INTERNET HACKCESS

It was nearly a year ago that Megaupload, a massive file sharing site with a reported 50 million daily users, was taken down by federal agents. Four people linked to Megaupload were arrested in New Zealand and an international crackdown led agents to serving at least 20 search warrants across the globe. Later it was reported that the collective hacker group “Anonymous” was responsible for taking down sites for the FBI, Department of Justice, Universal Music Group, RIAA and Motion Picture Association of America.

Last weekend there was a repeat performance from Anonymous where another government site was hacked to send a message. The United States Sentencing Commission site was hacked twice. It was done late Friday night and then again on Sunday. The site was replaced by a video claiming that the United States government had forced Aaron Swartz to commit suicide. Many people in the mainstream world are unaware that brilliant programmers and internet designers are being harassed by the United States government.



Swartz was a brilliant technologist who committed suicide after facing felony charges and 30 years imprisonment for downloading over 4 million JSTOR articles. This is an extremely harsh sentence and is literally the same amount of time terrorists get when they kill scores of people. Recently this was illustrated in a Yale law college exposé written by Nathan Robinson who pointed out that David Headley, the American Islamist who plotted the brutal attacks in Mumbai in which hundreds of civilians were casually gunned down was sentenced to 35 years.

All Swartz did was download millions of for-pay academic articles and then he was relentlessly pursued by the federal government – with the cooperation of MIT! Once again, this tragic story illustrates the increasingly unaccountable power of the United States government and how people’s lives are destroyed by the recent empowerment given to them for the guarantee of security.

According to Robinson, “Headley the terrorist had been sentenced in federal court to 35 years for helping to plot the al-Qaeda-linked attacks. Headley had conducted the extensive surveillance and scouting missions in India that made the killings possible. But though David Headley was an admitted terrorist with a crucial role in “India’s 9/11,” the U.S. government did not choose to assassinate him via drone, shoot first and dump his body in the sea later, or even arrange a loaded court proceeding for him — the usual approaches. Headley is different, because he had for some time been a paid informant of the United States government, working for the Drug Enforcement Agency and sent to Pakistan in that capacity.”

Swartz was just some guy down lading academic papers and was given a sentence as severe as a known Al Qaeda operative.

This was the reason Anonymous distributed a basic code of the government site , which turned the website into a version of the video game “Asteroids.” Players were invited to shoot away at the homepage to reveal a Guy Fawkes mask made up of text, “We do not forgive. We do not forget.”

more here: GroundZero