Episode: 1170
Title: HPR1170: TGTM Newscast for 1/20/2013
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1170/hpr1170.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 20:55:26

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You are listening to TGTM News number 88, recorded for two-stage January 22, 2013.
You are listening to the Tech Only Hacker Public Radio Edition to get the full podcast
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Hello again, this is Bobobex and now for the Tech Roundup.
From EFF.org dated the 11th of January 2013 by Honey for Corey.
Free speech victory, court grants preliminally injunction in EFF's Prop 35 suit.
Late Friday, a federal judge granted a preliminally injunction in the lawsuit EFF filed with
the ACLU of Northern Carolina that challenges the unconstitutional provisions in Prop 35,
a ballot measure passed by California voters in November that restricts the legal and constitutionally
protected speech of all registered sex offenders in California.
EFF and the ACLU NC filed the lawsuit the morning after election day, noting that although
Prop 35 is ostensibly about increasing punishment for human traffickers, it's beset with
problems.
The biggest was its requirements that registrants turn over a list of all their internet identifiers
and service providers to law enforcement.
The court granted a temporary restraining order, hours after the lawsuit was filed.
And today, the court granted the preliminary injunction, finding we were likely to succeed
in showing that Prop 35 violated the first amendment.
First, the court found that there was a clear chilling effect on speech because registrants
would have to disclose their identity either before they speak or within 24 hours after
speaking somewhere online.
Plus, without any safeguards to prevent the public dissemination of this online identification
information and the potential three-year prison term awaiting a registrant for failing
to comply, the court was convinced that registrants would think twice before speaking.
The court also found that Prop 35 applied both to more speakers and more speech than necessary
to advance the government-interesting combating human trafficking.
Prop 35 requires anyone who is a registered sex offender, even people with decades-old
low-level offences like Mr. Meenia, Indicent Exposure and people whose offences were not
related to the internet to report this information.
That would cover more than 75,000 Californians, and it required a wide range of information
including email addresses, user names and other identifiers used for online political
discussion groups, book and restaurant review sites, forums about medical conditions and
newspapers or blog comments to be turned over to the government.
While the government claimed that to hearing last month they only intended to use the
information, if it had a nexus to a criminal investigation, the court found that nexus
to be missing from the text of Prop 35 at all.
As a result, the court believed registrants right to speak anonymously will therefore be
chilled.
As a rest of this article, please follow the links in the show notes.
A Canadian court has rejected a request from the United States to hand over 32 servers
hosted by a local provider, instead of simply handing over all data, which may include personal
files or users, the court decided to first determine what files are stored on the machines.
Mega-upload lawyer, Ira Rothkin, is pleased with the ruling and hopes the United States
will be more considerate of the privacy of cloud hosting users when requesting data
seizures in the future.
When Mega-upload was raided last year, the US government seized 1,103 servers at Kapathy
as hosting facility in the United States.
However, that was not the only hardware used by the file hosting site.
Mega-upload also had machines elsewhere, including 32 servers at an Equinox data centre
in Canada.
Despite in that these machines may hold crucial data for the ongoing lawsuit, the US government
asked Canada to hand them over for investigation.
In their request to the court, the authorities back up their claim by citing an email from
Mega-upload staff stating that the Canadian servers will serve as a database, stroke number
crunching machines.
Mega-upload protested this broad request, arguing that the servers may contain a lot of
information that is simply irrelevant to the case.
The company has asked the court to either deny the request or appoint an independent forensic
examiner who can inform the court of what kind of files are stored on the 32 servers.
The Ontario court agreed with this reservation and refused to send a service to the United
States before the contents are confirmed.
The appropriate balance of the state interest in gathering evidence and privacy interests
in information can be struck by an order that the service be brought before the court,
so that the court can make an order of finding what is to be sent to the order reads.
For more information on this article, please follow the links in the show notes.
The next tech story comes from EmptyWheel.net dated the 17th of January 2013 by EmptyWheel,
what to do about computer crime laws.
In a long piece published in alternate on Tuesday, I noted that air and sports' treatment
was not at all that unusual.
Quoted as saying,
In some ways, what was happening to sports was not all that unusual.
George Washington University Law Professor Orrin Kerr, a leading expert on computer crime
law who is sympathetic to the issues that Swartz Trumpians explains that the government's
charges fall within the norm for computer crimes.
Moreover, the tactics used in this case are normal for the Department of Justice.
The government often multiple charges in order to coerce defendants to plead guilty
without trial.
The law's governing computer crime criminalise all sorts of actions that don't seem like
they should be crimes.
The government inflates charges beyond all proportion to coerce plea deals.
The government's prosecutorial powers are overwhelming.
This administration and these prosecutors have aggressively used the law to shut off the
free flow of information.
