Wired State

Pre-Occupied

Typical "meme" ad from Adbusters Culturejammers.

I've been collecting some notes for awhile to write something about Kalle Lasn, the odious Adbusters fellow who instigated the whole Occupy Wall Street mayhem, but have been busy and seem to keep putting it off.

But I just want to park here something to keep following, which is Lasn's latest call to harass Goldman Sachs with unruly crowds from the Occupy dregs.

I caught sight a few weeks ago of Democracy Now a short blurb, faithfully reporting Lasn's call to shut down 73 global offices of Goldman Sachs.

Well, hmm, it's been two weeks now, what happened? Everyone was supposed to use the tweet hash tag #Goldman.

I checked and found nothing for awhile, and now just found something from yesterday, with a wan 5 re-tweets -- and most of the use of the hashtag is in fact on neutral or positive stories, i.e. that Goldman is selling gold; perhaps it's time to buy? etc.

Did the action fizzle before it started?

Imagine that, despite the Globe & Mail also giving it upbeat replay, and of course Forbes, which should re-dub itself Capital Tool Breaker sometimes, I swear (and you have to wonder why the guy covering Brazil and Russia has to cover the Occupy Wall Street's calls for demonstrations).

So what's up?

When I caught sight of the fact that none other than the Kremlin had hired Goldman Sachs to be their PR booster to get investments, I had to wonder if Kalle Lasn would eventually get a memo that the big action should be called off.

That is, he wouldn't have to be on the agitprop dis list, or even be an agent of influence, to "just know" that if the illustrious Motherland had hired Goldman Sachs, they shouldn't be savaged -- at least not yet, before they managed to turn the tables on the Magnitsky list announcement, which already had seen Rsusia "cleverly" announce a list of American torture suspects -- and of course, that's a ludicruous mixture of people whose torture advocacy actually has been repudiated, like John Yoo, and the prosecutor who rightfully prosecuted Victor Bout, the notorious arms dealer. Goldman may not be in Magnitsky-list reversing, but it's interesting.

Naturally, every time you try to criticize Russia, some prog wit tells you that American "banksters" should be arrested. Well, actually, they are, like this very Goldman Sachs trader. But it's never enough, and they aren't interested really in justice to restore the system; they're interested in overthrowing the system.

It's just a hunch there could be a connection here to the fizzle, but another possible link is Obama, of course. Now, given how Goldman Sachs has bankrolled Obama's election and re-election, you could posit that the radical left pressuring Obama might target Goldman. But maybe not; maybe they are also susceptible to signals from Obama to shut up.

And it's interesting that the new US ambassador to Canada, where Kalle Lasn lives, is the Goldman Sachs guy, Bruce Heyman, a partner in Chicago.

Well, I just look at these strange coincidences regarding first, Russia's hiring of the would-be target of Goldman Sachs -- because the old trails of Soviet influence of Western social movements are still heavily worn, and show up obviously in RT, the Kremlin's TV station, and its guests.

And then I notice Obama's new Canadian ambassador-designate (he still has to be approved by Congress).

Of course, it could be just that the "action" didn't get started yet, or Occupy just doesn't get the following it once had (that seems for sure) despite still-positive press coverage. I see there's a hideous attempt to whitewash the Occupy story with this saccharine new video, Occupy Love. Do watch Occupy Unmasked as an antidote I just bought this and it's really quite something to see -- many scenes of violence, and some defectors telling the truth about Occupy.

 

 

Matthew Keys Is Running Out of Arguments

Here's Matthew Keys again, heckling me on the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper that he is charged with helping to vandalize. What a creep! There's also no sense of responsibility -- that he is a public figure in a public news agency. This parochial, village-like mentality of big people on the Internet with inflated egos is something I often come across in the "global village". A shock from an individual with numerous followers and fawning attention that he might have critics. A shriek that someone might fact multiple criticism on multiple news articles instead of just letting their crusading lawyers' misleading statements stand in the public eye. Incredible!

• Reply · Like · Edited · March 26 at 6:47am
• 

  Matthew Keys · Following · Top Commenter · Deputy Social Media Editor at Reuters · 21,784 subscribers

  "Often, "bullying" seems to mean something about hating gays -- but then that means if you question anything about the way that some aggressive gay activists are pursuing their cause by boycotting or trying to silence other groups they don't like, why, you're the "bully" then -- even if what they do would be classified as bullying in anyone else's hands."
  
  Apparently the same can be said for "harassment." When you question as to why someone is obsessed with an idea or an individual -- going so far as to look up every article on a subject so they can leave a comment -- that's "harassment," even if said person goes to great lengths (and takes great time out of their day) to write lengthy, rambling blog entries on said person, which might qualify as "harassment" to some people.
  
  Here, have some cake…

  Reply · Like · 7 hours ago
• 

  Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick · Top Commenter · Blogger at 3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state

  I certainly stand by any quote I make, and this quote about the aggressiveness of some gay activists trying to take others' freedom of association and freedom of expression of them is definitely a concern I have. I support equality, gay marriage, and LGBT rights. I don't support achieving them via persecuting others and taking away their rights. This shouldn't be a minority opinion.
  
  Matthew, you seem to have forgotten that you are a public figure, and a very public figure, running the Twitter feed for Reuters, a news agency. There's a saying about translators about how they should be different than the proverb about children -- "translators should be heard, not seen," i.e. their personalities should not get in the way of their job. This adage might apply to your profession as well. Nobody is "harassing" you because they comment on your case, whether in one comment or in numerous comments. There is no "Internet police" that decides that comments are "too much". I marvel at the involved narcissism and self-regard coupled with thin-skin geekitude that could produce a notion that leaving comments on public articles about public figures is "harassment". Rambling or no, blog entries about public figures are legitimate as well. This idea that you have to undermine legitimate activity -- take rights away from others -- is why we have to worry about arrogant people like you who act with a grand sense of impunity to take other people's rights away in the name of "journalism".

Apple "Bans Journalism"? Really, Anil Dash?

Anil Dash is ranting nonsense again.

It's the typical geeky hysterical edge-casing trying to make a larger political point, but it's pretty suspect.

He's claiming that Apple "bans journalism" critical of religions:

“We have a lot of software that forbids journalism.” He refers to the IoS [iphone operating system] Terms of Service for app developers that includes text that says, literally: “If you want to criticize a religion, write a book.” You can distribute that book through the Apple bookstore, but Apple doesn’t want you writing apps that criticize religion. Apple enforces an anti-journalism rule, banning an app that shows where drone strikes have been.

Really, Anil? "A lot" of software? What on earth are you talking about?

Probably this, the intifada app. That's all. There likely isn't any other use case of Apple "forbidding journalism".

As for the drone strike app, they may have decided that if the US government declares them secret, there is no sense in facing a possible lawsuit over it, I don't know the specifics. Plenty of people report on drone strikes. Again, probably some of the news apps that *are* allowed on the phone contain this reporting.

My comment:

re really blocking “journalism”.

That sounds like an overheated exaggeration that is basically trying to exonerate anti-Israel hate speech (or perhaps some other crude hate war game against Muslims or something) that really wouldn’t qualify as “journalism”.

They’re right that if you want to express your hatred for religion, a book is a better format because you can capture more nuances and make your arguments.

What is the “journalism” of any sort — about religions or any topic — that would fit into an app? Obviously, they don’t mean news apps, as there are articles in the New York Times or on the BBC which will contain critical comments about Catholics, Muslims, and Jews, for example. The apps carrying these op-ed pages or news articles are not blocked for their content, obviously — which is journalism critical of religion.

What Apple means specifically is the intifada app, that crudely propagandized the violent Palestinian movement against Israel, and denigrated Israel and Jews.

There may be others that involved such crude hate speech in the form of the externals of the app itself, not the content it might bring.

Apple, as a private company, is going to create some standards of taste and against hate speech that aren’t going to fit your own extremist politics. Good! If you want a different mobile company, go to CREDO. Maybe they have an independent app store where you can still get the intifada app.

The key is having a market with pluralism, so that those who feel they absolutely can’t live without hate apps can get them. The opposite — where “progressives” could force private corporations to include extreme political content they endorse — would not be freedom.

 

What's Wrong with Matthew Keys

Regardless of the outcome of the trial of Matthew Keys, the Reuters deputy editor for social media, the ethical issues will remain for "new journalism" with social media as a heavily politicized and manipulated tool.

Matthew Keys is heckling me now right on the pages of the once-defaced Los Angels Times about my legitimate blog posts questioning his innocence here, here and here. Speaking of journalistic ethics, it's okay for me to post that I don't buy his alibi, and it's okay for him to heckle, I suppose, although I think most employers would tell their employees not to heckle the customers. News is a business. That's okay, too. When it's a business, it has certain quality-control issues and standards to maintain that blogs are not burdened with.

WHY DO SOCIAL MEDIA WRANGLERS GET CALLED 'JOURNALISTS'?

And that's fine in an open society -- or should be, unless, of course, journalists of the new format intimidate bloggers who criticize them. Not for the first time. My challenges to Anthony de Rosa, Matthew Keys' boss (above) regarding his portrayal of the Occupy protest on the Brooklyn Bridge, led him to block me on Facebook -- which is a creepy function of Facebook that I find has a horrible effect on the "town hall" claims of these private platforms. But in my view, if Reuters is to be ethical, the public feed of Anthony de Rosa -- as a public figure, performing a public function casting the news from his "progressive" perspective for Reuters, really like a columnist -- should not be blocked from the literal view of members of the public who don't agree with them and have expressed dissent against the very process they are slyly engaging in. I don't buy the "in my living room" logic that these sly dogs invoke to keep the mindshare tilted their way.

