New Democrats choose interim leader

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 1:41 PM - 2 Comments

New Democrat MPs took part in an emergency caucus meeting on Wednesday to determine Jack Layton’s interim replacement. The caucus picked MP Nycole Turmel, the party’s caucus chair, to take the post. Layton revealed on Monday that he is taking a temporary leave to battle a new form of cancer. He said he plans to be back as leader when Parliament resumes in September. Party president Brian Topp told reporters he spoke with Layton early Wednesday, and said he was in “great spirits.”

The Globe and Mail

List reveals close relationship between News Corp. and U.K. Cabinet

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 1:38 PM - 0 Comments

A list revealed Tuesday by Britain’s coalition government shows that Rupert Murdoch and several of his News Corp. executives held more than 60 private meetings with senior members of government since David Cameron became prime minister last year. Furthermore, Rupert Murdoch, his son James and Rebekah Brooks, former chief executive of News International, received confidential briefings on Afghanistan and Britain’s strategic defence review by Defence Secretary Liam Fox. Prime Minister David Cameron, whose former aide Andy Coulson has been arrested for his role in the phone hacking scandal, met with Murdoch executives 26 times since taking office.

The Independent

Beck compares Norwegian camp to “Hitler Youth”

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 1:32 PM - 5 Comments

Conservative rodeo clown Glenn Beck is under fire after he compared the camp where young Norwegians were slaughtered Friday to the Hitler Youth. On his radio show Monday, the former Fox News host said the Utoya island camp, run by Norway’s Labour Party, “sounds a little like the Hitler Youth or whatever,” adding “who does a camp for politics? Disturbing.” With these comments, Beck has also seemingly overlooked the Tea Party-oriented summer camp taking place in Florida this summer.  A gunman shot dozens of teens at the camp in a murderous rampage last week. Anders Behring Breivik, an anti-Muslim extremist, has been charged in the attacks.

 Associated Press

Washington Post

Mayor of Kandahar killed by suicide bomber

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 12:48 PM - 0 Comments

The mayor of Kandahar city has been killed in a suicide bomb attack, officials say. Afghan police say Ghulam Haidar Hameedi was holding discussions with a group of tribal elders at city hall when a man detonated explosives hidden in his turban, killing the mayor. The attacker and another civilian are also dead. The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the attack. The killing of the city’s mayor comes just two weeks after Ahmad Wali Karzai, the influential half-brother of the country’s president, was assassinated by his long-time bodyguard. The string of violence occurs as NATO troops — including Canadians — begin to withdraw from the Kandahar area.

 BBC News

Science that dare not speak its name

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 12:44 PM - 29 Comments

The Privy Council Office bars a salmon researcher from speaking with reporters.

Science, one of the world’s top research journals, published Miller’s findings in January. The journal considered the work so significant it notified “over 7,400″ journalists worldwide about Miller’s “Suffering Salmon” study. Science told Miller to “please feel free to speak with journalists.” It advised reporters to contact Diane Lake, a media officer with the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Vancouver, “to set up interviews with Dr. Miller.”

Miller heads a $6-million salmon-genetics project at the federal Pacific Biological Station on Vancouver Island. The documents show major media outlets were soon lining up to speak with Miller, but the Privy Council Office said no to the interviews.

Facebook facial recognition technology not coming to Canada

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 12:43 PM - 0 Comments

Facebook’s new facial-recognition technology for photographs will not launch in Canada, a Facebook representative has confirmed. The rep did not say why Canada won’t adopt the controversial technology, which is capable of recognizing faces in photographs automatically, whether the user knows the person being identified or not. Digital rights groups in the U.S. are against the technology, arguing that it’s a gross invasion of privacy. Facebook users are not asked for their permission to be targeted by the technology, but must opt out instead. A coalition of U.S. digital rights groups has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission as a result.

