Kopimism

kopimism@sudoroom.org

30 discussions

by Eddan Katz

anyone seen a good write-up on how Giving Tuesday got started? > > > Indiegogo is the world's funding platform. > We empower people to fund what matters to them. > View this email in your browser > > Last Day to Support #GivingTuesday > > Today is #GivingTuesday, a global day of giving at the beginning of the holiday season. In its first year (2012), it activated over 2,500 partners and increased online giving by 50%. > > Indiegogo is excited to be a part of this movement, and we will be contributing $1 for every $20 raised on December 3rd on every valid #GivingTuesday campaign. > > Please help us make a big impact this year by reviewing our #GivingTuesday campaigns and contributing on December 3rd, 12am PST to 11:59pm PST. > > Support #GivingTuesday campaigns ► > Check out these #GivingTuesday campaigns: > > Heart to Heart > COMMUNITY // USA > Almost six years ago, Om Malik survived a serious heart attack, thanks to the efforts of UCSF Medical Center's cardiology division. Help him give back to the team that saved him. > Read More ► > > DIY Girls > EDUCATION // USA > Luz Rivera launched this #GivingTuesday campaign to encourage girls in her community to explore with technology, empower them with self-confidence, and inspire them to pursue technical careers. > Read More ► > Global Focus > > My Name is Emily > DUBLIN, IRELAND > My Name is Emily is a feature film by Simon Fitzmaurice, an award-winning Irish filmmaker with Motor Neuron Disease (ALS). He was diagnosed in 2008, just after his film The Sound of People screened at Robert Redford's Sundance Film festival. This #GivingTuesday campaign is focused on enabling Simon to direct his feature film in the Spring of 2014. > Browse Campaigns ► > > Want to raise money for your idea? > Start A Campaign ► > follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend > > Copyright © 2013 Indiegogo, All rights reserved. > > Our mailing address is: > 965 Mission Street > 6th Floor > San Francisco, California 94103 > > unsubscribe from this list | update subscription preferences | view email in browser >

10 years, 4 months

Fwd: [liberationtech] Group Thinks Anonymity Should Be Baked Into the Internet Itself

