From the indictment of Aaron Swartz: photos of him disguising his face with a bicycle helmet from the surveillance camera as he comes into the server closet to plug a laptop directly into the LAN.
Sometimes it pays to read the hard copies of the news media, I find, although it gets harder to find. You wouldn't notice this letter to the editor on the New Yorker's page, filled as it is with graphics jumping off the page to entice you, and under the blogs and articles, zillions of comments vying to be heard.
But here is Jane Scholz's letter to the editor online -- which caught my attention in the hard copy of the New Yorker and not online. I buy the New Yorker on a case-by-case basis, because sometimes it doesn't seem very substantive these days -- although by contrast now with New Republic, it's feeling a lot more substantive. After reading Jane's letter, I immediately put $25 into an envelope from an offer I got in the snail-mail for only $1 an issue! went online to their offer for $25 for 30 issues -- and I will even get the "weekend tote". So I can impress my friends when I go out of town with a bag that has the New Yorker logo. Woot!
Do read Jane's letter, which has such an important point I wish I had thought of. Despite writing tens of thousands of words on Aaron Swartz, I just didn't quite think of it. It's the obvious point: Swartz is just like Mitch Kapor in his day, in that he made millions of his software's patents, but then set about busily undermining other people's copyright online with his anti-SOPA and other campaigns -- culminating in his guerilla "propaganda of the deed" against JSTOR and MIT -- which ultimately left to his suicide.
I don't know if this is the same Jane Scholz who was a McClatchy editor -- McClatchy is a serious investigative news operation and every time hackers "liberate" the fruit of their hard labours with "information wants to be free," they all lose.
Swartz's suicide might have been treated as the casualty of bipolar or depression -- the mainstream media (Boston Globe) reported (while the tech press suppressed it) that the judge in Boston had ordered him to seek mental health treatment when she granted his bail bond and released him before trial.
But it's really more like a suicide-bombing, Palestinian style, the way Schwartz's friends and family have picked up his death as a banner in their struggle against the rule of law, online and off.
Scholz took on Lisa MacFarquhar's piece Requiem for a Dream, which some felt was critical, but which I felt wasn't critical enough. MacFarquuhar dutifully repeated much of the tech-take on his death, thereby displacing blame to mean prosecutors and IP protectors, even if in her pastiche of quotes, she turned in the very telling quote from Swartz's girlfriend what explains the case more than anything -- the folie a deux -- that she literally had to plead to him through a locked bathroom door on the morning he committed suicide not to hurt himself.
In any event, here's what Jane Scholz said:
Some people may consider illegally downloading content from the “1942 edition of the Journal of Botany” to be benign, but downloading periodicals such as the New York Times—or The New Yorker, for that matter—without paying for them would harm the people who worked for those publications in the past and who write for them today. I find it ironic that Swartz made several million dollars selling the rights to his own copyrighted programming to Condé Nast. Swartz’s is a sad story, but it’s not a heroic one.
Helps to remember that the New Yorker is owned by Condé Nast, too.
Of course, the geeks would be quick to say, Swartz was uncomfortable with the selling of his software and even the millions reaped and didn't feel like he fit the role of a rich man, even nouveau riche. He was to go on sleeping in closets and living on pasta. He was seen as some kind of St. Francis of the software set.
I've pointed out -- nobody else seems to want to look at this angle -- that Paul Graham of Ycombinator was the one to pressure Swartz into merging with his other protege, Redditt and then sell the whole thing to Conde Naste, so that Graham could have his "liquidity event".
So many versions of this story have put Swartz heroically as "co-founder of Redditt" which is supposedly "the front page of the Internet" that they don't want to admit that Swartz wasn't at the founding, and didn't seek Reddit on his own, but was sort of forced into the marriage by Graham, from all indications. He then parted with his own brainchild, Infogami, which got subsumed. So, some algorithms or whatever got taken over...and Swartz didn't like working in an office, or didn't like working in a disciplined fashion, period, and preferred to do his own thing, and left.
So many times are we told by gushing articles in the fatuous tech press that Swartz didn't like wealth and was uncomfortable with these millions that we tend to forget: this money is what enabled him to just hang around and do whatever he felt like, for years afterward, including working at Demand Progress, which likely only had a small nonprofit salary. Yes, it's sad that his millions got eaten up in legal fees later, but then, none of those Creative Commons pro bono lawyers who so boost his case now wanted to take him on pro bono then.
That's because no matter how you reform the CFAA, and even if you rewrote it the way EFF and Lessig would like it, it would still not likely wrap around Swartz's case and exonerate him then. Because of the server closet break-in and the LAN jacking, and of course, the large scale hack and the paralysis of the system for several days. While Orin Kerr and others want to stretch " protected computer" and "unauthorized access" to the breaking point on Weev's case and others, on Swartz, Kerr believes the law was properly applied, and while he is for reform of the law, and apparently lesser punishments, I don't see him characterizing the Swartz hack as somehow "authorized," as much as the script kiddies keep bombarding his blog with claims that it was like "taking too many books out of the library".
Meanwhile, we're still waiting for MIT's report which was promised back around January 23rd to be coming "in a few weeks" -- and with documents as well, although identities redacted. Maybe after spring break?
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