Category Archives: Aaron Swartz International Hackathon 2015

Complete Transcription of the Friends of Aaron movie, including: Cory Doctorow, Brewster Kahle, Cindy Cohn and Virgil Griffith.

From the November 7, 2015 evening event at the Internet Archive, in San Francisco, before the speakers.

“Hi, I’m Cory Doctorow. Welcome to the third annual Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon.”

Now a Few Words from a Few Friends of Aaron’s

Cory Doctorow
Blogger, BoingBoing, Science Fiction Author, Little Brother/Homeland
Special Advisor, Electronic Frontier Foundation

You know. I knew Aaron for a really long time. And when we first met, people who cared about the Internet were a bit weird. It was as though we were really interested in something trivial and futuristic and speculative, while all around us raged really important battles about more significant issues. Issues about climate change. Issues about financial fairness. Issues about privacy. Issues about race and gender.

And what we’ve found in the years since then is that those other issues have gotten even more urgent, but more and more people have come to realize that the Internet is the fight that will determine how all those other fights go on. Because the Internet is the battlefield on which all those fights will be fought.

And so it’s really crucial that we win the Internet. Not because the Internet is more important than everything else, but because it’s the most foundational thing.

I hope you have a great day at the International Hackathon.

Brewster Kahle
Founder and Digital Librarian
Internet Archive

Aaron Swartz lives in many many ways. Aaron Swartz’ ideas have been carried forward by many others, and in fact, tragically, by his persecution, prosecution, and death, has come to be widely known to others.

The idea of public access to the public domain. That we can live open source lives freely, and that it’s desirable, and you meet new and interesting people.

And the lesson of Aaron Swartz has not been forgotten by the institutions that participated in having him crushed, and has led to reforms, top and bottom, of those organizations, to not have that ever happen again. So, public access, public domain, living open source lives, should be encouraged for the next generation, and made safe by the institutions that are too slowly learning their lessons.

Cindy Cohn
Executive Director
Electronic Frontier Foundation

Aaron has left us all such a legacy of caring about the politics around technology and not just caring, but getting involved. And whether you’re getting involved as a technologist or an activist you can have no better loadstar than Aaron. I have watched as he’s inspired people all over the world.

We haven’t had success in building things in DC, to help fix things. Aaron’s law has gotten stalled. However, we’ve been able to stop the bad. There have been several attempts, and there’s one right now, in the Cybersecurity to continue on the horrible pathway of making the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act worse and worse and worse. And, we stopped it cold, shortly after Aaron died. We’ve gotten it dramatically changed this time, and I think we’re gonna stop it cold again. So, while we haven’t yet been able to make good out of what happened to Aaron, we’ve been able to stop some bad. I’m not done yet. It’s still early days. But, I still run into people all the time who tell me that learning about Aaron was the moment. Their “wake up” moment. When they decided, “I care about technology too, and I want to get involved.” And that’s awesome!

Virgil Griffith
Technologist d’Avant-Garde
Tor2Web, WikiScanner

So after Aaron Swartz’ death, there was a rash of suicides at Cal Tech, where I was at school. (Unrelated!) And they had a little suicide thing. And I gave a little talk there, and I’ve been thinking about it recently. And I remember what I told them. I said “even when you feel like crap. You’re like ‘I can’t do anything.’ ‘I’m no good.’ ‘I spend like four days out of the week sleeping.’ ‘I’m only productive one day a week, tops.’ I would say, “even that one day a week, is more valuable than you would ever realize.”

I used Aaron as an explicit example. Even though Aaron was not even near (pauses). He was definitely not thriving. He was in surviving, not thriving mode. But still, even him in surviving mode was like amazing. You know. But I think he just couldn’t see it.

And I feel like Aaron was making this mistake as well. Okay so, Aaron would kind of flip between being egotistical and being very self deprecating. So, internally, he though of himself very highly, but outwardly he’d be very self deprecating. I felt like just in general, he did not appreciate, like, his own importance and the things he could do. Even if Aaron was active one day a week. Well that’s awesome. A one day a week Aaron, I’ll take it. I’ll totally take it. Ya know. And I think he would have really had difficulty, seeing that, as useful to the world. He’d be like “oh I’m so unproductive. I’m so ungood. Blah blah blah blah. No no no. One day a week’s great.

Brewster Kahle (ending comments):

Aaron Swartz has inspired hackathons, yearly gatherings of people remembering and moving forward some of the ideas of SecureDrop, of going and building public access to journal literature, to basically building a public sphere that may not be tied to institutions, certainly not tied to business plans, but tied to an inspiring vision, of information access and living open source lives. Aaron Swartz lives on in many many ways.