by eddan.com

Do the doctrines of Kopimism cover the sanctity of anonymity? > From: Eugen Leitl <eugen(a)leitl.org> > Date: November 29, 2013 at 11:47:48 AM EST > To: tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org, Liberation Technologies <liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu>, cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net, doctrinezero(a)zerostate.is > Subject: [liberationtech] Group Thinks Anonymity Should Be Baked Into the Internet Itself > Reply-To: liberationtech <liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu> > > > http://www.technologyreview.com/news/521856/group-thinks-anonymity-should-b… > > Group Thinks Anonymity Should Be Baked Into the Internet Itself > > Following NSA surveillance revelations, talks advance on making the > privacy-protecting tool Tor an Internet standard. > > By David Talbot on November 26, 2013 > > WHY IT MATTERS > > Published reports suggest that Internet traffic is widely spied upon by the > NSA and other government agencies. > > The Internet’s main engineers have asked the architects of Tor—networking > software designed to make Web browsing private—to consider turning the > technology into an Internet standard. > > If widely adopted, such a standard would make it easy to include the > technology in consumer and business products ranging from routers to apps. > This would, in turn, allow far more people to browse the Web without being > identified by anyone who might be spying on Internet traffic. > > If the discussions bear fruit, it could lead to the second major initiative > of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in response to the mass > surveillance by the National Security Administration. Already the IETF is > working to encrypt more of the data that flows between your computer and the > websites you visit (see “Engineers Plan a Fully Encrypted Internet”). > > Collaborating with Tor would add an additional layer of security and privacy. > When Tor is successfully used, the websites you visit don’t know the true > address and location of your computer, and anyone watching traffic from your > computer wouldn’t know where you’re browsing—a distinct layer of protection > that goes beyond encrypting your communications. > > Stephen Farrell, a computer scientist at Trinity College, Dublin, believes > that forging Tor into a standard that interoperates with other parts of the > Internet could be better than leaving Tor as a separate tool that requires > people to take special action to implement. “I think there are benefits that > might flow in both directions,” he says. “I think other IETF participants > could learn useful things about protocol design from the Tor people, who’ve > faced interesting challenges that aren’t often seen in practice. And the Tor > people might well get interest and involvement from IETF folks who’ve got a > lot of experience with large-scale systems.” > > Andrew Lewman, executive director of Tor, says the group is considering it. > “We’re basically at the stage of ‘Do we even want to go on a date together?’ > It’s not clear we are going to do it, but it’s worth exploring to see what is > involved. It adds legitimacy, it adds validation of all the research we’ve > done,” he says. On the other hand, he adds: “The risks and concerns are that > it would tie down developers in rehashing everything we’ve done, explaining > why we made decisions we made. It also opens it up to being weakened,” he > says, because third-party companies implementing Tor could add their own > changes. > > The IETF is an informal organization of engineers that changes Internet code > and operates by rough consensus. Internet service providers, companies, and > websites aren’t required to implement any standards the IETF issues. And even > if security standards are implemented, they may not be widely deployed. For > example, years ago the IETF created a standard for encrypting Web traffic > between your computer and the websites you visit. Although this standard, > HTTPS, is built into most software for serving Web pages and browsing the > Web, only banks, e-commerce sites, and a number of big websites like Google > and Facebook have elected to actually use it. The IETF hopes to make such > encryption the default for a future Web communications standard known as HTTP > 2.0. > > The Tor Project is a nonprofit group that receives government and private > funding to produce its software, which is used by law enforcement agencies, > journalists, and criminals alike. The technology originally grew out of work > by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory aimed at protecting military users (see > “Dissent Made Safer”). > > When someone installs Tor on his computer and takes other precautions, it > supplies that computer with a directory of relays, or network points, whose > owners have volunteered to handle Tor traffic. Tor then ensures that the > user’s traffic takes extra steps through the Internet. At each stop, the > previous computer address and routing information get freshly encrypted, > meaning the final destination sees only the address of the most recent relay, > and none of the previous ones. > > Leaks by Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, suggest that circumventing > Tor was one of the NSA’s goals, and that the agency had had some success (see > “Anonymity Network Tor Needs a Tune-up to Protect Users from Surveillance”). > “We are about 10 people, and have multibillion dollar agencies trying to > break our technology,” Lewman says. > -- > Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys(a)stanford.edu.

10 years, 5 months

Press Freedom foundation's Encryption manual

by Eddan Katz

https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/sites/default/files/encryption_works.pdf sent from eddan.com

10 years, 10 months

Fwd: [tvi-discuss] Summary of the White House Meeting on the Treaty, Friday May 31

