One year ago: Web/RSS/Creative Commons developer and anti SOPA activist AARON SWARTZ committed suicide 1/11/2013 in Brooklyn, New York, SWARTZ was 26.
Next month, 2/11/2014, THE DAY WE FIGHT BACK expect mass protests against NSA mass surveillance, join the protest, and protect your 4th amendment and rights to privacy.
FROM EFF (ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION): One year ago, we lost Aaron Swartz, a dear friend and a leader in the fight for a free and open Internet. The shock was, and remains, a profound one. It's a testament to the power of his commitments and ideals that both in life and in death he has inspired millions around the world, including all of us at EFF, to redouble our own efforts to advance the causes that he believed in, and to untangle the twisted and brutal computer crime laws that were used to persecute him.
Next month, 2/11/2014, THE DAY WE FIGHT BACK expect mass protests against NSA mass surveillance, join the protest, and protect your 4th amendment and rights to privacy.
FROM EFF (ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION): One year ago, we lost Aaron Swartz, a dear friend and a leader in the fight for a free and open Internet. The shock was, and remains, a profound one. It's a testament to the power of his commitments and ideals that both in life and in death he has inspired millions around the world, including all of us at EFF, to redouble our own efforts to advance the causes that he believed in, and to untangle the twisted and brutal computer crime laws that were used to persecute him.
Aaron was a passionate activist, but he also stood out as a technologist whose ambitions were always aligned towards a better, more just future. His pioneering work demonstrated a passion for harnessing technology to advance the public interest. As the Internet community confronted massive new challenges to free speech and privacy in 2013, there were many moments when we wondered quietly about what Aaron would have said and done.
Sadly, we are left to wonder. We know from his work on the software that would become SecureDrop that Aaron believed in making the world a safer place for whistleblowers to expose injustice and wrongdoing. We are all worse off without the passion and curiosity he surely would have brought to Edward Snowden's continuing disclosures about NSA spying. We are reminded of Aaron as we push forward in our court cases against the NSA, help organizing against the spying with the stopwatching.us coalition, evaluate the Congressional proposals and, of course, as we continue to build and support technologies that let people take their privacy into their own hands. Aaron understood deeply that, more than ever in a world where information is power, both legal and technical protections for privacy are essential to keep people from being rendered powerless.
At the same time, he recognized that access to information can help to correct the systematic power asymmetries that preclude real accountability for the institutions that should defer to the will of the people. His conviction shone through in work to free the court records that make up the common law in the United States but which are often locked behind the PACER paywall. That struggle continues, and we are proud to defend Carl Malamud—an ally of Aaron's who delivered a stirring call to arms at last year's memorial—in his ongoing efforts to ensure the public has access to the law.
Aaron was an idealist who dreamed of opening up information far beyond just the law, though. The public deserves unfettered access to the products of publicly funded research and our shared culture, and he saw how the Open Access movement could play a part in that. He may have been heartened to see the great strides that movement has made in the past year. Aaron didn't get to see the White House come out strongly in support of Open Access for research funded by the federal government, or the FASTR bill, which you should tell your lawmakers to support, but we can hope he would have been pleased.
Of course it was ultimately an effort to download scholarly works—and a shameful failure by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to take even minimal steps to defend him as a member of their community or even explain that his access was not “unauthorized”—that led to his charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).In the year since his death, we've learned a bit about the notorious prosecution, although there is still much left shrouded in unnecessary secrecy.
We have also pursued reform of that hated, outdated law. Aaron's Law was introduced in June of last year by Representatives Zoe Lofgren, Jim Sensenbrenner, and Senator Ron Wyden, and it still represents the best legislative effort to fix the CFAA's serious flaws, by limiting the meaning of "without authorization," and adjusting the penalties. The existing law's vague definition of that phrase is one of the defects responsible for the CFAA's overbroad and overbearing application to many cases involving technology and EFF continues to defend those charged under the CFAA even as we work to fix the law.
