From Swartz's court documents -- photo of the MIT building door he walked through to get to the server closet and hack into MIT's servers.
This is a great story -- The Professor, the Bikini Model, and the Suitcase Full of Trouble.
It reminded me of the Swartz story. Now, maybe that's everything looking like a nail to a hammer these days, but it is similar.
A professor who is really good at physics gets caught up in this wild romantic story and then abandons reason and gets involved as a mule for some cocaine dealers.
It's not just the professor is some kind of one-for-one analogy for Swartz. That's not what I mean. I mean the way all Swartz's supporters just distort reality in this alternate, constructed world that they claim everyone should believe in because they are coders, computer programmers, professors at Harvard, etc. But it's rot.
So this bikini-lured professor would tell his lawyer that the provost who fired him summarily when finding out he was in jail over this drug deal was himself fired because it was wrong to do that before his trial, i.e. presumption of guilt. But then it turns out the provost resigned to take another position teaching at that same university, so it wasn't as he claimed. Or the professor says the chat on his smart phone will exonerate him but the prosecutor refuses to look at it. But the lawyer explains to the journalist that in fact the chat won't do that, but will get him in worse trouble. And so on.
Scientist. Dining out on being fact-based and famous and accurate. Scientist, living in a total constructed alternate reality where he says a thing is so, like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, and thinks it is so. Then the New York Times journalist compares and contrasts and, you know, reports the story like a real journalist and not WikiLeaks on Twitter.
What's missing over, and over, and over again in the Swartz case is the role of the New York Times journalist intervening and trying to establish facts normally about, you know, reality. Instead, we have 100,000 words from a dozen major magazine pieces, none of which do much investigative footwork to establish reality.
As they the Times did when they interviewed -- guess who! -- the MIT IT personnel who were the ones who explained that they had to call the cops because they thought at first it was a Chinese hacker. But instead of returning to this kind of investigative work, they've just left it. It's not a story. Or they are too sympathetic and think there's something to copyleftist gambits as "free speech". They just won't return to really finding out what this is about -- which I think they could. There's a lot more out there to study and many to interview.
My comment at the Times on the professor story:
What this story is about is really emblematic of our times, which is why it's so popular and has so many comments.
It's
about the ways in which scientists, who are brilliant with facts in an
area of hard science also construct a world of alternate utopian reality
where they believe that if they simply affirm some "truth" aggressively
enough, it will be true, even if it isn't.
And that leads to the
scientism in much of our lives these days, whether about global warming
or the elections (Nate Silvers) or the Aaron Swartz case (Lawrence
Lessig) -- where "science" is supposed to trump everything, even if
there are emotional hunches and cultural affectations just under the
surface of that science. Or even if the science may be true as far as it
goes (global warming) but not therefore grounds to impose socialist
curbs on business. The world so constructed by emotionally fragile but
petulantly aggressive factologists becomes unbearable for others in so
many ways.
Much of our world these days is dominated by the
scientists of the Internet who may be conversant in computer code and
engineering, but whose alternative, emotional, *constructed* reality
lacks balance and common sense.
And didn't scientists recently
discover that the genes that appear to govern autism, bipolar, ADHD,
etc. are related? Such "2e" or "neurally atypical" types may be
brilliant and creative, but they are hell on reality and hell to other
people because they can't concede or navigate reality.
While looking for news on Swartz's case, I found that the people at the monastery retreat in Italy where he wrote the Guerilla Manifesto posted a tribute to him right after he died, and said this:
Aaron penned the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto while at the Eremo.
So I wrote that on Twitter, and while I didn't approach Quinn Norton, she responded.
She had made it sound in her article published in The Atlantic that there were multiple authors and therefore you couldn't tell who the author was and therefore the feds couldn't use this document as evidence.
This is parallel to her -- and others' -- argument that even citing this document is prosecuting thoughtcrime.
I think it's cited merely to show motive. If Swartz didn't get to actually then liberating all those 4 million files so that little starving children in Africa could benefit from, oh, Peter Ludlow's papers on Chomskyan linguistics, well, the intent seemed to be there. But since he didn't distribute them and returned them (hackers always write "returned" them because obviously he could surreptiously leave himself a copy and still appear to "return" them) -- then he should get a lesser sentence. Well, that's why they offered 3-4-5 months, as Holder told Sen. Coryn.
Norton felt awful about giving the feds the Guerilla manifesto when it seemed they didn't know about it:
So this is where I was profoundly foolish. I told them about the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto. And in doing so, Aaron would explain to me later (and reporters would confirm), I made everything worse. This is what I must live with.