by Eddan Katz

An interesting first hand report on the Treaty for the Visually Impaired discussions of civil society organizations with the White House IP foreign policy delegation in connection with negotiations at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva. > From: Jonathan Band <jband(a)policybandwidth.com> > Date: June 1, 2013, 2:11:12 PM PDT > To: Luis Villarroel <info(a)innovarte.cl> > Cc: Tvi <tvi-discuss(a)lists.keionline.org> > Subject: Re: [tvi-discuss] Summary of the White House Meeting on the Treaty, Friday May 31 > > We did 95% of the talking so there is not much to add. As Jim said, the stress was on how this treaty would benefit the blind in the U.S. That is a message the USG folks not deeply involved in the treaty (i.e., Edelman, Perlmutter, and Niejelow) hadn't heard before, and it clearly made an impression. Justin conceded that even though U.S. law would allow an accessible format copy to be imported into the U.S. (at least post-Kirtsaeng), foreign law might not allow the export of that copy to the U.S., and thus the treaty would allow more imports of accessible copies into the U.S. Edelman asked whether the treat could be seen as promoting the free cross-border flow of information (which the Administration supports), and we heartily agreed. > > We also stressed that we wanted to make sure that nothing in the treaty could be used against us to narrow the Chafee amendment -- again, underscoring the potential impact on the blind in the U.S. > > One small point of clarification with respect to what I said. I said that the rights holders' concern with respect to the precedent this treaty would set for other copyright exceptions treaties had no merit because the other two exceptions treaties (libraries and educational institutions) on the WIPO agenda have no chance of adoption. Given this reality, U.S. libraries aren't pushing for a library treaty. Niejelow responded that there are other international agreements that are going forward, such as TPP and TTIP, so this treaty could have an impact on them. Unfortunately, the conversation moved on so that I didn't have a chance to agree with him on how truly awful it would be for US rights holders if the TPP referred to "fair practices, dealings and uses." ;-) > > > > Jonathan Band > policybandwidth > 21 Dupont Circle NW, Suite 800 > Washington, DC 20036 > phone: 202-296-5675 > fax: 202-872-0884 > jband(a)policybandwidth.com > > On Jun 1, 2013, at 4:23 PM, Luis Villarroel <info(a)innovarte.cl> wrote: > >> Jim Thanks very much for sharing this important exchange. I would encourage more info from others attending the meeting. >> >> Kind regards >> >> Luis >> >> >> 2013/6/1 Jim Fruchterman <Jim.F(a)benetech.org> >>> I thought I’d provide a summary of this meeting for the benefit of many interested parties, both inside the U.S. and globally. >>> >>> >>> >>> In attendance from the Obama Administration: David Edelman (Innovation, Internet and Privacy Senior Advisor from OSTP in the White House), Justin Hughes (the lead negotiator on the Treaty for the U.S.), Shira Perlmutter (from the US Patent and Trademark Office in the Commerce Dept, Jonathan says she’s de facto Justin’s boss), Nancy Weiss of IMLS (Museum and Library Services, the library person from a U.S. agency who is part of the Treaty team), and two folks from IP Enforcement, the unit headed by Victoria Espinel: Alexander Niejelow (Chief of Staff to Espinel) and Christine (who handed out no cards and whose surname is much longer than mine!). >>> >>> >>> >>> For the advocacy community: Jonathan Band (representing the Library Copyright Alliance), Melanie Brunson (American Council of the Blind), John Pare (National Federation of the Blind) and Jim Fruchterman (Benetech/Bookshare). >>> >>> >>> >>> The goal of the meeting was to present the advocacy agenda to the Administration to counterbalance the malign influence of the IP lobby. In theory, we were supposed to be meeting with Teresa Stanek Rea, Acting Under Secretary of Commerce and the acting head of the US Patent and Trademark Office, but Justin seemed surprised saying he didn’t think she was ever scheduled to be part of the meeting. An awkward moment. However, I think we ended up making progress with some of the key staff anyway. >>> >>> >>> >>> The planned goal for the meeting was to emphasize the value of the Treaty to Americans with print disabilities, to declare our interest as stakeholders in the outcomes of the Treaty negotiation. We planned on hitting each of the major World Blind Union key points, but framed from an American point of view, for an American political audience. >>> >>> >>> >>> John Pare set us up and concluded that this was a treaty that would help American blind people. Melanie talked about the lack of books for the blind, even with services like NLS (doing 2,000 books a year) and Bookshare (doing 30,000 books a year) compared to the 200,000 books being published each year in the U.S. alone. She addressed the issue of duplicate production, or about the reluctance to share books across borders because of the uncertainty of how legal that was. The issue of students and adults being interested in languages other than English was pointed out, since most of the groups can devote very few resources to titles in other