Aaron Swartz Day 2015, Aaron Swartz International Hackathon 2015, Press

Newsweek Covers the Aaron Swartz Day Hackathon

November 24, 2015 lisa

Newsweek’s Seung Lee came by the hackathon on Saturday. He’s written a nice piece that I’d missed last week :-)

Inside the Aaron Swartz Day Hackathon
By Seung Lee for Newsweek

1114swartz — Side view of Saturday’s hackathon on November 7, 2015.

From the article:

Programmers, journalists and whistleblowers flocked to San Francisco to speak during the conference. Representatives from the Tor Project, which advocates for online anonymity, and Glenn Greenwald’s project The Intercept were in attendance. In addition, Chelsea Manning, the Army lieutenant who leaked sensitive documents to Wikileaks in 2010, wrote a letter of support to the conference from her prison cell in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

The day was more than just a parade of experts talking and guests listening. “Aaron would not have wanted people to mope around about him,” says Rein. “He would have wanted us to build new things.”

More than 30 computer programmers huddled together around foldable tables in the foyer and typed away at assigned projects. One of these projects was Privacy Badger, a third-party tracker-blocking application built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights advocacy group. While Privacy Badger helped stop hidden trackers from following one’s digital footrpints, the application sometimes disabled images and videos from being displayed, and thus needed some outside help…

“Aaron led an open source life and took the open source movement to another level,” says Kahle. “Programming for the social good is still very much alive. But we, the general public, all screwed up by taking the life of a promising young man.”

In the evening, the Internet Archives hosted a dinner banquet during which several speakers, including Kahle and those from the afternoon conference, took turns saying a few words about Swartz. At the close, Manning’s letter was read aloud by Rein.

Manning spoke about the “paradox” of technology leaving society more connected and open and yet more paranoid and insecure. She asked the guests to use their technologies for a better, freer and more private Internet, as Swartz would have wanted.

“I now believe that today’s coders and engineers have an extra ‘hat’ that we have to wear on top of the colorful spectrum of hats we already have—namely, the technology ethicist and moralist hat,” reads Manning’s letter. “Technology is only a toolbox. It’s what we create our software for, what we intend to use it for, and who we allow to use it, and how much, that really count.”

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

November 5, 2015 lisa

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 International Hackathon 2015, Creative Commons, Internet Archive, Tor Project

OpenArchive: A Mobile Application That Saves To The Internet Archive

November 4, 2015 lisa

Interview with OpenArchive’s Founder, Natalie Cadranel.

OpenArchive is a free, open-source mobile application dedicated to
maintaining the privacy, provenance, and preservation of audiovisual civic media. Conceived during the Arab Spring and Occupy, and currently available in beta for Android, it unites the efforts of T or, Creative Commons, and the Internet Archive to foster a virtual commons where civil liberties and digital rights are protected.

Founder, Natalie Cadranel, and supporters of the OpenArchive project will be at the San Francisco Hackathon this weekend, ready to collaborate with folks. This is your chance to get your hands on the code and contribute to the Internet Archive’s first secure, open-source mobile application. You can join the beta-testing community here.

Natalie is an archivist, researcher, and independent media advocate. After finishing her master’s at UC Berkeley’s ISchool, she launched the OpenArchive App. The background and inspiration for the project is highlighted in her journal article Preserving Mobilized Culture. She will be engaging with the community at the San Francisco Aaron Swartz Hackathon, on Saturday from 10am – Noon, and looks forward to sharing it in the venue and spirit it was conceived.

Citizens armed with mobile devices are becoming history’s first
responders, amassing rich, contextualized, and crucial records of
their movements and breaking news. However, most of these recordings presently reside on social media platforms that can chill free speech and are subject to government censorship, privacy breaches, and data loss. While social media is an acceptable distribution platform, it does not provide sufficient privacy protections or archival preservation of this vital media.

OpenArchive’s mission is to preserve, amplify, and route mobile media to user-created collections in an accessible public trust (The Internet Archive and beyond) outside the corporate walled gardens currently dominating the online media ecosystem.

Lisa: So, is the idea that, while you are posting something to Facebook or Twitter, you might also post it to the Internet Archive, for safekeeping, for future generations?

Natalie: Definitely. This application is an alternative to social media and intended to meet the needs of three primary groups:

1) citizen journalists who no longer trust social media and want to share their documentation with organizations that respect their civil liberties and are committed to preservation and contextualization

2) archivists who are looking for effective ways to collect and preserve community media while respecting the media-creators’ intentions, and

3) those interested in using and remixing the media like news outlets, researchers, scholars, and artists.

