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

[Cari Machet]

Thanks - yes I know who may is and I understand the libertarian head space - as a fucking American citizen of native American descent I often find it at best 'racist' - I disagree with The laziness it's thought patterns propagate ... More later on ur packed analysis 

Sent from my iPhone

On 07.01.2014, at 12:50, Adam Back <adam at cypherspace.org> wrote:

> 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 <jamesd at echeque.com> 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 at gmail.com
>> AIM carismachet
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>> Twitter: @carimachet <https://twitter.com/carimachet>
>> 
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