[FORUM] What do you think of the case of Aaron Swartz?

The events leading to the death of computer programmer an activist Aaron Swartz were succinctly described in an obituary in The Economist.

Small, dark, cluttered places were important in the life of Aaron Swartz. His days were spent hunched in his bedroom over his MacBook Pro, his short-sighted eyes nearly grazing the screen (why, he asked himself, weren’t laptop screens at eye level?), in a litter of snaking cables and hard drives. In the heady days of 2005 when he was developing Reddit, now the web’s most popular bulletin board, he and his three co-founders shared a house in Somerville, Massachusetts, where he slept in a cupboard. And it was in a cupboard—an unlocked wiring cupboard, where a homeless man kept stuff—that in November 2010 he surreptitiously placed a laptop, hidden under a box, and plugged it directly into the computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His aim was to download as many pages as possible from an archive of academic journals called JSTOR, which was available by paid subscription only to libraries and institutions. That was morally wrong, he thought; the knowledge contained in it (often obtained with public funding, after all) had to be made available, free, to everyone. And it was absurdly simple to do that. He already had access to the library network; no need to hack into the system. He just ran a script, called keepgrabbing.py, which liberated 4.8m articles at almost dangerous speed. MIT tried to block him, but time after time he outwitted them; and then, as a last resort, he plugged in the laptop in the cupboard.

[. . .]

The JSTOR business, however, got him into deep trouble. When he went back to the cupboard for his laptop, police arrested him. He was charged on 13 counts, including wire fraud and theft of information, and was to go on trial in the spring, facing up to 35 years of jail. The charges, brought by a federal prosecutor, were hugely disproportionate to what he had done; MIT and JSTOR had both settled with him, and JSTOR, as if chastened by him, had even opened some of its public-domain archive. But theft was theft, said the prosecution.

There has been quite a lot of anger directed at the people and agencies charged with responsibility for Swartz's suicide: JSTOR a bit, MIT more, the federal prosecutors most of all. Essays condemning Swartz' prosecution as unfounded in law and representing a fundamental wrong with the American justice system. Essays like the ones written by Wired's Ryan Single in his "Aaron Swartz and the Two Faces of Power" or The Atlantic's Clive Crook in "The Death of Aaron Swartz" are typical.

I don't agree with them. Orin Kerr's two-part analysis of the case (1, 2) at the Volokh Conspiracy seems fair-minded. According to American law, Swartz does seem to have acted knowingly to commit a criminal act, and it doesn't seem as if the prosecutors came down especially hard on him. One case could be made that the computer laws should be changed, another that American prosecutorial practices should be less hard-core, but Swartz wasn't singled out for victimization. Swartz's actions in undermining the potential economic viability of JSTOR's model, resting on its expertise in digitizing and organizing very large amounts of data, also strike me as short-sighted and not the sort of thing that would help information be free. (If information can be free.)

What say you?

[PHOTO] Looking east at downtown Toronto from Bathurst Street

Looking east from Bathurst Street, the skyline of downtown Toronto rises dramatically from the depths of the railway tracks below the Sir Isaac Brock Bridge.

The first two photos come from April of 2012, the third from May of that year.

[URBAN NOTE] On the resignation of Toronto budget chief Mike Del Grande

Reflecting on the surprise resignation of Toronto city councillor Mike Del Grande from the position of municipal budget chief, Metro Toronto's Matt Elliott thinks Del Grande deserved better.

After watching his second consecutive city budget get rewritten on the fly by his colleagues on council last week, Coun. Mike Del Grande stepped down from his post as budget chief. He quit suddenly, prompting a messy round of finger pointing and blame.

Even worse, his resignation came only a day after the budget chief had to sit in council chamber and watch as Mayor Rob Ford — his boss — voted to blow up the budget Del Grande had spent thousands of hours pulling together over the last year. Ford surprised everyone when he supported a wildcard motion by Coun. Giorgio Mammoliti to freeze property taxes for 2013, based on an assumption that the city could replace that lost revenue with a floating casino.

Thankfully, in his bid to support Mammoliti’s casino boat, the mayor lost. The next day, he lost his budget chief, too.

[. . . Del Grande] was also loyal, sometimes to a fault. Translating the vague and often contradictory ideas coming out of Ford’s office onto his budget ledger had to be a frustrating task, but Del Grande did his best to make it work. And he stood by as a reliable vote even as the mayor exploded the goodwill and command of council he was elected with. Through it all, Del Grande was there to support the guy who hired him.

It’s just too bad the reverse wasn’t true.

NOW Toronto's Enzo Di Matteo and the National Post's Toronto panel go into more detail. The initial observation of Matt Gurney of the National Post deserves sharing.