It would be one thing if the owner of such a feed blocked *from commenting* someone he didn't like, who rained on his vanity parade. That would be irresponsible and also worthy of a call-out, but it would be something that the Facebook "social" notions would support -- Facebook is supposed to be for "friends" -- and only friends who "like" things (and that's why social-activist news corps love them). Friends who don't like things are unfriended. That's its devious premise, of course, which makes it unfit for political work -- or actually, very fit, for those who are adept at manipulating the public, as the Obama team has done in the last elections. But it's another thing when they block you as a person totally on Facebook, removing their *public* feed completely from view. That's really wrong -- but of course, the platform, also bent on social "progress", lets them do that.

I note that Twitter doesn't admit that kind of vanity manipulation of public figures. When Anthony de Rosa or Matthew Keys or other thin-skinned media geeks block me there, I can still look them up in search and read what they say, or use Google or Topsy.

Not so Facebook -- or I might add G+ -- which turn me and my statements into non-persons -- and makes those people who blocked me invisible to me as if they were non-persons, too -- an innovation on the old Stalinist airbrush trick -- so that we can all be cushioned in the cocoon of our same political beliefs with other "likers". Note that Anthony blocked me not for some kind of "TOS violation" -- there wasn't anything rude, hateful, racist, etc. There was just critical speech. But that's too much for them.

IS SOCIAL MEDIA WORK 'ANALYSIS' OR 'OPINION' OR POLITICAL PROPAGANDA?

The entire role of the social media manipulator that these news companies hire is to be questioned, which is the focus I took in first discussing the indictment of Matthew Keys. This post may be what he believes to be a "conspiracy" theory but it certainly isn't -- I've observed time and again how the person playing the social media maven at either nonprofits or news organizations or corporations (Andy Carver at NPR, Lara Kolodny at Fast Company and Alec Ross while at the State Department instantly come to mind) is used for political organizing. It's used to push one perspective -- the "progressive" line. It's not for the sake of real engagement as in "dialogue with the public" or "debate," but a way of purveying a line and getting massive cheers for it from a manipulated public -- or in some cases, an activist public that needs no manipulation as it is already subject to the propaganda flow of various cadre organizations like Moveon or Daily Kos.

I really think the people in these roles step out of all kinds of professional and ethical bounds as they perform them -- they should have a box around them labelled COLUMNIST --  but are forgiven for this under the guise of "innovation" and the ecstasy of "the new". And I constantly see it in operation. Matthew Keys describes himself as "breaking news," and believes he even provides professional tips about how to "break news" (i.e. this gem -- look up key words to find amateur videos on Youtube!). But the feed is always selective, beyond the very top stories that no news organization can afford to pass. It's always delivered with the snark on certain hate targets on the right, and with amplification of the left's own beloved story. It's worse than the liberal establishment media, however, precisely because it purports to be "of the people" and "authentic" and engaging -- yet blocks and mutes and ignores those that dissent from the left-of-center perspective. There's no letters section for the social media editor, you know? No op-ed column where you get to dispute his "authentic stream".

UNDERCOVER JOURNALISM OR UNDERHANDED ALIBI?

But of course, the ethical problems with Keys go far beyond the Twitter newscaster function, into consorting with a thuggish anarchist hacker collective, Anonymous, and pretending now that this was just news-gathering.

First of all, the question I had about this alibi was: which news organization gave the assignment to cover Anonymous? These events came before Matthew worked at Reuters, but certainly Fox TV didn't give him the assignment. He tells us on his Tumblr blog that in fact he did this in his capacity as a "freelancer". Some news corporations have strict rules about what their employees can do as freelancers, some don't; it's not clear if in fact Matthew was on a 1099 type contract relationship even when he did his social media chores for the Fox affiliate so that they may not have bound him with a clause that he couldn't write for other publications -- and they may not have even had a social media policy that would have provided some check on him as he went and cavorted in the IRC channels with Anonymous.

The sketchy freelance status of his original coverage of Anonymous as an "undercover journalist" is covered up by his later posting on the Reuters news site (while employed for Reuters) of a retrospective article about Anonymous featuring Sabu and his cooptation. Obviously, Reuters editors at that time didn't have any qualms about the nature of this piece, or that it was obtained by "undercover journalism" of the sort they should have had more questions about.

WITH ANONYMOUS, IN THE IRC CHANNEL

Second, I question the ethical implication of hanging with criminals for so long. By Matthews' own admission, he spent two months or more in the Anonymous interfeds IRC chat room -- an invitation-only chatroom that you would get to first by friending up the b/tards in other more open settings -- this is how their very rigid, hierarchical cadre organization in fact is structured. It is anything but the looseknit network over-eager liberal journalists -- and their lying propagandist sources in Anonymous -- always portray them to be.

During that time, he heard about operations even involving the theft of credit cards from people. Shouldn't he have reported that to the authorities? He didn't. If anything, in his statement on his own blog about this,  he even amended what was apparently a typo in an early blog post to make it absolutely clear that he did not go to the authorities with what he heard in these chatrooms -- an act he took so that no one would start calling him a snitch, as they do Adrian Lamo, for reporting Bradley Manning's activities, or Sabu, a LulzSec operative who was turned by the FBI to cooperate with them -- and who may even now be the source for the indictment against Keys -- and maybe motivated to set him up or trash him after the fact, as we obviously realize.

Two months of pretending to be with the goons -- and then oops, telling us all it was "undercover journalism". Leave aside what this tells us about movement solidarity on the left. It's an ethical problem for journalists that since the Food Lion case really, really needs to be questioned. Since when do you get to hear about crimes and do nothing just to hang with the cool kids and burnish your story as...a freelancer? While working for Fox which you hate? Which is then later hacked?

OTHERS QUESTION KEYS' BEHAVIOUR

On the Huffington Post, an anonymous reader with the handle SeattleSlew98337 questions the story about Fox with the following post:

06:31 PM on 03/20/2013
Really? So when Keys' changed Fox40's twitter handle to SacNewsWire and locked the rest of the station out of it as well as their Facebook page, he was acting as an "undercover journalist" too? Sorry, but I saw his behavior online right after he was fired and still have the emails (and screenshot of the Fox40/SacNewsWire stunt) between myself and a different Fox40 employee discussing his antics online.

Keys should be ashamed of himself for hiding behind the title of journalist and own up to what he did. Otherwise he is just cheapening the profession that right now isn't doing so well. Part of growing up is learning to admit when you screwed up and to make amends for it.

Presumably he knows what the feds know, given the confidence they feel in bringing their case -- that Matthew Keys -- or his account that he's now later after the fact going to tell us "wuz hacked" -- was involved in these email exchanges involved in stealing email addresses, including some of government contacts that this TV station had in their files.

Again, Keys commented on his "undercover journalism" on his Tumblr post back in the day, and then of course there's the Gawker article resulting from his leak.

But...NBC did just a bit more real journalism than Adrian Chen ever does at the Gawker however.

They read the Gawker piece, then contacted Keys directly, and got this damning statement from him:

"I chose to allow myself to be credited as the source of a piece of information in the Gawker article only to lend credibility to their story, but did so fully understanding the risks," he told me in an email.

As for that downside, he says, "During my two month engagement with their group, I witnessed a lot of what Anonymous can do, from harvesting emails of Amazon.com employees to gaining access to jailbroken iPhones to stealing credit card numbers ... From what I've heard, Anonymous hackers have already gained access to my address and phone number."

So what was the risk he thought he took -- firing or arrest? And...two months!

Here's what one of the anonymous commenters has to say under the handle Jerm Deeks:

Jerm Deeks a year ago
Also, what's going to happen to the people who turned these chats over to the authorities? If these people in the logs are guilty of what Anonymous has taken credit for, aren't they just as guilty? Not for the things that happened after they left, but everything before? That chatroom was by invite-only, meaning post-HBGary hack, they were still members of the Anonymous "leadership", will they get hit with criminal charges as well? After all, they didn't say they left because the group started committing criminal acts, they left because the group was using kids and other complaints.

Paging Ashera Research for comment...

WHAT WILL KEYS' ALIBI BE?

Matthew Keys denial is categorical -- he says he did not give an account name and password (Parmy Olsen also says he made that statement to her back when she questioned him while writing her book about Anonymous -- but she then didn't use this material and reported on it later on Forces). I have to wonder if this is going to turn out to be word salad -- what he will actually mean is that he gave an account name and password that he was convinced was deactivated after his departure, or even had proof was deactivated, and was then surprised later to discover wasn't. That would be my guess about how this cunning little maneuver will play out. Or he will simply say he was hacked, and who knows, gosh, those IP addresses are so dynamic and variable you just never know....

Keys may even brazenly say that he gave the authentic log on credentials knowing that all they'd do is a minor defacement that took 30 minutes to correct, merely to establish his bona fides in his "undercover journalism" caper. Hmmm. Well, that may be just like, um, helpfully "checking" AT&T's security for them with the i-Pads, and the judge and jury just may not buy it.

And even if Matthew Keys wriggles out of this case, or gets some kind of suspended sentence for something minor, I'll hardly be convinced. Not merely because he seems to have been an online thug for years before that, but because he's crossing the street to harass me merely for expressing my opinion that he's guilty -- and doesn't have a case, because no undercover job merits this amount of consorting with criminals, and the consorting was not necessary to cover the story anyway.

I'm not alone in my concerns about Matthew Keys --even Huffington Post in its headline about "rogue employees" implies Matthew Keys was one when he seemingly turned against his employer. Sure, they put in the word "allegedly," but the headline lets us know what they think about it. The Washington Post, even while clucking about the purported long sentence -- one that will come nowhere near him and is the usual hysterical take on the charges which isn't the same as the sentence -- still says Keys "is no Aaron Swartz".

