now? Anyone who has thought about Aaron Swartz's death will realise that even ordinary, everyday use of the internet is now dangerous. People are becoming frightened.

And governments see that the internet is out of their control. They are desperately struggling to wrestle it back into order, afraid of the consequences if their people knew too much about what they are doing.

With both sides feeling frightened and cornered, a new phase of the IFR seems inevitable. The only solution is for governments to accept that transparency is preferable to cover-ups and lies, and that people deserve free access to the information they seek.

Fighting for Freedom

I have the great privilege to be a ThoughtWorker, working alongside some truly creative and talented people. People like Aaron Swartz.

Aaron was an amazing young man. At the age of 14 he co-authored the RSS format that so many of us use to access the information that's important to us. He was also instrumental in the development of Reddit, Jottit and the Creative Commons, and founded Demand Progress.

Aaron was also a freedom fighter. He fought not with guns and knives, but with his remarkable intellect and his many talents. He fought to make the information that's on the internet freely available to all people.

He came to the attention of the FBI in 2009 when he paid PACER for the right to download US Court Documents. The documents stored in PACER are public domain documents. PACER charges significant amounts of money to make the documents searchable and available for download by the public. Aaron downloaded massive quantities of documents and made them freely available to all. At that stage the FBI monitored Aaron but did not press charges as the documents were in the public domain.

In January 2012 Aaron helped defeat the SOPA act, a law intended to protect copyright, that would have led to unprecedented internet censorship.

The US Attorney's office received their opportunity to silence Aaron when in late 2010 he used MIT's computer network to download over 4 million articles from JSTOR. The US Attorney claims he 'stole' the articles, although as a Harvard researcher he was allowed free access to them. Aaron did no permanent damage to JSTOR or the MIT computer network. He made no money from the download, nor did he harm any person. JSTOR was not interested in pressing charges against him, yet by September 2012 the US Attorney had charged him with 13 felony counts. He was facing up to 35 years in prison, and up to $1,000,000 in fines. He was facing monumental legal fees just to defend himself.  There's an excellent summary of the whole story in the Huffington Post.

On Friday January 11, after two years of harassment by federal prosecutors, Aaron gave up the fight by taking his own life.

Even if you're not concerned about what happened to Aaron, you should be concerned about this: every time you check a box that says "terms and conditions", you are making yourself vulnerable to charges of Computer Fraud. If the US government wants to keep you quiet, they have only to find some subparagraph in one of the many terms and conditions you have signed that you may have violated. Then they can bring charges against you that may land you in prison for most of the rest of your life.

It's time for all of us to stand up and fight. Fight with your words and with your own special talents.

US citizens, fight with your votes. Fight for the values that made your country a great nation. Fight for justice, fight for democracy, but most of all, fight for freedom!