Thread: Online activist, programmer Swartz dies in N.Y.

Too bad he wan't illegal, he probably would have gotten off. JMO

A lot of people that have spoken out against Obama are turning up dead these days. This kid spoke out against Obama's Kill Lists and now he is dead, go figure.

W

Swartz was facing criminal hacking charges, which carried a potential sentence of more than 30 years when he hanged himself at his New York City apartment.

This is the reason he killed himself.

RELATED

http://www.alipac.us/f19/anonymous-h...eforms-270373/

It seems the White has now raised the bar to 100,000 signatures.

WH petition to have Aaron Swartz’s prosecutor removed from office rapidly exceeds required amount for response

4:42 AM 01/16/2013
Josh Peterson
Tech Editor





Within three days, the White House petition to remove the late Aaron Swartz’s federal prosecutor from office has rapidly surpassed the amount necessary to require a response from the Obama administration.

Swartz committed suicide by hanging himself Friday after a lengthy struggle with depression and a long battle with the Department of Justice over allegations of felony hacking — charges Swartz denied. He was 26 years old.

Both his family and friends immediately blamed MIT and the federal prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, alleging that her zealous pursuit of a conviction against Swartz aggravated his depression and contributed to his death.

Swartz had been charged with 13 counts of felony hacking for allegedly downloading millions of publicly funded documents from the online academic archive service JSTOR in January 2011 while hiding in a closet at MIT.

JSTOR dropped its charges against Swartz in 2011, but federal prosecutors decided to press forward on the case anyway.

He faced a trial in April, a potential fine of a million dollars and 35 years in prison. Ortiz and her colleague, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann, posthumously dropped the charges Monday.

Swartz’s contributions to the development of the Internet made him a folk hero in the tech community, and the petition was started on Saturday January 12 when news of his death first broke. By 10 p.m. EST Tuesday evening, more than 33,500 people had signed the petition.

“It is too late to do anything for Aaron Swartz, but the who used the powers granted to them by their office to hound him into a position where he was facing a ruinous trial, life in prison and the ignominy and shame of being a convicted felon; for an alleged crime that the supposed victims did not wish to prosecute,” the petition reads.

“A prosecutor who does not understand proportionality and who regularly uses the threat of unjust and overreaching charges to extort plea bargains from defendants regardless of their guilt is a danger to the life and liberty of anyone who might cross her path,” it said.

White House “We the People” petitions created after Tuesday require 100,000 signatures for an official White House response. Because the Swartz petition was created earlier, it falls under the old rules requiring 25,000 signatures. (RELATED: White House changes petition rules)

Alex Stamos, the network security expert Swartz’s legal team had planned to leverage as their expert witness during the trial, even came forward on Saturday to offer what would have been his testimony.

“I know a criminal hack when I see it, and Aaron’s downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail,” he said in a blog post.

Read more: WH petition to have Aaron Swartz's prosecutor removed from office rapidly exceeds required amount for response | The Daily Caller

Sounds like a communist regime going after political prisoners. JMO
Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann: accountability for prosecutorial abuse

Imposing real consequences on these federal prosecutors in the Aaron Swartz case is vital for both justice and reform

Glenn Greenwald

Wednesday 16 January 2013 06.40 EST



US Attorney Carmen Ortiz is under fire for her office's conduct in the prosecution of Aaron Swartz. Photograph: US Department of Justice

Whenever an avoidable tragedy occurs, it's common for there to be an intense spate of anger in its immediate aftermath which quickly dissipates as people move on to the next outrage. That's a key dynamic that enables people in positions of authority to evade consequences for their bad acts. But as more facts emerge regarding the conduct of the federal prosecutors in the case of Aaron Swartz - Massachusetts' US attorney Carmen Ortiz and assistant US attorney Stephen Heymann - the opposite seems to be taking place: there is greater and greater momentum for real investigations, accountability and reform. It is urgent that this opportunity not be squandered, that this interest be sustained.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that - two days before the 26-year-old activist killed himself on Friday - federal prosecutors again rejected a plea bargain offer from Swartz's lawyers that would have kept him out of prison. They instead demanded that he "would need to plead guilty to every count" and made clear that "the government would insist on prison time". That made a trial on all 15 felony counts - with the threat of a lengthy prison sentence if convicted - a virtual inevitability.

Just three months ago, Ortiz's office, as TechDirt reported, severely escalated the already-excessive four-felony-count indictment by adding nine new felony counts, each of which "carrie[d] the possibility of a fine and imprisonment of up to 10-20 years per felony", meaning "the sentence could conceivably total 50+ years and [a] fine in the area of $4 million." That meant, as Think Progress documented, that Swartz faced "a more severe prison term than killers, slave dealers and bank robbers".

