Ghislaine Maxwell Charged In Manhattan Federal Court For Conspiring With Jeffrey Epstein To Sexually Abuse Minor

Epstein Confidante Ghislaine Maxwell Arrives in New York City, Bail Hearing Looms

Maxwell is Alleged to Have Facilitated, Participated in Acts of Abuse

                   Additionally Charged With Perjury in Connection With 2016 Depositions

Audrey Strauss, the Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, William F. Sweeney Jr., the Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), and Dermot Shea, Commissioner of the New York City Police Department (“NYPD”), announced that GHISLANE MAXWELL was arrested this morning and charged with enticing a minor to travel to engage in criminal sexual activity, transporting a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, conspiracy to commit both of those offenses, and perjury in connection with a sworn deposition.  The indictment unsealed today alleges that between at least in or about 1994 through 1997, MAXWELL and co-conspirator Jeffrey Epstein exploited girls as young as 14, including by enticing them to travel and transporting them for the purpose of engaging in illegal sex acts.  As alleged, knowing that Epstein had a preference for young girls, MAXWELL played a critical role in the grooming and abuse of minor victims that took place in locations including New York, Florida, and New Mexico.  In addition, as alleged, MAXWELL made several false statements in sworn depositions in 2016.  MAXWELL is expected to be presented this afternoon in the federal court in New Hampshire. This case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Alison J. Nathan.

Acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said:  “As alleged, Ghislaine Maxwell facilitated, aided, and participated in acts of sexual abuse of minors.  Maxwell enticed minor girls, got them to trust her, and then delivered them into the trap that she and Jeffrey Epstein had set. She pretended to be a woman they could trust.  All the while, she was setting them up to be abused sexually by Epstein and, in some cases, Maxwell herself.  Today, after many years, Ghislaine Maxwell finally stands charged for her role in these crimes.”

FBI Assistant Director William F. Sweeney Jr. said:  “Preserving the innocence of children is among the most important responsibilities we carry as adults.  Like Epstein, Ms. Maxwell chose to blatantly disregard the law and her responsibility as an adult, using whatever means she had at her disposal to lure vulnerable youth into behavior they should never have been exposed to, creating the potential for lasting harm. We know the quest for justice has been met with great disappointment for the victims, and that reliving these events is traumatic. The example set by the women involved has been a powerful one. They persevered against the rich and connected, and they did so without a badge, a gun, or a subpoena - and they stood together. I have no doubt the bravery exhibited by the women involved here has empowered others to speak up about the crimes of which they've been subjected.”

NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said:  “The heinous crimes these charges allege are, and always will be abhorrent for the lasting trauma they inflict on victims. I commend our investigators, and law enforcement partners, for their continuing commitment to bringing justice to the survivors of sexual assault, everywhere.”

If you believe you are a victim of the sexual abuse perpetrated by Jeffrey Epstein, please contact the FBI at 1-800-CALL FBI, and reference this case.

According to the Indictment[1] unsealed today in Manhattan federal court:

From at least 1994 through at least 1997, GHISLAINE MAXWELL assisted, facilitated, and participated in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of minor girls by, among other things, helping Jeffrey Epstein to recruit, groom, and ultimately abuse victims known to MAXWELL and Epstein to be under the age of 18.  The victims were as young as 14 years old when they were groomed and abused by MAXWELL and Epstein, both of whom knew that their victims were in fact minors.  As a part and in furtherance of their scheme to abuse minor victims, MAXWELL and Epstein enticed and caused minor victims to travel to Epstein’s residences in different states, which MAXWELL knew and intended would result in their grooming for and subjection to sexual abuse.

