Aaron Swartz passed away a year ago tomorrow. We are Cory Doctorow, Brian Knappenberger, Peter Eckersley (EFF), and David Segal (Demand Progress) here to talk about Aaron and a protest we're organizing on 02/11 in his honor. Ask us anything.

For Cory:

If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't have ever gotten interested in privacy issues or social responsibilities. Little Brother literally changed my life so thank you for that.

My question is this: What aspect of your fight against online censorship are you most proud of?

I'm humbled and honored. Thank you.

I think the UN work is some of the best we've done, only because the odds were stacked so high against us at WIPO, and we totally shredded there.

Do you think we will realistically be able to get the NSA to stop surveillance on such a massive scale?

Absolutely. To believe anything less is to give up on the rule of law and democracy itself.

How can we mobilize to respond to the changes brought about by WC3? Can we work around these proposed changes to keep the internet's architecture as it stands now?

This one is giving me fits. I don't know yet what to do about this. I'm literally losing sleep over it.

http://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/72759474218/we-are-huxleying-ourselves-into-the-full-orwell

I'm a little uneducated on all of this, but I just read your post here and I'm confused about something... should we not be supporting Netflix? Or doesn't it matter?

The problem is that the MPAA is dictating terms to Netflix, and Netflix is turning around putting DRM hooks into open Web standards so that it can impose the MPAA's restrictions on its users.

So no, while Netflix is doing the MPAA's bidding, we should not be helping them to do that.

How do we decouple money from political influence? If we are honest about it, that is the root cause of a lot of our pain in the US right now. The 'haves' fighting to keep what they've got while the 'have-nots' are losing hope of achieving the American Dream.

I think that this is the key. It's why Larry Lessig is walking across New Hampshire (http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/65527936195/help-us-organize-a-new-hampshire-march-in-january). I understand Larry's point and wish him the best and hold out hope for what he's working on, but I can't say that I like his odds.

But good odds or no, it's the best effort I know of and that's why I support it.

Aaron wrote a scene for me in Homeland where he proposes a post-Citizens-United means of making congresscritters beholden to voters, not money -- you can search in the text for

"Ambitious is good. I like ambitious."

to read the scene (http://craphound.com/homeland/Cory_Doctorow_-_Homeland.html)

And worth noting that Larry credits Aaron for attuning him to these core structural issues. That's why he's substantially reoriented his work away from copyright reform and towards money in politics -- money is the reason it's next to impossible to get anything that's good for the world to obtain through the political structures in this country.

It's clear that campaign finance is a thing that some societies do very differently to the US. Visit Germany during an election campaign and you'll see a completely different system in operation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_finance_in_Germany).

Moving the US to Germany's comparative level of transparency and democratic responsiveness would be difficult if not impossible. You have to play the hand you're dealt.

So I think the best we can do is the sort of thing that Aaron was trying to do: build new organizations to give ordinary people a time- and cost- efficient way of being involved in political campaigns, and create new counterweights to the influence of corporations and plutocratic elites.

This really strikes at the heart of it. One of my favorite quotes is Bob Cooper (D) Tennessee calling Congress "a farm league for K Street." Congress isn't a career goal, but a stepping stone on someone's resume on the way to a much bigger paycheck. Larry is doing amazing work on this, and he's right, it is the root of the evil. It is both simple and enormously difficult to fix. Simple in that it isn't one of those huge, painful problems that requires generations of people changing their minds, it just means passing appropriate laws, but unbelievably difficult in that the mechanisms of change have been bought.

As a Canadian living in the US on a work visa, I feel especially vulnerable to government malfeasance. What are some things I can do to contribute to the cause of digital freedom.

Speaking as a Canadian who also hold a US work visa (though I live in the UK) I think there are lots of ways you can help.

The SOPA fight was so successful in part because we each told our stories in our own way to our own circles.

There's nothing particularly difficult about understanding why NSA spying matters. The fact that a lot of your friends don't care about it doesn't mean they're unintelligent or that they're not capable of being worried about privacy. It probably just means they haven't bothered to think about it very hard, because we live in a big, complicated, difficult world and there's a limit to the amount of stuff you can give a damn about.

So I would start with that. If you've got a work visa, you've got a job, and hence a workplace. You can go to each and every one of your co-workers and explain to them, patiently, quietly, and forcefully, why this stuff matters.

Why it matters that their government is spending $250M/year on a program called BULLRUN whose mission is to sabotage device and network security. Why it matters that they're using unaccountable algorithms to decide who is guilty. Why it matters that they're lying to Congress. And so on. The Snowden leaks have something for everyone.

If you make it your mission to get every American you know to call her or his congresscritter, you'll have made a difference.