Aaron’s Law is a start. More should be done, but this is an essential fix to make. And it needs your support—tone-deaf legislators have insisted on drafting bills with provisions that amplify the CFAA, when the opposite is needed, including one introduced just last week.
Aaron had a gift for identifying the problems that mattered, mapping a theory of change, and then taking it on, step by step. That approach allowed him to undertake challenges that many people, most people, would dismiss as impossible. That may be the greatest legacy of the central role he played in the historic SOPA blackout protests: he dreamed a way that an individual could make a small difference, and enough acting together were unstoppable.
It takes a tremendous human spirit to look at the failures of the institutions around us—from the breakdown of governmental checks and balances to its war on whistleblowers to the tremendous corporate influence on crafting anti-user policies—and not despair. Aaron taught us that we must not. He's inspired people to take up big challenges not out of reckless optimism, but because he believed that if we can see the change we want in the world, we are powerful enough to make it happen. From Lawrence Lessig marching across New Hampshire to address corruption in politics, to public interest groups banding together for a day of action against NSA spying, that legacy lives on.
We gave Aaron a Pioneer Award last year and continue to fight in his honor. Join us bydemanding a fix to the CFAA and joining our month of action against censorship and surveillance and toward open access. Because in the end, the way to celebrate Aaron’s life is to come together and continue his work.
FROM DEMAND PROGRESS:
- Cory Doctorow, writer, activist, editor of BoingBoing and close friend of Aaron Swartz = doctorow
- Brian Knappenberger, filmmaker of The Internet's Own Boy about Aaron, and We Are Legion = knappb
- David Segal, co-founder of Demand Progress with Aaron = davidadamsegal
- Peter Eckersley of EFF, and close friend of Aaron = pdeEFF
- Sina Khanifar is a developer who's been behind many of the great activism sites of the last year or so, including https://TheDayWeFightBack.org/ = Sinakh
(We'll be in an out over the next few hours. Cory and Peter are here now as of 11AM eastern. Brian's now here, as of 12:30. David's in-and-out. Sina's here as of 1:15.)
1pm edit, for context: Brian has, in some senses, spent as much time with Aaron as anybody -- his film about Aaron will premiere at Sundance in a week or so, and he's spent the last year combing through footage and talking to Aaron's friend and family and colleagues. He's an extraordinary filmmaker, and Aaron's legacy is in safe hands with him.
For more on the February 11th day of action visit: https://TheDayWeFightBack.org/
Dedicated subreddit here: http://www.reddit.com/r/thedaywefightback/ -- let's start churning out tools and memes.
Press release here: https://thedaywefightback.org/press/
Two years ago, reddit and its users joined in fighting back against dangerous Internet censorship legislation during the SOPA protests. You blacked out your websites and started hundreds of creative campaigns to defeat a piece of legislation that threatened freedom on the Internet.
As was often the case, Aaron Swartz said it best: “[We defeated SOPA] because everyone made themselves the hero of their own story. Everyone took it as their job to save this crucial freedom. They threw themselves into it. They did whatever they could think of to do.”
In the last 6 months we’ve seen that government agencies, namely the NSA and GCHQ and others, have broken laws and twisted legal interpretations to create an infrastructure of mass surveillance of all of us online. This creates a dark form of censorship, of course, as people become afraid to speak freely -- and it’s one that undermines our security and our right to privacy as well. As users of the Internet, we have a responsibility to defend its freedom.
With SOPA, we had a clear goal: defeat a specific bill. In this case, we have to take a first step. We have some promising bills (like the USA Freedom Act) and terrible ones (the FISA Improvements Act). But we need our legislators to hear from people who love the Internet that we won’t stand by and let it be turned into a giant tool for mass surveillance. We need to push them to have the courage to support comprehensive reform. The kind of courage Aaron showed us all.
So today, on the eve of the anniversary of Aaron’s death, we’d like to ask you to join us in stepping up to the plate once again in defense of a free, open and secure internet, where no one has to watch over their shoulder for big brother.
In memory of Aaron, and looking back to the successes of the SOPA campaign, we’d like to ask you to join us in a month of action, culminating in a day of action on February 11th.