Interestingly, although Orin Kerr, the former DOJ official and lawyer who writes for Volokh.com, did not take up Matthew Keys case, although on the scale of  the trolldom where Keys inhabited for years, he's less of a nasty character than Weev, the hacker Kerr has decided to defend against the CFAA. Here's what the Post says:

But while it’s easy to see the CFAA as one monolithic relic, Kerr says, the law actually has several parts, and Keys was charged under the least controversial one. That’s because the CFAA’s biggest problem lies in its use of the phrase “unauthorized access” — a vague, only loosely defined term that has left prosecutors and courts to their own interpretations. Keys’s part of the law doesn’t mention that term. Swartz’s does.

Aside from the difference in their alleged crimes, there’s also a split in apparent motives. As many of Swartz’s defenders have pointed out on social media, Swartz was a documented Internet activist who fought publicly for freedom of information.

On the other hand, in chat room transcripts released by the Department of Justice, the user alleged to be Keys urges an Anonymous hacker to “go f--- some s--- up.” That isn’t just a public-relations issue: motives can factor into sentencing, too, Kerr says.

“For example, acting with an intent to profit can turn a misdemeanor into a felony,” he says. “Also, acting as part of a broader criminal scheme can lead to a sentencing enhancement.”

Kerr and the Washington Post -- like me -- took the indictment on good faith as the government's belief that it has a case. Of course, the defendant and his lawyers and the geek public are entitled to take a different view. But they didn't see fit to say "but Keys denies all this" (and maybe it was a timing issue, but there isn't an update).

Poynter also asks some questions. Even the lefty Atlantic has suggested that Keys' lawyers should tell him to shut his yap, he may incriminate himself further or make contempt-of-court type of statements showing lack of remorse that could get him a longer sentence, as it seems to have done for Weev. Yet Keys -- and his Anonymous-defending lawyers -- have brazened this out, in the mistaken belief that Keys, as a social media manipulator for Reuters, is expert at handling the media, whereas their other clients they tell to keep quiet are incapable of handling media.

Hmmm.... And imagine this, Ashera Wolf, community journalist for Anonymous that has turned in some loving profiles of their heroes, has asked questions about journalistic ethics around Keys. Naturally, she'll do that because he's harmed her friends and perhaps helped them go to jail.

I wonder....Is the difference the over-enthusiastic tech and liberal mainstream press is showing for Matthew Keys, "progressive" hipster social media wrangler for Reuters who exposed Anonymous, refused to cooperate with authorities, and Sabu, poor unemployed Hispanic programmer with kids to support, did? Did Matthew expose Anonymous for the sake of a news story (for which he had no assignment) or because they humiliated him by kicking him out of the chatroom once they cottoned to his treachery?

The Anonymous-defending lawyers think that you shouldn't go to jail for just a prank. Well, some of us beg to differ that it's just a prank, and we don't know if at trial, only the defacement of the LAT will be at issue. BTW, I'm calling out the lawyers here not because I don't think that people don't deserve legal defense, and the best they can get, or that people can't be viewed as innocent until proven guilty in a court of law -- of course they deserve defense and the benefit of the doubt as far as the court is concerned.

But these are partisan, vocally biased crusaders -- lawfarers trying to change law they don't like. They aren't even nonprofit advocacy lawyers; they are private lawyers with practices where they can pick and chose their clients -- and pick these ones to make their crusading point. Why, in a free society, would they get to advocate through lawfaring, but bloggers like me not get to say we don't buy their story line?

I won't be "apologizing" as Matthew Keys says I will be, as I haven't written anything that's wrong or that I regret. He's the kind of person who might start papering me with warnings of libel suits from his lovely pro-Anonymous lawyers, too -- once lawyers like this start lawfaring, they will stop at nothing to get their way. Hey, see you in court guys. Your clients are thugs.

Related articles

What are the Real Damages in the Matthew Keys Case?

"Boomerangs Don't Always Return to the Thrower." "This One Will."

Matthew Keys Heckling me On the Internet

Social Media is In the Hands of the Enemy in Any Company #MathewKeys

Reuters editor Matthew Keys says he did not conspire in hack

Reuters Suspends Matthew Keys, Anonymous Hackers Step In

As you may have read, Reuters' Matthew Keys - who is a contributor to SFB - has been indicted on conspiracy charges related to the hacker group Anonymous.

Matthew Keys denies charges in 'Anonymous' case

"Boomerangs Don't Always Return to the Thrower." "This One Will."

Exhibit from search warrant of USA vs. Matthew Keys

Matthew Keys, Reuters' deputy social media journalist has been suspended from his job, but the liberal news outlet is keeping him on the payroll. They've dismantled his work station, but not his computer. So that sums up their attitude: doing the minimum to still look like a capitalist corporation that has to do due diligence when one of their own is found to be charged with hacking their fellow news media, but expressing their tacit support by waiting to see if the charges stick.

The search warrant is now online, and makes for interesting reading, where you can discover the following:

o Yahoo turned over email materials to the investigation

o There isn't just some minor hack of a news article on the LA Times, as the tech symps keep claiming, restored in 30 minutes, but the issue of the theft of the Fox affiliate's email address list, which seems to include government email lists

o Damage to Tribune Media's server is set at $17,650.40 for 333 man hours and doesn't include costs related to the stolen email list affecting Fox 40 News in Sacramento nor ad revenue losses taken as a result of the attack

o There are at least two different IP addresses attached to the AESCracked account said to be run by Matthew Keys

o Other non-news stuff like "Adrian Lamo is gay"

Best quote? In the title of this blog -- about taking part in a hacking operation and thinking it will have no consequences. AESCracked says "Boomerangs don't always return to the thrower" after giving the hackers the passwords. And one of the hackers says: "This one will." Indeed.

So today Keys -- who is back perkily tweeting today and accepting well-wishers' concern and seeming to stave off one offer of Anonymous "court support" (does that mean stalking the prosecutors to their homes like Anon is doing to Carmen Ortiz from Swartz's case?!) -- announced that he had a pair of crack lawyers already notable (notorious) for defending Anonymous.

As @revmagdalen, a Twitter user who is often critical of Anonymous and WikiLeaks pointed out, if you are trying to show that you were *not* with Anonymous on a hacking operation, it hardly seems prudent to have accepted the pro-bono assistance of Anonymous-associated lawyers, but Keys said forthrightly that he didn't care about their past cases.

The Reverand is concerned about the defendant's rights in the hands of these lawyers and thinks it's not good if these work for The Cause through their client.

The attorneys do have a "progressive" agenda and seem to be trying to "write new law" as aggressive and vain lawyers are wont to do, and at least one of whom, Jay Liederman, loves the idea of the "DDoS as a sit-in" like the Woolworth's counter. Nonsense. The blacks in the 1960s demonstrating for their civil rights were asking for equality before the law, not taking other people's rights away. They politely entered stores, paid for a few purchases, then sat normally at the lunch counter like other folks. They were not disruptive. They didn't close down the entire store or make it unusable for other people. But that's what Anonymous does -- takes away other people's rights to freedom of association and expression, and closes down their business or nonprofit for varying periods, causing damage for clean-up and restoration. It's completely ridiculous to compare these very different types of protest, one non-coercive and the other coercive.

I don't know quite why Reverend is running a Bide-A-Wee Home for Wayward Anons (see Franny and Zooey) on her Twitter stream and worrying about their legal defense, to the effect that crusading lawyers shouldn't turn their clients into poster boys for their causes and should try to get them off. But... There will be plenty of others to worry about them getting off, and I'm more interested in seeing that justice is served -- and I believe that the feds would not bring this case after a year unless they felt they could make it airtight in court.

The operative point today from the lawyers speaking on the Kremlin tool Alyona Minkovsky's live Huffpo show is that -- surprise, surprise -- their client is not guilty (she used to run her propaganda spigot more directly at the Kremlin-funded RT, but now she is one thin layer removed at Huffpo, which makes it more "respectable," I guess).

And Jay Liederman, the attorney associated with the pro-DDoS position, says that Matthew Keys did not hack the site. When pressed rather gingerly by a Huffpo anchor who in fact was very supportive of the hacker throughout the show, as to whether or not his client was AESCracked, the pseudomyn of the person who gave the passwords to the Tribune news sites, he gets vague and starts saying that some of the time AESCracked was his client, but some of the time he was not.

Now, just a minute here. How is that going to be established? The problem with this IRC channel stuff is that the people operating the channel might scrub this information, but maybe some of it is retrievable from the ISP. It's true that when you log on to channels, you can just make up a name. So different people could use different names.

But the channel operator or moderator will have your IP address. And that's just what kayla -- that notorious kayla of LulzSec infamy -- asks for in this chat.

Now, here's what needs explanation -- and either it has one, that isn't going to be favourable to Keys, or it will prove his lawyers' point that he wasn't in control of this account or this name the entire time.

First, the search warrant from the agent says this:

p. 11 "cybertroll69x@hotmail.com was registered by someone purporting to be MATT KEYS from a zip code of 95824 for Sacramento, California; these values are set by the user upon account creation and are not subject to verification. The account was activated on December 2, 20010 and accessed only once by the user. The IP addressed used to access this account was 98.208.49.74 and resolved to a location in Sacramento, California. An attempt to identify the user of this IPO address was unsuccessful.

Now, that's the alibi that could be used throughout -- oh, IP addresses are dynamic. Oh, you can't figure out who really owns them, blah blah blah. But as we know perfectly well, this is just geekitude, and in fact IP addresses can stay static; they can also be dynamic but still on a range that still shows location; and it can be triangulated with other information to pinpoint identity. As I've pointed out many times, the very reason that every website in the Metaverse uses your IP address to enable your log on or your history or your access to certain things is because this is indeed an identifier, and good enough of one for the purposes of the functioning of the Internet -- and identification of you on a persistent basis. People who keep warbling on about how this isn't the case are just trying to Fisk and distract from the smoking guns.

