Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) said Tuesday that most opponents to his controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) are teenagers in their basements as the Obama administration threatened to veto the measure for its potential to violate civil liberties.

"People on the Internet -- if you're, you know, a 14-year-old tweeter in your basement … I took my nephew, I had to work with him a lot on this bill because he didn't understand the mechanics of it," Rogers continued. "I hear that a lot. Once you understand the threat and you understand the mechanics of how it works and you understand that people are not monitoring your content of your emails, most people go, 'got it.'"

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, reflected concerns shared by the White House and many civil liberties groups, arguing that the bill did not do enough to ensure that companies, in sharing cyber threat data with the government and each other, strip out any personal data of private citizens.

"They can just ship the whole kit and caboodle and we're saying minimize what is relevant to our national security," the Democrat said. "The rest is none of the government's business."

Rogers stressed that his bill doesn’t extend any extra surveillance powers to the federal government, despite condemnation from critics that say exactly that. “It does something very simple: it allows the government to share zeroes and ones with the private sector,” he said. Rather, he called it "a critical bipartisan first step for enabling American’s private sector to defend itself" and "improves cybersecurity without compromising our civil liberties."

“We have yet to find a single United States company that opposes this bill,” said Rep. Rogers.

But companies do in fact oppose CISPA. Facebook rescinded their support of the act, according to Cnet’s Declan McCullagh, because a spokesperson for the social media site says they prefer a legislative "balance" that ensures "the privacy of our users.” Facebook made the decision to rescind their support for the legislation after facing pressure from Demand Progress, the Internet freedom advocacy group founded by Aaron Swartz.

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On Friday, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) posthumously awarded internet activist Aaron Swartz the American Library Association’s (ALA) 2013 James Madison Award during the 15th Annual Freedom of Information Day in Washington, D.C. According to the American Library Association, “Swartz will receive the award for his dedication to promoting and protecting public access to research and government information.

“Aaron loved libraries. I remember how excited he was to get library privileges at Harvard and be able to use the Widener library there. I know he would have been humbled and honored to receive this award. We thank you,” said Robert Swartz, Aaron’s father in reaction to the award. “Aaron's goal was to make knowledge freely available to everyone and we can all further his legacy by making this happen.”

Before his suicide in January, Swartz was a co-founder of Demand Progress, an advocacy group that organizes people to take action on civil liberties and government reform issues. Swartz was also a leader in the national campaign to prevent the passing of the Stop Online Piracy Act, a bill that would have diminished critical online legal protections.

Swartz was revered as a gifted computer programmer long before he became a public activist. He helped to develop the web feed format RSS, the website framework web.py and the social news website Reddit. As a teenager, Swartz designed the code layer for the Creative Commons licenses.

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DemocracyNow! broadcast live Monday from the Freedom to Connect conference, a national gathering to promote Internet freedom and universal connectivity. It comes as the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act has been reintroduced in the House, calling for a "cybersecurity" exception to existing privacy law that would give immunity to companies that hand over troves of confidential customer records and communications to the National Security Agency, FBI and Department of Homeland Security.

Last year at this same conference, Aaron Swartz, the late cyberactivist, computer programmer, social justice activist and writer who committed suicide earlier this year, gave the keynote address, in which he described the battle to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA.

Swartz took his own life at the age of 26 just weeks before he was to go on trial for using computers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to download millions of copyrighted academic articles from JSTOR, a subscription database of scholarly papers. JSTOR declined to press charges, but prosecutors moved the case forward. Aaron Swartz faced up to 35 years in prison and a million dollars in fines for allegedly violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. After Aaron’s death, federal prosecutors dropped the charges against him.

Well, this year’s conference, which is "dedicated to the work Aaron still had left to do." DemocracyNow! is joined by Darcy Burner, delivering the "After Aaron" address this morning. She worked with him on several projects, including ProgressiveCongress.org, which she formerly directed, as well as the Progressive Congress Action Fund. She’s also one of the biggest tech geeks to run for Congress, having run for office three times from Washington state. She formerly worked for Microsoft.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re giving, Darcy, the "After Aaron" address today. What does that mean? And what are you saying?

DARCY BURNER: Well, you know, Aaron was a friend of mine. And I—

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Since their first issue in December 2011, Tidal has made it their practice to give name to our struggle, wrestling with the big ideas that propel us into the streets, with what we should do when we get there, and with where there in fact is.

This Friday, the folks at Occupy Theory will release their fourth issue of the magazine, featuring original pieces by organizers of Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Sandy, Strike Debt and Free University. Join them that night for conversation as we move together towards the empowerment that greater clarity and the free exchange of ideas can bring.

-- from the ‘Your Inbox: Occupied’ team

Occupy in the News

Jenna Pope documented last Sunday’s Forward on Climate Rally. Beautiful sights--the vistas of activists in D.C. to make their voices heard about climate change--beautifully captured.

Kevin Gosztola writes at FireDogLake’s The Dissenter blog about the recent history of climate change actions and points out just how high the stakes are. Our only hope to defeat the monstrosity of the Keystone XL Pipeline is continued, passionate action, that is to say, “...if everyone demonstrating channeled the spirit of the Occupy movement...”