As alleged, MAXWELL enticed and groomed minor girls to be abused in multiple ways. For example, MAXWELL attempted to befriend certain victims by asking them about their lives, taking them to the movies or taking them on shopping trips, and encouraging their interactions with Epstein.  MAXWELL also acclimated victims to Epstein’s conduct simply by being present for victim interactions with Epstein, which put victims at ease by providing the assurance and comfort of an adult woman who seemingly approved of Epstein’s behavior.  Additionally, to make victims feel indebted to Epstein, MAXWELL would encourage victims to accept offers of financial assistance from Epstein, including offers to pay for travel or educational expenses.  MAXWELL also normalized and facilitated sexual abuse by discussing sexual topics with victims, encouraging them to massage Epstein, and undressing in front of a victim.

As MAXWELL and Epstein intended, these grooming behaviors left minor victims vulnerable and susceptible to sexual abuse by Epstein.  MAXWELL was then present for certain sexual encounters between minor victims and Epstein, such as interactions where a minor victim was undressed, and ultimately MAXWELL was present for sex acts perpetrated by Epstein on minor victims.  That abuse included sexualized massages during which a minor victim was fully or partially nude, as well as group sexualized massages of Epstein involving a minor victim where MAXWELL was present.

As alleged, minor victims were subjected to sexual abuse that included, among other things, the touching of a victim’s breasts or genitals, placing a sex toy such a vibrator on a victim’s genitals, directing a victim to touch Epstein while he masturbated, and directing a victim to touch Epstein’s genitals.  MAXWELL and Epstein’s victims were groomed or abused at Epstein’s residences in New York, Florida, and New Mexico, as well as MAXWELL’s residence in London, England.

Additionally, in 2016, while testifying under oath in a civil proceeding, MAXWELL repeatedly made false statements, including about certain specific acts and events alleged in the Indictment.

*                      *                      *

GHISLAINE MAXWELL, 58, is charged with one count of enticing a minor to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, one count of conspiracy to entice a minor to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, one count of transporting a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, one count of conspiracy to transport a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, and two counts of perjury, each of which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

The statutory maximum penalties are prescribed by Congress and are provided here for informational purposes only, as any sentencing of the defendant would be determined by the judge.

Ms. Strauss praised the outstanding investigative work of the FBI and the NYPD.

This case is being handled by the Office’s Public Corruption Unit.  Assistant U.S. Attorneys Alex Rossmiller, Alison Moe, and Maurene Comey are in charge of the prosecution.

The charges contained in the Indictment are merely accusations.  The defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

Federal Appeals Court Orders Judge Sullivan To Explain Why He Is Hesitating To Dismiss The Michael Flynn Case

Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, twice pleaded guilty to lying to F.B.I. agents about his conversations with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition.Credit...Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

Judge Is Ordered to Explain Handling of Flynn Case as F.B.I. Announces Review

In the latest twists in a highly politicized case, Michael Flynn’s lawyers are trying to force a judge to end the case immediately, and the F.B.I. will weigh whether it committed misconduct.

By Charlie Savage, NY TIMES, May 22, 2020

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court panel has ordered a trial judge to explain why he is hesitating to grant the Justice Department’s request that he dismiss the criminal case against President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn.

Christopher A. Wray

The order came as the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, announced on Friday that the bureau would conduct an internal review of the investigation into Mr. Flynn, including to “determine whether any current employees engaged in misconduct” and evaluate whether the bureau should change any procedures.

The moves were the latest twists in a bizarre legal and political drama that has enveloped the prosecution of Mr. Flynn, who twice pleaded guilty to lying to F.B.I. agents in the Russia investigation about his conversations in December 2016 with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

“Everything about this case is unusual,” said David A. Sklansky, a Stanford professor of criminal law. “It’s unusual to ask a higher court to direct a lower court to do something before the lower court has had a chance to make up its own mind in the first instance — and that includes whether to dismiss a case.”

Mr. Flynn’s case has become a political cause for Mr. Trump and his supporters. This month, at Attorney General William P. Barr’s direction, the Justice Department asked the federal judge overseeing the case, Emmet G. Sullivan, to drop the matter, using as justification a disputed legal theory that Mr. Flynn’s false statements were immaterial to any legitimate investigation.