You know, when Mike Del Grande first announced that he was stepping down, I was a bit taken aback by how ferocious his critique of the mayor was. You guys probably recall that I sent you an email that entirely consisted of exclamation marks after he commented that Ford “does not have the capacity” to grasp what it was he (Ford) was voting for. Wow! From a genuine fiscal conservative — no one out there is going to question Del Grande’s true-blue beliefs — that had to be a stinging rebuke for the Mayor. It was all the more remarkable because Del Grande wasn’t just attacking the mayor’s politics, but, frankly, his fitness for the job. If the mayor doesn’t understand what he’s doing (in Del Grande’s view), well, that’s saying something, isn’t it? Del Grande’s post-resignation antics got a little bit bizarre, especially with him saying how hurt his feelings were shortly before saying he’d take the job back, but only if he was asked by a unanimous council vote. That reminded me of a kid having a tantrum about not being invited to a birthday party. But setting aside his antics, how does the Ford administration deal with this?

[URBAN NOTE] "Mayor Rob Ford says he knows what Toronto wants: a casino"

The Toronto Star's Oakland Ross reports.

Toronto residents still have five days to speak out on the controversial prospect of casino development in their city, but Mayor Rob Ford says he already knows what most people think.

“I have a pretty good feeling of what they want out there,” Ford said during his weekly two-hour radio program on Sunday. “How can people say no to this?”

An outspoken proponent of casinos, the mayor devoted much of his radio show to extolling the benefits — in jobs and revenue — that he says would flow from the construction of a major casino somewhere downtown, along with an expansion of the gambling attractions already available at Woodbine Racetrack.

His brother Doug — radio co-host and city councilor for Ward 2, which contains Woodbine — is also an enthusiastic advocate for casino development and joined the mayor on air in promoting the expansion of gambling facilities in Toronto.

“This is all about creating jobs, folks,” he said.

[. . .]

During their radio program Sunday, the Ford brothers said the two gambling proposals, taken together, would create 10,000 jobs and raise as much as $200-million in additional revenues annually.

They denied the project would attract crime to the city.

[LINK] "Algerian PM describes how militants, including two Canadians, planned gas plant attack"

This Canadian Press report carried by the Vancouver Sun may have significant ramifications. I'll be looking for followups.

The Islamist militants who attacked a natural gas plant in the Sahara included two Canadians and a team of explosives experts who had memorized the layout of the sprawling complex and were ready to blow the place sky-high, Algeria's prime minister said Monday.

Militants in the highly-organized operation also wore Algerian army uniforms and appeared to have help from the inside - a man from Niger who had once worked as driver at the plant, he said.

Algeria detailed a grim toll from the attack, saying that 38 hostages and 29 militants died in four days of mayhem. Three of the attackers were captured and five foreign workers remained unaccounted for, Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal told reporters at a news conference in Algiers, the capital.


[. . .]

The militants had said during the standoff that their group included Canadians, and hostages who had escaped recalled hearing at least one of the militants speaking English with a North American accent.

[. . .]

Officials in Canada could not immediately confirm whether two of the attackers were citizens.

"Canada condemns in the strongest possible terms this deplorable and cowardly act and all terrorist groups which seek to create and perpetuate insecurity,'' said Chrystiane Roy, a spokeswoman for the Department of Foreign Affairs.

"We are pursuing all appropriate channels to seek further information and are in close contact with Algerian authorities,'' she said in a statement.

[LINK] "Dissident soldiers storm government building in Eritrea in hasty power grab: reports"

My first reaction to the Associated Press report that a coup attempt in Eritrea by soldiers hoping to restore constitutional governance in Eritrea is sadness. Eritrea deserves so much better from its leadership than it got.

More than 100 dissident soldiers stormed the Ministry of Information in the small East African nation of Eritrea on Monday and read a statement on state TV saying the country’s 1997 constitution would be put into force, two Eritrea experts said.

The soldiers held all of the ministry workers — including the daughter of the president — in a single room, said Leonard Vincent, author of the book “The Eritreans” and co-founder of a Paris-based Eritrean radio station.

The soldiers’ broadcast on state TV said the country’s 1997 constitution would be reinstated and all political prisoners freed, but the broadcast was cut off after only two sentences were read and the signal has been off air the rest of the day, Vincent said.

By late afternoon there were indications the soldiers’ attempt would fail. A military tank sat in front of the Ministry of Information but the streets of the capital, Asmara, were quiet, and no shots had been fired, said a Western diplomat in Eritrea who wasn’t authorized to be identified by name.

Vincent stopped short of calling it a coup d’etat and said it wasn’t immediately clear if the action was a well-organized coup attempt or what he called a “kamikaze crash.”

Later Monday government soldiers surrounded the ministry, an indication the action by the dissident soldiers had failed, said Martin Plaut, a fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in Britain.

“It looks like it’s an isolated attempt by some soldiers who are completely frustrated by what is going on. But it wasn’t done in a co-ordinated manner,” Plaut said.

“They did seize the television station, they did manage to put this broadcast out, but the government is still functioning calmly. There is nothing on the streets.”