The Globe and Mail

Police won’t charge Toronto mayor for on road cellphone use

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 12:30 PM - 0 Comments

Police will not be charging Toronto mayor Rob Ford for talking on his cell phone while driving, The Globe and Mail reports. Police spokesman Mark Pugash says even though the mayor has admitted to using a handheld cellular device while operating a vehicle (an illegal act in Ontario since 2009), police not pursue charges for cellphone driving retroactively. A Toronto woman who asked Ford to hang up his phone while on the road says the mayor flipped her the bird immediately after. Ford denies the allegation, calling it a “misunderstanding”.

The Globe and Mail

Under Her Majesty’s watchful eye

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 11:25 AM - 34 Comments

John Baird redecorates the Foreign Affairs building.

A pair of historic paintings by Quebec modern master Alfred Pellan were removed from their decades-old spot and replaced by a 2002 photo portrait of the Queen late last month. The change was ordered before the visit of Prince William and Kate in late June, and took some staff by surprise when they entered the Lester B. Pearson Building after the long weekend.

The large, brightly-coloured Pellan paintings, called “Canada West Canada East,” show two coasts — one with details such as totem poles and the Coastal Mountains, the other featuring fishermen, moose and sailboats. They have hung in the spot above the reception desk since the Queen opened the building in 1973, and the faint outlines of the works are still visible on the brown stone wall around her newly-hung photograph.

Shortly after Stephen Harper moved into the Prime Minister’s Office, a member of his staff similarly ensured a picture of Her Majesty was found and hung.

REVIEW: Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life

By Jessica Allen - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 10:45 AM - 2 Comments

When she was a teenager, Sandra Beasley’s go-to restaurant food was french fries, which might sound downright divine to some. But the 31-year-old poet and author’s food allergies to eggs, dairy (including goat’s milk), soy, beef, shrimp, pine nuts, cucumbers, cantaloupe, honeydew, mango, macadamias, pistachios, cashews, swordfish and mustard didn’t permit many options. Her book, which takes its name from childhood birthday parties at which the author’s mother routinely warned guests not to “kill the birthday girl” with a buttery cake or creamy frosting kiss, plots her struggles with food reactions that often land her curled up on the floor in pain struggling for breath and popping Benadryl like candy against the history and science of food allergies. If you didn’t have sympathy for this relatively new generation of sufferers, you will after Beasley’s book.

The public can be pitiless: a fourth-grade classroom nutritionist, after hearing Beasley’s long list of threatening foods, says, “Well, that’s not somebody designed to survive, now, is it?” Waiters not trained, or sometimes unwilling, to deal with allergies can land her in the ER.

In the last few pages, Beasley introduces others as lethally allergic to foods as she is. Their voices are a welcome respite; even the most tender-hearted reader may become apathetic to her tribulations. But this is primarily a memoir and the emotional stuff is the best—from worrying about kissing boys who may have eaten forbidden foods, to considering the implications of having kids who’ll have to wash their hands before hugging their mother. It’s also an ode to close friends and family, particularly a patient and doting mother, who always made sure to pack her daughter’s travel bag with a “Sandra-friendly” Giant-brand loaf of Italian bread. They provide comfort and support, and truly appreciate what Beasley must endure daily to survive.

REVIEW: The Three of Us: Growing Up with Tammy and George

By Jen Cutts - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 10:45 AM - 0 Comments

Most newborns don’t attract much attention from Nashville, but when you’re Georgette Jones, the only daughter of country music legends Tammy Wynette and George Jones, you get a signed recording contract in your first few days of life. But even that optimistic gesture, as Jones reveals in her memoir, doesn’t protect you from your life playing out like a country tune, full of heartache and loneliness and being done wrong by.

Jones’s famous parents, who between them had a slew of No. 1 hits in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, divorced when she was just four. Summarizing the downfall of their relationship neatly, she writes: “Mom was busy trying to change a man who was digging in his heels.” In The Three of Us, Jones hopes to round out her parents’ reputations: Tammy, as a woman addicted to painkillers and bad men, and George, as a hard-drinking firebrand and unreliable performer. It seems a tough job, though. It’s fitting that her mother’s best-known songs are D-I-V-O-R-C-E—which she did four times—and Stand By Your Man, which she did even when those men exploited her finances, handed out nude photos of her, or, in the case of one, convinced her to show up at a farmhouse and claim to have been carjacked to keep the fact that he had beaten her silly out of the tabloids (none of those indecencies were George’s, for the record). George, whose biggest hit is He Stopped Loving Her Today, comes across as a distant, stereotypical manly man, never allowing himself to be vulnerable, not even with his own daughter.

