Wikileaks Says Aaron Swartz Was a Possible Source
mashable.com
mashable.com
Aaron Swartz was good friends with Jacob Appelbaum. You'll notice that the picture you'll see of Aaron on Reddit is taken by Appelbaum. http://blog.reddit.com/2013/01/aaronsw-1986-2013.html anyway, point being they were good friends and worked together.
Now Appelbaum is associated with Wikileaks (former spokesperson etc.) and has been repeatedly harassed and bullied by customs agents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Appelbaum , Appelbaum mentions how people from his contacts list (his cell phones have been confiscated numerous times) have also been questioned. I bet Aaron was one of them.
The assistance Aaron provided is probably in forms of software or development, probably working together with Appelbaum.
Also, Twitter successfully fought the court order to seal the federal requests for Applebaum's twitter contacts. Was Aaron Swartz's name found among the named associates of Applebaum? http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20027893-281.html
One thing I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere is that it looks like aaronsw was running tor2web.org, as it has the same IP and is running in the same Linode instance as aaronsw.com and at least two of his other projects, blogspace.com and jottit.com.
Tor2web is an interestingly risky service all by itself, being the only public interface into Tor hidden services. And the Wikileaks submission system at least in 2010 was running on a Tor hidden service (http://suw74isz7wqzpmgu.onion/ at the time accessible as https://suw74isz7wqzpmgu.tor2web.org/).
While the sniffing could've happened on any exit router, tor2web.org would present an interesting extension of that capability.
> 1. Aaron Swartz assisted WikiLeaks.
Could be a donation, could be a code improvement suggestion, could be anything.
> 2. Aaron Swartz was in communication with Julian Assange, including during 2010 and 2011.
Who wasn't Aaron Swartz in communication with whom he thought was involved in something interesting/worthwhile? After all, he was a teenager when he cold emailed Lawrence Lessig arguing for Creative Commons to use RDF.
> 3. We have strong reasons to believe, but cannot prove, that Aaron Swartz was a WikiLeaks source.
Empty statement.
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So if this "announcement" by WikiLeaks is basically baseless, what is the true motive?
The aim of these tweets could be to imply that the US
Attorney's Office and Secret Service targeted Swartz in
order to get at Wikileaks, and that Swartz died still
defending his contacts' anonymity.
A suggestion that Aaron's involvement as a 'source' made him a target of the government, so his suicide was not actually a suicide but rather a targeted attack?
Mashable may be leaving the 'not suicide' conspiracy theory open but I don't think that is what Wikileaks are suggesting.
Is this true or not? I honestly have no idea.
https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/bri...
Or Wikileaks have been lying all the time.
Previous wikileaks statements make a big show of saying how sources are anonymous by system design (i.e. "It is impossible to say if Bradley Manning was a source".).
Now they are saying that they think Swartz was a source? What is it. Is their system anonymous or not. If it is anonymous then this is non-news. If it is not then Wikileaks is broken
To me it just seems like them trying to get some more advertising by tying into this story, which is frankly disgusting.
Just because the system doesn't allow them to identify sources , is not the same as saying sources are unidentifiable through any means... else the allegations against Bradley Manning would have never occurred.
Which brings me back to my "Jump on the news bandwagon" last line.
1. Under what circumstances does Wikileaks ever find it necessary to reveal a source? Or in this case, to say "maybe he was a source, maybe he wasn't, we're just putting it out there"?
2. He assisted Wikileaks...how? In a way different than being a source?
3. He communicated with Julian Assange...how? About what? about secret stuff? Complimenting each other? Trading recipes?
If this was an attempt to help Aaron's cause, it seems very misguided...Aaron really doesn't need the association with Wikileaks, especially as his supporters attempt to portray his work as benign and altruistic. If this is just a naked cry for attention, well, that's just sad. There are probably other ways of getting attention than to violate one of your most important precepts (the anonymity of your sources) with a vague tease.
That would seem especially reckless of Aaron.
Yes. Most likely. Remember Aaron was also a developer and doubt he had access clearance to have access to embarrassing classified materials. I don't see why that's not the first guess.
