Aaron Swartz had voor zijn zelfmoord een groot aantal studiedocumenten, artikelen, van de MIT servers gedownload. Hij vond dat universitair onderzoek vrij beschikbaar hoorde te zijn. Nu blijkt dat er meer loos is.
TechDirt: "Many have noted that the US Attorneys had made a new filing on the day that Aaron Swartz committed suicide. While the filing may look like just a standard procedural filing, some are pointing out that it highlights some highly unusual activity in the case. It had to do with Swartz's motion to get some of the evidence blocked from being used in the case, over questions concerning how it was collected. But one of the key things that come out is that, for unexplained reasons, the Secret Service took over the case just two days before Aaron was arrested.
As Emptywheel points out, it doesn't make any sense for the Secret Service to be involved in such an issue:
According to the Secret Service, they get involved in investigations with:
Significant economic or community impact
Participation of organized criminal groups involving multiple districts or transnational organizations
Use of schemes involving new technology
Downloading scholarly articles is none of those things."
Was Aaron een samenwerking op het spoor tussen MIT en de Geheime Dienst? Bezit het MIT geheime documenten? Werkt het MIT aan geheime projecten? Of is dit gewoon een geval van intimidatie van kritische burgers en machtsmisbruik?
CrooksAndLiars: "The Secret Service developed a multifaceted approach to combating cyber crime by: expanding our Electronic Crimes Special Agent Program; expanding our network of Electronic Crimes Task Forces; creating a Cyber Intelligence Section; expanding our presence overseas; forming partnerships with academic institutions focusing on cybersecurity; ...
Could one of those partners have been MIT? Did the Secret Service and FBI fear that their partnership work in the area of combating computer crime and online fraud would be revealed?
MIT, of course, is the source of one of the great national-security collaborations, in the form of the Lincoln Laboratory, which currently works with DHS on several projects.
The problem I see is that Aaron Swartz didn't touch any data from those partnerships, yet from investigator to prosecutor, they treated him as though he were the modern-day Rosenberg spy team rolled up in one really, really smart young guy. Instead of reading what he wrote in the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, where he clearly said that he believed information should be free, and he intended to free it, they leapt to a conclusion and then reached for every fragment they could find to support it.
Now that the government has dropped the charges against him posthumously, I am hoping his attorneys will release all of the pleadings and documents related to his case. It's time to have an honest conversation about this notion of "homeland security", who exactly is being protected (besides banks, of course), and how it can come to pass that the full force of the FBI and Secret Service came down on the head of a smart, passionate person who simply wanted to publish academic papers for everyone to access."
TheTech: "MIT’s network fell to a denial-of-service attack Sunday evening, allegedly by the Internet activist group called Anonymous, cutting campus users off from Internet access to most websites for nearly three hours. The attack came in the wake of accusations that MIT’s role in the pending litigation against Internet activist Aaron Swartz contributed to his Friday suicide."
Gizmodo: "In Memoriam, Aaron Swartz, November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013, Requiescat in pace.
A brief message from Anonymous.
Whether or not the government contributed to his suicide, the government's prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for - freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it - enabling the collective betterment of the world through the facilitation of sharing - an ideal that we should all support.
Moreover, the situation Aaron found himself in highlights the injustice of U.S. computer crime laws, particularly their punishment regimes, and the highly-questionable justice of pre-trial bargaining. Aaron's act was undoubtedly political activism; it had tragic consequences.
Our wishes
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of computer crime laws, and the overzealous prosecutors who use them.
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of copyright and intellectual property law, returning it to the proper principles of common good to the many, rather than private gain to the few.
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for greater recognition of the oppression and injustices heaped daily by certain persons and institutions of authority upon anyone who dares to stand up and be counted for their beliefs, and for greater solidarity and mutual aid in response.
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for a renewed and unwavering commitment to a free and unfettered internet, spared from censorship with equality of access and franchise for all."
HuffingtonPost: "Over the weekend, Swartz' family issued a statement pointing blame at MIT:
"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. The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims.""
Anonymous Netherlands is intussen van het internet gehaald. Ik kan me voorstellen wie daar achter zit. Of had Sony misschien een copyright claim ingediend? (Grapje.) Maar het zou me ook niet verbazen als AN was opgericht door een of andere geheime dienst. Vergeet de Stasi of de geheime dienst van China of welk ander land ook, het westen is één gigantisch geheim bolwerk. Universiteiten werken samen met Homeland Security, dat doen ook Apple en Microsoft, Facebook en Twitter. En dat terwijl de dreiging in de wereld juist uitgaat van het westen, in het bijzonder de VS. Duidelijk is wel dat overheden veel zaken geheim willen houden omdat die in feite illegaal zijn, of de 'vijand' (en dit woord omvat iedereen tegenwoordig) kunnen helpen. Intimidatie en aantasting van de vrijheid van meningsuiting en controle van het internet behoren tot de vaste activiteiten van geheime diensten.
Julian Assange (in Cypherpunks): "If you look at the expansion in the military contractor sector in the West over the past ten years, the NSA, which was the biggest spy agency in the world, had ten primary contractors on its books that it worked with. Two years ago it had over 1,000. So there is a smearing out of the border between what is government and what is the private sector."
Vreemd genoeg blijkt al die controle totaal niet in staat om de misdaad uit te roeien. De overheidscomputers zijn zo lek als een mandje en de privacy van de burger is een lachertje.
Volkskrant: "De Belastingdienst waarschuwt burgers en bedrijven voor valse e-mails waarin gesuggereerd wordt dat ze van haar of van het ministerie van Financiën afkomstig zijn. Deze mails proberen de geadresseerden te verleiden op een link te klikken, waarna ze worden doorgeleid naar een website die sterk lijkt op die van de Belastingdienst. Daar krijgen ze het verzoek privégegevens, zoals hun DigiD, in te voeren."
Het opsporen en uitschakelen van dergelijke fraude behoort niet meer tot de taken van onze overheid, men heeft het te druk met andere zaken, te druk met het sturen van Patriots naar Turkije om al-Qaeda te ondersteunen. Zelfs het alarmnummer van de politie is niet betrouwbaar; geen garantie voor tijdige hulp. Maar elke e-mail en elk telefoongesprek wordt ondertussen wel vastgelegd. Daar is altijd geld voor. Wat beschermt men? Niet de burgers, maar het kapitalistische staatsbestel.