Lisa: What gave you the idea to build this?

Natalie: As a former journalist for IndyMedia, an archivist, and digital rights activist, I became increasingly concerned about the lifecycle of sensitive mobile media during global uprisings starting in 2010. I interviewed citizen journalists, archivists, and refugees from Iran’s Green Movement about the challenges surrounding their information gathering and distribution processes.

The ethical collection, contextualization, and amplification of citizen media are issues that crystallized during these conversations. Privacy and authentication emerged as critical concerns for people who had very sensitive media on their phones, which often included documentation of human rights abuses. Popular social media platforms were not secure enough to protect users’ identities or conducive for long-term preservation and there were no alternatives at the time.

Lisa: Explain more about this problem of our social media-filled world that could just be deleted, should a corporation, such as Facebook, get bought and disappear someday.

Natalie: Companies are committed to their bottom line, not long-term preservation or user privacy. While they are currently fantastic distribution platforms, users cannot rely on them to safeguard and preserve their content.

This platform is facilitating a timeline of a “people’s history” that
preserves and respects contributors’ content. Another benefit of
contributing this media to an archive is that it increases the
interoperability of it for future use and makes it widely available without betraying user identities or intentions.

Lisa: So when you upload to the Internet Archive, you are adding it to a personal collection at the Internet Archive, as if you had uploaded through its website?

Natalie: Yes. Exactly.

Lisa: What kinds of things might people be able to help you hack on at the hackathon?

Natalie: We currently need help with some usability and design
refinements. There are open issues on the GitHub site.

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

Aaron’s Open Library Project Lives On

November 3, 2015 lisa

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.”

Aaron Swartz Day 2015, Aaron Swartz International Hackathon 2015, Freedom of the Press Foundation, SecureDrop

Freedom of the Press Foundation: Come Hack on SecureDrop at the Third Annual Aaron Swartz Day

October 30, 2015 lisa

Come hack on SecureDrop and Celebrate the Third annual Aaron Swartz Day

From the blog post:

Next week on Saturday November 7th is the third annual Aaron Swartz Day, which celebrates the life of Aaron and the many wonderful Internet projects he created or worked on during his brief but brilliant life.

One of Aaron’s last projects was SecureDrop, the open-source whistleblower submission system, which Freedom of the Press Foundation adopted after his untimely passing in 2013. Every year on Aaron Swartz Day, we help host a weekend-long hackathon in Aaron’s honor.

This year, the hackathon will be held at the Internet Archive in San Francisco (there are also other cities holding similar events). We will be at the Internet Archive on Saturday and Sunday to help guide and hack alongside any volunteer developers who want to learn about SecureDrop and work on the many open issues.

If you’re interested, you can read through our developer guide and the new-and-improved SecureDrop documentation. On our GitHub page, there is a list of open issues, and by November 7th, many will be tagged specifically for developers to work on at the hackathon.

Please RSVP for the hackathon here if you’d like to attend.

Also make sure to stick around the Internet Archive Saturday night for the Aaron Swartz Day celebration. There will be many great speakers at the event, including SecureDrop’s lead developer Garrett Robinson to talk about the latest on the project, as well as two of our board members and co-founders, Micah Lee and J.P. Barlow.

Many thanks to Lisa Rein, who tirelessly organizes Aaron Swartz Day every year and always makes it a celebration to remember.

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

Two New Talks Added to Privacy-enabling Mini-Con, Courtesy of the EFF!

October 28, 2015 lisa

Just Added! On Saturday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation will be participating in the Privacy-enabling Mini-Conference going on at the San Francisco Aaron Swartz Day Hackathon:

At 1pm, Cooper Quintin, Staff Technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, will talk about the what, where, and how of Privacy Badger, EFF’s privacy-enhancing creepy-tracker-blocking browser extension. Come learn how you’re being tracked online, and how you can use Privacy Badger to take back your privacy as you browse the web. (People will also be hacking on Privacy Badger at the SF Hackathon.)

At 4pm, Brad Warren, a Let’s Encrypt Developer, will present Let’s Encrypt, a joint project between the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, Akami, Cisco, the University of Michigan, and open-source developers around the world. Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated Certificate Authority which anyone can use to quickly, easily, and securely set up HTTPS on their website in minutes–and the best part is you don’t even need to be a cryptographer or an experienced sysadmin to use it! In his talk, Brad will explain why setting up HTTPS is so difficult without Let’s Encrypt, how Let’s Encrypt is different, and how you can use Let’s Encrypt to secure your website and help bring the world one step closer to a completely encrypted web.

