No trust without oversight

When some-one decides to retake his own life than there is hardly one reason alone that contributed to this decision but in most of the cases there are different circumstances and facts together that madaue him or her see no way out. The death of Aaron Swartz is for this reason not the consequence of the prosecution alone, he was also quite sick and depressed. This is not to say that the prosecution was necessary and that they didn't treat him as if he was the biggest terrorist or criminal on earth.

FIrst we all use technology that this wizz kid of 14 helped develop : RSS, the first method of sending titels and other information automatically to other websites, databases and webservices. Just as XMS RSS became more of a wood of different dialects and interpretations instead of a good simple single solution but it liberated and exchanged more information to more people than any other 'channel' technology invented before and afterwards.

Secondly he was at the forefront of the big battle last year against the first major attempt to install secrecy and prosecution over internetuse at a global level (SOPA) a battle that was won and in large part because of his engagement and convictions.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg&sns=em

Third he wanted information and scientific information even more to be free so that more people could read them, debate them, change them and make it even better. Not the kind of nonsense that we read in wikipedia and where everybody is a specialist of something he is not and every information - even false information - is equal. No the really technical and scientific, academic information. THe closed paid walls that some investors and publishers and universities are trying to build around these publications are nefast for research and the future of innovation and debate. Most of that research has also been done with public money and should be public afterwards or was made during working hours and should be the propierty of the university. So he copied all the academic papers that were for free accessable in MIT and began distributing them on the internet. MIT - which otherwise is cool and supports all kinds of commons - decided together with the state prosecutor to give it to him big time.

"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves" Aaron Swartz RIP

And last we should not treat our cyberactivists any other than they would be in real life. But the fact that you are a cyberactivist people, press and police think you are such a powerful figure that you are so dangerous that you know a lot of things, that you are the digital superman to beat. And so they decide to go over the edge in describing what you do and in the choice of words and tactics if they want to prosecute you and they try to destroy every part of your real or digital existence and the only thing you can think off is  : let it stop.

If you ask me why I keep strictly within the law and why the message is more important than the method (that is to say that you must be sure that the method will overshadow they message which is mostly the case when you hack something) and why if there are any questions to ask the police can always ask them and I'll respond to them honestly, as always.And this is so for most of the securityguys i have known and know in Belgium.

It is for this reason that the status of cybervolunteer which exists in several countries is so important, just like responsable disclosure.

Each time such an activist takes his own life, you can only think, what a waste and if you look back on what he has already done is so few years, you can ask yourself, what should he have accomplished next if he was still alive, there are still so many battles to win and so many things to defend and develop and so many information to liberate.

but let us continue the work because some-one will have to do it

this is not Grozny, Sarajevo or the second world war this is now in Damascus (the suburbs but Damascus) where Assad has kept his last best loyal forces refusing to send them to the north that he now has nearly completely lost except for parts of some cities

the rumor is that he wants to split the country with Damascus as a capital but for that he needs to keep Damascus under control and totally under control otherwise he will be confronted with a situation like in Berlin, Belfast or Jerusalem that will soon or later cost him the rest of the power - this is why the end-battle there has been so hard and this is why it is so crucial to get those helicopters and migs out of the operations in the north (no fly zone) so that the rebels can decend to Damascus and get this over with once and for all

this is the capital

if this is not war and a war crime than what is

We’re not talking about the next Linux here, but this summer, the Treasury Board of Canada — which oversees Canada’s federal civil service — hosted a CodeFest to invite hackers — mostly government staffers — to hack its Web Experience Toolkit, or WET — a set of open-source tools that the Treasury Board uses for building websites.

One hundred and fifty people came. Many of them were young developers, excitedly swapping code and sharing ideas across tables. To Lucia Harper, a communications consultant at the event who has worked for the Canadian government, it wasn’t your federal coder snoozefest. It looked like the kind of hackathon that you’d see at private companies. There “were pods of people gathered in groups all sporting laptops; giant screens on the walls with Twitter feeds, code demonstrations, style guides and the like,” she wrote in a blog post about the event. “There was a hubbub people. There was a buzz of anticipation and solutions.”

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/wet/?utm_source=Contextly&utm_medium=RelatedLinks&utm_campaign=Interesting

yeah organising hackfests and bootcamps and opening up code from programs that can be made public without dangers for the data that they hold or control - not for the EID and the voting software without some guarantees and oversight as is done now

as natives are organizing protests also elsewhere in the world, Chile also

As Jimmy Savile died in late 2011, criminal prosecutions cannot be brought against him, nor can the testimony of his victims be challenged in the courts. Given the lack of potential justice for the victims, the report is being published in the public domain.

Approximately 600 people have come forward since the beginning of Operation Yewtree to provide information, with about 450 cases referring to Jimmy Savile.

Most of the offences were opportunistic sexual assaults, but there were other cases where grooming or planning occurred. Within the recorded crimes there are 126 indecent acts and 34 rape or penetration offences.