> 3. He communicated with Julian Assange...how? About what? about secret stuff?
Probably about secret stuff.
> Trading recipes?
So? Funny enough, I am 100% that is enough to put him on a black list of some sort in the DHS.
> Aaron really doesn't need the association with Wikileaks
Unless of course he was friends with wikileaks supporters and developers and then we got danso here telling who Aaron's friends should and should not have been.
Are you implying some kind of contrast?
But the problem with anonymity is that you never know what the leakers' motives are...and that is a tradeoff Wikileaks has to make. In Aaron's case, though, I don't think he ever obfuscated his motives (even as he tried to do the downloading in secret) in his actions.
you don't know anybody's motives, you know only what you are told the motives are (which might not be true), or you see their actions (and you interpret it they way you want to interpret it)
a) A known person who has stated what he believes in and why he does things b) An organization of unknown individuals, who has stated what it believes, acting on behalf of another unknown individual(s)
You're saying we're in the same epistemological black hole when it comes to evaluating the intentions and consequences-suffered by a) and b)? If so, then OK, that's a philosophical debate that would be really fascinating to discuss on some other day, but pretty much underscores why we won't agree on much in this thread.
On the other hand it is pretty clear that Aaron Schwarz did break the law, only the severity of the crimes is in dispute.
Not exactly a capital offense, but an offense nonetheless.
Well this is the bit that's unclear, MIT has an open network. Is changing your MAC address to stay on illegal? Another TOS violation in my opinion, either that or we're all guilty of federal offences.
Changing a MAC address by itself is not illegal. Doing so in order to gain access to a network which he is no longer authorized to access is. He was in an arms race, circumventing ever stronger countermeasures against him. He went much further than changing his MAC address, and he was obviously aware of the fact that he was no longer welcome.
Sorry, but I disagree strongly with this. I don't believe it is illegal, and I certainly don't believe it should be. This would make criminals of anyone who used a throwaway email to access a web service a second time.
Whether or not it is illegal would ultimately be for a jury to decide.
Application of law is not a an execution of a script applied by a stupid robot: It does allow for intent and the bigger picture to be factoring in.
There are many reason to claim that Aaron's actions were rather harmless, and that, taking all factors into account, they do not warrant significant punishment. But claiming that he did not do anything illegal at all requires some serious twisting of the facts.
http://unhandled.com/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron-swartz...
Instead of asking me as if my speculation meant anything, why don't you ask the many publicly available confidantes of Aaron about why they haven't yet tied Aaron's JSTOR cause to Wikileaks?
Yet you refuse to say whether you think Wikileaks' work is either benign or altruistic. Your opinion of how Wikileaks would characterise itself is of no benefit in understanding the basis of your claim.
And now, instead of answering a straightforward binary question about a claim you did make, you want me to go and ask a whole bunch of other people about claims they didn't make?
I understand less and less.
I'm not clear on what you're not clear on, but I'll be a good sport and take the bait.
I assert that the altruism of Aaron Swartz stands in contrast with that of Wikileaks because the latter, being an anonymous organization that filters anonymously-submitted information, cannot be automatically assumed to have an altruistic motive regarding the information that it disseminates. Not because they're evil. But because we just can't know.
Contrast this with Aaron and the many public statements he's made about freeing information and how it would help the world and what he gains (or rather, doesn't gain) from it. You don't have to agree that this makes him altruistic, you just have to see that there's a difference between a guy whose altruistic claims we can concretely evaluate and an organization that we just have to trust.
Here's a good example: Whatever happened to all that supposed dirt on Bank of America that Wikileaks had? Not only do we not know the source (it could be someone working for Chase Bank who used to be at BoA and has an interest in destroying his former employer), but it suddenly got wiped out by a disgruntled Wikileaks officer?..but that's something we have to take on faith, that it was a careless, irreversible act and not something done out of some other ulterior motive. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/22/us-bankofamerica-w...
