Mar 5, 2013

Wealth Inequality in America

I found this short video very educational.  The facts are startling, but as far as I know, they are accurate and uncontroversial.


It seems essentially everyone agrees this is the reality, and it is a problem, but we disagree on solutions.  Nevertheless, simply waking Americans up to the reality of the problem is half the battle.

Jan 26, 2013

Hacktivist who took his own life faced 30 years in prison, $1 million in fines

The well-known internet activist and hacker Aaron Swartz took his own life this month, at age 26.  He helped create Reddit, made books freely available to the public on the Internet Archive, and started a grassroots movement against last year's anti-piracy SOPA bill, among other accomplishments.  Wired.com explains the overzealous and disproportionate federal charges which may have lead to his untimely death:


JSTOR provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals online. MIT had a subscription to the database, so Aaron brought a laptop onto MIT’s campus, plugged it into the student network and ran a script called keepgrabbing.py that aggressively — and at times disruptively — downloaded one article after another. When MIT tried to block the downloads, a cat-and-mouse game ensued, culminating in Swartz entering a networking closet on the campus, secretly wiring up an Acer laptop to the network, and leaving it there hidden under a box. A member of MIT’s tech staff discovered it, and Aaron was arrested by campus police when he returned to pick up the machine.
The JSTOR hack was not Aaron’s first experiment in liberating costly public documents. In 2008, the federal court system briefly allowed free access to its court records system, Pacer, which normally charged the public eight cents per page. The free access was only available from computers at 17 libraries across the country, so Aaron went to one of them and installed a small PERL script he had written that cycled sequentially through case numbers, requesting a new document from Pacer every three seconds, and uploading it to the cloud. Aaron pulled nearly 20 million pages of public court documents, which are now available for free on the Internet Archive. 
The FBI investigated that hack, but in the end no charges were filed. Aaron wasn’t so lucky with the JSTOR matter. The case was picked up by Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Heymann in Boston, the cybercrime prosecutor who won a record 20-year prison stretch for TJX hacker Albert Gonzalez. Heymann indicted Aaron on 13 counts of wire fraud, computer intrusion and reckless damage. The case has been wending through pre-trial motions for 18 months, and was set for jury trial on April 1.Larry Lessig, who worked closely with Aaron for years, disapproves of Aaron’s JSTOR hack. But in the painful aftermath of Aaron’s suicide, Lessig faults the government for pursuing Aaron with such vigor. “[Aaron] is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying,” Lessig writes. “I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.”

JSTOR declined to file a civil suit against Aaron, and asked the federal government to drop its criminal case.  MIT was not as quick as JSTOR to rush to Aaron's defense.  

In response to Aaron's death, the internet activist group Anonymous hacked a federal judicial website, www.ussc.gov. As of this posting the website is still down.

Weren't the charges against Swartz a disproportionate and inefficient abuse of judicial power?