Even so, there's this:

When the Anonymous hacknarchists (I don't like the cutesy name "hacktivist" and won't use it on them as it implies they do good social activism which they mainly do not) suspect that AESCracked is an informant, they expel him from the chat room. Then kayla asks for his IP address:

Client connecting at belldandy.anonops.ru:A2SCracked (A2SCracked@75-53-171-204.lightspeed.nscrca.sbcglobal.net) 

Then kayla says: "that's a real IPS" -- and indeed it is, because it shows a Sacramento location, it's not an anonymizer.

Then later, another LulzSec operative asks for and gets the IP addresses of AESCracked and gets these:  78.129.220.46   78.129.220.46

These could be anonymizers and they show the UK as a location -- that's my understanding of it but someone who is a "computer scientist" can examine all this and tell me what they think.

So the alibi is either/and a) you can't tell what my client's IP address is because it doesn't show that much information to locate him b) IP addresses aren't identifiers because they are dynamic c) look at these different ones ascribed to him in this one chat log.

Mkay, but yah, whatever. No sale from where I sit. It's really a stretch to think that first AESCracked comes on and offers passwords and eggs the hackers on, then somebody else hijacks/hacks/takes/uses his account from somewhere else, to do other stuff, more serious, like take Fox affiliate emails? I find that hard to believe.

This is just my first rough take from reading this quickly and I will try to find more time to study it later.

Meanwhile, some other interesting Anoniana: one of them says at one point "never the media" at the offer of hacking the Fox affiliate. As if Anonymous as some thieves' law that they don't hack media, so that they are not accused of harming the First Amendment freedom they seek. Nonsense, of course, because they've hacked Gawker, PBS and other media sites and they do all count as media.

Then AESCracked argues essentially, "but Fox isn't media".  And the Anon reasons thusly, even with bad spelling:

"you're correct but people percieve them to be media, and that would be very bad for us"

Yeah. Truly. But you are bad. So meh.

And they go and hack the Fox stuff anyway. So much for thieves' law.

As we know, Parmy Olson, who wrote the door-stop book on Anonymous, says that she asked Keys if he did the hack and he denied it.

But she didn't put all of this in her book, and I challenge her about this at the Forbes site, because I think she is just protecting her journalsts' tribe there (and it's part of minimizing the crimes of Anonymous and their infection of society, too).

In fact, she seems to be part of what has outed his involvement, as her book is mentioned in the search warrant. But Keys himself bragged of his involvement. Motivation? Well, it looks to me like it's this -- wanting to belong:

It disappoints me because there was a good chunk of time when I didn't fit in anywhere, and finally I fit in somewhere, even if it was among a group of renegade criminals. You guys were funny and smart and very patient even though I'm internet dumb. And then this happens and it sucks balls

He's disappointed that they are accusing him of leaking to the feds. Not clear exactly how that worked, with Sabu deliberately, or because Sabu was working for the feds and leaked him.

But the lawyers claimed today that Keys was "on assignment," that he did this hack merely as part of a caper whereby he wanted to gain the confidence of Anonymous hackers that he was studying in the IRC channel, in order to "do a story".

Well, I instantly thought of the Food Lion defense and how that notion didn't work. That is, Food Lion was specifically about using the deception of an employment application at a supermarket, to enable journalists to work undercover in the store to cover bad conditions. But it's in the larger sense philosophically (even if not technically or legally) about how you can't commit a felony, then get exonerated from it by saying you were "doing a story" as a journalist, and you "needed" to do it this way for cover. This case is taught everywhere as an ethics issue in journalism schools, and I've never seen anybody claim in the press freedom community claim that this court decision should have been different. You don't get to feign employment and defraud an employer, or commit a felony like hacking and stealing and defacing, in order to "get the story".

I couldn't help thinking how this comes back to my muting and defriending by Anthony de Rosa, the director of social media for Reuters, whom I confronted on Facebook for his tendentious coverage of OWS on the Brooklyn Bridge, and asked him to stop trying to make the news, and just cover it. Because indeed, these that's what happens when he joins the Jacobins and the Marxist-Leninists in trying to justify bridge occupation.

Reuters should ditch these social media mavens who are just crypto-revolutionaries in their midst trying to overthrow the institution.  Yes, I mean that. It's not journalism.

I will be watching very carefully to see if the Committee to Protect Journalists caves under the ferocious pressure they have been under now for years by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who has one of their operatives now on the staff, and takes up Keys as a "journalist's case".

It doesn't at all appear to be one, whatever the lawyers are bluffing with.

Some other noise on the Internet --  the wacky Internet life of Matthew Keys, who led a "double life," as a journalist by day and a nerd nuisance by night trolling people. Did you know that Keys is a "famous Internet troll" and has an entry at Encyclopedia Dramatica?  And so on. There are plenty of comments around, i.e. on Gawker to let us know that Keys is a douche -- stalking people, playing the victim, being an ass, whatever. It's immaterial to his case, however. Sabu or any number of "Internet enforcers" may have felt that this guy needed to go down -- and maybe they set him up and burned him, especially because he wrote negatively about them.

But really what this case comes down to is whether these lawyers can make the case that their client's attachment to AESCracked and these IP addresses sticks or not. We don't know everything the feds may have come up with to show that these things all stick, but I have a feeling that they do have the goods.

"you've been part of this operation," says tflow, one of the Lulzsec hackers.

Here's Mr. Alibi coming down the tracks:

"AESCracked: I've never been part of the operation.
AESCracked: Just a lurker ; )"

And yet he distinctly came in the chat room, gave the passwords, then said "go get 'em". So we'll see.

Adrian Lamo said on Twitter, after reading the search warrant, "There are some aspects of alleged e-mails to @FOX40 that don't quite fit the conclusions. Details."

Hey, I should apply to be the Reuters deputy social media journalist, I have an entry at Encylopedia Dramatica, too!

 

Social Media is In the Hands of the Enemy in Any Company #MatthewKeys

So The Matthew Keys (@thematthewkeys) is going down. The feds have issued a warrant against him on charges of interstate computer wire fraud because he gave the hacking collective Anonymous the passwords to his former corporate news site and helped them break into the Los Angeles Times and deface its news stories. Here is the press release about the indictment.

You know, I hope he is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And I think that will be the Aaron Swartz six months' treatment at worst, maybe even lighter. And we'll never hear the end of the squawking from the hacker set about this, but it doesn't look good.

Lots of the open source coder cultists think of this sort of action as a prank, on the order of soaping a window on Halloween. Not me. If you want property rights to be upheld on the Internet, which are part of what upholds human rights, then you can't have technocommunist neo-anarchist movements depriving you of choice like this by destroying your property or your media, even for a day,  even for damages that don't seem like much.

This is my new aphorism about about companies and social media.

"Like the client in MMORPGs, social media is in the hands of the enemy in any company."

I remember people like Raph Koster, the great games designer used to explain how game designers always had to fear the client, i.e. the browser of their game, being in the hands of "the enemy," i.e. the game player, as he was constantly trying to hack and mod and copy and steal the game scripts or pieces and cheat and they constantly had to foil him in this.

Hey, the rest of the Internet is no different, you know?

(Of course, as Yoz Linden cheerfully explained on an old post about copybot I just noticed, that's only about what goes "over the wire"; what is server-side is "safe". Sort of.)

I'm not as extreme as Loren Feldman, who has a bunch of great videos and tapes about how corporations, especially these big ones like Burger King and such, really don't need social media and are just making themselves look stupid by even having this liability. True enough.

I'm sure social media guru Beth Kantor and others who tout the wonders of social media would blanche at my claims, but I've become more invested in them from real experience.

Don't forget I got on Twitter in 2007 (on my account @prokofy) and on @catfitz on 2008, so I wasn't born yesterday and I'm not a newbie egg. To be sure, I don't have as many followers as socialist socialite Katrina vanden Heuvel, a factoid that she thinks puts me right up there with...nationalist professors at MGU for some reason (or just about everybody else who isn't Blake Hounsell or Alec Ross) but...whatever.

And what I've always said about social media is that it is merely a political movement, mainly for the left, but to some extent for extreme libertartians of the #tcot Ron Paul sort, and that they use it to take power, not for any "empowerment of the people" or "more democracy" or "A Better World".

Reuters' social media is, of course, the kind of company that "needs" social media because it "needs" more traffic to its website. Reuters can only sell so many stories and so many story products, i.e. consulting or analysis -- they age out after 4 hours or sooner, and become "yesterday's newspaper" which is worthless -- you can't even wrap fish in a day-old Internet news story.

So social media gives them away of constantly infusing their sites with traffic and ad clicks and buyers.

At Reuters, the main social media guru is Anthony de Rosa who I occasionally spar with on Facebook but who hasn't blocked me (like Lara Kolodny of Fast Company or now-ex-State Dept. official Alec Ross) merely for standing up to his propaganda within the TOS.

But he uses this position to flog a very distinct "progressive" political line that goes to the left of the actual corporate managers, who are liberal but not THAT extreme -- how can they be, when they're in business as capitalists?

Reuters is notorious as a liberal media outfit for doing things like not calling terrorists "terrorists" but other things like "militants" but they may have eased up even on that.

So Mathew Keys, as deputy social media editor, is that much more out there.

And he swaggered around in the IRC channel with the Anonymous kids and gave them the passwords to his former employer's site, and said for extra measure, go get 'em.

Classig geek swagger -- which is what now passes for gonzo journalism now. David Corn didn't so much do investigative journalism, as he parleyed his connection to Jimmy Carter's grandson, who had discovered the bar tender's social media, so to speak -- his home movie of Romney where he considered the most damning statement was about moving business to China, not the 47%. So David Corn is a typical new-age journalist in that he exploits the social media artifacts of his adoring fans and the larger networks but then he gets his Pulitzer Prize for this: the ability to tell that the real story isn't the China thing, which had been already done with another "scandal" about jeeps being made in China that blew up in Romney's face. The real story was the supposed snub of the "47 percent".