languages. >>> >>> >>> >>> I talked about the cost and legal uncertainty (even though Justin disagrees with our lawyers on how far we can go) of importing books, even though we have considerable demand. I emphasized how well Chafee worked in the U.S., that we were able to scan and convert hundreds of books a month based on specific requests from people with print disabilities. I pointed out how little piracy there was: that with over 1.2 million downloads a year, we found fewer than ten cases of books being posted on the Internet, and that in nine out of the ten cases, the name of the individual who downloaded the book was in the plaintext of the ebook file! I hammered on the commerciality issue as un-American: that as a library we thought it was wrong to tell patrons they should buy a book rather than borrow one. I also talked about the problem of Digital Rights Management and how they stop people from gaining access. My final point was that we were worried about the Treaty having provisions in it that threatened our favorable copyright exception. >>> >>> >>> >>> Jonathan Band added a great deal from the library perspective. He tackled head-on the issues cited by the rights-holders. He didn’t buy the “slippery slope” argument that helping the blind with an exception would suddenly lead to catastrophic provisions in treaties on libraries or education. His members aren’t even sure that a Treaty for Libraries is a good idea. He (and John) noted that patent-holders were not stakeholders in this policy debate, that the Treaty had zero to do with patents, and suggested that the Administration not take them seriously in their advocacy. He also brought up the HathiTrust litigation in some detail and Justin and he went back a forth on that. >>> >>> >>> >>> Everybody talked about the need for a workable treaty that helped Americans with disabilities. We don’t want onerous provisions that discourage access to works: John Pare emphasized that the Treaty should promote access, promote reading. >>> >>> >>> >>> The White House guy was interested in numbers, in the impact both in terms of access and economics. A fair number of queries were trying to get a handle on the number of beneficiaries, and we ended up noting that these provisions are supposed to help a narrow number of people (I used my 1-2% rule of thumb that we cite internally at Bookshare). We did talk about people with severe dyslexia and physical disabilities as being included. The IP Enforcement guy was trying to push some of the rightsholders points, but couldn’t point out which U.S. law he thought we should change. >>> >>> >>> >>> We avoided getting deep into the weeds on the 3-step test, although it came up in the context of how many people would benefit (Justin noted that it’s part of step 1). Justin talked a fair amount about compromises that had been struck. We were supportive of the compromises that the WBU had bought into, such as commerciality being an option and not a requirement (handling objections from countries like Canada, Japan and Australia where that’s part of their law). I pointed out that exceptions with commerciality seemed largely if not totally ineffective, but that we strongly objected to it being mandatory in cross-border exchange. >>> >>> >>> >>> The White House guy asked about the politics, if we were happy now that MPAA had made their statement. John and Melanie made it clear that the coalition was continuing with its foot on the accelerator. The NFB sign with “Exxon doesn’t want blind people to have Braille books” and a possible “GE wants to keep the blind in the dark” slogan was mentioned. Since the IP Owners Association had explicitly named policy objections that we found unacceptable, we said we would keep attacking them for their unconscionable positions. I think this made an impression on the politics involved. >>> >>> >>> >>> Jonathan worked in (with support from Nancy I believe) the authorized entity issue that especially concerns the libraries. >>> >>> >>> >>> The conclusion statements from Melanie and John were clear: blind people in America want an effective treaty out of self-interest, out of the need to respect their human right to read. We want it to not simply permit, but promote access to works created outside the U.S. And, we do not want a Treaty that is more restrictive than U.S. law, that would erect needless barriers to overcome imagined but nonexistent problems posed by the IP owners. >>> >>> >>> >>> I hope that others who were in attendance at the meeting, who are on this email list, could share points that I missed or got wrong. >>> >>> >>> >>> Jim >>> >>> >>> >>> Jim Fruchterman >>> President and CEO, Benetech >>> Email: jim(a)benetech.org >>> >>> Twitter: @JRandomF >>> Blog: The Beneblog >>> >>> 480 California Ave, Suite 201 >>> Palo Alto, CA 94306 USA >>> (650) 644-3406 >>> Fax: (650) 475-1066 >>> www.benetech.org >>> Benetech - Technology Serving Humanity >>> A nonprofit organization >>> >> >> -- >> Luis Villarroel Villalón >> Director de Investigación >> Corporación Innovarte >> www.innovarte.cl >> (56 2) 688 69 26 >> _______________________________________________ >> tvi-discuss mailing list >> tvi-discuss(a)lists.keionline.org >> http://lists.keionline.org/mailman/listinfo/tvi-discuss_lists.keionline.org