Remove the element of celebrity, and The Three of Us is a straightforward tale of the too-common trials of growing up in a family where everyone is so busy trying to protect themselves from pain that much goes unsaid. Though Tammy’s death in 1998 brought Georgette closer to her dad, and perhaps freed her to begin shaping her own country music career, the First Lady of Country Music took a lot of secrets to her grave. It leaves the reader, and Georgette, undoubtedly, hankering for more—that, and a helping of Tammy’s famous banana pudding.

What do we need to know? (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 10:36 AM - 7 Comments

Jack Layton’s aides discuss their approach to disclosure and the Canadian Press explores the history of private health in public life.

“I think the nature, sadly, of this disease is that it’s changed,” says Monk. “And that’s why he announced yesterday his temporary leave. He admitted quite publicly yesterday that he’s facing serious medical challenges.”

Layton has not, however, divulged the form of cancer he is now battling, the treatment he’s receiving or the prognosis. ”I think that Canadians respect his right to keep some things about his treatment private,” says Monk.

The NDP caucus is presently meeting on Parliament Hill. Mr. Layton is due to address the gathering by phone. Before the meeting, party president Brian Topp described a conversation with the NDP leader this morning. Continue…

The crisis in the Horn

By Patricia Treble - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Thomas Mukoya/Reuters

As drought and an ensuing humanitarian catastrophe tightens its grip on 10 million people in the Horn of Africa, regional authorities are making U-turns. Al-Shabab, the Islamist militant group that controls swaths of southern Somalia, is allowing back the international aid groups that it kicked out a few years ago after accusing them of being anti-Muslim and creating dependency. Now, with around 3,000 Somalis fleeing their ravaged nation each day, UNICEF has been given permission to drop five tonnes of food, medicine and water equipment into a parched town.

In Kenya, the Dadaab camp is overwhelmed by 375,000 refugees. Facing international criticism, the government opened the empty Ifo refugee camp, which was never settled because of fears it would lure more Somalis across the border. The crisis affecting Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia is due to widespread drought, combined with conflict and high food prices. Families have no choice but to make the perilous trek to Kenya’s camps. By then it is often too late for the most vulnerable. The death toll for children in Dadaab for the first four months of 2011 equalled that of the entire previous year.

Peter Munk: in conversation

By Kenneth Whyte - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 3 Comments

Aaron Harris/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Peter Munk, the founder and chair of Barrick Gold, the world’s biggest gold miner, found a land of opportunity when he arrived in Canada as a teenager after he fled Nazi-occupied Hungary. But the 83-year-old businessman is convinced the country’s brightest days may still lie ahead. As the appetite for raw materials skyrockets in China, India and other developing countries, he argues that Canada has a rare, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to establish itself as the world’s next big financial sector, rivalling the dominance of London and New York.

Q: Let’s talk first about your earliest impressions of Canada as an immigrant boy.

A: That day I arrived, it was a miserable, rainy day in early March ’48. It was like, terra incognita, like going to Mars. I know it sounds moronic.

Continue…

Bikinis and beer are okay

By Cigdem Iltan - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

The election of an Islamist government in Tunisia wouldn’t mean bikinis and beer won’t be welcome on its beaches, the leader of a once-outlawed party says. Rached Ghannouchi, who heads the North African country’s most liberal Islamist party, Al Nahda, says women may sunbathe and alcohol can flow freely if his party takes power in the elections scheduled for October. Ghannouchi, 70, supports a democratic interpretation of Islam, as seen in Turkey, and spent more than two decades in exile in London for his views. He returned to Tunisia in January after a popular uprising ended president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s 24-year despotic rule.