Mr. Barr had earlier intervened to seek a more lenient sentence for another Trump associate prosecuted in connection with the Russia investigation, Roger J. Stone Jr., than prosecutors had sought. In both cases, Mr. Barr’s moves prompted accusations that he was politicizing the department by showing special favor to presidential favorites.

Judge Sullivan responded to the abrupt reversal in the Flynn case by appointing a former mafia prosecutor and retired federal judge in Brooklyn, John Gleeson, to argue against the Justice Department’s new position. He also asked Mr. Gleeson to evaluate whether Mr. Flynn committed criminal contempt of court in the form of perjury, apparently because Mr. Flynn has made contradictory factual statements under oath in court, by admitting he knowingly lied and then saying he did not lie.

On Tuesday, Mr. Flynn’s defense lawyer, Sidney Powell, filed a petition with the appeals court seeking an order that would short-circuit Judge Sullivan’s review. She argued that her client had been mistreated and that the judge was legally required to drop a case if that was what the Justice Department decided to do.

Mr. Barr has made clear that he considers to be illegitimate the government’s counterintelligence effort to understand the scope of Russian election interference in 2016 and any links to the Trump campaign. He has commissioned John H. Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, to re-examine that investigation, and in January, he assigned another prosecutor, Jeff Jensen, the U.S. attorney in St. Louis, to go over the Flynn case files.

After Mr. Jensen’s review, the department disclosed to Ms. Powell several documents she has used to portray her client as a victim. Many experts in criminal law have disputed the notion that he was treated differently in any legally meaningful sense than countless other people under investigation who lack presidential ties and receive no special lenity.

The disclosures included notes by a former senior F.B.I. official musing about whether the goal in questioning Mr. Flynn was to get him to tell the truth, or to get him to lie so he could be fired or prosecuted. It also disclosed materials showing that James B. Comey, then the F.B.I. director, violated bureaucratic etiquette by dispatching the agents to interview Mr. Flynn without going through the office of the White House counsel.

And the review also disclosed internal F.B.I. files showing that the bureau had been about to close an investigation into Mr. Flynn specifically, having not found evidence that he was a Russian asset, when the question arose about why Mr. Flynn was repeatedly lying to colleagues like Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with the ambassador.

Because the Flynn investigation was still open as a bureaucratic matter, the F.B.I. agents used it as a basis to ask Mr. Flynn about his discussions with the ambassador. Before Mr. Barr’s intervention, the Justice Department had also portrayed the interview as separately justified by and material to its umbrella investigation into Russian election interference.

While Mr. Wray was not at the F.B.I. when agents interviewed Mr. Flynn, Mr. Trump has criticized him on and off since appointing him in 2017. Mr. Wray has been under renewed political pressure by Mr. Trump over the recent disclosures in the Flynn case, and the announcement that he has begun his own investigation, by itself, could function as a release valve.

The details of the inquiry, as described in an F.B.I. news release, appear to be limited and largely duplicative, however. The F.B.I.’s Inspection Division will conduct a review that will “complement” the review already underway by Mr. Jensen, largely using the same agents already assisting him, and his efforts will “take priority” if the two conflict.

The Inspection Division lacks the authority to impose disciplinary action against people no longer employed by the F.B.I., which covers most of the major players in the Flynn case. A few, however, including the case agent, William Barnett, and one of the agents who interviewed Mr. Flynn, Joe Pientka, are still at the bureau.

Ms. Powell’s petition to the appeals court, as has been her practice, was littered with hyperbolic language unusual for a legal document. The request for an immediate intervention initially appeared to be a long shot since Judge Sullivan has not declined to dismiss the case, but rather is conducting a review before making a decision. Mr. Barr had acknowledged in an interview with CBS News that dropping the case is not automatic and the judge “does have a say.”