So to the extent people are horrified by how Swartz was treated, they should also be horrified
by the abuse of prosecutorial discretion more generally, whether it affects a genius
like Swartz, nabbed on a computer crime charge, or a regular person brought on in drugs
charges.
End quote.
That same day, I suggested would be far better off and far truer to air and Swartz's
ethic trying to fix systemic problems than avenging him personally, though I also called for
firing Lanny Brewer, the head of the Department of Justice's criminal division.
Quote.
One of the most ethical suggestions I've seen, and I'm not even sure if there is a white
house petition for it, is to fix the computer fraud and abuse act.
Update.
Thanks to Saul Tanenbaum, here it is.
The government should never throw the book at Aaron for accessing MIT's network and downloading
scholarly research.
However, some extremely problematic elements of the law made it impossible.
We can trace some of those issues to the US criminal justice system as an institution,
and I suspect others will write about that in the coming days.
But Aaron's tragedy also signs a spotlight on the couple of profound flaws in the computer
fraud and abuse act, in particular, and it gives us an opportunity to think about how
to address them.
I didn't know Aaron personally, but he doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who would seek
individualized solutions to systemic problems, and one of the problems with the system that
destroyed him is a law that badly criminalises actions that don't present much harm.
To read the rest of this post, please follow the links in the show notes.
Our next article comes from torrentfreep.com dated the 15th of January 2013 by Ben Jones.
Copyright strike systems are modern witch trials.
Our final text story is from EFF.org dated the 12th of January 2013 by Peter Eckersley,
farewell to Aaron Schwartz, an extraordinary hacker and activist.
Yesterday, Aaron Schwartz, a close friend and collaborator of ours, committed suicide.
This is a tragic end to a brief and extraordinary life.
Aaron did more than almost anyone to make the internet a thriving ecosystem for open
knowledge and to keep it that way.
His contributions were numerous and some of them were indispensable.
When we asked him in late 2010 for help in stopping COICA, the predecessor to the SOPA and
PEPA internet blacklist bills, he founded an organisation called Demand Progress, which
mobilised over a million online activists and proved to be an invaluable ally in winning
that campaign.
Other projects Aaron worked on included the RSS specifications, web.pi, tortuweb, the
open library and the chrome port of HTTPS everywhere.
Aaron helped launch the creative commons.
He was a former co-founder at Reddit and a member of the team that made the site successful.
His blog was often a delight.
Aaron's eloquent brilliance was mixed with a complicated introversion.
He communicated on his own schedule and needed a lot of space to himself, which frustrated
some of his collaborators.
He was fascinated by the social world around him but often found it torch was to deal with.
For a long time, Aaron was more comfortable reading books than talking to humans.
He once told me something like, even talking to very smart people is hard, but if I just
sit down and read their books, I get their most considered and insightful thoughts condensed
in a beautiful and efficient form.
I can learn from books faster than I can from talking to the authors.
His passion for the written word for open knowledge and his flair for self-promotion sometimes
produce spectacular results, even before the events that proved to be his undoing.
In 2011, Aaron used the MIT campus network to download millions of journal articles from
the JSTOR database, allegedly changing his laptop's IP and MAC addresses when necessary
to get around the blocks put in place by JSTOR and MIT and sneaking into a closet to get
a faster connection to the MIT network.
For this purported crime, Aaron was facing criminal charges with penalties up to 35 years
in prison, most seriously for unauthorized access to computers under the computer fraud
and abuse act.
If we believe the prosecutors allegations against him, Aaron had hoped to liberate the millions
of scientific and scholarly articles he had downloaded from JSTOR, releasing them so
that anyone could read them or analyse them as a single, giant data set, something that
Aaron had done before.
While his methods were provocative, the goal 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, is one that we should all support.
Moreover, the situation Aaron found himself in highlights the injustice of US computer
crime laws and particularly their punishment regimes.
Aaron's act was undoubtedly political activism and taking such an act in the physical world
would at most have meant that he faced light penalties akin to trespassing as part of
a political protest.
Because he used a computer, he instead faced long-term incarceration.
This is a disparity that EFF has fought against for years.
Yesterday it had tragic consequences.
Lawrence Lessig has called for this tragedy to be a basis for reform on computer crime laws
and the over-zealous prosecutors who use them.
We agree.
Aaron, we sorely miss your friendship and your help in building a better world.
May you rest in peace.
Other tech headlines in the news that you may wish to read are, Aaron Schwartz's lawyer
Prosecutor Stephen Heyman wanted juicy case for publicity.
Law Professor James Grimmelman explains how he probably violated the same laws as Aaron
Schwartz.
EFF's initial improvements to Aaron's law for computer crime reform.
To read these articles, please follow the links in the show notes.
This week's edition has been staffed and produced by the TGTM news team, editorial
selection by DeepGeek, views of the story authors reflect their own opinions and not
necessarily those of TGTM news.
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