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We live in the future.

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Arm-chair activism

In the past, Political protest was done with picket signs and chants in front of a capitol building somewhere. Today, it’s happening more and more in a digital format. In 2010, the internet poured on opposition for the Stop Online Piracy, and PROTECT IP act’s. I wrote about it in another blog entry here while it was still a hot topic. The protest went so far as for many sites, including high profile sites like Wikipedia, to black-out their front page during a day of protest. This protest got noticed, and got the job done. SOPA and PROTECT IP died. More legislation has come along with similar dire consequences, and has met similar opposition. None seemed so vocal though.

The idea of threatening someone, or an entity comprised of many someone’s, with information which would tarnish their reputation, or force them to face consequences. Otherwise known as Blackmail, has also, unfortunately, evolved. The concept of stealing someones information has moved away from ski-masks and crow-bars, to data breaches and high-tech compromises.

These developments are all leading us into a new era, of cyber-warfare. Where not only are we letting machines and CPU’s carry out our battles, but we’re not leaving our parents’ basements while we do it. Hacktivist groups are becoming a real threat, for good or ill. So how do we respond to this? Well.. It would seem that the US DOJ responds by making examples out of those tried for cyber crimes. Which has lead up to some interesting events in the past few weeks, and prompted me to write this article.

The death of brilliance

One such case of disproportionate punishment, the case of Aaron Swartz. If you’d like to know more about Aaron, and who he was, you should try google. I couldn’t begin to accurately describe him. I’ll say that many called him brilliant. He help found Demand Progress, and Reddit. He wrote the spec for RSS when he was 14. Sounds like a pretty bright guy to me. Unfortunately, he was caught attempting to harvest all of JSTOR‘s articles. He and JSTOR apparently came to acceptable terms, and they were going to let him off the hook. Again, I don’t have all the details here, I’m more or less regurgitating what other media outlets have told me. The point is, that the matter was settled, and no jail sentence was being pushed.

Enter the US Department of Justice. They apparently weren’t satisfied with Aaron’s punishment, and pushed for (numbers have varied here from reports I’ve heard) up to 35 years in prison, and up to $1,000,000 in fines. Sound’s like a fair punishment, right? Aaron’s lawyer was attempting to work out a Plea deal, where he’d have up to 7 years in prison, but the DOJ wasn’t biting. On 1/11/2013 Aaron took his own life. You can speculate on why, or what contributed. It seems safe to assume that the impending sentence didn’t help matters.

An Anonymous ultimatum

On 1/25/2013, the Hacktivist group Anonymous decided it was time to put an end to injustice. Or, at least as it pertains to the unfair treatment of cyber-criminals. In the late hours of Friday 1/25, Anonymous attacked the US Sentencing Commission’s web site, www.ussc.gov, and placed on their site an embedded YouTube video giving the US DOJ an ultimatum. Fair sentencing for cyber criminals, or “Chaos”. The group claims that through their on-going infiltration of the US Government, they have obtained a lot of dirt on a lot of US Justices. They have encrypted a collection of this data, and broken it into chunks, and distributed the data across the globe, to anyone interested in downloading it. Anonymous holds the key, and threatens to release it if the DOJ doesn’t change its ways.

Did that just happen?

This all sounds like the plot of a Movie. Something thought-up in Hollywood and acted out with unrealistic computer simulations, and kids on roller-blades. Well it’s real, it’s happened, and we’re all just waiting to see how it pans out. The point here is that this is an indication that the days of activists living anonymously on the internet are upon us. The ability to affect change without having to actually leave your house are here. Let’s hope the world’s population is ready for it.


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