I remain haunted by the death of Aaron Swartz. In fact, his passing is still one of the first things I mention to people when I want to provide an example of how out of control and drunk on power the government is. The incredible accomplishments he achieved in his short life are nothing short of extraordinary, and the fact the feds mercilessly attacked him and drove him to suicide epitomizes the unfortunate rapid decline of our culture and civilization. Amazingly, Aaron continues to bless the world with gifts from his brilliant mind even after his passing. In this case I am referring to Strongbox, an encrypted and more secure way of providing information to journalists. It was a project Aaron was working on with Kevin Poulsen before his death and was launched by the New Yorker a few days ago. From Techdirt:
The New Yorker has announced a new anonymous document sharing system called Strongbox, that will allow people to anonymously and securely submit documents to reporters from the New Yorker. Other publications have tried to set up something like this — often inspired by Wikileaks — but for the most part, they’ve been full of security holes, sometimes big and serious ones. What may be more interesting than the fact that this system is being set up is the story behind it. It’s based on DeadDrop, an open source system that was put together by Aaron Swartz and Kevin Poulsen.
Poulsen has the backstory of DeadDrop here, which is well worth reading. Basically, he and Aaron worked on this project on and off for quite some time, and it was only just completed a few weeks before Aaron’s death.
Of course, Poulsen leaves out his own history here as well. As (perhaps?) many of you know, Poulsen was a somewhat infamous hacker back in the day who eventually (after avoiding law enforcement for quite some time) went to prison for some of his hacks. Since then, he’s become one of my favorite journalists, writing for SecurityFocus and then Wired (and writing a wonderful book, Kingpin about some more recent hackers). While Poulsen and Swartz met long before Swartz was indicted — and Swartz and Poulsen were indicted for very different types of activities — having the two of them work together on a project like this is really quite fascinating.
Here’s how it works.
Full article here.
In Liberty,
Mike
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Great news for whistleblowers!
Really good to know. People have to organize properly considering these criminals running things are getting laws all over the place passed to criminalize whistleblowing. Think how insane that is and the level of brainwashing taken on these legislators and politicians to go along with this total anti-American nonsense. These people should be tried as traitors to the country.