Al Nahda, which means “the awakening” in Arabic, is expected to emerge from the election with more votes than any other political party. Maintaining the appeal of Tunisia as a tourist destination is front of mind for the party, as the industry has taken a hit amidst an ongoing war in neighbouring Libya. Ghannouchi says his party will discourage drinking, rather than ban the use of alcohol. “Islam is not a closed religion. We want our country to be open to all nations,” he told the London Times. “Our aim will not be to cut supply of alcohol, but to reduce demand.”

Air Canada’s ‘biggest mistake’

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 72 Comments

Photograph by Blair Gable

Michel Thibodeau admits it: he is probably the loudest of the roughly one million French Canadians living outside Quebec. Over the last decade, the Ottawa resident and his wife have filed some 100 complaints over the dearth of French language services against the federal, provincial and Ottawa municipal governments—everyone, he says, except the police. The 43-year-old father of two may look about as threatening as a folded newspaper, but he has chalked up a number of victories: his complaints to the City of Ottawa are the main reason you’ll hear French announcements when riding the bus in the nation’s capital. Fluently bilingual, he’s been called unreasonable (among many other things) and fielded the occasional death threat for his efforts.

Yet Thibodeau scored his biggest success last week, when a federal court ruled against Air Canada, his foil in an 11-year case marked by the tension (and occasional absurdity) of the typical made-in-Canada language battle. As a former Crown corporation, the airline must, as a condition of its 1988 sale, conduct a language survey every 10 years and make French services mandatory at airports and on flights where there is at least a five per cent demand. According to the court, the company has repeatedly failed throughout the years to provide adequate services in French, and must pay the self-described soccer dad nearly $19,000 in costs and restitution.

“Air Canada must be able to provide services in both languages,” Thibodeau, who works as a computer technician in the House of Commons, told Maclean’s. “My rights are compromised if it doesn’t, and I have two choices. I can let it be, and my rights become non-existent, or I can do something. I decided to do something.”

Continue…

Here comes the rain again

By David Agren - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Marco Ugarte/AP

With the onset of the summer rainy season, Adriana Cornejo moves her furniture upstairs in the blue-collar suburb of Nezahualcóyotl to the east of Mexico City. Here, the heavy precipitation often brings rising flood waters. “It’s like Christmas. You know it’s coming and you get ready,” Cornejo says.

Flooding dates back centuries in Mexico City and its environs, which were built on drained lakes in a high-altitude valley with no natural drainage outlet. But residents and experts say the situation is worsening as changing weather patterns, past political corruption and the pumping of water from aquifers to serve a regional population now topping 20 million causes areas to sink by up to 40 cm per year.

The National Water Commission has warned of the potential for catastrophic floods, which would cover the eastern half of the Mexico City area—turning it once again into a lake. But water-basin management consultant Valente Souza calls that kind of talk “irresponsible.” Still, he argues places like Nezahualcóyotl, which was built by squatters, are unable to drain themselves and will be plagued by worsening floods.

Continue…

Love the team—hate the name

By Tom Henheffer - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 2 Comments

Tom Henheffer

It’s the vodka fuelling their jigs, the blended cappuccino expanding their waistlines, the frozen islands sinking their cruise liners—ice caps are ingrained in Newfoundland culture. But many islanders don’t want the iconic iceberg adorning the jerseys of St. John’s new AHL franchise.

“It’s probably a little bit close to the Tim Hortons thing,” says Gerry Taylor, chairman of Hockey Newfoundland and Labrador. A recent online poll by the Telegram, St. John’s daily newspaper, found a full two-thirds of residents are unhappy about calling their team the Ice Caps. Many critics simply don’t like the association with the creamy summer beverage, but Taylor also feels that the designation is too St. John’s-centric. “It should be more than a capital city team,” he says.

Team director Danny Williams, the former premier of Newfoundland, says the name was actually chosen to appeal to the entire province. “We make Iceberg Vodka, Iceberg Water, we’re the leading jurisdiction for Arctic research. The ice cap is iconic here.”

Continue…

Apple’s Lion: a step toward a unified operating system

By Peter Nowak - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 12 Comments

Apple CEO Steve Jobs talks about the new Apple Mac X Lion at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2010. (AP Photo/Tony Avelar)

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when I stopped caring about computer operating systems, but it was definitely at some point during the past two and a half years. I bought my first Mac back in March 2009, which is when I started delving into the heavy-duty writing of Sex, Bombs and Burgers, and since then I honestly haven’t thought much about the software powering my computer because it simply just worked.