Swartz's girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, told the WSJ that the case had drained all of his money and he could not afford to pay for a trial. At Swartz's funeral in Chicago on Tuesday, his father flatly statedthat his son "was killed by the government".

Ortiz and Heymann continue to refuse to speak publicly about what they did in this case - at least officially. Yesterday, Ortiz's husband, IBM Corp executive Thomas J. Dolan, took to Twitter and - without identifying himself as the US Attorney's husband - defended the prosecutors' actions in response to prominent critics, and even harshly criticized the Swartz family for assigning blame to prosecutors: "Truly incredible in their own son's obit they blame others for his death", Ortiz's husband wrote. Once Dolan's identity was discovered, he received assertive criticism and then sheepishly deleted his Twitter account.

Clearly, the politically ambitious Ortiz - who was touted just last month by the Boston Globe as a possible Democratic candidate for governor - is feeling serious heat as a result of rising fury over her office's wildly overzealous pursuit of Swartz. The same is true of Heymman, whose father was Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton administration and who has tried to forge his own reputation as a tough-guy prosecutor who takes particular aim at hackers.

Yesterday, the GOP's House Oversight Committee Chairman, Darrell Issa, announced a formal investigation into the Justice Department's conduct in this case. Separately, two Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee issued stinging denunciations, with Democratic Rep. Jared Polis proclaiming that "the charges were ridiculous and trumped-up" and labeling Swartz a "martyr" for the evils of minimum sentencing guidelines, while Rep. Zoe Lofgren denounced the prosecutors' behavior as "pretty outrageous" and "way out of line".

A petition on the White House's website to fire Ortiz quickly exceeded the 25,000 signatures needed to compel a reply, and a similar petition aimed at Heymann has also attracted thousands of signatures, and is likely to gather steam in the wake of revelations that another young hacker committed suicide in 2008 in response to Heymann's pursuit of him (You can [and I hope will] sign both petitions by clicking on those links; the Heymann petition in particular needs more signatures).

In sum, as CNET's Declan McCullagh detailed in a comprehensive article this morning, it is Ortiz who "has now found herself in an unusual - and uncomfortable - position: as the target of an investigation instead of the initiator of one." And that's exactly as it should be given that, as he documents, there is little question that her office sought to make an example out of Swartz for improper and careerist benefits. Swartz "was enhancing the careers of a group of career prosecutors and a very ambitious - politically-ambitious - U.S. attorney who loves to have her name in lights," the Cambridge criminal lawyer Harvey Silverglate told McCullagh. Swartz's lawyer said that Heymann "was going to receive press and he was going to be a tough guy and read his name in the newspaper." Writes McCullagh:

"If Swartz had stolen a $100 hard drive with the JSTOR articles, it would have been a misdemeanor offense that would have yielded probation or community service. But the sweeping nature of federal computer crime laws allowed Ortiz and [] Heymann, who wanted a high-profile computer crime conviction, to pursue felony charges. Heymann threatened the diminutive free culture activist with over 30 years in prison as recently as last week."

For numerous reasons, it is imperative that there be serious investigations about what took place here and meaningful consequences for this prosecutorial abuse, at least including firing. It is equally crucial that there be reform of the criminal laws and practices that enable this to take place in so many other cases and contexts.

To begin with, there has been a serious injustice in the Swartz case, and that alone compels accountability. Prosecutors are vested with the extraordinary power to investigate, prosecute, bankrupt, and use the power of the state to imprison people for decades. They have the corresponding obligation to exercise judgment and restraint in how that power is used. When they fail to do so, lives are ruined - or ended.

The US has become a society in which political and financial elites systematically evade accountability for their bad acts, no matter how destructive. Those who torture, illegally eavesdrop, commit systemic financial fraud, even launder money for designated terrorists and drug dealers are all protected from criminal liability, while those who are powerless - or especially, as in Swartz's case, those who challenge power - are mercilessly punished for trivial transgressions. All one has to do to see that this is true is to contrast the incredible leniency given by Ortiz's office to large companies and executives accused of serious crimes with the indescribably excessive pursuit of Swartz.

This immunity for people with power needs to stop. The power of prosecutors is particularly potent, and abuse of that power is consequently devastating. Prosecutorial abuse is widespread in the US, and it's vital that a strong message be sent that it is not acceptable. Swartz's family strongly believes - with convincing rationale - that the abuse of this power by Ortiz and Heymann played a key role in the death of their 26-year-old son. It would be unconscionable to decide that this should be simply forgotten.