10 years, 11 months

Lex Machina

by Eddan Katz

Developed in part by Mark Lemley (http://www.law.stanford.edu/node/166497) http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/01/lex-machina-raises-a-round-as-ip-litigatio… ... One of the fundamental problems in intellectual property (IP) litigation is the lack of information available to both plaintiffs and defendants. The identity of the plaintiff and the defendant, the district(s), judge(s), and lawyers involved in a particular case, have a significant impact on the outcome of a litigation, including whether a particular litigation will proceed at all. While legal professionals have anecdotal and scholarly information on individual districts and judges, granular data on lawyers, courts, judges, and districts can be invaluable in litigation decision making. Lex Machina, which just announced that it has raised a $4.8 million Series A funding round led by Boston-based Cue Ball Capital, aims to provide this information. As the number of lawsuits and verdict amounts increase to all-time highs, the information is becoming increasingly valuable. The company claims that total patent litigation cases filed have increased more than 100 percent in the last three years, and three verdicts over $1 billion for patent infringement have been awarded in the last eight months, while median damages awards in patent cases now exceed $4 million. Existing investors XSeed Capital, Costanoa Venture Capital, and Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang also participated in the round. According to Josh Becker, CEO of Lex Machina, Cue Ball found Lex Machina through AngelList. ...

10 years, 12 months

Friday Filosophy - changed format. Weekly Rant.

by Eddan Katz

The fact that no one else came for Friday Filosophy gave me some time to think about the possibility of a different format for the weekly congregation. In addition to the time of day being problematic for a meat/(vegan)space gathering, it seems unnecessarily old-fashioned to confine the conversation to any particular bounds of time and space anyhow. So, in the Kopimist spirit of post-neo-luddite optimism -- I propose that Friday begin a virtual and asynchronous form of worship that can last for whenever you have the time for it before the sudo-minyan meets on Sunday. Rather than a particular form of chant, I propose the prayer take the form of a 'rant'. Due to the nature of this format, Ray gave a wise suggestion to cap it 2 pages/minutes, [as in 2 minutes of hate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Minutes_Hate) in Orwell's 1984.] Given this week's interest in bookmaking, I thought to start off a rant with a parable about the good old days when the people who made the books mattered. from Robert Darnton's, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775-1800 (1979) ... pg. 230 ... To see into the life behind a fingerprint in the Encyclopédie is to get some sense of how men moved through the obscure channels of working-class history, but Bonnemain's thumbmark also can be studied for its typographical significance. It illustrates a point that is difficult to appreciate in an age of automation: the printers of the Old Regime left their mark on their books -- literally, in Bonnemain's case, and figuratively in all the others. For each workman stamped each page with something of his individuality, and the quality of his craftsmanship affected the success of the product. Bonnemain's fingerprint really resulted from a typographical trick. By smearing the forms excessively with ink, he and his companion did not have to pull so hard at the bar of the press to get an impression. But the extra ink came off on their fingers and smudged the sheets during handling. ...

10 years, 12 months

Fwd: From the creators of WE ARE LEGION - A New Documentary about Aaron Swartz

by Andrew

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: We Are Legion: The Story of The Hacktivists < info(a)wearelegionthedocumentary.com> Date: Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 10:49 AM Subject: From the creators of WE ARE LEGION - A New Documentary about Aaron Swartz To: pcmaho(a)gmail.com ** A new film by the Director of We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists about the Internet pioneer and activist, Aaron Swartz. View this email in your browser<http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=df607dc4f152ac44b73b921f4&id=adb5d93b6a…> KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN <http://wearelegionthedocumentary.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=df607dc4…> Announcing the launch of a Kickstarter campaign for the new documentary about Aaron Swartz by the Writer/Director and Composer team of *We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists.*<http://wearelegionthedocumentary.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=df607dc4…> Currently titled “The Internet’s Own Boy.”The new film by Brian Knappenberger, director of *We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists<http://wearelegionthedocumentary.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=df607dc4…> * follows internet activist and programming pioneer Aaron Swartz from his teenage emergence on the internet scene and involvement in RSS and Reddit, to his growing interest in political advocacy and the controversial actions he allegedly took in downloading nearly four million academic articles from the online service JSTOR. The film explores Aaron’s arrest, the prosecution’s tactics in bringing the case to trial through the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the CFAA, and the impact a seemingly small hacking gesture had on Aaron’s life and the possible future of information access on the internet. JOIN US and HELP MAKE THIS PROJECT HAPPEN! We start the first phase of our Kickstarter campaign today. We are also launching the website for the film today. <http://wearelegionthedocumentary.us4.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=df607dc…> Wired profiled the project today and our decision to raise the budget via Kickstarter and release the film via Creative Commons. It's a great piece, check it out! *Copyright © 2013 Luminant Media, All rights reserved.* You are receiving this email because you signed up for our mailing list. *Our mailing address is:* Luminant Media 7162 Beverly Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90036 Add us to your address book<http://wearelegionthedocumentary.us4.list-manage1.com/vcard?u=df607dc4f152a…> unsubscribe from this list<http://wearelegionthedocumentary.us4.list-manage2.com/unsubscribe?u=df607dc…> update subscription preferences<http://wearelegionthedocumentary.us4.list-manage.com/profile?u=df607dc4f152…> [image: Email Marketing Powered by MailChimp]<http://www.mailchimp.com/monkey-rewards/?utm_source=freemium_newsletter&utm…> -- ------- Andrew Lowe Cell: 831-332-2507 http://roshambomedia.com