And you can make more of a difference, too. Call the MP from your old Canadian riding and tell her or him that you're concerned about the extensive ways in which Canada's surveillance establishment participated in NSA spying. Explain that as a Canadian living abroad, you're especially vulnerable (c.f. Maher Arar).

There is no one perfect message that will explain this to everyone. The only way this can work is if the people who care about it take the time to engage in dialogue with the people around them, and make the case, personally, one at a time, face-to-face.

[deleted]

It's conceivable that the ground could shift a bit between now and then, but as of now it looks like we're be pushing for passage of the USA Freedom Act and additional measures to protect non-Americans. And makings damn certain that the so-called "FISA Improvements Act" which is being pushed be the leaders of the Intelligence Committees and would, for the first time, actually CODIFY the phone records collection and other unconstitutional spying programs, never passes.

Hi everyone, Brian here. I see Cory, David and Peter are already exhibiting their usual brilliance, so hopefully I can contribute....so AMA.

For reference, the film about Aaron will be shown for the first time in about a week at the Sundance Film Festival. We are obviously very honored in so many ways, here is a short interview they did with me this week about the film.

https://www.sundance.org/video/meet-the-artists-14-Brian-Knappenberger/

Hello, thank you for all that you do. I am apart of one of over 30 Overpass Light Brigade groups I just found out this morning about the planned protest day on February 11th. I plan on asking the groups to all collaborate on that date (or leading up to it) for a national light brigade action. Many of us have already done anti-NSA messaging. Is there any other specific messages you would like to see up in lights?

Oh man, I hope someone comes up with something great for this.

Cory, how are you finding writing dystopian sci-fi since GCHQ plagiarised all your ideas?

Pretty fucking depressing, to tell the truth. I've been planning a fundamentally optimistic novel (see eg http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2013/03/cory-doctorow-ten-years-on/) about the proposition that a utopia isn't a place where things are going well -- it's a place where, even when things go badly, people are still good. As someone interested in systems, I'm way more interested in whether they fail well than whether they work well.

This month especially has been hard. Between the W3C's work on DRM and the grinding attacks on civil liberties here in the UK, I'm hardly sleeping these days for worry.

But the first step to a better world is imagining a better world. I'm working on a short story for Bruce Sterling's guest-issue of Tech Review right now, and when that's done, I'm hoping to muster the optimism to write the book.

To what extent should the government be able to monitor communications in the interest of national security? How should that power be checked? Should the process evolve as technology evolves?

They should be limited to surveillance of particular individuals for whom they have legitimate suspicions that are validated in the form of a court-issued warrant where that court has an adversarial procedure that includes an advocate for the surveilled subject.

The structural risks we take on if we leave deliberate holes or backdoors in our communications technologies are much greater than any likely benefits in terms of "national security". So we should do everything we can to ensure that our basic protocols and communication tools are hard to eavesdrop upon.

For better and worse, governments will always have ways to surveil specific individuals or groups that they choose to target. Governments know how to plant physical bugs in your house; infiltrate your organization; find and exploit vulnerabilities in the software you use. That will mean they always have ways of pursuing their national security objectives. And because those targetted surveilance capabilities are so ripe for abuse too, they need to be checked by thorough and transparent judicial review, an independent media, and by whistleblowers.

what do you think about the EU asking Snowden to give evidence and (i think i saw that they are) saying that NASA and GCHQ acted illegally? http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/09/nsa-gchq-illegal-european-parliamentary-inquiry

I had held out some hope that they'd offer him safe passage to Belgium, but that was more wishful thinking than anything realistic.

I'm glad they've done it. It legitimizes his work, and delegitimizes the EU-based spy agencies that collaborated with the NSA.

For Cory- Firstly, I just wanted to thank you for Little Brother. If it wasn't for that book, I wouldn't be here, on this AMA. I also wouldn't know about my love for computers and engineering. So thank you so much for that. What do you think teenagers (who aren't able to just ditch school or would never be taken seriously by their state representative) are able to do to help? Thanks so much!

Thank you very much. I'm honored.

I'm sure the others will have their own answers (and there's a bunch at https://thedaywefightback.org), but here's my answer:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1uw05k/aaron_swartz_passed_away_a_year_ago_tomorrow_we/cem77gz

There are so many stories and it's so hard to follow the NSA revelations because they trickle out, but realistically, what parts of my activities on the internet is the NSA following? Can they see my emails?

I think the answer is "All of it" and "Yes."

They're looking at an appreciable fraction of the entire volume of global Internet traffic, and storing a very large slice of that.

But GPG/PGP work. The universe wants you to have secrets.

Why would the federal government do all of this? Greed? Power? and even then to what end? Do they not see how self-destructive their behavior is?

Forgot to say: reading Homeland and Little Brother, keeping up with you guys, Jacob Appelbaum, Lessig, Glenn Greenwald and all things technology, privacy, and scifi has made my heart race.