Beyond this specific case, the US government - as part of its war to vest control over the internet in itself and in corporate factions - has been wildly excessive, almost hysterical, in punishing even trivial and harmless activists who are perceived as "hackers". The 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) - enacted in the midst of that decade's hysteria over hackers - is so broad and extreme that it permits federal prosecutors to treat minor, victimless computer pranks - or even violations of a website's "terms of service" - as major felonies, which is why Rep. Lofgren just announced her proposed "Aaron's Law" to curb some of its abuses.

But the abuses here extend far beyond the statutes in question. There is, as I wrote about on Saturday when news of Swartz's suicide spread, a general effort to punish with particular harshness anyone who challenges the authority of government and corporations to maintain strict control over the internet and the information that flows on it. Swartz's persecution was clearly waged by the government as a battle in the broader war for control over the internet. As Swartz's friend, the NYU professor and Harvard researcher Danah Boyd, described in her superb analysis:

"When the federal government went after him – and MIT sheepishly played along – they weren't treating him as a person who may or may not have done something stupid. He was an example. And the reason they threw the book at him wasn't to teach him a lesson, but to make a point to the entire Cambridge hacker community that they were p0wned.It was a threat that had nothing to do with justice and everything to do with a broader battle over systemic power.

"In recent years, hackers have challenged the status quo and called into question the legitimacy of countless political actions. Their means may have been questionable, but their intentions have been valiant. The whole point of a functioning democracy is to always question the uses and abuses of power in order to prevent tyranny from emerging. Over the last few years, we've seen hackers demonized as anti-democratic even though so many of them see themselves as contemporary freedom fighters. And those in power used Aaron, reframing his information liberation project as a story of vicious hackers whose terroristic acts are meant to destroy democracy . . . .

"So much public effort has been put into controlling and harmonizing geek resistance, squashing the rebellion, and punishing whoever authorities can get their hands on. But most geeks operate in gray zones, making it hard for them to be pinned down and charged. It's in this context that Aaron's stunt gave federal agents enough evidence to bring him to trial to use him as an example. They used their power to silence him and publicly condemn him even before the trial even began."

The grotesque abuse of Bradley Manning. The dangerous efforts to criminalize WikiLeaks' journalism. The severe overkill that drives the effort to apprehend and punish minor protests by Anonymous teenagers while ignoring far more serious cyber-threats aimed at government critics. The Obama administration's unprecedented persecution of whistleblowers. And now the obscene abuse of power applied to Swartz.
This is not just prosecutorial abuse. It's broader than that. It's all part and parcel of the exploitation of law and the justice system to entrench those in power and shield themselves from meaningful dissent and challenge by making everyone petrified of the consequences of doing anything other than meekly submitting to the status quo. As another of Swartz's friends, Matt Stoller, wrote in an equally compelling essay:

"What killed him was corruption. Corruption isn't just people profiting from betraying the public interest. It's also people being punished for upholding the public interest. In our institutions of power, when you do the right thing and challenge abusive power, you end up destroying a job prospect, an economic opportunity, a political or social connection, or an opportunity for media. Or if you are truly dangerous and brilliantly subversive, as Aaron was, you are bankrupted and destroyed. There's a reason whistleblowers get fired. There's a reason Bradley Manning is in jail. There's a reason the only CIA official who has gone to jail for torture is the person – John Kiriakou - who told the world it was going on. There's a reason those who destroyed the financial system 'dine at the White House', as Lawrence Lessig put it.

"There's a reason former Senator Russ Feingold is a college professor whereas former Senator Chris Dodd is now a multi-millionaire. There's a reason DOJ officials do not go after bankers who illegally foreclose, and then get jobs as partners in white collar criminal defense. There's a reason no one has been held accountable for decisions leading to the financial crisis, or the war in Iraq.

"This reason is the modern ethic in American society that defines success as climbing up the ladder, consequences be damned. Corrupt self-interest, when it goes systemwide, demands that it protect rentiers from people like Aaron, that it intimidate, co-opt, humiliate, fire, destroy, and/or bankrupt those who stand for justice."

In most of what I've written and spoken about over the past several years, this is probably the overarching point: the abuse of state power, the systematic violation of civil liberties, is about creating a Climate of Fear, one that is geared toward entrenching the power and position of elites by intimidating the rest of society from meaningful challenges and dissent. There is a particular overzealousness when it comes to internet activism because the internet is one of the few weapons - perhaps the only one - that can be effectively harnessed to galvanize movements and challenge the prevailing order. That's why so much effort is devoted to destroying the ability to use it anonymously - the Surveillance State - and why there is so much effort to punishing as virtual Terrorists anyone like Swartz who uses it for political activism or dissent.