Our organizations - Demand Progress, EFF, and BoingBoing, along with countless others - will be doing everything we can to make that day as impactful as possible, and demonstrate to political and corporate leaders the world over that we will not stand for the harms they are perpetrating against us.
Will you join us?
FROM THE DAY WE FIGHT BACK:
Mobilization, dubbed "The Day We Fight Back" to Honor Swartz & Celebrate Anniversary of SOPA Blackout
Washington, DC – A broad coalition of activist groups, companies, and online platforms will hold a worldwide day of activism in opposition to the NSA's mass spying regime on February 11th. Dubbed "The Day We Fight Back", the day of activism was announced on the eve of the anniversary of the tragic passing of activist and technologist Aaron Swartz. The protest is both in his honor and in celebration of the victory over the Stop Online Piracy Act two years ago this month, which he helped spur.
Participants including Access, Demand Progress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Free Press, BoingBoing, Reddit, Mozilla, ThoughtWorks, and more to come, will join potentially millions of Internet users to pressure lawmakers to end mass surveillance -- of both Americans and the citizens of the whole world.
On January 11, 2013, Aaron Swartz took his own life. Aaron had a brilliant, inquisitive mind that he employed towards the ends of technology, writing, research, art, and so much more. Near the end of his life, his focus was political activism, in support of civil liberties, democracy, and economic justice.
Aaron sparked and helped guide the movement that would eventually defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act in January 2012. That bill would have destroyed the Internet as we know it, by blocking access to sites that allowed for user-generated content -- the very thing that makes the Internet so dynamic.
David Segal, executive director of Demand Progress, which he co-founded with Swartz, said: "Today the greatest threat to a free Internet, and broader free society, is the National Security Agency's mass spying regime. If Aaron were alive he'd be on the front lines, fighting back against these practices that undermine our ability to engage with each other as genuinely free human beings." According to Roy Singham, Chairman of the global technology company ThoughtWorks, where Aaron was working up until the time of his passing:
"Aaron showed us that being a technologist in the 21st century means taking action to prevent technology from being turned against the public interest. The time is now for the global tribe of technologists to rise up together and defeat mass surveillance."
According to Josh Levy of Free Press:
"Since the first revelations last summer, hundreds of thousands of Internet users have come together online and offline to protest the NSA’s unconstitutional surveillance programs. These programs attack our basic rights to connect and communicate in private, and strike at the foundations of democracy itself. Only a broad movement of activists, organizations and companies can convince Washington to restore these rights.”
Brett Solomon, Executive Director, Access, added:
"Aaron thought in systems. He knew that a free and open internet is a critical prerequisite to preserving our free and open societies. His spirit lives in our belief that where there are threats to this freedom, we will rise to overcome them. On February 11th, we'll rise against mass surveillance."
On the day of action, the coalition and the activists it represents make calls and drive emails to lawmakers. Owners of websites will install banners to encourage their visitors to fight back against surveillance, and employees of technology companies will demand that their organizations do the same. Internet users are being asked to develop memes and change their social media avatars to reflect their demands.
Websites and Internet users who want to talk part can visit TheDayWeFightBack.org to sign up for email updates and to register websites to participate. Regular updates will be posted to the site between now and the February 11th day of action.
WHO: Access, Demand Progress, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Free Press, The Other 98%, BoingBoing, Mozilla, Reddit, ThoughtWorks -- and many more to come
WHAT: Day of Action in Opposition to Mass Spying, Honoring Aaron Swartz and SOPA Blackout Anniversary
WHEN: February 11, 2014
HOW INTERNET USERS CAN HELP:
- Visit TheDayWeFightBack.org
- Sign up to indicate that you'll participate and receive updates.
- Sign up to install widgets on websites encouraging its visitors to fight back against surveillance. (These are being finalized in coming days.)
- Use the social media tools on the site to announce your participation.
- Develop memes, tools, websites, and do whatever else you can to participate -- and encourage others to do the same.
Thanks-Stay Metal, Stay Brutal-\m/ -l-
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