11 years

Hackers as Warrior Priests

by Andrew

An essential aspect of hacking is sharing. From the days of leaving your punch cards in a drawer, where anyone could find it and fix it for you. To Git Hub and Gitorious. What if hackers have always been the warrior priests of Kopimism. Practicing out of pure faith while fighting for the rights of others to copy and remix. Makes sense, if coping is essential to life everything else in the universe, we move forward by hacking, changing things, and sharing those modification with everyone. There is no other way than Kopimism! -- ------- Andrew Lowe Cell: 831-332-2507 http://roshambomedia.com

11 years

'One of the first religions inspired by the internet'

by Eddan Katz

By Annalee Newitz ... I first encountered Kopimism atNoisebridge, a hackerspace in San Francisco, CA, where hackers, makers and artists collaborate on projects that range from free software to electronic music and weird new Arduino-enabled devices. A group of people from Noisebridge's sister hackerspace in Oakland, Sudo Room, were showing us pictures of their new digs. The Kopimist symbol was emblazoned on its doors. What the hell is that? I wondered. A few quick searches online answered my question. ... > http://io9.com/one-of-the-first-religions-inspired-by-the-internet-476516354

11 years

Hacktivists as Gadflies, Peter Ludlow

by Eddan Katz

For those concerned that Sudo Room is the corrupting the minds of the youth ... Going to try to make it to Kopimism worship today. If there's time, I'd like to read it aloud. Also, a reminder that we have to have Ludlow over to check out what we've been up to. sent from eddan.com APRIL 13, 2013, 1:36 PM Hacktivists as Gadflies By PETER LUDLOW Around 400 B.C., Socrates was brought to trial on charges of corrupting the youth of Athens and “impiety.” Presumably, however, people believed then as we do now, that Socrates’ real crime was being too clever and, not insignificantly, a royal pain to those in power or, as Plato put it, a gadfly. Just as a gadfly is an insect that could sting a horse and prod it into action, so too could Socrates sting the state. He challenged the moral values of his contemporaries and refused to go along with unjust demands of tyrants, often obstructing their plans when he could. Socrates thought his service to Athens should have earned him free dinners for life. He was given a cup of hemlock instead. We have had gadflies among us ever since, but one contemporary breed in particular has come in for a rough time of late: the “hacktivist.” While none have yet been forced to drink hemlock, the state has come down on them with remarkable force. This is in large measure evidence of how poignant, and troubling, their message has been. Hacktivists, roughly speaking, are individuals who redeploy and repurpose technology for social causes. In this sense they are different from garden-variety hackers out to enrich only themselves. People like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates began their careers as hackers — they repurposed technology, but without any particular political agenda. In the case of Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak, they built and sold “blue boxes,” devices that allowed users to defraud the phone company. Today, of course, these people are establishment heroes, and the contrast between their almost exalted state and the scorn being heaped upon hacktivists is instructive. For some reason, it seems that the government considers hackers who are out to line their pockets less of a threat than those who are trying to make a political point. Consider the case of Andrew Auernheimer, better known as “Weev.” When Weev discovered in 2010 that AT&T had left private information about its customers vulnerable on the Internet, he and a colleague wrote a script to access it. Technically, he did not “hack” anything; he merely executed a simple version of what Google Web crawlers do every second of every day — sequentially walk through public URLs and extract the content. When he got the information (the e-mail addresses of 114,000 iPad users, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Rahm Emanuel, then the White House chief of staff), Weev did not try to profit from it; he notified the blog Gawker of the security hole. For this service Weev might have asked for free dinners for life, but instead he was recently sentenced to 41 months in prison and ordered to pay a fine of more than $73,000 in damages to AT&T to cover the cost of notifying its customers of its own security failure. When the federal judge Susan Wigenton sentenced Weev on March 18, she described him with prose that could have been lifted from the prosecutor Meletus in Plato’s “Apology.” “You consider yourself a hero of