But cases are randomly assigned to judges on the circuit, and Ms. Powell’s petition drew what may be an unusually favorable panel, the order on Thursday revealed.

Two of the three judges on it — Karen L. Henderson, an appointee of former President George Bush, and Neomi Rao, an appointee of Mr. Trump — have proved more willing than the majority of their colleagues to interpret the law in Mr. Trump’s favor in other politically charged cases, like disputes over congressional subpoenas for his financial records and whether Congress may see secret grand-jury evidence from the Russia investigation.

The third judge assigned to the Flynn panel, Judge Robert L. Wilkins, is an Obama appointee. He apparently voted to let stand a panel ruling against Mr. Trump in the case over a House subpoena for Mr. Trump’s financial records.

Should the panel issue an order to Judge Sullivan that he drop the Flynn charge without further consideration, it would not necessarily be the end of the matter, according to Mr. Sklansky and another criminal law professor, Samuel W. Buell of Duke University.

For one thing, they said, Judge Sullivan is likely to appoint a lawyer to represent him before the appellate panel, and that lawyer could ask the full appeals court or the Supreme Court to reverse any order shutting down his review.

Mr. Sklansky also said it would not necessarily take a decision by Judge Sullivan to push the matter further. He pointed to a rarely invoked rule that permits the full appeals court to order a rehearing on its own, without any petition, if the judges deem the matter to involve “a question of exceptional importance.”

On the other hand, if the three-judge panel decides against issuing an order to Judge Sullivan — or is overruled by the full court — Mr. Flynn’s legal team can appeal, too.

The immediate intervention the Flynn team is seeking — called a writ of mandamus — is disfavored and is supposed to be reserved for rare occasions “when a judge is off the reservation about the law,” Mr. Buell said. The general rule is that appeals courts are supposed to wait to intervene until a case has been decided and one side appeals.

“The idea of mandamusing a judge to tell him who he is or isn’t allowed to hear from when he’s deciding an issue is ridiculous,” Mr. Buell said. “But with what’s going on in the federal judiciary right now, I’ve given up predicting what ridiculous issues will and won’t be treated as nonridiculous.”

FBI Director Wray orders internal review of Flynn investigation

Norman Seabrook,President of the Correction Officers' Benevolent Association, is Arrested by the FBI For Pension Fund Fraud

What needs to be said: Seabrook's double dealing was well-known for many years. I guess it is better late than never.

Betsy Combier

betsy.combier@gmail.com
Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, National Public Voice

Editor, The NYC Public Voice

Correction Officers' Benevolent Association President Norman Seabrook was
arrested by the FBI on Wednesday morning.

The FBI has arrested the leader of a powerful city union on corruption charges in an ongoing investigation focusing on the NYPD and City Hall.

Norman Seabrook, longtime president of the Correction Officers' Benevolent Association, was arrested at his Bronx home Wednesday morning without incident.

• NYPD Officers Transferred, Put on Desk Duty Amid Probe

Investigators say Seabrook took kickbacks in connection with his union’s pension fund investments.

Seabrook allegedly received tens of thousands of dollars in payoffs and in exchange steered business to the Platinum investment fund. The former head of the fund, Murray Huberfeld, was also arrested Wednesday morning.

• De Blasio's Relationship to Donors Scrutinized

The news comes as the federal authorities investigate allegations that NYPD officers engaged in a cash-for-favors scheme, and as Mayor de Blasio’s campaign fundraising is under scrutiny. The mayor insists his fundraising followed all laws.

Seabrook has ties to two Borough Park fundraisers for the mayor — Jona Rechnitz and Jeremy Reichberg. The FBI investigating whether Rechnitz and Reichberg provided free vacations and other gifts to Seabrook and former NYPD Chief of Department Philip Banks.

• Sheldon Silver Convicted in Federal Corruption Trial

All have denied any wrongdoing.

