Anonymous Hacks MIT in Aaron Swartz’s Name
Source: gizmodo.co.uk
The Internet is dealing with the suicide of gifted programmer and activist Aaron Swartz in a variety of ways — but Anonymous is responding with what it does best. Two of MIT’s sites have been hacked into memorials.
Spelled out in typical red-on-black hacker script, the defacement requiem doesn’t include much of Anon’s typical bellicose Fuck Everything language. Rather, it calls for the suicide to be in itself a call for action and reform, namely:
- We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of computer crime laws, and the overzealous prosecutors who use them.
- We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of copyright and intellectual property law, returning it to the proper principles of common good to the many, rather than private gain to the few.
- We call for this tragedy to be a basis for greater recognition of the oppression and injustices heaped daily by certain persons and institutions of authority upon anyone who dares to stand up and be counted for their beliefs, and for greater solidarity and mutual aid in response.
- We call for this tragedy to be a basis for a renewed and unwavering commitment to a free and unfettered internet, spared from censorship with equality of access and franchise for all.
In case MIT has these hacked subdomains scrubbed back to the way they were soon, the entire message is presented below. It’s interesting that the hackers go out of their way to say they aren’t blaming MIT for the death of Swartz — despite the fact that many are pointing fingers at the university, which is itself conducting an investigation into the role it might have played. Anon could have not hacked MIT tonight. Anon did hack MIT.
In Memoriam, Aaron Swartz, November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013, Requiescat in pace.
A brief message from Anonymous.
Whether or not the government contributed to his suicide, the government’s prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for – freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it – enabling the collective betterment of the world through the facilitation of sharing – an ideal that we should all support.
Moreover, the situation Aaron found himself in highlights the injustice of U.S. computer crime laws, particularly their punishment regimes, and the highly-questionable justice of pre-trial bargaining. Aaron’s act was undoubtedly political activism; it had tragic consequences.
Our wishes
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of computer crime laws, and the overzealous prosecutors who use them.
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of copyright and intellectual property law, returning it to the proper principles of common good to the many, rather than private gain to the few.
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for greater recognition of the oppression and injustices heaped daily by certain persons and institutions of authority upon anyone who dares to stand up and be counted for their beliefs, and for greater solidarity and mutual aid in response.
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Read the full article at: gizmodo.co.uk
