Internet freedom and the ghost of Aaron Swartz | iPolitics

Ben Winkler, a long-time friend, speaks during the memorial service for Aaron Swartz, Saturday, Jan. 19, 2013 in New York. Friends and supporters of Swartz paid tribute Saturday to the free-information activist and online prodigy, who killed himself last week as he faced trial on hacking charges. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Was Internet ?saint? and prodigy Aaron Swartz harried to death by prosecutors? Is the United States planning another scorched-earth campaign against online freedom?

Whatever the answer, this much is obvious to anyone who has been following the ongoing battle between democracies (which are rapidly turning into national security states) and information-hungry citizens clinging to an open Internet: The skirmishing is now a war.

To paraphrase Tennessee Williams, next to Christmas, fear is the biggest business in America. Last Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano?hit the ultimate red button?with Americans, warning that a ?cyber-911? could happen ?imminently?.

Her turn of phrase conjured up images of planes blasting through buildings and every bad disaster movie ever made ? chaos at a keystroke that would affect all critical infrastructure, including water, electricity and gas.

A decade ago, Homeland Security didn?t exist on the U.S. bureaucratic landscape. Now it has 200,000 employees, a budget of $98 billion, and is only exceeded in size by the Defence Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs. When its boss wants to make a splash in the media, as Napolitano clearly wanted to with her speech at the Wilson Centre in Washington last week, it is like calling ducks to dinner.

And what a timely warning it turned out to be.

As if by magic, just a couple of days after Napolitano?s dire predictions, the hacker collective known as Anonymous?took control of a U.S. federal government agency website. And not just any agency, but the Federal Sentencing Commission.

Anonymous demanded reform of the American justice system so that ?cyber crimes? like the ones for which their members are prosecuted would not be so harshly punished. It threatened an embarrassing document dump from the internal files of the Department of Justice if its demands were not met. As cyber-Robin Hoods operating out of a bits-and-bytes Sherwood Forest, Anonymous sees the demise of democracy in the steady choking-off of information on the Internet.

But why did they act now, and why did Napolitano issue her warning so presciently? The answer is all tied up with the 26 year-old computer genius who, according to the authorities, hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment on January 11th ? Aaron Swartz.

To Anonymous and millions of people around the world, Swartz was and is a hero ? a kind of Ghandi of the Internet.

He established his creative brilliance by developing RSS and co-founding Reddit. He made his reputation as a champion of democracy by fearlessly pursuing online freedom and copyright reform. It was not a theoretical crusade. The kid posted his FBI record online.

In 2011, Swartz used the campus network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to download boatloads of scholarly journals with the aim of making them available without a fee. He was charged with unauthorized entry under the Computer and Abuse Act and indicted by a Grand Jury; he faced a 35-year jail sentence if convicted. Weeks before his court appearance on the government?s charges, he was found dead in his apartment.

Then came the outrage and the theories. Some said that Swartz had been harried to his death by prosecutors who acted as if they were dealing with Bernie Madoff rather than a new-age Milton. This despite the fact that the documents he downloaded were never shared on peer-to-peer networks, would never have benefitted Swartz financially if they had been, and were returned to MIT.

Some entered darker tunnels of speculation, arguing that celebration, not suicide, had been in order for Swartz. Some pointed to the fact that the formal victim in the case, JSTOR,?not only decided not to press charges, but publicly released the papers Swartz had accessed ? and asked who the real victim was here. And with the alleged victim bowing out, why would a brilliant young man end his life with so much ahead of him?

Swartz challenged the idea that a powerful few should own the world?s treasure trove of knowledge. As he himself wrote, ?The world?s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.?

Whatever the facts are behind the tragedy of Aaron Swartz, there is no mystery about the intentions of the U.S. government or Secretary Napolitano in the current circumstances. They will try to make the case that they need greater control of the Internet to keep the lights on and the swimming pools heated.

It just might work. The fear dividend after 9/11 was enormous and continues to grow. At the time, citizens were told to keep an eye out for Osama bin Laden at the grocery store in Witchita and Phoenix, while government unburdened them of key civil rights, a divestiture driven by the twin delusions of patriotism and paranoia.

There is every reason to suspect that carefully stoked fears of a ?cyber 9/11? will lead to the same result ? a docile acquiescence on the part of the public in giving up their rights to the last open prairie on the planet, the Internet. The stumbling block so far in the United States has been the First Amendment, which makes it difficult for the government to control the Internet as the ultimate vehicle for freedom of speech.

But that doesn?t mean successive administrations haven?t tried to get around the Constitution by other means. Protecting children is usually a popular goal, so in 2000 the U.S. adopted the?Children?s Internet Protection Act, which gave the government the right to ?filter? the Internet.

It also adopted measures to regulate Internet providers, an indirect way of partly-controlling the technology. Senators like Joe Lieberman insisted that the U.S. president should have a ?kill switch? to disconnect the Internet (insofar as that can be done) during an emergency.

The president himself got in on the act in late 2010 when he told Congress he already had that power under a Second World War law allowing the president to shutter telephone and telegraph networks.

Now Janet Napolitano is demanding that Congress try again to pass a cyber-security bill giving government greater control over the Internet. Last year, a bill dealing with the same issue was defeated after it was rejected by both business and privacy groups on the basis of ?government overreach?.

In other words, people were afraid that the big, sneaky ear of government would use any new regulatory power to eavesdrop on the Internet.

It is worth mentioning that President Obama?s desire to control the Internet, whatever justification may be used, puts him in the company of autocrats in Russia and China who support the same approach for different reasons.

Vladmir Putin has openly declared war on the Internet by giving himself the power to shutter websites, charge bloggers with treason and strip away their online anonymity.

In China, where Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked, it is now legal for the government to delete posts and pages and to force Internet providers to turn over what is risibly referred to as ?illegal information.?

You thought the gun registry was bad? In China, in order to use the microblogging platform Weibo, users have to hand over their real names. An Internet Registry.

Here in Canada, the Harper government has been a galloping horse?s ass in its attempt to sell an Internet surveillance bill as a war against child pornographers.

What the government really wanted in the infamous?Bill C-30?was for Internet Service Providers and cellular phone companies to install equipment that would permit online spying on Canadians and then have that information provided to police or secret agents without warrant. You know, just a little 1984.

There was a time when the Harper government planned to take its legislation directly to a House of Commons committee, bypassing the traditional second reading and doubtless rejecting all amendments. Then the Internet Nation roused itself and the blowback was fierce. As he often does when a real political threat emerges, the prime minister took a step back.

But only to re-group. As?Jim Bronskill of the Canadian Press recently reported, the Harper government has now enlisted the help of the federal privacy commissioner to come up with a palatable version of Bill C-30. As long as the end result is handing over yet more private information to police and spies, and compromising the Internet, this is a dog that won?t hunt.

Not with the Internet Generation ? and not with the ghost of Aaron Swartz hovering over their computers.

Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his ?unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.? His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. He is currently working on a book about the Harper majority government to be published in the autumn of 2014 by Penguin Canada.

Readers can reach the author at michaelharris@ipolitics.ca. Click here to view other columns by Michael Harris.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author?s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

Source: http://www.ipolitics.ca/2013/01/27/internet-freedom-and-the-ghost-of-aaron-swartz/

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