aaron swartz – RI Future

All across America today – and in Providence at 1pm – Americans will fight back against the National Security Agency and remember Aaron Swartz, the internet activist who took his own life last year and fought alongside Rhode Island’s own David Segal to keep the NSA off of random American hard drives.

Segal, a former RI state rep who ran for Congress in 2010, and Swartz together created Demand Progress, a progressive organization that fights for net neutrality and against domestic internet spying by the US government.

Today that organization is leading some of the biggest names on the web in a national day of action to draw attention to the NSA proactively searching everyone’s computer for evidence of wrongdoing. Occupy Providence helped organize the action at Kennedy Plaza at 1pm today.

“Today the greatest threat to a free Internet, and broader free society, is the National Security Agency’s mass spying regime,” Segal said in a press release. “If Aaron were alive he’d be on the front lines, fighting back against these practices that undermine our ability to engage with each other as genuinely free human beings.”

Demand Progress is joined by the ACLU, Upworthy, the Progressive Democrats of America, Reddit, Tumblr, Mozilla, Greenpeace and Amnesty International in sponsoring this day of action. And the National Journal reports that Google, Facebook, Twitter, AOL and Microsoft also joined the cause Monday.

According to National Journal:

“organizers are promising that banners will be prominently displayed on websites across the Internet urging users to engage in viral activity expressing their opposition to the NSA. Additionally, those banners will ask readers to flood the telephone lines and email in-boxes of congressional offices to voice their support of the Freedom Act, a bill in Congress that aims to restrict the government’s surveillance authority. It remains unclear to what extent Facebook, Google, and the others will participate, or whether they will host such banners on their individual sites [Ed note: no doodle today].

And if you don’t yet understand why you should care about the mass surveillance sweeps the NSA is doing to every American, watch this video:

I don’t want anyone to miss the recent piece in the Providence Phoenix on the positive organizing that has emerged out of the tragic loss of Aaron Swartz, particularly around the push to pass “Aaron’s Law” to amend the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act:

There are several critiques of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Courts have interpreted CFAA such that a violation of a product or service’s terms of service can trigger criminal penalties. The law also allows prosecution for the sort of small-bore technical workarounds — altering how a program is used for instance — that is standard fare for hackers. And it focuses too heavily on felony penalties, critics say, with little room for misdemeanors.

The story also deals with some of the emotional issues surrounding this campaign, including insights from David Segal, who is one of the people leading the charge on this issue.

Swartz “was chiefly friends with activists,” Segal says.” He dated an activist. Even his parents have an activist instinct. So I think there was immediately a sense that we had to do something — make something positive happen in light of what had befallen all of us.”

That speaks to me a great deal. Personally, I am pretty new to the internet freedom cause (it was always easy for me to say, “It’s the internet, it’ll always be there, what’re they gonna do?”), but the more I learn about it, the more critical it seems to me. And I have learned that Rhode Island’s usually progressive-champion Congressional delegation is actually not very good on this issue, and may not support Aaron’s Law. So the next time you happen to see a member of our delegation (as you probably will at some point in the next couple months, since this is Rhode Island), it might be worth mentioning this issue.

The death of Aaron Swartz hit me like a ton of bricks. I went to high school at the same K-12 school that Aaron grew up going to, and his younger brother is one of my best friends. As terrible as this loss is, however, I continue to be inspired by the positive activism and organizing that has emerged from dark situation. Let’s make sure something good comes out of this.

Tag: aaron swartz

Today is the day to fight back against the NSA

Phoenix on Aaron’s Law