I still don't think that's really journalism; I think it's expert political work of the sort the stealth socialists are really good at and have gotten superb at under Obama. But Corn is still a good journalist anyway.

There will be all kinds of wailing and gnashing of teeth and attempts to prove that what Matthew Keys did wasn't wrong. But it was wrong. And a crime. You don't get to take your employer's website log-in, hand it out to criminals who then deface and harm it -- inciting them to mayhem on the way -- and except to just get a journalism prize.

Already Adrian Lamo -- and he should know! -- is telling us that Keys may be an asshole (but we should understand that he had a hard life and make excuses for him) but that he doesn't deserve the "interstate commerce" charge.

Well, why not? The Los Angeles Times isn't only read in California. I read it. In fact, trying to shed its social media and email spam is really, really hard, it's one of the more clingy ones that even an unsubscribe doesn't free you from.

Reuters should instantly fire him if they want credibility. And the prosecution should go forward.

I got this insight about the social media movement from nonprofits first. I saw that people who were the Marxist-Leninist stealth socialists who had many years of hardcore "community organizing" training and tactics under their belts were naturally gravitating to the "community manager" or "social media manager" or even "Chief Communications Officer" role (newly created to accommodate their inflated egos) in many nonprofits.

I saw them swagger around, collecting their tens of thousands of followers, many of them just SEO gurus and prostitutues, just to be able to look like they were a valuable property. They would use these accounts to flog the line, as full-time staff or consultants. They learned how to tweet all day with "constant partial attention" as Mark Wallace used to call it. Then when they "went too far" promoting their own agenda and got in hot water, they merely picked up their entire social media guru/community organizer role and went off, nomad-style, to their next high-paid gig. I've seen this personally in a number of operations.

Then I started to see it in companies. Either they had interns or their grandchildren doing the social media or they had these types.

This is how you get somebody like @noneck running all of New York State's online information systems, a horror that I used to regularly pronounce about and write my assemblyman about, as this freak supported WikiLeaks, Anonymous, DDoSing as a form of "speech," etc. -- so it was only a matter of time before residents of New York State found their health, tax, etc. information "doxed" if he or his friends didn't like what they said. I also saw they burned through tens of thousands of dollars of giddy social media budget money on totally stupid non-working geeky code projects that I kept asking about and not getting answers about, because there were never hearings about this, and never a democratic procedure around it -- it's just scared managers signing checks for importunate technical managers who intimidate them into thinking they are left behind if they don't staff up on social media and run faddish projects. New York City is going through this now. And who isn't?

The entire gov2.0 thing covers a multitude of sins of racketeers and political operatives who don't just do tech but weld their ideas right into the very code of the tools (like Drupal, like Clay Johnson).

Lamo told me on Twitter that he is innocent until proven guilty.

Sure. But there are IRC chat logs. And Anonymous informants that blew him in. Sabu tweeted about his involvement back in 2011.

It's like the point Morozov is saying about how perfect crime-stopping in fact makes for a society that you can't reform (I don't buy his concept completely and want to think about it some more, but it's a useful discussion). And the correlary of that which Morozov doesn't likely want to admit because he's soft on Anonymous is that the chat log is the new indictment. It's a one-man, er, robot grand-jury. Once you have the chat log -- plus the truth that comes out in the comments, as Peter Ludlow (Urizenus Sklar always said), i.e. that "confession that is the crown of evidence" that Vyshinsky, Stalin's prosecutor general, so loved, why, you don't need a judge and jury.

The server does not lie. Sure, you can redact and distort and re-do chatlogs and their screenshots. But if the feds ask for the chatlogs and get them, they will have to be the machine's artifact that will be unimpeachable, right?

 

Related articles

Reuters Social Media Editor Indicted For Allegedly Conspiring With Anonymous

Reuters Producer Matthew Keys Indicted for Allegedly Conspiring with Anonymous [UPDATED]

Reuters social media editor charged with helping Anonymous vandalize the LA Times website

Anonymous is a Rigid, Hierarchical Cult, Not a Looseknit Hacker Collective

Doxed by Anonloverz Over Criticism of JustSec on Steubenville

Social Media, Don't Even Bother...

Burger King Twitter account hacked

Evgeny Morozov and Angela Davis: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom

"Keep up the criticism!"

Yes, that's what Evgeny Morozov wrote to me in 2011 at an event during Social Media Week in New York City, not because he enjoys my criticism -- of him. He just wrote that to make it seem as if he didn't care about such criticism and would be charitable enough about it to someone willing to spend a day's grocery money on his book.

In fact, I'd sparred with him before that date a number of times, despite originally enjoying his piece on the FSB outsourcing hate in Russia in the comments sections.

Why? Because among many other things, I saw what an opportunist he was. It's okay to be an opportunist. This is America! Opportune all you like! But I found it rather, well, facile the way his views went from NGO-ish, when he worked for Transitions Online, then turned to exposing the FSB when he was a Soros fellow, then blasting certain excessive Internet guru types while a Yahoo fellow and at the Berkman Center,  then the whole Silicon Valley thing while at Stanford -- interposed with periodic blasts on the State Department and their Internet freedom program.  He's at New American Foundation today in the heart of the Soros-funded "progressives" -- there isn't a soul around Morozov, critic or supporter, who will ever care that he endorsed Angela Davis. That's the problem.

I write this as my daughter reads aloud in frustration her homework assignment for tonight (I'm not kidding): write a Marxist critique of Jane Eyre. Yes, I'm not kidding. There's even a little capsule summary of what Marxism is. Marxism is, according to the New York City School District's handout today, the following:

The Revoltion

The continuing confilct between the classes will lead to uopheaval and revolution by oppressed peoples and form the groundwork for a new order of society and economics where capitalism is abolished. According to Marx, the revolution will be led by the working class (others think peasants will lead the uprising) under the guidance of intellectuals. Once the elite and middle class are overthrown, the intellectuals will compose an equal society where everyone owns everything (socialism - not to be confused with Soviet or Maoist Communism).

Mkay, we'll be sure not to do that! And next week's assignment -- and again, I'm not making this up: critique Jane Eyre from the perspective of a "third-wave feminist". In case you don't know what that is, here's the handy tip-sheet: "early 1990s-present: resisting the perceived essentialist (over generalized, over simplified) ideologies and a white, heterosexual, middle class focus of second wave feminism, third wave feminism borrows from post-structural and contemporary gender and race theories to expan on marginalized populations' experiences."

See, this is why I bother with this stuff -- look at the kind of minds we will get coming to college -- where even worse awaits them.

But to get back to Morozov -- he didn't like my criticism, but when he happened to meet me after his presentation at the Soros Foundation, when I still worked at EurasiaNet, he saw that I was in the milieu of people that he couldn't really dis so outrageously. So he pulled back. He tucked in his claws -- for then. The minute I announced a year after that or so that I had left the Soros realm, then he went back to making nasty -- nastier -- comments.

The Sage of Soligorsk!

BTW, note this: his entry is yet another Wikipedia entry that is much shorter than mine, barely perceptively critical although he is very controversial, and contains hardly anything on his publications and articles -- even though the person is genuinely famous, has books commercially published, he has has academic positions, etc. which I have never had. Why? Every blog post that some griefer didn't like is given direct quotes and links and tendentious assessment on my entry, and he gets nothing of that treatment.

But yes, I give Morozov his due -- he has accomplished a tremendous amount since he left that god-awful irradiated shithole of Belarus run by Lukashenka a wacky Soviet-style tyrant -- who cancelled the Soviet holiday International Women's Day only because it conflicted with his proclaimed day of mourning for Chavez, one of his biggest financial and political supporters.

I wouldn't ever expect anyone to stay in Belarus -- I tell any of my friends or colleagues there to get out if they can, it's a hideous, awful place in so many respects and not easy to change with both Russia and the EU dedicated to pretty much keeping it the way it is.

But Morozov just never criticizes Belarus -- at all. Maybe he thinks it's self-evident. Maybe he is a jaded, hipster youth hating on all authority. Now, if he has relatives back there, I wouldn't ask him to do that, either. But then he goes out of his way to be nasty. He makes cracks, like saying that the Belarus democracy movement's hashtags are "trending only in DC" as if they are only of interest to politicians wanting to make hay of them, or as if revolutions are only paid for by the US government or something. Sure, the US criticizes Belarus because it can, it's a little country it doesn't depend on, like Russia or Uzbekistan, where it is more circumspect about its criticism because it depends on them now for the exit from Afghanistan.

Yet the intelligentsia of Belarus are among the bravest people I know. While Zhenya was tweeting snottily to me that he was "30 km. from the action" during the big democracy demonstration in Minsk in 2010 (he was home for the holidays in his provincial town or somewhere else in Europe), other people, including the independent presidential candidates, were getting their asses kicked and being beaten and thrown into jail for years, some of them still there. I don't require bravery. I don't require somebody joins every dissident movement. But I think the moral thing to do if you have left a situation where other people are still fighting the good fight is to have a bit of humility. To not shit on them, at the very least, you know?

The number of people who track Morozov on what he says about Belarus and its opposition movements is likely: 1. I realize that. Who cares, in the larger world? But it tells you what you need to know about his character, and that matters. I want to understand what I'm getting in a society when somebody critiques Big IT or the Internet utopian fallacies, which I also critique.

And what I don't want in that society is communism, particularly of the violent, radical Black Panther sort of Angela Davis.

Yes, that Angela Davis is the one Morozov has praised first in his New York Times opinion essay on Internet movements, then later in his book.

And that forms the basis for this Twit fight, recorded here on Storify. Enjoy!

Whimsley has a review up -- I'm not among the privileged to get a free book to review, so I will have to buy it in the remainder bin at the Strand one of these days.