sorts,” she said, and noted that Weev’s “special skills” in computer coding called for a more draconian sentence. I was reminded of a line from an essay written in 1986 by a hacker called the Mentor: “My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.” When offered the chance to speak, Weev, like Socrates, did not back down: “I don’t come here today to ask for forgiveness. I’m here to tell this court, if it has any foresight at all, that it should be thinking about what it can do to make amends to me for the harm and the violence that has been inflicted upon my life.” He then went on to heap scorn upon the law being used to put him away — the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the same law that prosecutors used to go after the 26-year-old Internet activist Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide in January. The law, as interpreted by the prosecutors, makes it a felony to use a computer system for “unintended” applications, or even violate a terms-of-service agreement. That would theoretically make a felon out of anyone who lied about their age or weight on Match.com. The case of Weev is not an isolated one. Barrett Brown, a journalist who had achieved some level of notoriety as the “the former unofficial not-spokesman for Anonymous,” the hacktivist group, now sits in federal custody in Texas. Mr. Brown came under the scrutiny of the authorities when he began poring over documents that had been released in the hack of two private security companies, HBGary Federal and Stratfor. Mr. Brown did not take part in the hacks, but he did become obsessed with the contents that emerged from them — in particular the extracted documents showed that private security contractors were being hired by the United States government to develop strategies for undermining protesters and journalists, including Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for Salon. Since the cache was enormous, Mr. Brown thought he might crowdsource the effort and copied and pasted the URL from an Anonymous chat server to a Web site called Project PM, which was under his control. Just to be clear, what Mr. Brown did was repost the URL from a Web site that was publicly available on the Internet. Because Stratfor had not encrypted the credit card information of its clients, the information in the cache included credit card numbers and validation numbers. Mr. Brown didn’t extract the numbers or highlight them; he merely offered a link to the database. For this he was charged on 12 counts, all of which pertained to credit card fraud. The charges against him add up to about 100 years in federal prison. It was “virtually impossible,” Mr. Greenwald, wrote recently in The Guardian, his new employer, “to conclude that the obscenely excessive prosecution he now faces is unrelated to that journalism and his related activism.” Other hacktivists have felt the force of the United States government in recent months, and all reflect an alarming contrast between the severity of the punishment and the flimsiness of the actual charges. The case of Aaron Swartz has been well documented. Jeremy Hammond, who reportedly played a direct role in the Stratfor and HBGary hacks, has been in jail for more than a year awaiting trial. Mercedes Haefer, a journalism student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, faces charges for hosting an Internet Relay Chat channel where an Anonymous denial of service attack was planned. Most recently, Matthew Keys, a 26-year-old social-media editor at Reuters, who allegedly assisted hackers associated with Anonymous (who reportedly then made a prank change to a Los Angeles Times headline), was indicted on federal charges that could result in more than $750,000 in fines and prison time, inciting a new outcry against the law and its overly harsh enforcement. The list goes on. In a world in which nearly everyone is technically a felon, we rely on the good judgment of prosecutors to decide who should be targets and how hard the law should come down on them. We have thus entered a legal reality not so different from that faced by Socrates when the Thirty Tyrants ruled Athens, and it is a dangerous one. When everyone is guilty of something, those most harshly prosecuted tend to be the ones that are challenging the established order, poking fun at the authorities, speaking truth to power — in other words, the gadflies of our society. Peter Ludlow is professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. His most recent book is “The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics.” Copyright 2013 The New York Times CompanyPrivacy PolicyNYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018 sent from eddan.com

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