Monthly Archives: November 2015

Aaron Swartz Day 2015, Chelsea Manning, Fight For The Future, Surveillance Reform

Chelsea Manning Prepares Special Statement For Aaron Swartz Day Celebration

Donate to Chelsea’s legal defense fund to help with her appeal.

In support of this year’s Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon, Chelsea Manning has prepared a special statement that will be read at Saturday night’s Celebration of Hackers and Whistleblowers at the Internet Archive.

HERE IS THE LINK FOR A LIVE WEBCAST OF TONIGHT’S SPEAKERS, at 8:00 pm PST. (Movies only seen by attendees.)

Meanwhile, Chelsea has written an Op-Ed for the Guardian on why the FISA courts should be abolished. (She’s also published a 129-page surveillance reform bill.)

Sign this petition from Fight For The Future to tell your politicians to read Chelsea’s bill.

Fisa courts stifle the due process they were supposed to protect. End them

Intelligence agencies will always seek to collect more data. But the courts that oversee them must be as concerned about due process as they are with secrets

From the article:

 Those courts were established nearly 40 years ago, in response to allegations that the intelligence community was abusing their power in order to spy on US citizens: the US Senate’s Church Committee conducted a massive investigation into the intelligence community and expressed concerns that the privacy rights of US citizens had been violated by activities conducted under pretenses of foreign intelligence collection.

The result then was new procedures and the creation of a new court system – the Foreign Intelligence Court – to process surveillance requests by the government in secret. Unfortunately, it also created a new host of oversight problems: only a similar secret court process can review the actions taken by the courts, leaving many in Congress and all of the American public in the dark.

Some of these systemic problems have finally been examined by non-Fisa courts in the last two years – most notably by the US court of appeals for the second circuit early in 2015. However, because of the continuing secrecy of the Fisa courts, any ruling by a court of appeals was only a symbolic gesture. The USA Freedom Act, for all that it’s trumpeted as the solution to some of the excessed, does little to institute real oversight over the Fisa courts.

The solution: we should abolish the entire Fisa Court system and bring all surveillance requests into the oldest and most tested court system in America: the US district courts and courts of appeal.

Aaron Swartz Day 2015, Aaron Swartz International Hackathon 2015, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy-enabling Mini-Conference 2015, SecureDrop

EFF: Aaron Swartz Hackathon This Weekend Is Your Chance To Hack for a Better World

Aaron Swartz Hackathon This Weekend Is Your Chance To Hack for a Better World

 From the post:

This weekend marks the third annual Aaron Swartz Day hackathon, and a chance for you to meet up with other people working to use technology to make the world a better place. Once again, cities around the world will host two days of meetups.

The Internet Archive in San Francisco is the main event hub, with film screenings, talks from developers working on projects started or inspired by Aaron, a mini-conference of privacy-enhancing technologies, and a two-day hackathon.

The hackathon will focus on SecureDrop, an anonymous whistleblower document submission system originally developed by Aaron, and now maintained by the Freedom of the Press Foundation. SecureDrop has grown significantly in the years since Aaron began the project—it is now installed in newsrooms around the world—and it benefits from a robust community of developers and supporters who help build and document the project. Lead developer Garrett Robinson will lead the hackathon and explain where people with different skillsets can pitch in.

SecureDrop will not be the only thing to work on. The founder of the OpenArchive project will also be there to lead prospective hackers on developing that app. Developers from our own Privacy Badger browser tool will be there hacking, and EFF staff technologist Cooper Quintin will present during the privacy mini-conference.

Also at the privacy mini-conference on Saturday: presentations on Keybase; former EFF staffer Micah Lee, now with The Intercept, presenting on encryption for journalists; and Brad Warren on exciting developments with the Let’s Encrypt certificate authority.

Starting at 6pm after the first day of hacking, the Internet Archive will host a reception where people can meet. At 7:30, there will be a rare opportunity to see excerpts of the upcoming “From DeadDrop to SecureDrop,” a documentary about that software and Aaron’s role in developing it.

Finally, on Saturday night from 8 to 10pm an impressive line-up of speakers, including EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn and co-founder John Perry Barlow, will present on their work and Aaron’s legacy. Tickets for the evening event—including the reception, screening, and talks—are available on a sliding scale.

The hackathon and mini-conference continue on Sunday, with more talks from Library Freedom Project’s Alison Macrina and Restore The 4th’s Zaki Manian.

For friends of EFF, and people who want to advance the causes Aaron dedicated his life to, this weekend’s event is a can’t-miss. If you can make it, please RSVP so the organizers can plan accordingly. We hope to see you there.

Aaron Swartz Day 2015, Aaron Swartz International Hackathon 2015, Internet Archive

Aaron’s Open Library Project Lives On

Giovanni Damiola has just been added as a speaker for Saturday’s Celebration of Hackers and Whistleblowers. He will say a few words about how he and Jessamyn West have been working on the Open Library project this past year. The Open Library was one of Aaron’s first projects, right after Creative Commons.

Giovanni was a hacker at last year’s San Francisco Aaron Swartz Day
Hackathon. He ended up getting a job at the Internet Archive shortly after last year’s event, and has now taken on Aaron’s beloved Open Library project, which attempts to create “a page for every book” in existence. Giovanni revamped the site to be more stable, and a re-index found 500,000 books, authors and editions lying around. Here’s an up to date “status report“ on the project from Librarian Jessamyn West. It’s also a project you can hack on at the hackathon this weekend.

The Open Library lends books to people in countries with no public libraries, and Jessamyn  frequently uses Google translate just to read and reply to email from all over the world.

Although originally envisioned by Aaron as providing, “a page for every book, so you can find the book, so you can buy it, or borrow it,  it’s become much more than that, and is, in fact,  a lifeline to information for many countries.

As Jessamyn explains, “I was around when Open Library was first getting started, and I think the people who built it and designed it were way ahead of their time. I’m really happy to get to carry-on Aaron’s legacy of sharing as much as possible to as many people as possible.”