 

Alec Ross Has Left the Building; Tweeter-in-Chief Job Remains

Alec Ross, State Department's "innovation" guy and Tweeter-in-chief, speaking at the "The Project [R]evolution Digital and Social Media Conference" (*gag*) in New Zealand. Photo by US Embassy in NZ, 2012.

Well, not quite -- he's on his last foreign trip, and it's his last week in the job of Senior Innovator at the State Department.

Alec Ross -- who has never been on a Google+ Hangout, just to keep the record straight -- is leaving public service.

And he's taking his 300,000+ followers with him. After all, his Twitter account formed more than two years ago is just in his own name, it's not the name of a generic office.

And that's wrong. I think that private persons shouldn't be able to privatize social capital that they gained while performing a government job. For that matter, the same applies whether they were in a corporate or nonprofit job. In fact, that's a good reason for institutions to stop letting these big stars who drag all the attention to themselves make and maintain these private reputation-builders that they can't then control.

Sure, those same followers can dump him and then go follow the new guy. But he's got them now to blast out huge messages of lobbying industrial strength to enhance his new position -- at Google, or a Mitch Kapor nonprofit, or some other third-world-go-gooding collectivist operation like the NGO that languished after he went to take up his government job.

The State Department should make an account called @StateInnovator or whatever (@innovator is taken by some goof who wants Ross' job) and then have the picture of the person in that office for now on it, but not enable that person to make an entire fiefdom with his followers that he can then take away.

I first noticed this phenomenon of tribal leaders attracting all the attention to themselves with one-way broadcast accounts and numerous followers when I first came on Twitter five years ago (I joined in 2007 on my account Prokofy and 2008 on my accout catfitz). Some people would gain enormous amounts of followers -- the early adapters like Scoble did it with automatic scripts, in part scripts that automatically followed back other people or automatically said thank you or started conversations.

Twitter banned some of these resource-eating automatic scripts later, but the advantage was clear -- as it still is. When you join Twitter today, just as in the past, it forces on you a list of recommended people that you must chose among to make your "friends" before you can move on to using Twitter -- it's quite coercive and you can't seem to escape out of it. In fact, it forces on you the number of five friends before it lets you out of its clutches. The friends to pick from include Lady Gaga but also a lot of those tech friends of the Twitter devs -- Alec Ross is on there if I'm not mistaken and so is Human Rights Watch and Anne Marie Slaughter and other "progressives" who get a significant boost by having every new member of Twitter (I don't know if it is localized) have to pick from these enforced "friends". The only Republican leader on there is Mario Rubio although there is the now out-of-date Mitt Romney account.

A position at the State Department is not a place for you merely to build your personal resume and gain connections to use in corporate lobbying jobs later. You're supposed to build the institution while serving the public, you know. Serve the public?

Another thing that the rules should stipulate is that people making or operating social media accounts on behalf of the US government should not block critical members of the public on those services. If the services themselves have not found reason to block them for spam, incitement of hatred, or harassment with excessive @ posting etc. then those government officials should not block them merely because they are egomaniacs with thin skins.

Alec Ross muted and blocked me -- meaning he entirely disappeared from the view! -- on Facebook, where he maintains not a personal account to share pictures of his kids and cats, but continues his public, government influence-making.

That is too much power for government officials to have.

He had no business doing that. Any judge in the land would throw it out as a violation of the First Amendment by the state, not only censoring speech but blocking even the view of government speech from the public that is otherwise open to all.

It's no good hiding behind the fact that Facebook is a private company and it can do what  it wants -- public officials can't do what they want and have to uphold the Constitution. It's not upholding the Constitution to hold town halls and block people who merely ask questions -- and it's not about swearing, or heckling or disrupting, that in a real-life town hall might bring the security guards or cops. It's about pasting a one-line disagreement on to the high-view page of an ego-infused influencer and arrogant "thought-leader" who is entirely full of himself and unable to take even the slightest mar of his propaganda campaign.

If officials went around behaving like this with the real press in real life, or went around behaving like this in town halls in real life, they'd be criticized severely. Oh, they've started doing that. Look at the ruckus over Woodward and pressure from the White House.

Officials gone wild on social media -- our Russian ambassador Michael McFaul comes to mind -- should be tethered more to their public service functions. And they are getting tethered, as Alec Ross found himself reined in, when State finally decided to do Twitter clearance and make people submit tweets before they blasted them to their huge audiences of 300,000 plus their massive network effect of re-tweeting.

When you see this, you can't help wondering if these accounts will finally be removed all together:

Michael McFaul @McFaul

23:35 in Moscow RT @robbirgfeld Ambassador @McFaul spends a couple of hours a night responding and reading social media. #smwdiplomacy

Ross' feed has always tended toward the anodyne, to the point that you wondered if it was some kind of Aesopian message:

@AlecJRoss

1,476 years ago today, the Ostrogoths began the first siege of Rome. It lasted for a little over a year.

@AlecJRoss

This has long been a key to America's success. We must attract brilliant innovators like Tesla & allow them to make America their home (2/2)

@AlecJRoss

212 year ago today, America's 1st Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, was inaugurated as President of the United States.

Er, what made him think of barbarians at the gates?

And...sucking up to his new boss, implying that he, too, could become president?

Funny that Kerry comes in, and this guy goes out. Why? Just a new broom sweeps clean?

Alec follows slavishly the "progressive" line and the Google line for all the issues. And I suspect Kerry will be no different, but I just don't know yet.

Ross has always dutifully retweeted the line du jour, which is exemplified by a recent one about how "we must all oppose cell phone jailbreaking" and retweet of this link -- and yes, retweets ALWAYS mean endorsement with this gang. The president answered this tekkie flashmob and Ross revelled in it.

Google pushes this line effectively through all its networks and lobbying active measures and agents of influence. Why? Because it wants to erode the power of telecoms, and have people be able to directly use Google and the Internet in general more for communicating.

Hackers and copyleftists who make up the some 7 million people who jailbreak their phones are lobbying to have this wrongful act legalized.

Why is it a wrongful act? Well, because it is a violation of the user's agreement. Why do these mean telecoms want to "lock you in" to their services? Well, because they gave you a ridiculously low-priced loss-leader -- your smart phone itself. Those things are expensive to make. They should cost more than they do. But no one would buy them if they did. So they drop the price of the phone, then tuck that cost into a binding two-year agreement to use a phone service like Verizon or AT&T.  You pay ahead something on this contract, then have to keep paying, and if you default, you are billed with a heavy fine that the companies zealously collect.

Well, aren't these telecoms just being greedy? Well, no, they have real costs -- the kind of costs Susan Crawford never calculates in her jihad against them applauded by Google -- capital costs.

When you jailbreak the phone and start using Internet VOIP or various other things like Skype only for calls or free wifi, then you defeat the plan that subsidizes your phone.

This criminality doesn't trouble Alec Ross, Mashable, or the White House, as it responded to a massive engineered outpouring with smug approval. I can only hope the courts will push back. Because it isn't fair or just to the telecoms. How will they get the cost of the phone and its use covered in a world where hackers rampantly engage in theft of services and "liberate" the device?

When I get a cable TV box, I don't "jailbreak" it to get more channels I don't pay for; I don't "liberate" my Verizon modem box to get more broadband or even some other service. Why should I get to do this to my phone?

Apple wants to go on disguising the cost of these phones -- they can be $400 and that doesn't reflect either its real cost or the cost it should be if it had better labour conditions -- to sell more of them and get people hooked then on the apps and other products. They don't like jailbreaking, but I don't know that they are going to lobby that hard against it.

It's wrong of the president to take a position on what amounts to a *business dispute about costs and how to cover them* and weigh in on the side of some businesses and not others. Doing that is not proper to free enterprise and a liberal and democratic state. It's the sort of thing that begins to happen in socialist states with cronyism and state capitalism or oligarchy.

Alec Ross is delighted to be part of that. His entire career as "innovator" exemplifies my constant refrain about the Wired State, that a group of radicals and corporate copyleftists have harnessed their social media inventions to take power and ram through their agenda.

While Ross ignored my question on Twitter, where he doesn't block me for some reason, he confirmed in answer to another person's question on Facebook (which I got a friend to check as he has me blocked) that the position at State is going to remain open.

Who will take over this position?

Probably someone who will travel less -- after all, if the Sequester has to stop Co-dels (Congressional delegations) from going to some of their favourite haunts like Vienna or Paris, then it makes sense that the Innovator guy should stop going to Australia and places like that to boost the copyleftist cause.

While I've been a big critic, especially meeting him in person and confronting him with his bad ideas -- like the "post-Westphalian" borderless woo-woo, and the "engineering against copyright infringement" shill -- Diplopundit is more skilled and more connected than me and is scathing.

"State Department Bundle of Joy" indeed! But it's all part of an overall social media schizophrenia that Diplo covers further.

 

 

In Soviet Russia, the Crowdsource Business Works *You* -- For Free

UMD miniMBA Social Media Panel

Details at www.rhsmith.umd.edu/miniMBA2.0/courses.aspxSocial Social Media Marketing
Marketing strategy has been revolutionized by the rise of social networks, real-time tools like Twitter and Facebook, user-generated content (e.g., blogging) and a shift in consumer attention to new media. Old paradigms of word of mouth marketing, viral strategy, consumer targeting, brand and reputation management are being radically altered for this business 2.0 phenomenon. The course will address key strategic and tactical aspects of social media marketing, using examples and techniques from corporations, election campaigns, and recent startups. The strategic themes focus on the business case for using various social media approaches and examples of successes and failures. The tactical aspects will introduce participants to the capabilities and uses of individual technologies through case examples and hands-on exercises.