That’s opposed to my previous experiences with other operating systems, where I generally spent more time worrying about getting the computer to run properly than on what I was actually supposed to be doing with it.

So when Apple released the updated Snow Leopard OS later in 2009, I really didn’t care. I was quite pleased with what was already on my computer, its predecessor Leopard, so I didn’t even bother upgrading. Similarly, I wasn’t too excited about the newest Lion operating system, released last week. I did download Lion onto a Macbook Air laptop, however, just to check it out.

Thorough reviews are all over the web, so I won’t delve too deeply into what’s new. Essentially, there are a couple nifty improvements among the 250 new features touted by Apple, most of which are likely to be familiar to anyone using the iOS found on Apple’s iPads, iPhones and iPods.

Chief among the new features is gesture control, which is available on compatible computers with trackpads – either on laptops or as side accessories. Besides just controlling the cursor on screen with one finger as we’re used to doing, now swiping up or down with two fingers will scroll the screen correspondingly. Swiping up with three fingers, meanwhile, will bring up Mission Control, which I’ll get to in a second. The feature also brings the pinch-to-zoom capability, made famous by the iPhone, to computers. Pinching in and out on websites zooms in on them the same way as it does on an iOS device.

Although it’s a neat feature, I’m not too crazy about gesture control on computers. As other reviewers have noted, tablets and phones are mostly media consumption devices while computers are largely devoted to creation. While whooshing around with your fingers is great if you’re watching movies and reading websites, that sort of interface isn’t the best for when you’re editing videos or, ahem, writing blog posts. Whether or not this particular feature proves practical is up for debate.

Mission Control is a sort of home screen where you can look at everything you’ve got open, then switch to what you want quickly. It’s handy if you often have tons of stuff running at once. I’m not exactly a power user in that I only have a few things going at any given time, so I can’t see myself using this feature much, the same way I barely touched its predecessor, Exposé.

Lion’s other main feature is the Launchpad, which is instantly recognizable to anyone who has used an iOS device. Launchpad calls up essentially the same grid of applications found on an iPad or iPhone. And, just as on those devices, the app pages can be navigated by swiping sideways on the touchpad.

Lion also installs the Mac app store right on the computer’s dock. While the store was available to users of Snow Leopard after they downloaded it, it’s a little more front and centre on Lion. Launching it brings up the same sort of one-stop software house found on iOS devices – free apps such as Twitter are available, as are paid ones (the Lego Star Wars Saga video game is only $29.99!).

The app store is a nice-if-not-entirely-necessary concept in that it brings a lot of software together into one place. However, anyone who wants to buy an Adobe product probably already knows they can simply get it from the company’s own website.

When all of the above is put together, it’s very clear Apple is trying to nudge its computers closer to working like its mobile devices. Gesture control and a focus on apps are basically what made the iPhone such a phenomenon. It’s no surprise then, that the company wants all of its products to be more like the iPhone. The Lion operating system therefore seems to be the first real step in that direction.

The complete OS can be downloaded for $30, a measly price for anyone who wants to stay up to date on the latest features. But, like I said at the top of the post, there’s still no real urgent reason to upgrade. Mac users really can’t go wrong either way.

Lion’s biggest accomplishment, however, is in proving that the race for the unified operating system is most definitely on. Microsoft last month issued a video that gave a first glimpse at its upcoming Windows 8 operating system, which will evidently work on computers, tablets and phones. Google also has some work to do in unifying its computer-based Chrome operating system with the various flavours of Android that run on phones and tablets.

A unified operating system that works across all devices is something of a holy grail in that it can tie customers to one specific company. If you have an iPhone, for example, you’re likely to want your computer and tablet to work nice and smoothly with it, which might motivate you to also buy a Mac and an iPad.

A unified operating system is therefore not unlike the telecom service provider’s bundle, where getting multiple products from the same company provides a benefit to the customer. In the telecom world, that’s usually a discount on each service, whereas in the computing world it’s ease of interoperability.

