Hacktivists: Fighters of privacy AND open sharing?

              Talking about piracy in the last post got me thinking about some of the bigger stories in the last few years that deal with piracy and content.  I came upon an article about Megaupload in the NBC News section on technology titled "Kim Dotcom is the anti-Zuckerberg: Share nothing, encrypt everything, be happy".  Basically, Kim Dotcom (yes that's his real name) built a website where people can store information anonymously and share it the same way.  Sounds great to most people, as we always prefer privacy in our regular lives.  Personally, I think Kim Dotcom knew people would use it to share movies and other copyrighted material.  He carries himself as kind of a mafioso sleazebag anyway.  But something I never really put into perspective was the privacy idea he touts.  The hacktivist group Anonymous supports the efforts of Kim Dotcom and other websites that do this and here is why I think they do.  Sites like Google with it's Google Drive, a virtual locker for personal storage, and Facebook both have a heavy account interface with private information.  Well that information gets sold and more importantly the government can ask for it anytime they would like without you knowing. In Google's transparency report for 2012, they complied with different governments 88% of the time when they were asked for peoples private information or to delete certain things from their search engine.  Sites like Megaupload are almost impossible to determine where information comes from without digging into it's servers further, people do not need an account.

             The article from NBC News also mentions the fact that 50% of Megaupload's content was never accessed more than once, meaning it was most likely not movies or music.  It also mentions that several world governments and our own military stored information on the site.  What would happen if those names of people using Megaupload were released?  Contrary to how my opinion my appear, I would hope nothing would happen.  People expect privacy.  You wouldn't buy a home with government cameras in the closet to make sure your garments or handbags weren't counterfeit.  I don't think highly of people like Kim Dotcom, knowingly getting rich off of stealing other peoples intellectual property, but I do support 100% privacy and that is what his site did and what Anonymous supports.  It brings back my thinking that government and lawmakers might be scared of technology and thus are making examples of people to thwart these ideas.  On the contrary, maybe if it didn't cost the average family over $50 to see a movie, sites like this one wouldn't be as big as they are.  Frankly there are hundreds of other sites like Megaupload, it was just the grandest accounting for nearly 4% of all internet traffic at one point.  It is apparent that there is and will be to come an absolute huge amount of conflict where intellectual property laws are concerned within the internet.  Going back to privacy, here is a very interesting video from the TED conference in 2011 talking about Facebook, Google, and other website's abilities to tailor even your search results just for you.  SCARY.

               I want to continue this post by falling back to my discussion on Aaron Schwartz for a minute.  Speaking about intellectual property,   I read a great article in The Wall Street Journal titled "Aaron Swartz believed a wrong made a right".  I appreciated the author of this article, David Weidner, because he pointed out Aaron Swartz's flaws, such as depression, as a problem for a hacktivist; contrary to the previous article in this post where I thought the author, Helen Popkin, pretended Kim Dotcom was some kind of god.  It's kind humerous to see how Popkin initially touts Dotcom as the "Osama bin Laden" of downloading in some sort of positive light as I don't believe Weidner would ever use analogies like that to describe anyone.  This second article by Weidner talked about how JSTOR, the database Swartz hacked, gave away scholarly material for free to Africans and also allowed users to have unlimited downloads.  I did not know these things a few posts back on this blog.  Swartz took over 4 million articles from the database and that is roughly equivalent to every person in just Botswana, Africa (population 2 million approx.) downloading 2 articles a piece.  Whats the difference?  JSTOR didn't obviously see one, as they didn't pursue Swartz, but U.S. attorney general Eric Holder did.  Why he decided to pursue Swartz is a question many have asked.  Personally I think it was to make example out of him.  I just can't figure out why the government doesn't go after more blatant offenders more often.  Why did they choose Aaron Swartz with such a huge gray area involved?