The law and prosecutorial power should not be abused to crush and destroy those who commit the "crime" of engaging in activism and dissent against the acts of elites. Nobody contests the propriety of charging Swartz with some crime for what he did. Civil disobedience is supposed to have consequences. The issue is that he was punished completely out of proportion to what he did, for ends that have nothing to do with the proper administration of justice. That has consequences far beyond his case, and simply cannot be tolerated.

Finally, there is the general disgrace of the US justice system: the wildly excessive emphasis on merciless punishment even for small transgressions. Numerous people have written extensively about the evils of America's penal state, including me in my last book and when the DOJ announced that HSBC would not be prosecuted for money laundering because, in essence, it was too big to jail.

All the statistics are well known at this point. The US imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in the world, both in absolute numbers andproportionally. Despite having only roughly 5% of the world's population, the US has close to 25% of the world's prisoners in its cages. This is the result of decades of a warped, now-bipartisan obsession with proving "law and order" bona fides by advocating for ever harsher and less forgiving prison terms even for victimless "crimes".

The "drug war" is the leading but by no means only culprit. The result of this punishment-obsessed justice approach is not only that millions of Americans are branded as felons and locked away, but that the nation's racial minorities are disproportionately harmed. As the conservative writer Michael Moynihan detailed this morning in the Daily Beast, there is growing bipartisan recognition "the American criminal justice system, in its relentlessness and inflexibility, its unduly harsh sentencing guidelines, requires serious reexamination." As he documents, prosecutors have virtually unchallengeable power at this point to convict anyone they want.

In sum, as Sen Jim Webb courageously put it when he introduced a bill aimed at fundamentally reforming America's penal state, a bill that predictably went nowhere: "America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace" and "we are locking up too many people who do not belong in jail." The tragedy of Aaron Swartz's mistreatment can and should be used as a trigger to challenge these oppressive penal policies. As Moynihan wrote: "those outraged by Swartz's suicide and looking to convert their anger into action would be best served by focusing their attention on the brutishness and stupidity of America's criminal justice system."

But none of this reform will be possible without holding accountable the prime culprits in this case: Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann [MIT officials have their own reckoning to do]. Their status as federal prosecutors does not and must not vest them with immunity; the opposite is true: the vast power that has been vested in them requires consequences when it is abused. It is up to the rest of us to ensure that this happens, not to forget the anger and injustice from this case in a week or a month or a year. A sustained public campaign is necessary to bring real accountability to Ortiz and Heymann, and only then can further urgently needed reforms flow from the tragedy of Swartz's suicide.

Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann: accountability for prosecutorial abuse | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Originally Posted by Newmexican

It seems the White has now raised the bar to 100,000 signatures

Here's why. The petitions have been turned into a total joke.

White House Petition to deport AJ McCarron filed, the reason why will blow your mind

alabamagamedayr | January 13, 2013 at 2:40 pm

For more from the Gamedayr Nation, visit GD Blog.


You’ve got to love America, land of the free home of the brave. This doesn’t so much pertain to the brave, but it does for the free.

A man by the alias of Creepy M, most likely a play on college football announcer Brent Musberger’s name and recent actions, has filed a petition to deport Alabama star QB AJ McCarron.

[Related: Spirit Airlines takes out Musberger ad, seriously]

The petition reads:

“Deport AJ McCarron so Brent Musberger can steal his girlfriend”
“A 73-year old broadcaster’s 100% healthy obsession with a college quarterback’s model girlfriend.”

As you’ll recall, Musberger let America know just how good looking Katherine Webb was during teh 2013 BCS National Championship game. ESPN followed his comments with an apology.

As of Sunday, the petition had received 26 signatures, with just 24,974 more needed to execute.

This probably won’t worry McCarron too much, but Lebron James following Webb on Twitter does.

To sign the petition click here.
h/t fansided.com

http://gamedayr.com/gamedayr/aj-mccarron-katherine-webb-white-house-petition/

White House removes Obama birther petition from website

• Barack Obama
• January 16, 2013
• By: Marv Dumon

Barack Obama's alleged Kenyan birth certificate re-surfaced in 2012 in the middle of last year's highly contentious presidential election cycle.
Credits: wasobamaborninkenya.com

Related topics

• Barack Obama
• White House
• birther
• Orly Taitz
• Barry Soetoro

Late Monday, the White House removed at least one birther-related petition seeking Barack Obama's resignation due to his alleged ineligibility to be president of the United States. The online solicitation read: "We petition Barack H. Obama (aka Soetoro aka Soebarkah) to resign due to his use of a stolen CT SSN, forged BC and SS". On Jan. 15, the White House removed a second birther petition on the site which was likely uploaded by the same party.