Ironically though, the real success of these eventual unified operating systems may not lie in how well they succeed in tying their own devices together, but rather in how well they work with the other guys’ OSes. While there are benefits to using only one company’s products, nobody likes to be forced to do so. The smart ones will do well to remember that and not get too myopic.

Frank Darabont Bails on ‘Walking Dead’

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 9:36 PM - 3 Comments

There were a lot of stories, some maybe true, some maybe not, that Frank Darabont was having trouble adjusting to the job of running The Walking Dead, even though the first season was very short. Now he has stepped down from the showrunner job, sparing himself the need to turn out a whole 13 episode season.

The theory in the linked post and others is that Darabont is a writer-director, not really a showrunner. He wrote and directed the pilot, generally considered the best part of the series. (AMC has now done two straight shows, The Walking Dead and The Killing, where the series didn’t really live up to the pilot, but in fairness, not living up to the pilot is a long-standing tradition of U.S. television drama.) Pilots are well-suited to the skill set of a feature writer-director: he writes the script and shoots it, just with less money and in a more compressed amount of time than a feature. Running the subsequent series, at least in the U.S., is obviously different.

Even a very hands-on showrunner has to do a lot of delegating. Someone else had to write at least the first drafts of the script most weeks. Someone else almost always has to direct. So the showrunner’s job is to oversee the cranking-out of all these episodes while putting his or her personal stamp – or at least a consistent style – on all of them. Darabont isn’t the first movie person to be less than fully right for that job. One random example, film and TV director Don Siegel took a job as producer on the series “The Legend of Jesse James,” and told Peter Bogdanovich that he regretted it: “I directed the pilot and became the series producer, a job that I’m not equipped to do – an enormous amount of detail. There’s no time to direct if you’re going to be a producer.”

I don’t know that Darabont’s self-demotion (he’s not leaving completely, just not running it) will change the show much, for good or bad, since he has a second-in-command who can slide into the job for now. And of course the demands of the original comic-book source, along with the ratings success of the first season, mean that certain things will be similar no matter who’s running it.

Bestsellers – Week of July 25th, 2011

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 6:12 PM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

The Stock [Phrase] Company

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 6:11 PM - 0 Comments

You may have seen this compilation of movie clips where people say “we’ve got company,” but it’s new to me. I always found it weird that the line turned up verbatim in so many films. Normally a stock phrase is one that is simple enough that you could imagine almost anybody saying it in that situation; the most-used phrase is supposedly “let’s get out of here,” and you can put that into the mouth of any character. But “we’ve got company” is such a clunky phrase, and seems to characterize someone in a specific way (flippant in the face of danger). Yet you hear it all the time, or used to. I guess that when writers or directors are looking for some quick phrase to insert into an action sequence that mostly doesn’t depend on dialogue, they tend to go for phrases they’ve heard before.

Here’s a “let’s get out of here” compilation, by the way. It would be even longer if “let’s get the hell out of here” were counted.

Just because it should be free, doesn’t mean you can steal it

By Alex Derry - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 4:56 PM - 11 Comments

Photo by Chris Devers c/o Flickr Creative Commons

Aaron Swartz was arrested last week after allegedly breaking into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s computer network to play Robin Hood—stealing academic journals from the ivory tower and making them available for free online. The 24-year-old online activist and then-fellow at Harvard now stands accused of fraud. The prosecution, led by U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Carmen M. Ortiz, alleges that between September 24, 2010 and January 6, 2011, Swartz repeatedly broke into M.I.T.’s restricted computer wiring closet, accessed the network using an anonymous email address (at one time shielding his face with a bicycle helmet to hide his identity from security), and illegally hacked his way into the school’s JSTOR account to download 4.8 million articles. At one point near the end of his heist, according to the indictment, Swartz fled M.I.T. security officials attempting to question him.

Swartz, an early contributor to reddit and the co-founder of Demand Progress, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization specializing in online campaigns for progressive causes, including protecting internet freedom and protesting the Patriot Act, may have disclosed a possible motivation behind his alleged actions three years ago. In his “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” released in 2008, he rallied against what he saw as the private monopoly of public culture:

“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks.”

