Politics

The family of celebrated internet activist Aaron Swartz has accused prosecutors and MIT officials of being complicit in his death, blaming the apparent suicide on the pursuit of a young man over an alleged crime that had no victims.

In a statement released late Saturday, Swartz’s parents, Robert and Susan, siblings Noah and Ben and partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman said the Redditt builder’s demise was not just a personal tragedy but the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.

They also attacked the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for not supporting the internet activist in his legal battles and refusing to stand up for its own community’s most cherished principles.

The comments came a day after the 26-year-old killed himself in his Brooklyn apartment on Friday night — via redwolf.newsvine.com

For more than a year now, EFF has encouraged mainstream press publications like the New York Times to aggressively defend WikiLeaks’ First Amendment right to publish classified information in the public interest and denounce the ongoing grand jury investigating WikiLeaks as a threat to press freedom.

Well, we are now seeing why that is so important: at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on July 11th, some members of Congress made it clear they also want New York Times journalists charged under the Espionage Act for their recent stories on President Obama’s Kill List and secret US cyberattacks against Iran. During the hearing, House Republicans “pressed legal experts Wednesday on whether it was possible to prosecute reporters for publishing classified information,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

In addition, the Washingtonian‘s Shane Harris reported a month ago that a senior Justice Department official made it clear that reporters who talked to sources about classified information were putting themselves at risk of prosecution.

Leaks big and small have been happening for decades — even centuries — and the most recent are comparable to several others. No journalist has ever been prosecuted under the Espionage Act and it has generally been accepted, even by Congress’s own research arm, that the publication of government secrets by the press is protected speech under the First Amendment. Yet the government is actively investigating WikiLeaks and now threatening others for just that.

The mainstream media may see little in common with Assange’s digital publication methods or his general demeanour, but what he is accused of is virtually indistinguishable from what other reporters and newspapers do every day: poke, prod, and cajole sources within the government to give up classified information that newspapers then publish to inform the public of the government’s activities — via EFF

Senator Patrick Leahy has abandoned his controversial proposal that would grant government agencies more surveillance power — including warrantless access to Americans’ e-mail accounts — than they possess under current law.

The Vermont Democrat said today on Twitter that he would “not support such an exception” for warrantless access. The remarks came a few hours after a CNET article was published this morning that disclosed the existence of the measure.

A vote on the proposal in the Senate Judiciary committee, which Leahy chairs, is scheduled for next Thursday. The amendments were due to be glued onto a substitute (PDF) to H.R. 2471, which the House of Representatives already has approved.

Leahy’s about-face comes in response to a deluge of criticism today, including the American Civil Liberties Union saying that warrants should be required, and the conservative group FreedomWorks launching a petition to Congress — with more than 2,300 messages sent so far — titled: Tell Congress: Stay Out of My Email!

A spokesman for the senator did not respond to questions today from CNET asking for clarification of what Leahy would support next week — via redwolf.newsvine.com

This morning, the majority of Bill C-11, the copyright reform bill, took effect, marking the most significant changes to Canadian copyright law in decades. While there are still some further changes to come (the Internet provider notice-and-notice rules await a consultation and their own regulations, various provisions related to the WIPO Internet treaties await formal ratification of those treaties), all the consumer oriented provisions are now active — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Russian internet users warned on Monday that a new law aimed at blacklisting websites devoted to drug use, suicide promotion and paedophilia was being used as a tool for censorship after two popular sites were banned.

More than 180 sites have been banned since the law came into effect on 1 November, RIA-Novosti, a state-run news agency, reported. No official public register of the blacklist exists, though the government has opened a portal where users can check to see if specific sites are on it.

Analysts have warned that the vaguely worded law could be manipulated to crack down on the Russian internet, the one media platform untouched by the Kremlin’s heavy hand — via redwolf.newsvine.com

It’s appropriate that the lingering but inevitable death of Labor’s mandatory internet censorship policy finally happened this week, because it’s a third fine victory for the connected and data-aware over dumb dinosaurs.

The other two are pollster Nate Silver’s precision data-driven prediction of the US election result, and the comprehensive ridicule of TV chef Pete Evans’ belief in the nutty nutritional pseudo-sciences of alkalised water and activated almonds.

These three disparate stories demonstrate a simple, obvious but frequently forgotten fact: this internet revolution thing is completely rebuilding the way human society handles information, at every level. Information leads to knowledge, and knowledge is power. So the power relationships are changing, fundamentally, at every level of society.

Fundamentally.

Every level.

In the jockeying for power in this rapidly evolving environment, the winners will be those who understand what it’s really about. One key factor is that brains beat brawn. In the online world, brain power can be pooled to create more intelligence, whereas muscular huffing and puffing just makes you look more stupid as your most ludicrous sound bites go viral — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The Federal Government has abandoned its controversial plan for an internet filter.

Five years after Labor promised to filter the internet, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is dumping the plan.

Instead he will ask internet service providers to block child abuse websites that Interpol includes in its worst of list — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The Russian government has opened a blacklist of websites that will be blocked from domestic internet users to avoid them harming themselves with too much information.

The new rules mean that ISPs will automatically block websites that the courts have deemed inappropriate. The law was introduced with the usual caveats about it being to protect children from online predators and to stop drug distribution, but political websites that criticise Tsar President Putin have already been blocked by the courts.

The decision on what sites are to be banned will be enacted by the sinister-sounding Roskomnadzor (AKA the Agency for the Supervision of Information Technology, Communications and Mass Media) and enforced with deep-packet inspection of all internet traffic across the country — which must be reassuring for those using Russian cloud providers — via redwolf.newsvine.com