This is insane, of course, because they could find an open document on the Internet anyway, and sooner or later they would have found it. And it's precisely because the feds were not pursuing "thoughtcrime" that they didn't go trawling through all his blogs.
So after the feds got this and she felt it was now the smoking gun they lacked to prosecute her old boyfriend, she switched tactics:
Aaron was incredibly angry with me. I pointed out that any journalist worth a damn would have the manifesto in no time; he agreed, but said these guys weren't as smart as journalists. I said the press would uncover it when the case went public. He told me, as he had so many times before, that the press wouldn't be interested in the case. We were both wrong.
Is Mr. Demand Progress really telling the truth when he claims his case wouldn't be interesting to the press?!
So Quinn then tried to spin it with another constructed narrative based on part of a phone call she heard:
Later I listened to Aaron on the phone as he described to a journalist how he had downloaded 400,000 law journal articles to do text analysis, revealing what kind of legal research was being funded by what kind of companies in 2008, and publishing an academic paper at Stanford about it, all as explanation of why he might have downloaded the JSTOR articles. It was the best answer legally to the question I'd been asked in that small fluorescent room surrounded by big men. Listening to him say that I felt my insides collapse.
That is, it's ambiguous, as others have pointed out before me, whether he himself is ssaying this is his JSTOR hack motive, or whether she's interpolating that as his motive -- it seems the latter.
Of course, you could ask JSTOR for access to do a big data drill if you really needed to as a fellow of the "ethics" center at Harvard, you know?
Quinn then turns in this bit of very fancy footwork -- just too fancy:
They put the manifesto, the cause of so much grief, in front of me to read to the jury. I read what they directed me to and they asked me if Aaron was the author. I explained I didn't know, it had been authored by four people, not one. I'd edited it right after, still in Italy, but Aaron had brought it from the group and his name got attached to it. I told them there was no way to know if he'd written the part they were trying to use to prove his intent. Asked if it reflected his current thinking, I looked at the middle-aged audience and said, honestly, that he'd moderated many of his views in the last few years, I couldn't know. I referred to the drift of a young man's mind and said we shouldn't be held to everything we said in our early 20s. I caught one of the woman in the back nodding. The prosecutors were furious.
Too fancy, because the people who hosted the conference said, "Aaron penned the manifesto" in their tribute to him. Unwittingly. Because they didn't square the story with her -- how could they? And she must have failed to allign her story with what they had written -- she didn't see it or realize it. Well, she is under stress and on Vicodin, too.
But it's that hole through which we see reality. I trust there are more holes. They are like the discrepancy in the Professor and Bikini-Clad Model's case. He claims he didn't know what was in the suitcase or it was empty, yet his texts are found to refer to drugs. Then he claims he was just joking.
Here's my exchange with Quinn:
CatherineFitzpatrick @catfitzSo much for the "multiple authors" alibi: http://www.eifl.net/news/tribute-aaron-swartz … "Aaron penned the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto while at the Eremo"
Quinn Norton @quinnnorton@catfitz what? there were 4 people in a little group at the eremo, and they all talked it through, then he brought it to me.
CatherineFitzpatrick @catfitz@quinnnorton They said he penned it, and it has his name on it. You were trying to say no one cd be sure of the authorship. Doesn't seem so.
Quinn Norton @quinnnorton@catfitz o.O dude, i was there
CatherineFitzpatrick @catfitz@quinnnorton That's great. But you claimed there were multiple authors. They were there, too, and *they* said he penned it, and it's signed.
Well, this is the sort of discovery that merely gets you labelled a "troll," and blocked and banned and maligned. But it sure sounds to me like there's a discrepancy here.
But really, how can you have it both ways, kids? If the feds are evil and prosecuting "thoughtcrime," then the manifesto is a nothing, and it doesn't matter that it has aspirations for copying stuff and liberating it because it's just general and you don't know when its imminent.
So why worry about who wrote this non-thoughtcrime? It doesn't matter.
But then you double back and start alibi-ing your way out of it as multiple authors and you can't be sure he wrote that bit about liberating the copies.
Mkay.
This is why I can't believe Steve Heymann is "apoplectic". I don't buy this narrative. I don't buy any of their narratives when I find these sorts of "misaligned" materials.
So much more needs to be researched -- and I don't have the time or the resources or the access.
Somebody has to get those MIT geeks to talk.
Somebody should follow up with Danny Clark. What's he doing? What does he know?