I think it's empire building. I seriously believe that there are spooks whose mission in life is to amass the biggest budget, the largest number of reports, and the most institutional power as is humanly possible, because they get brain-reward for doing it.

There is no coherent national security explanation. But institutional psychology explains a lot.

This is abetted, of course, by corruption: Congress and the administration let them get away with it because every penny spent on empire-building is a penny that the state transfers to a military contractor, and some fraction of that penny is recycled into lobbying efforts.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Thanks for the kind words about the books.

Hey guys thanks for your work.

Do you have any thoughts on internet alternatives like Project Meshnet? Worth supporting?

https://projectmeshnet.org

It's too soon to say. We have a handful of censorship-resistant routing protocols (Tor hidden services, I2P, GNUnet) but having a few more serious projects in that direction might not hurt.

The ending of Aaron's life story saddens me a lot, but at the same time his drive and passion inspires. He did so much, it saddens me because I wonder what could've been.

What's one thing you'll never forget that Aaron left you or the world?

The obvious one for me is the afterword he wrote for Homeland http://craphound.com/homeland. It was incredibly inspiring. I went out on tour with that book less than a month after his death. 23 cities in 25 days. More than 100 presentations. I don't think I made it through a single one without choking up when I described his contribution to the book.

Aaron's responsible for my whole entry into this issue space, and it's been a fascinating ride. I'll always owe him for that. And it's remarkable how frequently my mind conjures up that sweet, but so mischievous, smile of his: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/1/13/1358102963220/Aaron-Swartz-008.jpg

Will The Day We Fight Back partner with the Internet Defense League to trigger the Cat Signal on February 11?

Edit: how are non-Americans supposed to participate in the day of action? Will there be widgets for other countries?

We're going to be teaming up with international organizations -- most likely this effort, which 100+ orgs are already supporting: https://necessaryandproportionate.org/take-action/digitalcourage

I think that's a safe bet.

Yes, I will join you. Keep up the good fight.

And thank you for "Little Brother". I couldn't put that dude down.

Thank you!

Cory, are you as cool as XKCD would lead me to believe?

Nope.

Sorry!

For Cory and Peter - could you regale us with any personal anecdotes about Aaron? The man himself often gets lost in the politics of his death.

Somehow telling pure anecdotes feels strange in a discussion thread, like the hooks are in the wrong places.

So I'll tell one that comes with the (ghost) of a link. Back in 2007, Aaron, and I started an experimental blog called Science That Matters: https://web.archive.org/web/20110826202455/http://sciencethatmatters.com/ .

Our aim was to unearth and explain scientific research papers that had profound public policy implications that were being overlooked. We found quite a few, and had fun writing them up for a while. Aaron was generally a bit more cavalier than I was; he'd get excited and fire off a post or three while I'd spend a weeks worrying if my understanding of some field or question was right. I remember spending months trying to write up the theory that supervolcanoes nearly wiped out humans around 75,000 years ago (which has been promoted by Bill Bryson, amongst others) before concluding that it was probably wrong.

In any case, it gradually dawned on both of us that no matter how closely we read individual papers and their citations, there was no way we could reliably tell if they were right (for example, we wrote up an intriguing paper on computer science education, and then six or twelve months later a researcher in the field came along and said they'd been trying to replicate the study at great length, but couldn't do so: https://web.archive.org/web/20111011065554/http://sciencethatmatters.com/archives/9 ). What it told us was that it isn't peer review of individual papers that's doing most of the work in verifying scientific results, but replication of results and the much longer, slower, and problematic social process of refutation and validation.

We concluded that we needed a much more ambitious site, that would keep track of the ongoing work on many of these questions, trying to provoke researchers' interest when the subject was under-studied, and explain the evolving state of knowledge well when it was. We never had the time or resources for that larger project, so we stopped updating the blog. But I think we were both a little sad that the more ambitious and beautiful version never got to exist.

I loved to see him interact with Ada, my goddaughter, with whom he lived for many years. He was the perfect goofy uncle/older brother figure -- just the guy you'd want to have around when you were growing up.

No question, just a huge thank you and I am proud to send EFF & Demand Progress my money!

Thank you. I send all I can spare to EFF every year. My goal is to have my lifetime donations be more than my total earnings from the organization during my employment there.

Thank you, w00dbeck!

For doctorow - In "Little Brother", the main character installs a custom ROM on his phone called "ParanoidAndroid". There actually is a custom ROM called "ParanoidAndroid" - are they one and the same? If so, what is it about the real "ParanoidAndroid" that makes it worthy of mention in the book?

No, it's not the same. I'm ashamed to admit that it's been a year since I've paid close attention to Android ROMs and have defaulted to CyanogenMod since then.

Is there anyone else reading this who can give a better answer than me? I'd like to know too.

