Internet Freedom Day and Aaron Swartz

Jan 18: Internet Freedom Day

It has been called the largest online protest of all time:

• More than 1 billion people saw anti-SOPA messages on January 18
• 4 top-10, 13 top-100 US sites, 115,000 small and medium sites participated in strike, 50,000 blacked out all or part of site (WordPress network: 27,000 blackout and 17,000 ribbons)
• 10 million petition signers, 3 million emails, 100,000+ calls and 8 million Wikipedia call lookups to Congress opposing PIP3 million+ tweets mentioning “SOPA”, “PIPA”, “sopastrike”, “blackoutSOPA”, “stopSOPA”At least 13 senators backed away from the bill in one day. 5 co-sponsors dropped their support of the bill: Blunt, Boozman, Cardin, Hatch, and Rubio.

In celebration, the anniversary was called Internet Freedom Day, with the action items including:

• Join Demand Progress in calling for Justice for Aaron Swartz

• Sign the Declaration of Internet Freedom

• Take action to stop the Trans Pacific Partnership. It’s like SOPA on steroids and for many countries.

• Join Craig Newmark over at CraigConnects and write something about how the Internet gives you a voice!

• Access action alert! Write to Congress and tell them: We will defend the internet against any legislation that threatens our freedom of speech, privacy, and other fundamental rights.”

• Demand a privacy law update to stop the government from reading your email without a warrant.

• Fill out this UC Berkeley Survey and tell what SOPA/PIPA meant to you.

• Engage in a small act of civil disobedience and share this video of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech. Dr. King’s call for racial justice is as relevant today as it was in 1963. Because this speech is copyrighted, if SOPA had passed, entire websites could have been shut down just for linking to it.This speech is too important to be censored by broken copyright laws. Please share it today.

Fallout has continued from the Swartz tragedy:

• World wide web inventor Tim Berners Lee calling his prosecution a “travesty of justice.” 
• A petition to fire U.S. Attorney Ortiz whose office prosecuted the case has exceeded the 25,000 signatures required to merit a written response from the White House (and is now at over 40,000 signatures).
• Silicon Valley Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) criticized the prosecution, saying the handling of the case “pretty outrageous” and “way out of line”, while Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO) said the charges were “ridiculous and trumped-up.”
• Ms. Ortiz has released a statement that asserted that

The career prosecutors handling this matter took on the difficult task of enforcing a law they had taken an oath to uphold, and did so reasonably.  [She said that his actions, while a violation of the law] did not warrant the severe punishments authorized by Congress. [She said her office offered Swartz six months at a low-security prison if he pleaded guilty to the charges.] At no time did this office ever seek — or ever tell Mr. Swartz’s attorneys that it intended to seek — maximum penalties under the law.