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

[Adam Back]

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
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>carimachet at gmail.com
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>
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