Faculty: Dr. David Godes
Panelist on the Oct 2010 Session:
Panelist: Shashi Bellamkonda, Director Social Media, Network Solutions
Panelist: Rohit Bhargava, SVP Ogilvy/Author
Panelist: Teddy Goff, AVP, Blue State Digital
Panelist: Peter LaMotte (President), GeniusRocket (cc) Shashi Bellamkonda www.shashi.name Social Media Swami Network Solutions Please credit as above if using this picture

 

I put all the details of this picture from Flickr because it lets you know how social media marketers morphed to political marketers and then won the election for Obama. Above is Obama's Digital Director, Teddy Goff, formerly of Blue State Digital. We will come back to him at the end.

You know that Silicon Valley saying, "If you are not paying for it, you are the product."

I think most people don't care very much about this and feel if they get a free product like Facebook or Linked-In, with maybe some premium options, they don't care. That is basically the social bargain.

I do think it's always worth peering at the business model, however, especially as the free/freemium platforms' business model always involves you working for free and often supplying free content, too.

A tweet fell into my vision from my feed from a guy named Ross Dawson, one of those typical newfangled Internet gurus who is famous for being famous and who tells you he is "sought after" and "in demand" as a speaker and consultant. It may be so.

Futurist/ Entrepreneur/ Keynote Speaker/ Author and contributor to global brain. Visualization of my neural activity: http://bit.ly/AHTGpBizModel

You know, I haven't clicked on that visualization of Dawson's neural activity -- I prefer to see if it is evidenced on Twitter for now.

So Ross was having a Twitchat and I decided to ask him a question.

He had begun breathlessly, but had few takers:

Ross Dawson ‏@rossdawson

In 23 hours I will be doing a Twitter #crowdchat on Crowd Business Models - tune in if interested! http://bit.ly/11N5W1G

Ross Dawson ‏@rossdawson

A "crowd business model" is a business model based on participation and value creation by many, often outside the company #crowdchat

So I asked if these companies were profitable -- I figured to start with that. Answer:

@catfitz most of the companies on our Crowd Business Models visual are profitable. Jigsaw mentioned earlier sold for $140m

So, not all of them are.

My next question was to ask what the crowd gets paid. But his talk was over before you knew it.

If you look at Jigsaw, you get the answer: of course the crowd doesn't get paid. The crowd is relied upon to upload business cards of other people -- without their permission -- to fill up the data bases and create the service. They use it and get something out of it. They pay for premium accounts/advertising/consulting whatever -- although we never learn if this company *made a profit* on its own, running its business; it is so telling that in the hustle and shill of Silicon Valley, it is described as "making a profit" merely if it is sold to another entrepreneur and its original venture capitalists take a cashout. It's never about *the company*.

Salesforce, a much more gigantic and older and successful company that does customer service and all kinds of other things for companies found it in their interests to buy out a competitor. The data is criticized as being sloppy/erroneous/not with customer's approval. The New York Times wrote enthusiastically four years ago.

Jigsaw may disappear into the mists of Salesforth's maws, another little piece of the delusional history of the dotocom and web 2.0 manias. But for Ross Dawson, it's Exhibit No. 1. Jigsaw figured out how to get all those sales people out there to input data of those they were targeting in exchange for getting their peers' data -- and they could pay to access more for $25, or as a corporation, get unlimited access (the way LinkedIn, like an old Oriental Bazaar, makes you pay bakshish into the palms of Reid Hoffman, in order to make a connection to another person who might advance you in life; sometime, if it doesn't exist already, we will see the relationships reduced to commodities as they are in Russia or China, where you pay money not just for introductions; you pay money to get the job itself, as a bribe.)

So all those middle-class sales drones input data for free into this service, paid a little to get more of it out, and put $142 million cash into the hands of Jim Fowler, the owner, when he sold it to Salesforce. Great work if you can get it -- and he did, by not doing it, because you did.

Ross Dawson has a point to make:

Ross Dawson ‏@rossdawson

Q9) we will see a dramatic rise in crowd-based businesses. In addition many established orgs will start to tap crowds in earnest #crowdchat

I had more questions, but it was hard to find answers about those other profit-making companies and what the user really got out of it (do we ever learn what percentage of LinkedIn premium users get actual jobs?).

But suddenly, my eye was struck by another piece of news:

Jo Brothers ‏@jobrothers

Futurist @rossdawson joins Obama’s Digital Director at Air NZ Social Media Breakfast http://www.theflyingsocialnetwork.com:8080/archives/9175  via @FlyAirNZ

And then this:

Dawson joins headliner Teddy Goff at the Air New Zealand Social Media Breakfast on Wednesday 13 February. Goff is the groundbreaking Digital Director of President Obama’s data-driven 2012 re-election campaign. Teddy Goff’s team harnessed data effectively to fundraise a ground breaking US$690 million, build online followings of more than 78 million people, and register more than a million people to vote in the largest online promotion programme in political history.

So, while Kim Dotcom was rolling out his new company in New Zealand, having fled American justice to his empire in NZ, and was twitting the content industry once again by encouraging uploads of content while he looked the other way and collected fees and ad revenue, Obama's digital director, head of Obama's "data driven" win, was breaking bread at an Air New Zealand Social Media Breakfast.

My mind boggles at things like that. Obama's ICE and prosecutors are trying to round up Kim Dotcom. He eludes their capture and eludes the NZ law-enforcers as well and the FBI are left bungling and fuming.

The smart thing to do then is to start to say to New Zealand, "Look, we understand you have your laws and all, and you need to respect civil rights and perhaps you haven't, but Kim Dotcom is wanted for piracy, we still have an indictment out, and we think maybe what would be appropriate because you keep refusing to cooperate in his extradition now is for us to cease to do business with you."

That's how technologists themselves do it.

Instead, Obama's Digital Director flies to New Zealand the week of Dotcom's rollout (was he in the audience for the big show? I bet he was!), and breakfasts with Air New Zealand, which is of course one of NZ's biggest businesses getting US revenue.

It's at moments like this that I realize Kim Dotcom will never be extradited during the Obama Administration.

 

Aaron Swartz Committed a Crime But Would Not Do the Time

Aaron Swartz in May 2012 evangelizing in Washington, DC at a conference about his anti-SOPA crusade. It involved an outright lie in claiming that there would be "Internet censorship" merely because the government legitimately prosecuted large-scale piracy sites for commercial gain. This was typical of the entire hysterical anti-SOPA campaign.

Oh. So now we're learning that there was never any "50 years" or "30 years" or anything remotely similar; there was an offer of six months.

Six months.

And Aaron Swartz knew that before he killed himself; his family, lawyer, close friends and supporters all knew this. He just didn't want to do that time, and his doting and coddling family and lawyer felt he was emotionally too fragile to do that time and felt he should get an exemption as neurologically atypical.

Tragically, they were right, but he sentenced them all to something much worse: a lifetime of guilt and torment and grief.

So all this ridiculous posturing with the "50 years" that we got from the likes of Declan McCullough, the craven sell-out copyleftist scribe for CNET, was complete tripe. There were never any 50 years!

DEFENSE TURNS DOWN OFFER OF ONLY SIX MONTHS' PRISON

Here's what the Daily Call and Boston Globe reported:

Swartz’s lead defense attorney, Elliot Peters, said today that both he and Swartz rejected the plea deal offered by the office of US Attorney Carmen Ortiz, and instead were pushing for a trial where federal prosecutors would have been forced to publicly justify their pursuit of Swartz.

But at the same time, Peters said, he was worried about Swartz’s emotional vulnerability and planned to try and bypass trial prosecutors, Stephen Heymann and Scott Garland, and use a letter-writing campaign from local academics to convince Ortiz to change the proposals.

“As eager as I was to try to win it, I didn’t want to expose Aaron to the risk,” said Peters.

Imagine the sheer gall of this well-paid attorney accusing the prosecutors Ortiz and Heymann of "overreach" when his client was offered only six months for these serious crimes!

And now we have the additional Internet spectacle of Andrew Good, Swartz's former lawyer (we don't learn why he's "former") saying that his client was suicidal and therefore could not serve jail time (!). We're to hate "The Man" more because the prosecutors replied that he'd be safer in prison. Actually, if we had mental illness internment in this country in any kind of humane and sane fashion, Swartz could have been put in residential treatment if that was the issue -- and likely should have been if he were that depressed -- and he might be alive today as a result.

PROFESSORIAL OVERREACH

Swartz's family said in anguish that their son's death is "the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach." And I realize that they are grieving and sincere in their beliefs.

But I have to cry "nonsense" for everything that is sane and right and not about their own selfish interests and sectarian beliefs. Truly, instead, their son's death is the product of "professorial overreach" in trying to build by fiat and force an imaginary world where everything digital is collectivized and the coders come to power and do whatever they feel like. A world where we are forced to live with coder intimidation, and that if you refuse to go along with this totalitarian world, you will be hacked, your privacy will be exposed and you will be endlessly bullied and harassed -- see the online vigilantes demanding Carmen Ortiz' head merely because she did her job and prosecuted computer fraud and theft. My God, this is outrageous. It now has over 25,000 signatures which means we're likely to get some smarmy, self-serving sufficiently vague but dog-whistly response from the Obama Administraiton. Ugh.

Aaron Swartz committed a crime and admitted that he had committed these acts that were indeed rightfully deemed criminal. Evidently he and his defenders just thought he should get a doctor's excuse from the law.

GUERILLA MANIFESTO TO "LIBERATE" ALL DIGITAL CONTENT

His guerilla manifesto outlines the criminal intent to "liberate" all and also outlines his technocommunist beliefs -- corporations are greedy and evil (instead of legitimate entities in a free enterprise system that create value and provide jobs); everyone's property should be "liberated" because anarchists say so; politicans are merely "bought" and therefore we shouldn't have free speech, democracy, campaign contributions, elections, and instead have coders run things and "code as law". No thanks!

