August 22, 2014 – Lessig’s Mayday Super PAC stunned the political world by raising $7 million to fight corruption. Now comes the hard part: using money in politics to kick money out of politics. Lessig returns to the show to bring us inside the battle.
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How Universities Can Lead The Way For Legal Reform and Protection of Student Innovators
This article sets out a straight forward plan for how universities can support student innovation and protect their students from unnecessary prosecution (see very bottom of this post).
Students Who Push Tech Boundaries Should Be Encouraged, Not Punished
By April Glaser for Wired
From the article:
Notably, after faculty members and students circulated an open letter, MIT President Rafael Reif announced plans to support the Tidbit innovators, and MIT sent a formal letter to New Jersey’s Attorney General, asking it to withdraw the subpoena. The open letter stated that the subpoena from the New Jersey Attorney General will have, “a chilling effect on MIT teaching and research.” Soon after, MIT faculty and MIT students wrote additional letters of support, asking New Jersey to withdraw the subpoena. Over 800 members of the MIT community signed onto these letters.
President Reif appears to get it. In response to the outcry over the Tidbit controversy, Reif announced that MIT plans to create a new legal resource for students threatened by legal challenges as a result of their innovative work and entrepreneurial pursuits. “In the case of someone creating an innovative new product and then getting into legal trouble doing something that was a part of their classwork — then, MIT absolutely does have a legal interest to be involved,” Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, told the press.
Also from the article:
Now is the time for students and campus communities that want to vitalize innovation to speak up and demand university support. There are some simple steps that universities can take to foster inventiveness in their campus communities:
1. Create a legal intake mechanism or program for students who receive subpoenas and are threatened by computer crime laws. Student innovators need to know where to go to receive help.
2. Publish a guide on CFAA and in-state computer crime laws so that students and researchers can better understand the contours of the laws that may be leveraged against them.
3. Universities should be pushing for computer crime legal reform and come out with strong institutional support for reform efforts on the federal and state level.
Just as laws are frequently outdated by the accelerated pace of technology, campus policies often lag behind in addressing the potential legal needs of their most innovative students exploring the frontiers of digital invention. Yet universities don’t have to move at the slothful pace of legal change.
SecureDrop’s Garrett Robinson and James Dolan – At Aaron Swartz Day 2013
SecureDrop is an open-source whistleblower submission system managed by Freedom of the Press Foundation that media organizations use to securely accept documents from anonymous sources. It was originally coded by the late Aaron Swartz.
The goal of SecureDrop is to simplify the process of using Tor and an airgapped computer viewing station (decrypted with a private key) to protect the identity of a whistleblower uploading documents.
(From video) Garrett Robinson:
“The impetus behind SecureDrop is that we (FPF) want to restore the balance between governments and journalists who want to communicate with anonymous sources. Historically, the U.S. has had really strong press freedoms. This is essential for a functioning democracy.”
Main page:
https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/securedrop
Project page on Github:
https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop/
Form to fill out to request help with SecureDrop:
https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/securedrop#contact
SecureDrop Development List:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/securedrop-dev
SecureDrop FAQ:
https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/securedrop#faq
SecureDrop User Manual:
https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop/blob/develop/docs/user_manual.md
Lessig Announces The MayDay PAC’s Next Move
Lessig has announced the first two candidates that MayDay PAC is supporting!
One is Staci Appel, a Democrat running for a congressional seat in Iowa.
The other is Jim Rubens, a Republican in the New Hampshire senate race.
It’s in the NY Times:
Spending Big to Fight Big Donors in Campaigns
Aaron’s “Homeland” Afterword – Read by Noah Swartz
Here’s the Afterword that Aaron wrote for Cory Doctorow’s Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother, as read by Aaron’s brother, Noah.
BoingBoing Post re: this audio recording.
Review of IOB: “A frightening case study in the power of government”
The Internet’s Own Boy (Review)
By Norm Schrager for Paste Magazine on June 27, 2014
From the Review:
The Internet’s Own Boy is Brian Knappenberger’s (We are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists) account of Swartz’s immensely abbreviated life as one of the most vital and controversial contributors to the progress of the Internet and, more notably, the availability of its contents. A distinctively human tale in a world of software development, Own Boy succeeds on many levels: it’s a compact, descriptive history of a nascent Internet, a frightening case study in the power of government, and a collection of interviews with the most prominent voices of the Web Age. But most important—and most effective to the storytelling—The Internet’s Own Boy is about a brilliant youngster who was becoming a brilliant man before he took his own life…
Knappenberger traces Swartz’s growth and burgeoning activism with the eye of an investigative reporter, assembling some of the most interesting talking heads in the industry, including Tim Berners-Lee (yeah, he invented the World Wide Web) and soft-spoken Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig. Brilliant minds themselves, they all recognized Swartz’s smarts and courage, and express it on screen wonderfully.
Cory Booker and Rand Paul, the Senate’s crime-reforming superduo
New! Episode #28 of The Good Fight!
Cory Booker and Rand Paul, the Senate’s crime-reforming superduo
Afterword By Aaron Swartz for Cory Doctorow’s “Homeland”
In the Huffington Post, Cory Doctorow talks about the afterword that Aaron wrote for Homeland (the sequel to the incredible Little Brother).
This afterword is probably one of the best explanations of the spirit behind having an Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon every year.
From Cory Doctorow:
I knew I wanted an afterword from Aaron Swartz, who had the best techno-activist instincts of anyone I knew, and who I’d know since he was a little kid, and who was also being savagely victimized by the US government for his principled work. I’m devastated about what happened with Aaron. I asked him to write me a afterword in the form of a letter to a kid like himself, but who was 14 in the year 2013. What he gave me was a call-to-arms that made me want to rush to a barricade, and left no doubt that we both hoped for the same thing from this book: that it would inspire a generation of activists who wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer when it came to freedom in the information age.
From the Afterword to Homeland by Aaron Swartz:
This is your life, this is your country — and if you want to keep it safe, you need to get involved…
The system is changing. Thanks to the Internet, everyday people can learn about and organize around an issue even if the system is determined to ignore it. Now, maybe we won’t win every time — this is real life, after all — but we finally have a chance.
But it only works if you take part. And now that you’ve read this book and learned how to do it, you’re perfectly suited to make it happen again. That’s right: now it’s up to you to change the system.
Let me know if I can help.
Interview with “The Internet’s Own Boy” Director Brian Knappenberger for Reason TV
Guardian Piece On Ben Wikler and Aaron Swartz’ “Good Fight”
Listen to this: Ben Wikler and Aaron Swartz’s The Good Fight
Wikler’s increasingly popular political podcast tries to ‘inspire people to get involved in stuff that really counts’
By Lilah Raptopoulos for The Guardian
From the Article:
Wikler was close friends with the free-information pioneer Aaron Swartz, who took his life last January – he was facing up to 50 years in prison for allegedly downloading millions of copyrighted academic articles. Wikler and Swartz began The Good Fight’s predecessor, a radio show called the Flaming Sword of Justice, meant to spotlight people making real progressive changes, in January of 2012. Wikler now hosts the show alone, but each episode still evokes Swartz’s quest to empower people and to fight the status quo…Without a doubt, start with episode 25: Lawrence Lessig, Aaron Swartz, and the Super Pac to end Super Pacs. Then, check out episode 17: the Nanny Uprising, about a group of women who fought to give nannies and other domestic workers basic labor rights they didn’t already have, and episode 26: Pulitzer winner. Undocumented. American, where journalist Jose Antonio Vargas tells his story of coming out as public representative for other undocumented migrants living in America.