Heather Brooke mentions three names:
Danny Clark
Tyler Watkins
David House
Tyler Watkins is Bradley Manning's ex-boyfriend; David House is the hacker at MIT who started a Manning defense campaign, and Danny Clark was the guy the grand jury wanted to know about when they asked House if Clark had breakfast with Manning.
The "progressive" blogger Empty Wheel has come up with more than anybody on intriguing clues, because she's a resourced investigative journalist with all day to spend on these things. Although she wants to exonerate Swartz and show him as possibly a fishing-expedition victim related to Manning, inevitably she's going to raise the question as to whether in fact there *was* more to this case and the feds were right to go after Swartz in a big way that wasn't just about JSTOR. We don't know yet.
There's the mamoth 600-plus page case file of court documents. BTW, lots of geeky stuff showing the fake log-ons and whatnot. Supposedly there is exonerating material in here. Doesn't seem so.
There's Aaron's FBI file that shows the FBI looked at the open source stuff on him like social media and followed him. So what? Not much to see here (including the Guerilla Manifesto which isn't there).
On that thread at FireDogLake, Saul Tannenbaum, the former MIT network manager who knows A LOT about how things work there and has turned in some very useful stuff in the comments at Empty Wheel, says "This is great work. You can find all of Aaron’s own FOIA requests here" on Muckrock."
So I looked them over, but other than the self-serving stuff looking into Manning, I'm convinced to see if maybe he (or his friends) are mentioned, there is a grab-bag of his various loony causes, like the minting of the trillion dollar coin.
Here's what Saul Tannenbaum says:
"The fact that he was making FOIA requests about Bradley Manning (another alleged massive unauthorized downloader of files), that he had a personal connection to David House (creator of the Bradley Manning Support Network) as documented in one of those FOIA requests, is certainly suggestive of, well, something."
Indeed. But what? That's in the sweep of the net around Manning's case? But it doesn't seem so and hasn't appeared (yet) in the court sessions. Yet the investigation is still open, even though Swartz is dead, meaning maybe it's about one of the other people.
I keep coming back to the story of Dalmatov, the Russian mathematician who worked in "post office box" (i.e. secret factory) who killed himself in an asylum detention camp in the Netherlands right at the time Swartz committed suicide. There was much the same outcry, although Dalmatov was demonstratively a victim as the FSB wanted him on charges of instigating violence at the May 6th mass demonstration last year. Since he was in Limonov's National Bolshevik group (yes, I asked why a mathematician would be stupid enough to join these wacky extremists), which has incited and used violence, it seemed like an open-and-shut case, although they didn't in fact have evidence (so we're told).
Dalmatov fled abroad, asked for asylum but didn't get it. It's not clear why. He should have gotten it. Even if his group was sketchy, he had a "well-founded fear of persecution" if returned and the UN Convention Against Torture stipulates that you cannot return asylees if they face a credible likelihood of torture, even if they have committed violent offenses or even terrorism. This drama plays out frequently. In any event, the Dutch were returning him anyway, his pleas were exhausted.
He then committed suicide and left a note in which he implied "I have informed on a good man," i.e. he must have given testimony against someone that would send them to jail. There is one version of the story that says the FSB even came and got to him in Holland. Or maybe they got to him back in Moscow, and he fled afterwards, afraid of facing the community and going to jail himself.
Anti-Putin activists made a huge protest against the Dutch, holding them responsible. And I do have to wonder why they planned to return him to a situation of notorious torture, which they shouldn't have done. Maybe they obtained "diplomatic assurances". Who knows, I think it is still being investigated.
My point of raising this case is that people's motivation for committing suicide in movements can be when they have informed on someone else and feel guilty about sending them to their doom. Could that be the case in Swartz's motivations for suicide? No one knows and there is no indication of it as such, but the shadowy connection to Manning does make me ask that question.
What we have learned from Alexa Obrien's transcripts of the Manning pretrial hearing is that Danny Clark communicated with Adrian Lamo, the same hacker who turned in Manning to the feds:
Lamo: At that time I wasn't working with Mr. Clark, until I knew he was involved with illegal activity.
Defense (Coombs): What in this chat with Danny Clark made you want to report to law enforcement?
Lamo: I found it unusual that someone would install additional encryption software on an Army computer, and that they would employ a civilian in so doing.
It was Swartz who discovered Danny Clark in the social networks of "Mako", the Foundation for Free Software guy in Boston, while Heather Brooke was trying to talk to him.
There's not much recent (probably scrubbed) about him online except things like a "like" of the MIT page mention of Swartz's memorial service.
Most likely it's not a crime to install aditional encryption software on an army computer.
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