Peter Watt, NSPCC director of child protection advice and awareness, said:

"The sheer scale of Savile's abuse over six decades simply beggars belief. He is without doubt one of the most prolific sex offenders we have ever come across and every number represents a victim that will never get justice now he is dead. But with this report we can at least show his victims that they have been taken seriously and their suffering has been recognised.

"We also know from the huge increase in calls to the NSPCC helpline about sexual abuse that the problem did not die with Savile. Since the Savile scandal broke we have seen a surge in contacts about child abuse, both past and present, with many victims speaking out for the first time.

"Almost 800 additional children have been protected from abuse because the publicity around this case prompted people to contact our helpline.
http://www.nspcc.org.uk/news-and-views/our-news/child-pro...

http://www.nspcc.org.uk/news-and-views/our-news/child-pro... the report

science-fraud.org has been silenced by lawyers for scientists who couldn't accept an objective discusscion about their tests and results and used intimidation letters by lawyers to silence the blog who has written about mistakes and fraud in scientific research and publications and who was respected for it

at the same time the blogger was also threatened in this job

But Google still had a Google cache and we copied the pages and saved the pages to PDF

this zipfile has those that could be recuperated - some pages were already definitively gone

republish and re-distribute them

censorship is not the way to help the scientific discussion and research go forward

Those of us concerned about the decaying credibility of Big Science were dismayed to learn that the whistleblower site Science Fraud has been shut down due to a barrage of legal threats against its operator. With billions of dollars in federal science funding hinging on the integrity of academic researchers, and billions more in health care dollars riding on the truthfulness of pharmaceutical research claims, the industry needs more websites like this, not fewer.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/billfrezza/2013/01/09/a-barra...

and if Forbes says that, than it means that this site was really doing its job as it should be

it is the world upside down

is there anywhere a lawyer or organisation that can stand up against this kind of legal murdering of freedom of speech

is there a place on earth this site can be exiled to so that it stays out of the hands of these hired guns

is there somewhere a copy of the site so that just as with wikileaks it can be distributed

The notorious RedHack collective has breached the systems of Turkey’s Council of Higher Education (YÖK), leaking a total of more than 60,000 documents apparently related to corruption investigations that target universities.

The hacktivists say they’ve found cases of corruption at various educational institutions, including Istanbul University, the Uludağ University in Bursa, Marmara University, and Çukurova University.

“Some of the documents includes claims of banks buying luxurious vehicles for university rectors in exchange for them agreeing to deposit university tuition fees at the particular bank,” the hackers said about the Istanbul University in their latest press release.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Turkey-s-Council-of-Higher...

Imagine you are a girl of 16 in a small town in Ohio and you are invited by friends to have a party out at the end of the school year and you get into a car with the most famous footballplayers of the town, have a drink and remember nothing afterwards. Only to discover and remember some time later that you were raped by several guys several times at several places (brought along as a shot deer). When your parents want to complain to the local sherif he thinks there is not so much to it at the time and the woman responsable for investigating the thing doesn't want them to put in a real complaint and says that she will handle it (as her son is one of the persons that standed by and did nothing, took pictures or participated). And as the local footballcoach, the rape crew of the football team and their parents and friends seem to be very cozy and open and confident about it, who would come to your rescue ?

Anonymous did

and thanks to Anonymous the local and national and international press did

and thanks to Anonymous information was hacked (which is illegal) so it could not be destroyed (which would also be illegal but would have made the case more difficult) and information and leaks were published and put together in a story that is now in the US making headlines because they have found and published a video in which one of the rapist on video (and very drunk) talks about that night

the more you read those stories the more you think that those bastards without any consideration for these girls deserve no better than to have Anonymous deal with them (not because what we think they are but because they show in the video and the comments in social media what they really are)

and now that will be there for the rest of their lives and I hope they will have daughters later in their live who will ask them 'why daddy why  I don't want to speak to you anymore'

and girls - don't take drinks from strangers or friends you can't trust, bring and open your own bottles and if you want to be very very drunk do it with a real girlfriend that will continue to look after you however drunk you are (and next time she may be very drunk and you stay sober)

maybe not everything is true but http://localleaks.blogs.ru/ gives their account and version

so also read http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/01/steubenville-high-football-rape-crew/60554/

Multiple reports and the group's legal history point to one key factor here: The Belgian government won't charge Scientology for being a cult — authorities are focusing on prosecuting it as a criminal organization. Which is a new twist, as most of the group's many court battles over the years have focused on establishing its legitimacy as a religion. Scientology's well-funded legal team engaged in expensive cases like the one against against Time in 1991 and won its battle with the Cult Awareness Network in 1996, but the Belgian authorities have been battling Scientologists since 2007, when the country tried to label the group with cult status in a move that even received blowback from the U.S. State Department.