Late in the day on Jan. 14, the first birther petition was promptly removed by staffers from the administration-run website petitions.whitehouse.gov. Within 24 hours of its posting, the solicitation had gone viral and quickly became one of the most popular posts on the official site.



Adobe analysis: Obama fake birth certificateAdobe analysis: Obama fake birth certificate

In one day, the post generated nearly 25,000 signatures. Typically, web-based petitions on the White House website gets a few hundred to as much as 5,000 virtual signatures. The removal has been ignored by the mainstream media, including conservative network Fox News.

Dr. Orly Taitz submitted the petition alleging that Barack Obama used forged documents and fake IDs in order to run for political office.
Here's what her post stated in full:

On February 15, 2013 Supreme Court of the US will hear in conference Noonan et al v Bowen A12606 brought by Attorney Orly Taitz. This case deals brings forward undeniable evidence of Barack Obama being listed in his school records in Indonesia as an Indonesian Citizen and using his step father’s last name Soetoro.

Inis mother’s passport records, as a child he was listed under the last name Soebarkah. E-verify and SSNVS show him using in his tax returns a CT SSN 042-68-4425, which was never ssigned to him and Sheriff Arpaio, former Chief investigator for Coast Guard Coffman declare his Selective Service Certificate a forgery. Multiple experts found his alleged birth certificate a forgery with letters of different fonts and sizes. We call for Obama to resign due to his use of forged IDs.

On Feb. 15, birthers will have their case distributed for conference at the Supreme Court. Last week, Chief Justice John Roberts elevated docket no. 12A606 to conference. However, less than two percent of such cases get a full hearing by the nation's highest court.

http://www.examiner.com/article/white-house-removes-obama-birther-petition-from-website

Clearly, the politically ambitious Ortiz - who was touted just last month by the Boston Globe as a possible Democratic candidate for governor - is feeling serious heat as a result of rising fury over her office's wildly overzealous pursuit of Swartz. The same is true of Heymman, whose father was Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton administration and who has tried to forge his own reputation as a tough-guy prosecutor who takes particular aim at hackers.

This should make a person think very long and hard.

Lawmakers to Holder: ‘Inconsistencies’ in Reports of Swartz Prosecution ‘Require Serious Responses’

by
BRIDGET JOHNSON
Bio
January 10, 2014 - 3:52 pm

Conservatives and liberals are calling out the Justice Department for not being forthcoming after their requests for information about Aaron Swartz’s prosecution.

The Reddit co-founder committed suicide a year ago on Saturday while facing an aggressive prosecutorial effort by the DOJ.

After Swartz’s death, Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Al Franken (D-Minn.) and, separately, Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder asking numerous questions about the U.S. Attorney’s Office conduct in the case.

Swartz, a freedom of information advocate, was charged with breaking into the computer networks at MIT and downloading thousands of academic articles.

Just 26 years old at the time of his death, he was facing up to 50 years behind bars for allegedly violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

“We regret that the information your Department has provided to date has not been satisfactory – among other things, it painted a picture of prosecutors unwilling or unable to weigh what charges to pursue against a defendant, something which you have instructed federal prosecutors is ‘among [their] most fundamental duties,’” said the letter to Holder today signed by Cornyn, Issa, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), and Reps. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), and Jared Polis (D-Colo.).

The Justice Department’s account is “inconsistent with findings in the report prepared by MIT.” For example, the DOJ claimed that the prosecution of Swartz had nothing to do with the “exercise of his legal rights as a citizen,” while the MIT report indicates that the U.S. Attorney said “the straw that broke the camel’s back” in moving forward with the indictment of Swartz was an Internet petition gathering signatures on Swartz’s behalf.

“Inconsistencies such as these require serious responses to the original letter, and indeed raise more questions about the prosecution of Mr. Swartz. One year ago, we sought the basis for the U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz’s determination that her office’s conduct was ‘appropriate.’ We have received no such information, not even the sentencing memoranda that surely were prepared in a case such as this,” the lawmakers wrote.

“In March, you testified that Mr. Swartz’s case was ‘a good use of prosecutorial discretion.’ We respectfully disagree. We hope your response to this letter is fulsome, which would help re-build confidence about the willingness of the Department to examine itself where prosecutorial conduct is concerned.”

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/01/10...ous-responses/