It's a radio head song (97)

Then it was in the book. (2008)

Pretty sure the ROM then came out. (2012)

It was an epithet from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (1978!)

Why are you telling us now about a protest to be held in November?

That's a translation issue -- month comes first in American calendar shorthand. Feb 11.

We saw how the internet blackout was successful at stopping SOPA and PIPA. Has anyone thought about repeating it for the NSA?

That's the kind of campaign we're building over at https://thedaywefightback.org/. It isn't going to look exactly the same as SOPA/PIPA, because stopping a piece of legislation is a lot easier than dismantling the massive dragnet surveillance institutions operated by the US, UK and other governments. There are other things we can do too, of course, like working to make ourselves harder to surveil: https://eff.org/encrypt-the-web

I just recently re-told the story of SOPA in the film and was reminded how dynamic that approach was... The blackout was simple and effective - you immediately got what was happening - and it felt new. It seems to me that recreating that kind of direct action involves creatively looking at the tools we have and using them in surprising ways. I think mass, dragnet, suspicion-less surveillance hits people in a visceral way - seems like that could be harnessed.

[deleted]

Do a little bit, every day. Don't stop until it's done, then go back and look at what you've done and revise as necessary.

http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2009/01/cory-doctorow-writing-in-age-of.html

Hi, thank you for organizing these actions. Do you have a favorite effective argument you make to someone who is uninformed about surveillance, privacy, and freedom of information issues and who sees only contradictions between those issues? (E.g., an anonymous source leaking documents.) Thinking beyond the "safety of the source" arguments, how do you explain that an ethical commitment to both freedom of information and privacy is not a contradiction?

Here's one I like a lot:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/jun/14/nsa-prism

What do you think of Lessig and NHRebellion? Thank you for your work.

Demand Progress and Rootstrikers are actively supporting it. We need to build a constituency of people in New Hampshire (everywhere, really, of course, but NH is especially influential) to force politicians to contend with the issue of the corrupting effects of money. And it's off to a great start -- it looks like thousands of people will participate over the next couple of weeks.

I'm not as connected and aware as I could be but Aaron's death has made me more so this past year than I have been before. I'm heartened and grateful for all your and your compatriots' work but I still have the same question at the end of every article or podcast or news story. I know it's a simple question with a complex answer but like a little kid scared of shadows I keep wanting to ask, is it all getting better? It doesn't feel like it's getting better.

Ooph. I might be too cynical to be the person to answer this one. It's not easy. But we can say, with confidence, that more people understand these issues than ever before -- speech, privacy, money-in-politics corruption. These used to be such abstractions for most people, but no more.

Will this be a US-only campaign again, or will there be international campaigning going on as well?

Those of us in the UK/EU need to make sure we reign in our own intelligence agencies as well as the NSA.

Definitely global.

See http://openrightsgroup.org/

I was fortunate to get to know Aaron through his early work on RSS. I'm still extremely angry at MIT for betraying its legendary hacker ethos by allowing him to be ground up by malicious federal prosecutors. A year later, do any of you understand how MIT could let that happen?

We're all still at a loss. And even worse, they've been stymieing the lifting of the protective order that covers the evidence in the case. We expect the lifting thereof to reveal potential malfeasance by MIT and the prosecutors.

This is a powerful piece on Boston Magazine from a week or so ago that focuses on MIT:

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2014/01/02/bob-swartz-losing-aaron/

Thanks guys! Your work means a lot to me, me and a lot of people I care about! The TPP has a lot of censorship measures, but is taking a different route through the legislative process. They're looking to fast track that. What are some ways we can combat this effort?

High fives, guys!

This issue has been so hard to fight, because the negotiators are basically entirely insulated from concern about public opinion -- they're not elected officials, rather, they're appointees of some of the least publicly accountable public officials. But now, with the fast track push, it's at a stage where people who are somewhat more accountable (with all the necessary caveats about how money can matter more than popular sentiment) are actually going to be voting on the issue. We need to to scare them off.

If we win, it'll be a coalition of progressive and center-left Democrats, along with some people on the far right who will stop it. There'll be a lot of activity on this over the next few weeks, and it really could make all the difference.

First thanks a lot for your support to Aaron. He is a great soul.

Second: How can we encourage more Aaron's in the world to happen? AKA Aaron was a genius, granted, but what can we do to encourage more innovation/political engagement through technology?

One thing that we and some of his other friends and colleagues are trying to do is institute an award in Aaron's honor, to encourage precisely that:

http://act.demandprogress.org/survey/2013Nominations

And, frankly, I think the NSA revelations have been a rude awakening for a lot of technologists who'd previously just seen fit to follow the money. More exposure of the evils that many technologists are complicit creates social pressure and calls the question -- will you use your skills for ill or for good.