No Advertising
No Government Funding
No Corporate Funding
Michel Bauwens: Aaron Swartz’s Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto
#OSE Open Source Everything, Advanced Cyber/IO, Cultural Intelligence, Culture
Aaron Swartz’s Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
Written by Aaron Swartz, July 2008, Eremo, Italy
“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.
Continue reading “Michel Bauwens: Aaron Swartz's Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto”
Michel Bauwens: Cloud Computing as Virtual Prison
IO Impotency15th January 2013
Republished from David Bollier:
“As more and more computing moves off our PCs and into “the Cloud,” Internet users are gaining access to a wealth of new software-based services that can exploit vast computing capacity and memory storage. That’s wonderful. But what about our freedom to create and share things as we wish, free from corporate or government surveillance or over-reaching copyright enforcement? The real danger of the Cloud is its potential to limit how we may create and share what we want, on our terms.
There are already signs that large corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter and all the rest will quietly warp the design architecture of the Internet to serve their business interests first. A terrific overview of the troubling issues raised by the Cloud can be found in the essay, “The Cloud: Boundless Digital Potential or Enclosure 3.0,” by David Lametti, a law professor at McGill University, and published by the Virginia Journal of Law & Technology. An earlier version is available at the SSRN website.
Lametti states his thesis simply: “I argue that the Cloud, unless monitored and possibly directed, has the potential to go beyond undermining copyright and the public domain – Enclosure 2.0 – and to go beyond weakening privacy. This round, which I call “Enclosure 3.0”, has the potential to disempower Internet users and conversely empower a very small group of gatekeepers. Put bluntly, it has the potential to relegate Internet users to the status of digital sheep.”
Continue reading “Michel Bauwens: Cloud Computing as Virtual Prison”
NIGHTWATCH: French Advance, Islamic Militant Tourism Up, Touaregs Discover Government Better than Islamists
Cultural Intelligence, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency
Mali: On the fourth day of the French military action in Mali, Islamist rebels seized another town in southern Mali, but were driven out of Konna. French officials said Diabaly, 400km (250 miles) from the capital, Bamako, was taken in a counter-attack. French aircraft continued to bomb rebel gathering areas in the north and northeast.
Comment: Diabaly is in territory considered government-held. Apparently the Islamist rebels attacked from Mauritania with a daunting force of five pickup trucks carrying rebel fighters. The Malian garrison at Diabaly claims to have fought for 10 hours, but appears to have run away. Hmmm.
Mali's Touareg rebels, meanwhile, announced they are prepared to assist French military forces in Mali by confronting jihadist groups on the ground in the country's northern region, a senior Tuareg official said on 14 January.
Theophillis Goodyear: Networks of Corruption—-Critical Mass—-Divided Loyalties—-Dilemmas of Betrayal—-Sacrifice—-the Harm of Innocents—-The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number
Ethics
There's something from the systems perspective that illustrates the difficulties faced by whistleblowers and also explains why vast networks of corruption can be so hard to reform. Corruption in a network often reaches a tipping point, or critical mass. And once that point has been reached, the mass of the network becomes far greater than any individual or group within the network; and keeping secrets becomes like a force of gravity.
It's also similar to a long freight train. Think of the force it would take to tip a single freight car off the tracks. But then think of the force it would take to tip it off the tracks if it was in the middle of a quarter-mile long train, with every car linked together. But the lines of force in a network are not just linear; they go in every direction. So how does one fight a network whose corruption has gone beyond critical mass? One needs to create critical mass in the opposite direction. And that's essentially what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa did.
This is also a case of divided loyalties and of being on the horns of a dilemma of betrayal, where one betrays someone or something no matter which way one turns. So if you fear betraying your promise to keep the secret, you have already, perhaps, betrayed the people against whom the secret is being kept from, the American people, for example. Maybe that would be some comfort to people who are considering whether or not to become a whistle blower. But then again, the American people are an abstract quantity compared to colleagues that might be harmed.
Mini-Me: The Prosecution of Aaron Swartz: Sharing Knowledge Is a Greater Crime Than Bringing Down the Economy
07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government
Huh?
The Prosecution of Aaron Swartz: Sharing Knowledge Is a Greater Crime Than Bringing Down the Economy
Ali Hayat
Huffington Post, 13 January 2013
Aaron Swartz is no longer among us though the contributions he made to promote free flow of information and knowledge sharing will continue to benefit our present and future generations. He was charged with 13 felony counts for downloading millions of academic articles from JSTOR and accused of intending to distribute these articles through file-sharing sites.
The manner in which Aaron had been prosecuted offers a sharp contrast to the manner in which our legal system dealt with corporate America after the 2008 financial crisis, where there were no prosecutions of top corporate figures. Sadly, the contrast highlights that trying to disseminate knowledge, quite literally by making academic journal articles available online, is a greater crime than bringing down the United States economy through “corporate mismanagement and heedless risk-taking.”
Driven by a desire to make knowledge accessible Aaron has been attributed to author the “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.” Some key excerpts are as follow:
Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable … Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world … It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy … It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
Aaron's untimely death has left us without a great mind and even more importantly a compassionate activist. While Aaron is irreplaceable, we must aspire to freely disseminate the moral imperative he advocated, in the very spirit that he himself would have done.
Mongoose: Moti Nissani on Who Killed Aaron Swartz?
07 Other Atrocities, Corruption
For contextual orientation.
Moti Nissani
Veterans Today, 13 January 2014
”How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?”—Bob Marley
On January 11, 2013, according to indoctrination organs of the criminal Syndicate calling itself the US government (a Syndicate comprised, for the most part, of big bankers, generals, spooks and, below them, their puppets in the White House and gubernatorial mansions, Congress and state legislatures, and almost the entire judiciary), Aaron Swartz, aged 26, killed himself.
Many on the internet have already traced Aaron’s tragic and untimely death directly to the Syndicate. I wish to add my voice to this growing chorus, placing this recent event in a somewhat larger context of historical scholarship.
In relating this story, the Syndicate’s propaganda organs conveniently forgot four crucial points:
- The Syndicate had excellent reasons to wish Aaron dead.
- As in most cases of covert Syndicate assassinations (e.g., Fred Hampton, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway), Aaron’s death was preceded by a vicious, totally unjustified, campaign of surveillance, harassment, vilification, and intimidation.
- The Central Institute of Assassinations (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Intimidations (FBI) can and do kill people while making the murder look like suicide.
- In America, England, and most other countries, painstaking research by people like Kevin Barett, Jim Douglass, Jim Fetzer, Jim Garrison, David Helvarg, and William F. Pepper discloses an unmistakable pattern: influential friends of the people (and hence, enemies of the Syndicate) tend to die before they reach old age, often under bizarre circumstances. This pattern has an obvious corollary: when friends of the Syndicate die prematurely, we can reasonably assume, with a high degree of probability, that the Syndicate killed them.
Let me expound on these four points, one at a time.
Full article below the line.
Continue reading “Mongoose: Moti Nissani on Who Killed Aaron Swartz?”