As for being benign...Well, let's tally up the score. Wikileaks' most famous alleged collaborator is in a military prison and likely faces a terrible fate for the information he disseminated. The information that Aaron disseminated, meanwhile, was not as critical...to the point that JSTOR decided not to pursue charges. Aaron's problem was that the prosecutor wouldn't let go of the actual act of hacking, which is the primary cause of outrage.
So that's the issue here. Aaron and Wikileaks may have been friends and like-minded. But they had necessarily different paths.
> being an anonymous organization
It isn't. It has a very public and (quite deliberately) accountable director who has made several detailed statements about the purpose and goals of the organisation. Several of its staff are also well known but that's not the important point. Also, the statements themselves have a distinctly altruistic character and they stand, like a declaration from any group of people, independently from the personalities involved.
> but that's something we have to take on faith
As one would with an individual. What ulterior motive? I'm willing to accept that the organisation's actions have at times been questionable in terms of effect. But to say that its aims are not altruistic is a different kind of claim altogether.
> As for being benign ... Wikileaks' most famous alleged collaborator is in a military prison
I see; you're working with a definition of 'benign' as 'harmless' rather than 'doing good' or 'doing more good than harm'. So the test is whether anyone was harmed as an outcome of the work done. If you can't see the harm in Swartz's case I don't know what to say, especially when you mention Manning as a victim of leaking.
If we go by the second definition, 'doing more good than harm', which I think most would accept as being more reasonable, then I think the US government's statements about the harmlessness of Manning's leak[1] coupled with outcomes such as the Arab Spring shows (and this is a fairly low bar) that there is no stark contrast to be drawn.
> But they had necessarily different paths.
Whether Swartz was involved in Wikileaks work isn't really in question here. The question is whether there's a moral distinction between the different entities' goals and actions ('altruistic' and 'benign' being unavoidably value-laden terms).
I find it impossible to agree with you about that but I appreciate you taking the time to make the case.
[1] http://www.theweek.co.uk/us/wikileaks/43110/white-house-said...
So my perception here is that the emotional weight of Aaron's case is based on how the prosecutors played hardball for what amounted to a petty crime. This is why I'm having a hard time understanding Wikileaks' motive here: do they not think the "official" story is compelling enough? It seems that claiming that Aaron had an unspecified relationship with Wikileaks only muddies up the water...people seem plenty pissed that he got the book thrown at him for "hacking", and the spotlight on the DoJ does not seem to be lessening.
2. There are also many competing opinions on which reforms would be appropriate or sufficient in the wake of what was done to Aaron Swartz.
3. It's not surprising, nor is it inappropriate, that Wikileaks would be advocating for more sweeping reforms and adjustments in how we look at the application of judicial force in these situations.
Remember that it is a core contention of Wikileaks that the channeling of power within and across organisations and the loci of that power and decision-making are at the moment dangerously obscure to the public. Of course they would be looking for signs of that in this case.
To the extent that there is evidence for ulterior agendas, it's important. Lack of evidence makes it, as you say, murky -- people see what they want to see. But it's also true that you can't find what you're not looking for.
To put it another way: There are conspiracy theories but there are also conspiracies, and systemic mal-alignments of purpose. Formulating conspiracy theories without evidence is the opposite of helpful. But identifying unforeseen patterns of collaboration can help us reason defensively about situations we, as a public, will never have adequate information of.
Did you want to see the commits and email logs?
I think the point they're making is that if Wikileaks were aware of these (possible) facts then other actors could be too.
And before you say, "Well, the New York Times deserved it"...that's not what the argument is about. The argument is: will Wikileaks publish a lie if it believes that the ends justify the means? The answer is "yes". So until they show actual evidence in this case, I don't think they should be given the benefit of the doubt just because they're Wikileaks. I'm curious to what more harm could be done to Aaron besides, well, him already being dead, and also, the innuendo generated by Wikileaks' teaser tweets.
The whole thing reminds me of the Sacco & Vinzetti case. They got railroaded on a bullshit charge, but they couldn't fight it because they (probably) had other stuff to hide...
And the head of wikileaks is known to refuse electronic communication from those who identify themselves in chats, etc to assist the ethos of keeping things anonymous.