The Church of Scientology houses its European headquarters in Brussels, so a ban in Belgium could be crippling to the group — and authorities there seem to know it. One of the more similar recent cases against came in 2009, when the French chapter of Scientology was convicted of fraud by a Paris court and fined nearly $900,000. "But the judges did not ban the church entirely, as the prosecution had demanded, saying that a change in the law prevented such an action for fraud," reported The New York Times's Steven Erlanger. So the French chapter got saved by a legal wrinkle, but the Belgian prosecutors don't appear to be backing down.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/12/belgium-sci...

once again, the attention of the world is going to a very small complex country

I hope they have enough patience because the justice system is very slow around here.

For those following this blog, they will have known by now that Occupy was since the 60's and the altermondalist movement there hasn't been such a popular protest movement in the US that had such an influence on public opinion. It was the single biggest threat to the monopoly of the vested financial interest on the bigmedia discourse - if we believe the quotes by their PR advisors.

Than came the coordinated and persisted crackdown.

Released documents now show that this was a coordinated effort by the official FBI and police services (which is their normal intelligence business) and Terrorism fusion center (which is an unnecessary criminalisation) and .... private banks using private intelligence services and their own information about the activists ?????

"The documents show stunning range: in Denver, Colorado, that branch of the FBI and a "Bank Fraud Working Group" met in November 2011 – during the Occupy protests – to surveil the group. The Federal Reserve of Richmond, Virginia had its own private security surveilling Occupy Tampa and Tampa Veterans for Peace and passing privately-collected information on activists back to the Richmond FBI, which, in turn, categorized OWS activities under its "domestic terrorism" unit. The Anchorage, Alaska "terrorism task force" was watching Occupy Anchorage. The Jackson, Michigan "joint terrorism task force" was issuing a "counterterrorism preparedness alert" about the ill-organized grandmas and college sophomores in Occupy there. Also in Jackson, Michigan, the FBI and the "Bank Security Group" – multiple private banks – met to discuss the reaction to "National Bad Bank Sit-in Day" (the response was violent, as you may recall). The Virginia FBI sent that state's Occupy members' details to the Virginia terrorism fusion center. The Memphis FBI tracked OWS under its "joint terrorism task force" aegis, too. And so on, for over 100 pages. "
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-c...

eBay was contacted by the U.S. Secret Service sometime last month to remove the Liberty Dollar precious metal coins. Citing consistency with eBay’s general policy of not listing counterfeit items, eBay spokesperson Ryan Moore confirmed the ban with Coin World.  The following email was sent to affected sellers when the systematic removals began:

The United States Secret Service has requested the removal of all Norfed Liberty dollars on the eBay site as counterfeits. … Please do not relist this item(s). We appreciate that you chose to list this coin on our site and understand there was no ill intent on your part. Your listing fees have been credited to your account.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/12/15/u-s-sec...

in fact the Norfed Liberty Dollars were launched as a political initiative by extremist libertarians who would like to freemarket the printing and distribution of money (instead of by the state) as it was the case in the middle ages (and write books and articles about this - mostly in the sphere of conspiracy of dark forces etc....)

Bitcoins aren't an anti-usa or any (gold)standard inittiative (even if these lunatics try to hijack this like nazi's hijacked the skins and foolballfanantics some time ago). They are an international virtual currency to exchange services and goods without making some middleman very rich in doing nothing special.

There are some serious security issues by the way and with bitcoins you are as rich as your virtual dreams (you are virtually rich)

now why didn't they think about that earlier

a new foundation - the pressfreedomfoundation - in the US makes it possible to donate more or less anonymously (however that is possible in the US - especially for communications from outside the US (NSA) - is something strange for me) to wikileaks. In fact you donate to them and they donate to wikileaks.

they are in fact a financial proxy :)

Why they didn't do this before ?

probably because somebody had to take a step back for others to come forward and probably because there had to be a difference between what Assange gets (if anything) and what wikileaks gets for what

it is a good thing that such a banking blockade has now be made useless and this will be a lesson for others who think they could replicate this kind of actions against other online services or movements

but this doesn't stop the discussion about the (non)sense of wikileaks and what it should do (more)

Wikileaks started as a project against dictatorships and finished as a database against (unfinished and unperfect) democracies (but who are better than dictatorships) with a spokesperson who works for the propaganda-tv of Russia (which undermines his credibility with radical democrats like me - for which democracy is a must and is never finished untill it is there everywhere and for everyone in every aspect of economy, politics and life)

http://shop.wikileaks.org/donate

Members of the National Socialist Movement joined the Ku Klux Klan for an anti-immigration rally at Old City Hall on West Trade Street, but the counter-protesters outnumbered them at least five to one.

Instead of shouting, the protesters used squeaky toys, whistles, and noisemakers to drown out the amplified speeches.  Many dressed as clowns.  

When the speakers talked about “White Power,” the protesters sprinkled white flour.  Another held a sign reading “Wife Power.”

They said they wanted to make a point that racism is ridiculous.

“The message from us is, you look silly,” said Lacey Williams, the youth coordinator for Charlotte’s Latin American Coalition. “We're dressed like clowns and you're the ones that look funny.”
http://www.wcnc.com/news/White-supermacist-rally-drowned-...