NORMAN SEABROOK, MURRAY HUBERFELD ARRESTED IN CONNECTION WITH FEDERAL PROBE

LINK

BRONX, New York (WABC) --Norman Seabrook and hedge fund financier Murray Huberfeld 

were arrested Wednesday morning in connection with a federal investigation.

The two are charged with one count of honest services wire fraud and one count of conspiracy 

to commit honest services wire fraud. They will appear Wednesday in federal court in Lower Manhattan.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara is expected to discuss the arrests at a news conference.

The investigation predates the ongoing corruption probes in the New York City Police Department and the city government.

However, one of the Brooklyn businessmen at the central of the investigation, Jona Rechnitz, is believed to have referred Seabrook to Huberfeld.

Seabrook's invested $10 million from the union pension fund through Huberfeld and his Platinum Investment Fund.

Huberfeld is then alleged to have kicked back some of the money to the union president.

Federal investigators have been looking into Seabrook's relationship with Huberfeld for at least 

two years.

Huberfeld has prior arrests, including a 1993 fraud conviction. He also had to settle a separate 

action with the SEC in 1998.

FBI File On Internet Activist Aaron Swartz is Released

Aaron Swartz

 
Re-posted from Parentadvocates.org

Details of FBI Probe into Internet Activist Aaron Swartz Released
LINK 

NORTHRIDGE (BlackVault) – February 19, 2013 – The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has released the details of a 2009 investigation into internet activist Aaron Swartz to The Black Vault website (http://www.theblackvault.com). Swartz, an internet prodigy and self-made millionaire, was the subject of a probe into the misuse of the “Public Access to Court Electronic Records”, or PACER. PACER houses more than 500 million documents from the U.S. district courts, U.S. courts of appeals and the U.S. bankruptcy courts.
According to the Bureau, the Government Printing Office (GPO) realized the computer system that hosted the PACER database was compromised, and a single user session was being used to download millions of pages from the digital archive. Only seventeen libraries were authorized to access the files at that time, but it was believed that Swartz figured out a way to get in from outside those locations, and continually download documents without using the proper channels.
Although the information was in the public domain, the government was to be paid 8 cents per page for any digital copies obtained from the PACER system, and accessed only from the seventeen authorized libraries. But Swartz circumvented the proper channels, and directly accessed the information from the outside.

They estimated that Swartz downloaded more than 18 million documents, and uploaded them to a document sharing site onto the internet for the world to see. The newly release FBI File of Swartz chronicles the FBI investigation into this computer breach from 2009.

The documents detail their search for Swartz and the tracking of his multiple social network pages on Facebook, Linkedin, and even made note of his personal blog.
After his alleged suicide at the young age of 26, Swartz’ supporters believe that there is much more to the story that authorities are not releasing. These documents may shed some light on the investigation, and the relentless pursuit to prosecute him.
You can download the FBI file of Aaron Swartz at:
FBI File of Aaron Swartz

FEBRUARY 20, 2013
They Can't Stop the Movement
Aaron Swartz and the Fight for Information Freedom
by ALFREDO LOPEZ, Counterpunch
LINK

In the madness of our media-fed consciousness, the greatest threat to an informative news story is time. Given enough time, and the dysfunctional and disinformative way the mainstream media cover news, even the most important and revealing story quickly dies out.

That is, unless we who use alternative media keep that story alive.

So it is with the death of the remarkable technologist Aaron Swartz. It’s been only a month since Aaron apparently killed himself in his apartment here in Brooklyn and yet the story has pretty much disappeared from mainstream news. The threat is not only that the legacy of this remarkable young technologist will also disappear but that the analysis of his life and death and the policies they bring into relief will be frustrated.

During the brief spasm of mainstream coverage, the most prominent line being circulated was that he was a casualty of the sloppiness, pettiness and bullying of a federal government that went too far in its prosecution of him. The truth is that Aaron Swartz was a target of a deliberately vicious, sadistic government campaign in which the federal government wanted to make his pain an example to the entire progressive techie community. What’s more, his death was the outcome of a policy that is a threat to human freedom. That’s why we need to keep talking about Aaron Swartz.