Indeed, he outlines his intent to steal and "liberate" -- the first sentence is not qualified by any notion of copyright and the subsequent reference is merely yet another item on the list:

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with  the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

COMPUTER FRAUD AND TAMPERING

Read the indictment and quit listening to the Anonymous gabbling on Twitter. The indictment establishes (and these acts are not denied by the defense or Swartz himself) that Swartz:

o broke into a closet to commit the hack

o diguised his identity

o used a false identity and also physically covered up his face from security camera view

o use circumvention software called "keepgrabbing" to grab millions of files rapidly in a way not intended for the system

o intended to distribute separately for free these files normally available only to universities at cost to the institution and for free for students

o disabled the MIT computer network for a time because of the enormity of the download

o caused damage to the computer system due to this hack and downloading that required the IT people to clean up and repair the hack

All this word salading about how he accessed "unrestricted files" is pure nonsense. If he needed to access what in fact were to him, as a Harvard student at the Ethics Center (!), unrestricted files, he didn't have to take a crowbar to the system, he could just log on and get the articles he needed for research.

BUT THAT WAS NOT HIS INTENT OR PURPOSE OR ACT. He accessed these unrestricted files in a way not intended by the managers of the system for the purpose of smashing the system. Duh!

This is just like Julian Assange's rational for WikiLeaks -- it's not really about whistleblowing and isn't whistleblowing and he himself explains this in his own writings and interviews; it is to smash the liberal state by making it clamp up and become unlike its open and democratic self, and therefore collapse. That this lovely notion isn't applied to the states that really need transparency and don't have it, like Russia, is only a function of the similarity of the anarchic hacker movement's goals and methods being similar to communist and post-communist authoritarian states -- they want to make sure that no one can use the Internet in any way except the way they, as hackers, decide -- or else.

This fast-talking tap-dancing that Anonymous does in lying about criminal acts like this is typical of everything they do. They wish to cover their criminality by trying to get the public to focus on some little piece of the event that might appear as "legitimate access". But they are lying about and obfuscating the purpose, which is to commit an anarchist act to smash the system.

Lessig, Doctorow, Barlow -- they're all for anarchy. They really want to smash this system. They work very hard at smashing it rhetorically and in various campaigns like "stop SOPA". They stop a little shy -- like Road Runner coming to a screeching halt right before the cliff -- of actually smashing. But they were happy to sic a young man like Swartz on the job or look the other way while he published his "guerilla manifesto" and swaggered around all the tech conferences bragging about how he would defeat the Man. As we know, Barlow dog-whistled to his followers in Anonymous and told them outright that they were the "foot soldiers in the war" and that they now knew what they had to do to defend WikiLeaks -- which they proceeded to do by hacking PayPal and Amazon. Barlow tried later to wriggle out of this and claim he meant they should just put up mirror sites and they "went too far" -- but his tap-dancing shuffle was not convincing.

Swartz did not access open files properly or legitimately -- he hacked into them by disguising his identity, making a fake account, and fraudulently downloading millions more files than were intended by the system, and through circumvention of the system.

YOU DON'T NEED A CROWBAR TO USE JSTOR

If you want to use JSTOR, it is open and free to use if you are a student of a university. Aaron Swartz was not merely needing to use JSTOR for research -- that was not his intent or his action.

JSTOR was in fact the wrong target if you were intending to go after "evil corporate greed" -- JSTOR is a nonprofit entity that gives away their content in large amounts for fees from universities that can afford it -- to cover their costs in digitalizing, maintaining, organizing, storing, providing, etc. the content. It's normal. The fees are not excessive. As this commenter closetothetruth Brian Bulkowski said under Lessig's post

I feel terribly bad for Aaron Swartz and his friends and family. As posted elsewhere here, I don't much agree with prosecutors throwing the books at him. But it is very hard for me to understand what principle or what freedom is represented by his actions, unless one believes that honest labor does not deserve honest pay. JSTOR made the materials it distributes (the digital copies of articles otherwise existing only in hard copy). It continues to add to the archive. It is a non-profit entity created by a consortium of universities and its purpose is to make materials available, and by any count those materials are much more available today than they were before JSTOR or would be without it.

It would be great if I could feel bad in the way that this Brian does -- then I'd fit in, then I'd be part of the commuuuunity. But I don't fit in and would never want to be any part of this immorality. I feel only a white-hot fury and intense revulsion at what I see Lessig, Doctorow, Barlow and all the others doing on two counts, as I wrote -- a) not having the courage of their convictions to really defend their cause (which I do not at all share) and defend this mascot for their cause who took it to their logical conclusion; b) having an immoral cause even in the first place that smashes civil society and human rights which I hold dear. It's wrong, wrong, wrong.

The "community" Aaron Swartz lived in and whom he was ostensibly "helping" had no need of this "liberation". Any one of them as a professor or student or member of a non-profit organization in many cases could access this material. The use case for "liberation" might be some one like me, not affiliated with any university, who still wants to study and learn. But I have no need of such "liberation" either -- I simply pay the fee. Or I go to a university library and explain my research and get help. What people often do is ask someone who is in a university to get them the PDF from JSTOR -- and JSTOR does not police this one-off sort of usage.

"THE PROPAGANDA OF THE DEED"

That's not what Aaron Swartz did. What he wanted to do was "make a point" and deliberately, defiantly downloaded *4 million* documents -- a huge trove, as he had criminally done with the PACER material and as Bradley Manning did with WikiLeaks. Like any anarchist or terrorist, he was out to make "the propaganda of the deed," that is, he wanted his deed not just for its own sake, but for the larger "message" it would send and viral resonance it would have.

It's exactly that sort of thing -- a deliberate and defiant and large-scale act of theft in criminal hacking -- that the authorities cannot play professor with and pretend we need linguistic lessons from Prof. Peter Ludlow. Because it's about upholding the rule of law, and as I keep pointing out, enabling all kinds of people to use the Internet freely, including by having walled gardens and pay walls if they desire to cover their costs and maintain their livelihoods!

Aaron Swartz only wanted to smash this capacity to privatize or commodify as "evil" -- as a technocommunist -- because he thought he was making "a better world". But it's not better when you don't have the freedom to have free enterprise, and you are coerced into collectivization by anarchists. That is totalitarianism, and that's what these people who support Swartz offer -- with themselves in charge.

A commenter in the New York Times named Michael Lissak summed up the problem as well -- that people who make moral crusades with stunts like this expect the prosecutor and judge to go along with their "civil disobedience" and concede that it was all just an interesting moral lesson:

I have just finished reading the entire court record (or at least the parts which are not under seal). It is clear that Aaron believed he had the right to do what he did and wanted the governments evidence that he did it struck from the record. It seems likely that his lawyers told him this approach was unlikely to succeed.

Aaron's mental health issues aside, there is a pattern of not being willing to take responsibility for one's own actions and then bearing the consequences. Like a professional athlete or a Hollywood star this young man seems to have been shielded from "reality: by well meaning friends who in sum were doing more harm than good.

Aaron's legal defense seems to be "but in my moral system this was a good thing." And it is exactly that defense strategy which demands a vigilant NO from the government. Having one's own moral code may play well to the Internet blog/twitter set, but if one is not prepared to accept responsibility for the consequences when that moral code conflicts with society's all that awaits is disaster.

The lesson from this is to stop coddling "genius, talent, or fame". These people are just that -- people -- and they too must learn to deal with the real world. Aaron Swartz should be a lesson to Lindsey Lohan and Charlie Sheen.

The government, MIT, and Carmen Ortiz have done NOTHING WRONG here. The tragedy is Aaron's. The loss is of Aaron. And the blame game needs to stop. Aaron did this to himself.

Yes, I agree Aaron has himself to blame, but he had clear-cut, established enablers -- Lessig, Doctorow, Barlow and others and the blame does have to be aportioned to them. The prosecutor is not to blame and must indeed act when there is a large-scale assault on the system like this. Not because there's some sort of corporate neoliberal blah-blah that "has' to be upheld -- that's how these posturing lefties paint it -- but because the rule of law has to serve the whole community and the Internet has to remain free for a variety of models of content to thrive on it. People need to get paid. It's okay to charge. Not everybody is a consultant to MIT on intellectual property (!) like Aaron Swartz's father, wealthy enough to send their wunderkind to Harvard.

"The Internet" set think that the system is corrupt and it's okay to smash it. I think they're corrupt because they smash, and the world they want to make with themselves in charge is a claustrophobic, unfree horror in any event.

As we saw, JSTOR eventually released 4 million documents. What ostensibly Aaron Swartz was fighting for (but wasn't really) might have been achieved non-coercively and non-violently without smashing systems -- with a letter campaign. Maybe just not as fast as the little tyrant wanted in his tantrum.

SUICIDE AS COERCION

I always view suicide as a tantrum, quite frankly -- or worse, a kind of coerciveness of everyone around -- not just friends and families and all those professors fretting and clucking who wouldn't go to the mat for him last year -- but all of society following this.

And all of Swartz's friends and family and supporters are playing along with this script now and trying to coerce us all into the mania. We're supposed to be guilt-tripped into accepting now that it's okay to hack computers and smash systems -- or else. We're supposed to be coerced into accepting the "liberation" of information online or else we are uncaring monsters. Sorry, not playing.

Suicides never impress me. I view them as cowards and manipulators; I view suicide as a sin, not victimhood. It's a deliberate act of torture of all those people who cared about you, sentencing them to a lifetime of torment and gnawing conscience and "what-ifs". How can you have any respect for anyone who does such a thing? I realize this runs contrary to all the modern psycho-babble; I don't care. An entire industry has sprung up of "helping profession" that want to "destigmatize" suicide and medicalize it and make it a disease as they do with so much else that represents a failure of will and morality in society, like drug addiction and alcoholism and pedophilia. I don't care how politically incorrect it is to point out that suicide is wrong; it hurts other people, and it is throwing an enormous tantrum to get your way. There is no humility in suicide; there is only self-aggrandizement.