The story goes viral. Only, the intensity of the virals decreases.
http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/290252/scitech/technology/anonymous-hits-mit-web-pages-in-tribute-to-aaron-swartz[*quote*]
Hacktivists broke into the website of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to post a "tribute" to Internet activist Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide last week at age 26.
The hacktivist group Anonymous took over cogen.mit.edu and rledev.mit.edu to display a message calling for reforms to computer crime and intellectual property laws, tech site The Next Web reported Monday (Manila time).
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This is the message, taken from a screenshot:
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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.
* 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.
For in the end we will not be judged according to what we give but according to what we keep to ourselves.
Aaron, we will sorely miss your friendship, and your help in building a better world. May you read in peace.
[*/quote*]The situation has escalated. Does it now take dead to get onward? How many dead will it take next time? Dead can not be and must not be a motor of political development.
If only death leads to changes, death will rule. If politicians want this escalation, it might well be them who will pay. Do they really know what they are doing? They willingly and with all their powers set OTHER people's lives at risk. But would they with the same abusiveness risk their own lives? There is a new civil war, THIS is a new civil war. We are right in it. The Internet is a machine of war. It might fire back at the political powers that created it. Who will win the war over The Net? Are we facing a new age of despotism, worse than Ivan the Terrible, Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, and commercial TV combined?
You can not kill a dead man. But his death can kill you.