Les Leopold of the Huffington Post explains why “the raison d’etre for Occupy Wall Street is proving correct. Much of high finance is based on a ‘corrupt business plan.’” Proof of Wall Street’s corruption continues to mount, with ratings agencies on the take, money laundered for drug cartels, and rampant insider trading, among many other ethical and moral malignancies.

On occupywallstreet.net Heather Marsh argues for a society with no financial system at all, a currency-free system in which the endless cycle of excessive consumption and meaningless busywork is ended. The proof that this could work already exists. “With no financial incentives,” Marsh says, “the internet has managed to create collaborative efforts which have pushed the potential of society far beyond what could have been possible before the internet.”

On the OWS Direct Action Blog, Mark Adams gives us the push we need to meet, to talk, to plan for spring.

Revisit Liberty Plaza in full swing in Why We Occupy, an open-source book of interviews gathered in the park in 2011. See the park grow and change in real-time through the heartfelt words of the participants.

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Hacktivists claiming to be from the group Anonymous threatened early Saturday to release sensitive information about the U.S. Department of Justice as a response to the prosecution and death of Aaron Swartz.

They claimed to have one such file on multiple servers ready for immediate release.

The hacktivist collective had previously knocked the DOJ and MIT's websites offline as a form of "tribute" to Aaron.

The website of the U.S. government agency responsible for federal sentencing guidelines was hijacked, and a message demanding the United States reform its justice system or face incriminating leaks to select news outlets:

Two weeks ago today, a line was crossed. Two weeks ago today, Aaron Swartz was killed. Killed because he faced an impossible choice. Killed because he was forced into playing a game he could not win — a twisted and distorted perversion of justice — a game where the only winning move was not to play.

Anonymous immediately convened an emergency council to discuss our response to this tragedy. After much heavy-hearted discussion, the decision was upheld to engage the United States Department of Justice and its associated executive branches in a game of a similar nature, a game in which the only winning move is not to play.

The "game" mentioned in the video involves releasing a file ("warhead") containing sensitive information about the Justice Department. Anonymous isn't saying just what the information is:

The contents are various and we won't ruin the speculation by revealing them. Suffice it to say, everyone has secrets, and some things are not meant to be public. At a regular interval commencing today, we will choose one media outlet and supply them with heavily redacted partial contents of the file. Any media outlets wishing to be eligible for this program must include within their reporting a means of secure communications.

The hacked site also contained links to "warheads" each named after one of the Supreme Court justices, and each linked to a website containing a "503 service unavailable" error message.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission took its website down for several hours before restoring it later Saturday, although it still didn't seem to be quite fully functional at last check.

A full transcript of Anonymous' message after the jump.

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Some new information on the prosecution of Aaron Swartz...

CNET News:

State prosecutors who investigated the late Aaron Swartz had planned to let him off with a stern warning, but federal prosecutor Carmen Ortiz took over and chose to make an example of the Internet activist, according to a report in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.

Middlesex County's district attorney had planned no jail time, "with Swartz duly admonished and then returned to civil society to continue his pioneering electronic work in a less legally questionable manner," the report (alternate link) said. "Tragedy intervened when Ortiz's office took over the case to send 'a message.'"
...
The Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly report was written by Harvey Silverglate, a prominent Cambridge criminal defense lawyer whose clients have included Michael Milken and Leona Helmsley. Silverglate, the author of Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, is of counsel to the firm that initially represented Swartz in his attempts to defend himself against 13 felony charges brought by Ortiz's office. Those charges carried a maximum penalty of 50 years in prison.

Silverglate told CNET today that:

"Continuance without a finding" was the anticipated disposition of the case were the charge to remain in state court, with the Middlesex County District Attorney to prosecute it. Under such a disposition, the charge is held in abeyance ("continued") without any verdict ("without a finding"). The defendant is on probation for a period of a few months up to maybe a couple of years at the most; if the defendant does not get into further legal trouble, the charge is dismissed, and the defendant has no criminal record. This is what the lawyers expected to happen when Swartz was arrested for "trespassing at MIT." But then the feds took over the case, and the rest is tragic history.

Be sure to also read the mention of the efforts by Ortiz to seize a family-owned motel, that failed -- thankfully -- and the stinging rebuke she received from the judge in the case. The case screams "Abuse of power!"

Up with Chris Hayes talked about the ongoing legacy of Aaron Swartz on Saturday:

Democracy Now! has generously provided a special livestream as family and friends of Aaron Swartz gather at Cooper Union’s Great Hall in New York City to celebrate his life and remember their beloved friend, sibling, child, and partner.

Speakers include Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, David Segal, Ben Wikler, Roy Singham, Doc Searls, Edward Tufte, David Isenberg, Holden Karnofsky and Tom Chiarella and other friends. OK Go’s Damian Kush will be performing at the service.

The service ended at 6:00 pm ET, but you can still watch it all via this livestream video.