Open access ‘hacktivists’ like Swartz argue that academic journals constitute open data that should be freely available for the benefit of public knowledge. As Matt Blaze, a computer scientist at Princeton University, puts it, expecting authors to release their intellectual property to copyright is “quaintly out of touch with the needs of researchers and academics who no longer expect the delay and expense of seeking out printed copies of far flung documents.” The New York Times even lauded Swartz for a similar hack in 2009, when he and “a small group of dedicated open-government activists teamed up to push the court records system into the 21st century,” by downloading and releasing to the public over 19 million pages of court documents from the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, described as “cumbersome, arcane and not free.” While government officials were beside themselves, Swartz and his crew had broken no laws.

Matt Ingram of Gigaom.com finds Swartz’s recent indictment disturbing, and argues that what the online activist did was no worse than when Mark Zuckerberg downloaded photos from Harvard’s network to create the beta version of Facebook. “It’s certainly nowhere near the kind of espionage that the government is alleging occurred in the case of WikiLeaks and the diplomatic cables it published, or the hacking that groups such as Anonymous and Lulzsec are accused of being involved in. What could possibly [be] gained by going after a young programmer for trying to liberate academic research from a library?” In a statement, Demand Progress Executive Director David Segal said that Swartz’s indictment was “like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”

But in reading the indictment, “liberating academic research” is not the charge he is facing. The four counts leveled against Swartz are for wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. Timothy B. Lee of Forbes.com also notes that M.I.T. students’ access to JSTOR was cut off for several days following the Mission Impossible-inspired data breach, no doubt providing students much-needed fodder for the old “hacker ate my homework” excuse. Like the comedian who threw a pie at Rupert Murdoch and succeeded only in victimizing a man who was doing just fine making himself look bad, such actions make JSTOR “look like an injured, even magnanimous, party and gives them an excuse to make their policies more restrictive.”

Swartz wasn’t arrested for reading under the covers with a flashlight after bedtime. He faces allegations of deliberately breaking into someone else’s bedroom and re-wiring the lighting completely before even getting under the covers, all while wearing a mask. While the purpose of distributing JSTOR’s content for free on file-sharing sites may seem bizarre grounds for federal charges, fraud and trespassing aren’t.

Whether Swartz should be facing felony counts that could bring him up to 35 years in prison for actions, which while perhaps brazen and illegal, harmed no one, is another question altogether—JSTOR is not pursuing legal action against him and say they have no interest in doing so because the articles have been re-secured (although plenty of documents have already appeared online). However misguided such methods may be, it seems unfair to punish someone so severely for wanting to help the general public access a science journal, which would normally be available only to an elite group of graduate students.

What do we need to know?

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 4:22 PM - 12 Comments

Colin Horgan explores the question of public life and personal health.

Privacy is an important consideration, says Asselin. “Unless something’s very meaningful in terms of disease or condition, I don’t think people should have the obligation to tell everyone about everything,” he said.

Meisel says it raises questions of the public’s reach into the private lives of those who serve their communities. “My guess with the media now being so invasive, we’re in danger of really depriving politicians of so much privacy that some people who could make a great contribution in politics won’t enter politics because they don’t want to expose themselves to that.”

This question came up yesterday on the specific of what type of cancer Jack Layton is now dealing with (it was later reported that doctors don’t yet know). There’s certainly a case to be made that the public isn’t necessarily entitled to much more than the basic information about the health issue and whether the politician will be remaining in his elected position. In batting the issue around yesterday on Twitter, I did wonder whether a prime minister might be expected to be more thorough in disclosure and explanation.

How much longer in Libya?

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 2:49 PM - 5 Comments

At the outset of the Libyan mission, the Prime Minister ventured a prediction of Colonel Moammar Gadhafi’s impending fate.

“He simply will not last very long,” Harper said. “I think that is the basis on which we’re moving forward. If I am being frank here, that is probably more understood than spoken aloud. But I just said it aloud.”

That was more than four months ago. Yesterday, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs used the term “stalemate” to describe the situation. Continue…