To talk that talk, it’s important to be clear about what actually happened.

Swartz was a 26-year-old programmer and Internet activist whose accomplishments would be stellar for a person three times his age. He wrote many programs that are now used routinely on the Internet and its servers, he helped build resource websites to gather and provide those kinds of resources to people who needed them and he was active in organizing around issues of freedom and access. In the techie universe, he was a blazing super-star.

Like every committed progressive techie, Aaron Swartz believed that information should be accessible to everyone and, over the years, he campaigned against information hoarding and restriction and took concrete actions that dramatized that important issue. One day he walked into a server room at MIT (to which he had full, legal access) and set up a small device that captured files from a server belonging to JSTOR, a private company that was selling downloadable scholarly papers and materials for a dime a page. (This, by the way, is not money that goes to the actual creators of the materials in question. It goes to JSTOR and MIT. For the most part, the copyright laws are being used to enrich corporations, not creators, as publishers and employers routinely require the creators, on an entortionate take-it-or-leave-it basis, to sign over their control of copyright when they sign a publishing contract or an employment contract.)

Aaron downloaded everything without paying a penny, thereby violating JSTOR’s “terms of service” (the rules governing your interaction with the server). People at MIT can download stuff off that server for free but they can’t download it to redistribute it, and so MIT’s administration turned Aaron into the Feds, claiming that’s what he was going to do. The U.S. Attorney for that area of the country, Carmen Ortiz, apparently saw the potential for setting an example. She and her team of assistant attorneys went after Swartz with a vengeance, piling count upon count on in an indictment that accused him of felony theft.

They offered a stunned Swartz a deal: plead guilty to a felony and we’ll recommend six months in jail. He refused. He wasn’t guilty after all. So then they piled on more charges. At that point, if he were found guilty he could have gone to jail for over 35 years!

I don’t know what went through Aaron’s head as he put it into a noose that final Friday of his life. I know he was alone, and being alone makes everything scarier and more desperate. Some speculate that it was the case that drove him to suicide. Others say he was overcome by the depression that did, from time to time, plague him. Ortiz actually had the gall to argue that, had he taken their deal instead of stubbornly insisting on his innocence, none of this would have happened.

Such is the country we’re living in that a federal prosecutor would imply that someone’s death is the outcome of their stubborn desire to exercise their right to a legal defense.

In fact, had the case gone to court, it could well have ended in acquittal or very minor convictions. What Aaron did may have been a violation of “Terms of Service” but he wasn’t planning on selling anything and hadn’t yet distributed any of it. A jury would have been hard pressed to send this young man to jail for something people do everyday on the Internet.

But these government bullies were playing the odds that Aaron would crack, hand them a lovely legal precedent and serve as a “back off” warning to others who might have similar plans. They knew that, for a white middle-class kid with very little street experience, the prospect of going to jail was a nightmare and for a techie, who combats the inevitable isolation of his or her work by on-line relationships with the rest of humanity, being in a cell without a laptop would be akin to death.

So, one morning when he was alone (and probably at a moment when he felt as alone as a human being can feel) Aaron gave it up and we all suffered an enormous loss. The government people probably didn’t expect him to kill himself, but that doesn’t change the fact that they drove him to suicide.

Those of us who think about the Obama Administration’s policies on imprisonment without trial, detention in what are effectively concentration camps, and the use of slaughter (by drone and army) as a political tactic shouldn’t be surprised by what they did. But the question remains. Why did they do it?

There are so many battles going on over our right to information that it’s not easy to drill down to the real answer. There are battles, fought in courts, blogs and conferences, over copyright, website access, privacy, email and data protection, and freedom of satire, criticism and expression.

Thousands of actions by governments all over the world and hundreds of cases in our own country’s courts show a frightening, galloping trend toward information control. Small armies of progressive Internet activists have taken up that fight. We’re winning some and losing some.

Aaron Swartz was a major fighter in those struggles and he concentrated on the strategic lynchpin of all government and corporate policy on data: the notion that someone can actually own an idea or a body of information.

When you look at it soberly, the very concept is absurd. How in the world can any person claim ownership of an idea? In a world that is built on collaboration, populated by human beings whose key to survival has been our instinct to collaborate, has there ever been an “original idea”? Yet almost all law is based on that distorted and artificial concept, ignoring the combination of vast experience, conversations, reading, and research that hones every idea.

Techies understand. So collaborative is the work of a techie that the very notion of an original idea has no meaning in techie-talk. Nobody invents anything; they “play a leading role” in its development. You don’t write code alone; you combine libraries of code written and developed by thousands of others and freely available, with code gleaned from your interaction with other techies and you write the whole thing in languages collaboratively and collectively developed by programmers world-wide. All of this is free and it’s done by people who probably have never met.

Everything you use on the Internet develops that way. The Internet and the technology that supports and drives it are proof of the collaborative nature of all thinking and creation.

In other words, it’s a model for the kind of world a lot of us are trying to build.

That’s why the government, and the corporations that seek to subvert and control copyright law in the interest of profit, were so threatened by Aaron’s actions and the people he might influence. The question Aaron posed that day that he started downloading those documents was: Is research that is based on the experience and thinking of the entire human race not humanity’s property?

Of course, if we start treating information as the collective property of humanity, there are going to be some serious repercussions socially and economically. And that explains the fierceness of the battle between progressives and corporations (and governments serving corporations).

Progressive techies favor Free and Open Source Software because the collaboration needed to produce software means its ownership can’t be restricted. Companies believe in proprietary software because they’ve built their wealth stealing people’s thinking, claiming ownership over it, and then re-selling it to people.

Progressive techies believe in Internet privacy because any attempt to intrude upon, monitor or disrupt communication damages collaboration.

The government doesn’t even know what that means.

Many progressive techies find selling information based on the experiences of the rest of the human race a bizarre obscenity. Corporations live off that obscenity and governments obscenely support them.

Finally, progressive techies believe that complete access to and flow of information is fundamental to the success of struggles for democracy, justice and freedom. Most of the leading governments on earth spend much of their time trying to figure out how to close the faucet on that information flow and close the door on its source.

In the United States, the Obama Administration has not only encouraged but has effectively used on-line communications, and the president even positions himself as a champion of Internet freedom — periodically rattling a toy sabre at those governments that seek to curb it.

But that’s until you reach the bottom line: challenging the idea that someone can own information. That’s the Obama trigger: when people distribute on-sale information, copyrighted materials or information people need to have but that our government wants to keep hidden. At that point this administration has jumped on scores of techies and other Internet activists, taken them to trial, sent them to jail, or taken away their computers in a deal to avoid jail. They have done it with many techie activists, they are doing it with Bradley Manning and they want to do it to Julian Assange.

They just did it with Aaron Swartz.

And they are doing it all over the world.

You don’t hear about many of these cases, because our mass media ignore them and our progressive movements have failed to identify this as the critical political issue it is.

Perhaps that’s the challenge Aaron leaves us. In challenging government and corporate theft and hoarding of information, he also challenged our entire movement to stand up and oppose it. That’s what our techies do and, for our future’s sake, we can’t let any government do to another techie what it did to Aaron Swartz. Techies and their work are too important to us all and we need to tell the governments of the world, our own included, that to get to them, they’ll have to go through us.

ALFREDO LOPEZ is the newest member of the TCBH! collective. A long-time political activist and radical journalist, and founding member of the progressive web-hosting media service MayFirst/PeopleLink, he lives in Brooklyn, NY