By Christie Thompson, ProPublica, Jan. 18, 2013

When Reddit co-founder and internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide last Friday, he was facing up to 13 felony counts, 50 years in prison, and millions of dollars in fines. His alleged crime? Pulling millions of academic articles from the digital archive JSTOR.

Prosecutors allege that Swartz downloaded the articles because he intended to distribute them for free online, though Swartz was arrested before any articles were made public. He had often spoken publicly about the importance of making academic research freely available.

Other online activists have increasingly turned to computer networks and other technology as a means of political protest, deploying a range of tactics — from temporarily shutting down servers to disclosing personal and corporate information.

Most of these acts, including Swartz's downloads, are criminalized under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), an act was designed to prosecute hackers. But as Swartz's and other "hacktivist" cases demonstrate, you don't necessarily have to be a hacker to be viewed as one under federal law. Are activists like Swartz committing civil disobedience, or online crimes? We break down a few strategies of "hacktivism" to see what is considered criminal under the CFAA.

Publishing Documents

Accessing and downloading documents from private servers or behind paywalls with the intent of making them publicly available.

Swartz gained access to JSTOR through MIT's network and downloaded millions of files, in violation of JSTOR's terms of service (though JSTOR declined to prosecute the case). Swartz had not released any of the downloaded files at the time his legal troubles began. 

The most famous case of publishing private documents online may be the ongoing trial of Bradley Manning. While working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq, Manning passed thousands of classified intelligence reports and diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, to be posted on their website.

"I want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public," Manning wrote in an online chat with ex-hacker Adrian Lamo, who eventually turned Manning in to the Department of Defense.

Both Swartz and Manning were charged under a section of the CFAA that covers anyone who "knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer…"

The charges hinge on an interpretation of this section that says anyone in violation of a website's terms of service is an unauthorized user. Because they're unauthorized, all of their activity on that website could therefore be considered illegal. Both were charged with felonies under the CFAA, on top of other allegations.

The Ninth and Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled that such an interpretation of the CFAA casts too wide a net. With the circuit courts divided over whether a broad definition of "unauthorized" is constitutional, it may fall on the Supreme Court to ultimately decide.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Heymann of Massachusetts was the lead prosecutor in Swartz's case. (He was known for winning a 2010 case that landed hacker Albert Gonzalez 20 years in prison.) Heymann offered Swartz a plea bargain of six months in prison but Swartz's defense team rejected the deal, saying a felony and any time behind bars was too harsh a sentence. Swartz's family blamed his death in part on "intimidation and prosecutorial overreach."

As a result of Swartz's suicide, some lawmakers are now calling for a review of the CFAA. On Tuesday, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) proposed a piece of legislation called "Aaron's Law," which would amend the law to explicitly state that merely violating a site's terms of service cannot fall under the federal CFAA.

Distributed Denial of Service

A Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS attack, floods a web site's server with traffic from a network of sometimes thousands of individual computers, making it incapable of serving legitimate traffic.

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Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) introduced “Aaron’s Law” on Tuesday night, announcing it via the user-generated site Reddit. The piece of legislation would modify the the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to exclude terms of service violations. “There’s no way to reverse the tragedy of Aaron’s death, but we can work to prevent a repeat of the abuses of power he experienced,” Lofgren wrote. “The government was able to bring such disproportionate charges against Aaron because of the broad scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and the wire fraud statute.” Read the full bill here.

Meanwhile, The Hill reports that federal prosecutors came under fire yesterday by lawmakers for their "ridiculous and trumped-up" charges against Aaron Swartz:

“The charges were ridiculous and trumped-up,” Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) told The Hill. “It's absurd that he was made a scapegoat. I would hope that this doesn't happen to anyone else.”

Polis called Swartz — a co-creator of Reddit who was accused of stealing articles from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — a "martyr" for why Congress should limit the discretion of prosecutors.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said the government's handling of the case was “pretty outrageous.”

“Based on what I know, I think the Department of Justice was way out of line on the case,” she told The Hill.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has said that his Oversight panel will take a look at the case to determine if the federal prosecutors acted inappropriately:

Issa expressed sympathy with some of Swartz’s goals. While “cybercrime and hacking has to be taken seriously,” he said, Congress should take up Swartz's cause of making more information freely available to the public.

“We're looking at the real question of open government,” Issa said. “Has the government or even MIT been holding back materials that the public has a right to know?”

Issa said he wanted to make sure “that what is paid for is as widely available as possible to the American people.”

Many materials on JSTOR are funded by public universities or government research grants. Subscriptions to JSTOR cost thousands of dollars.

He also said “whether or not there was excessive prosecution is something we’ll look at.”

All three lawmakers -- Issa, Polis, and Lofgren -- serve on the House Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Justice Department. They also worked with Swartz and his group "Demand Progress" in 2012 to defeat online piracy legislation that was backed by the entertainment industry.

The Department of Justice announced on Monday that they had dropped the charges against Reddit cofounder Aaron Swartz after he died from an apparent suicide on Friday. Swartz, 26, had been accused of breaking into a computer at MIT and downloading 4.8 million documents from JSTOR, an academic-articles subscription service. He faced up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. His trial was set to start in April.