RSVP to the Privacy-Enabling Mini-Con (or the SF Hackathon).

It is likely the live event (at 7:30 pm on November 7th) will be sold out. Get your moderately priced or free ticket now. Thanks! :-)

Aaron Swartz International Hackathon 2015, Privacy-enabling Mini-Conference 2015

Come to the Aaron Swartz Day Privacy-enabling Mini-Conference

October 25, 2015 lisa

RSVP for the privacy-enabling conference, November 7 and 8, in San Francisco, at the Internet Archive.

The SF Hackathon will be going on downstairs, where Garrett Robinson will be there, in person, with other folks from the Freedom of the Press Foundation, working on SecureDrop.

Meanwhile, upstairs in the “Great Room,” there will be a Privacy-enabling Software Conference that starts at the very beginning, for folks that are savvy enough to know they need encryption, but kind of don’t know where to start.

Again: this encryption and privacy-enabling training starts at the very beginning — with the folks from Keybase, who will be providing both a beginning and an advanced tutorial for folks who are just starting out:

10 AM: Session 1:
* Motivation: why encryption, what is public/private key encryption, and why is secure public key distribution important.
* The Keybase solution: social media proofs, client/server architecture,etc.
* Step through generating a key and installing Keybase
* Using Keybase via the website (https://keybase.io)

Break 10:50am-11:10am

11:10 AM Session 2 (advanced):
* Why you probably shouldn’t use Keybase via the website
* Using Keybase on the command line (or native app)
* Using Keybase with an email client
* Looking up public keys using Tor
* Preview of the Keybase File System

Lunch 11:50am-1pm

At 2pm, Micah Lee, of The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, will be giving his “Encryption for Journalists” workshop, so that journalists, librarians, researchers, or anyone else needing to, can protect their sources from prying eyes.

At 3pm, Micah Lee will cover using Onionshare and SecureDrop.

On Sunday, Alison Macrina, librarian and privacy activist and the director of the Library Freedom Project (a partnership among librarians, technologists, and privacy experts that helps people take back their privacy in an age of pervasive surveillance.will offer some solutions to help subvert digital spying) will be presenting from 11am-1pm (with a break from 11:50-12:10):

Come learn about strategies for keeping your information safe from government and corporate surveillance! Alison will teach basic concepts in information security, and cover tools like Tor Browser, NoScript, passphrase management, safer searching, encrypted texting and other mobile security strategies, and more.

Lunch from 1-2pm

At 2pm, Zaki Manian from Restore the 4th will be presenting an introductory tutorial to using Tor Anonymity System on desktop and mobile computers. He will cover the Tor security model and practical application choices to make.

At 3pm, Zaki will give a developer-level talk on “the care and feeding of Tor hidden services.”

RSVP for the privacy-enabling conference.

And be sure to come to the evening event.

Aaron Swartz Day 2015, Aaron Swartz International Hackathon 2015, SecureDrop

Come to this year’s Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon

October 4, 2015 lisa

INVITATION

This year we are celebrating whistleblowers and hackers that work hard to make the world a better place, and, specifically, the “SecureDrop,” anonymous whistleblower submission system, now at the Freedom of the Press Foundation (originally prototyped by Aaron and Kevin Poulsen).

There’s also an “Encryption Training for Beginners” day going on in San Francisco, upstairs all day, at the SF Hackathon. (See below for more details.)

Now, thanks to SecureDrop, whistleblowers can connect directly, safely and anonymously to news organizations, such as the Washington Post, Guardian, The Intercept, the New York, Gawker, and other news outlets.

Evening speakers include: Garrett Robinson (Lead Developer, SecureDrop), Alison Macrina (Library Freedom Project), Brewster Kahle (Digital Librarian, Internet Archive), Cindy Cohn (Executive Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation), Micah Lee (Co-founder, Board Member, and Technologist at “The Intercept,”) Jacob Appelbaum (Wikileaks volunteer, Security Expert/Citizen Four, Tor Project), and John Perry Barlow (EFF and Freedom of the Press Foundation co-founder) and Special Guests. See more details in the INVITATION.

In San Francisco, at the hackathon, there will be a mini-conference for beginners to receive training on encryption and privacy-enabling software.

In the morning, the Keybase folks will be giving tutorials on encryption basics and tools that you can use to protect your privacy.

In the afternoon, Micah Lee, Technologist for The Intercept and The Freedom of the Press Foundation, with be giving his “Encryption for Journalists” tutorials. Then Micah will give tutorials on OnionShare (a P2P-based anonymous whistleblowing submission platform) and SecureDrop. Details on mini-conference/hackathon

Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon