Anonymous Takes Down DOJ & MIT in Tribute to Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz keynote - "How we stopped SOPA" at F2C:Freedom to Connect 2012, Washington DC on May 21 2012.
The websites of the U.S. Department of Justice and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were knocked offline on Sunday, and the work is being attributed to the hacktivist collective, Anonymous.
DOJ.gov and MIT.edu were both back online Monday morning.
The action was taken as a tribute to the late Aaron Swartz, a co-founder of the site Reddit.com and at the age of 14, co-developed the RSS web protocol that is the key component of much of the internet's publishing infrastructure.
In another tribute, hundreds of academics worldwide have begun tweeting links to their copyright-protected research in Swartz's honor, using the hastag #pdftribute. Links from Twitter posts with the hashtag are being collected at Pdftribute.net. The links appear to be to academic papers.
In a statement about his death, Aaron’s family and partner wrote in part:
"Aaron’s insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitable—these gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter. We’re grateful for our time with him, to those who loved him and stood with him, and to all of those who continue his work for a better world..."
"Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death...Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.”
Aaron’s funeral will be held at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, January 15th at Central Avenue Synagogue, 874 Central Avenue, Highland Park, Illinois 60035. Announcements about memorial services in other cities will be posted here in coming weeks.
If you ever have thoughts of suicide please speak to someone, in the USA call 1-800-273-8255 or find numbers for your country here.
attack government institutions? It is called treason. It is no different is essence than blowing up a building even if the consequences are less severe and no lives lost. It is nothing but vandalism.They've already started knocking on the doors of your hactivist collective and I'm guessing we're in for some more arrests. If this is what you want to celebrate Ms Sweet than I think your movement is a total lost cause. The hero, in whose name this was purportedly committed, was a confessed thief and the author of his own misfortunes.
Hasa Diga Eebowai
so early in the morning?
Prohibiting access to a bloody website is no different than standing in front of a government office and not allowing access.
It is not an attack.
Bloody hell, reading your comments I know your smarter than that.
No coffee at your house this morning?? Makes me bitchy too.
I didn't realize Diane was their queen. That's pretty cool, Diane. Keep up the good work.
far left loon >.<
The fact remains that the government was being a bully. Bullying is not just a school yard problem, and it often leads to suicide wherever it occurs.
What the anonymous did among other things is call attention to DOJ bullying. Bullying the citizenry, while they coddle Wall Street crooks...
"Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob"
-= Franklin Delano Roosevelt =-
You're a business owner, right.
If an employee took a pen you paid for would you alert the RCMP. Would you hound them until they considered suicide?
far left loon >.<
Swartz committed theft (and, in the aggregate, very serious theft). However, he should get a free pass because, on this site, we like his ideology. On the other hand, had he been a far right gun nut and worn an AR-15 to a mall in Oregon, he should have been prosecuted.
A prosecutor's job involves determining whether sufficient evidence of a crime exists to warrant proceeding with prosecution. Are some of you really suggesting that the prosecutor should have given him a pass (either by refusing to prosecute or by not seeking punishment set out in the letter of the law)? Really? Does the same principle hold true if the accused has done something you don't approve of (like spray paint a Planned Parenthood Center) but that a rightwing prosecutor sympathizes with?
If the 'perp' got 35 years in prison I might cry fowl, yes.
far left loon >.<
has long been the method for addressing grievances against a tyrannical oppressive government. This symbolic action by Anonymous is no more than an acceptable form of protest for the over reaching actions of the DOJ and MIT. There are many fine and good citizens who believe that information that has been collected through government subsidy are the property of the people and should be freely available to that public.
Aaron Swartz stands as a figure who represented the right of the people to access its own information, and the actions of the government directly led to his unfortunate demise.
Calling this treason is definitely over kill but I also think we give it far too much credit to put it in the same league as people who put themselves on the line with civil disobedience. People who commit civil disobedience are honest about what they are doing. They do it in the light of day. The whole point is to show that people of conscience are willing to risk their liberty because a cause is so important.
These kinds of petty nuisance attacks are more analogous to lighting a bag of crap on fire on a rich neighbor's door step. It accomplishes nothing except to annoy people and make some extra work for the under payed help that have to clean up the crap, in this case the over worked sys admins who maintain these sites and probably are or at least were very sympathetic to the cause.
This isn't about copyright and it never was. You think your taxes paid for your local transit system? I'll bet they did. Does that mean you get to ride for free? Try it. Head down to your local bus stop, climb on a bus and claim your entitlement to free transportation. See how long it takes for you, insisting on your rights, to get arrested. The system Swartz hacked or by passed security is a subscription system not because of copyright, or not entirely since authors do have rights, but because users have to pay to maintain the library. He stole those services. He did it for what I and the law consider very misguided reasons. It's a damn shame he committed suicide for he had a first rate intellect. The claim of civil disobedience is not a get out of jail free card. Breaking the law because you disagree with it is a hazardous road and not for the faint of heart.
Hasa Diga Eebowai
There was no hacking or bypassing of security involved. JSTOR had an agreement with MIT to allow full access to the content of their site for anyone visiting from an MIT network address. MIT does not lock down their network so anyone can connect to it. All Mr. Swartz did was to connect his netbook to MIT's open network and use a script on the computer to download content available to him because he was on the network. Here is an article that gives a good summary of what his actual actions were:
http://unhandled.com/2013/01/12/the-truth-abo...
anyone can come in and take what they like right?
Hasa Diga Eebowai
Yes, provided they don't use a 'script' to do it... apparently. It was bullying.
"Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob"
-= Franklin Delano Roosevelt =-
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