Swartz, Weev & radical libertarian lexicon (Re: Jacob Appelbaum in Germany - Aaron Swartz)

Dont worry about James hyperbole, he's just channeling Tim May who was one of the three or four list co-founders, wrote the cyphernomicon [1], and had a habit of using that phrase 'needed killing' now and then, as I recall as phrase to express his distaste for someone's actions. Its an expression, not something literal... but James' black & white, non-PC, absolutist personality precludes him saying that :) You just have to read it with a USENET flame war mentality and parse for what he's actually saying. Apart from the refusal to bow to PC, James is actually a pretty smart guy from what I recall. He implemented some simplifed UX, ECC crypto email stuff called 'crypto kong' [2] way back in 1997. Cypherpunks write code & all that, gives James some brownie points. About Aaron's case and suicide, it seems to me that Aaron miscalculated, and the hacking was pretty escalated, engaged in multiple escalating counter-measures when it was obvious the sysadmins were on to him as an intruder, he didnt back off but took it to the next level including physical intrusion & hiding equipment. But MIT (and to a lesser extent JSTOR) let him down badly as did some of his academic friends and its tragic that he was a victim of some extremely over reaching imbalanced law the CFAA [3], aggressively prosecuted by self-agrandizing politically motivated, and almost legally immune deeply flawed US federal prosecution and plea bargain system, which also saw Weev [4] put in jail over the most ridiculous and egregious abuse of law (noticing a defect in AT&T web site and giving the information to the media). Yes Weev enjoys trolling, but thats an art-form and since when has unpopular speech been illegal, freedom of speech means unpopular speech too. Aaron's earlier hacktivism was pretty spectacularly successful in demonstrating the stupidity of charging for access to publicly funded legal information, in a way that ultimatey they could find no legal fault with, though the feds were not doubt pretty pissed that they couldnt get him for anything. But even the legal dox hacktivism stunt was very high risk, the US legal system is hard to rely on, even when you are doing legal but politically unpopular to things to a subset of the higher echelons of office holder. It seems to me that particularly in the US the political/legal system tends to hold grudges and fail spectacularly at balance and impartiality and legal independence from political influence. Its better than Russia still, but its falling in world rankings of rule of law and political indendence for sure. There are probably some independent rankings on this aspect of the government/jurisdiction comparison. Adam [1] http://www.cypherpunks.to/faq/cyphernomicron/cyphernomicon.html [2] http://echeque.com/Kong/ [3] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act‎ [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev On Tue, Jan 07, 2014 at 02:15:07AM +0100, Cari Machet wrote:

shut the fuck up

who is arrogant (and simplistic)? u

On 1/6/14, James A. Donald wrote:

...

On 2014-01-07 03:18, John Young wrote:

...

Swartz was ratted by a sysadmin, investigated by several sysadmins, some who formerly helped him and were pressured to betray him, indicted with the essential help of sysadmins. University and JSTOR administrators could not have discovered him , aided the investigation, cooperated with the prosecutor, without sysadmins. The cops and prosecutor could not have caught, investigated, coerced witnesses, indicted and killed Swarz without sysadmins. Some of those sysadmins are under lifetime vows of secrecy for cooperating against Swartz.

They were not "ratting" on him

A sysadmin tries to keep his systems working. Aaron Swartz was disruptively trespassing on their systems - he was arrogantly and obnoxiously aggressing against them.

And that, in fact, was what he was charged with, not with releasing JSTOR IP property, but with screwing up other people's computers.

If he had been furtive about collecting the data, the way Snowden was, there never would have been any problem.

The problem was that Aaron Swartz was an arrogant asshole who thought he was ruling class and above the law, and that those he aggressed against were menials beneath the law - the Henry Louis Gates phenomenon.

One of the things our ruling class filters against is conspicuous and obnoxious arrogance. They don't want us noticing them. Aaron Swartz failed the conspicuous arrogance filter before being granted tenure, so suddenly found himself no longer ruling class.

-- Cari Machet NYC 646-436-7795 carimachet@gmail.com AIM carismachet Syria +963-099 277 3243 Amman +962 077 636 9407 Berlin +49 152 11779219 Twitter: @carimachet https://twitter.com/carimachet

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