I’ll tell you what other clams are not opening up to fishing expeditions and are tighter than the clams in the federal government — the hacker community in MIT. They know more than they are telling; they aren’t talking. They are scared.

I’ve studied all the blogs and chat and tweets on this and thought about it a lot, and my question now is this:

Did Aaron Swartz help Bradley Manning download all those quarter of a million cables and other files illegally by helping create for him a scraper script and/or helping him move and store the files?

After all, Swartz really got to be an expert at that sort of “movement” work — he dl’d the Library of Congress, PACER, and JSTOR files in record time and efficiently, although he did get caught. Even so, he was an expert.

Or did Swartz help Danny Clark do that, and Danny Clark helped Manning? Or some other MIT hacker?

The feds were absolutely right to fish in these waters, because Bradly Manning, who is properly arrested and will be appropriately tried, regardless of any issues with his mistreatment, did go to the MIT hacker community in 2010 with his then-boyfriend while on leave during his service in the Iraq war, and did then eventually reach Assange at WikiLeaks and did from all accounts leak the files he had obtained. I always thought he had to have had help.

The narratives at Empty Wheel and other sites where people ask a lot of questions to try to prove their case that the “feds are overreaching” in fact help create the plausible set of suppositions that Swartz and/or others helped WikiLeaks. Certainly Jacob Appelbaum was front and center helping WikiLeaks and was properly questioned by the grand jury.

Once you suspend the hagiography, there really are a lot of questions to ask about Swartz, and you could sadly conclude that he killed himself precisely because he realized that he had either inadvertently or deliberately helped prosecute Manning, or sent someone else to the grand jury, or worse. We’ll never know. But it’s more likely he committed suicide over the despair and shame of such a thing, than fear of serving a mere six months in jail, in the plea bargain. That’s never been a persuasive reason for his suicide. (Naturally, his suicide could be completely unrelated to his Internet causes and his hacking case, but based on sheer depression or personal matters.)

You have to ask what it was that his ex-girlfriend told the grand jury as well, she’s mentioned in the court documents.

My operating theory is that WikiLeaks, with this accusation that Swartz was their source, was hoping to act quickly to pin the blame that might accrue to any hacker at MIT or anywhere else in the Manning loop on a dead man who wouldn’t talk. I also assume they’d like to distract attention from Jacob Appelbaum — again, to a dead man. They are opportunistic thugs. This is in keeping with their character.

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/02/did-aaron-swartz-help-bradley-manning-hack-for-wikileaks.html

One of the things that is tripping you up here is your certitude that the Feds “drew a blank” back then on these connections. You don’t know that because the trial hasn’t taken place. That’s just something some prosecutor or other party leaked to the Wall Street Journal and which you reported because it fit your theories of fishing and overreach. You don’t know that they leaked that as a false flag operation or just because there are wars among them on the theories of the case. It means nothing.

There is nothing to say that the Lamo chat logs published in Wired in fact will be used in the trial. They don’t quite rise to the test of “trial truth,” in my view, but this is a court martial. Furthermore, investigators said they found further proof of Manning’s contact with Assange during the hearings, and we haven’t seen that this was somehow “thrown out,” or “countered” by the lawyer, who actually hasn’t really made much of a robust defense on “I am a political prisoner!” grounds, preferring to lurch from “my transgender made me do it!” to procedural wrangles and admissiblity wrangles that haven’t worked — to simply gutting out his client’s time in solitary so he can book it against his sentence to have him serve less time. What a strategy! 900 days! That’s like the Siege of Leningrad. He should have been holding press conferences daily on the court house steps. He wasn’t.

Remember David House? He wouldn’t talk to the grand jury. But he published his notes. His notes let us know that the grand jury asked House whether Danny Clark had breakfast on the morning following the BUILDS open house with Bradley Manning at the Oxford Spa. So that means there is testimony about that or an allegation about that or something. He pleaded the fifth. But David House got mugged on Twitter and accused of all kinds of Bradsploitation by bloggers, and he seems rather quiet lately. The grand jury wanted to know about the girl with the purple hair, too. Who *is* the girl with the purple hair?

I think you nervously posted this blog because you think there might be something to it and you just want to be on the record as admitting it in case it comes out later. But you and Empty Wheel and other leftwing bloggers want to convert your analysis of “the fishing expedition” into a “prosecutorial overreach” narrative, even if in fact it may have been justified. You all want to liberate stuff and hack stuff, but committing treason big time, you might want to stop short there, and begin to mumble piously about “crossing a line” as Lessig has been doing about his dead protege.

Swartz’s FOIAs were made not out of concern for Manning — he didn’t really campaign for Manning. They were made for concern about what Bradley told House in the brig in Quantico during his visit, to see what in fact House may have given them or may have said that they monitored or something.

Bradly Manning is going to allocute (confess). That means he might name names. There may be no way to get those people he named because maybe the feds can’t pin it on people. Maybe it’s not a crime for you as a script kiddie to give scraping tips to Bradass87. But maybe if you did you might want to consider moving to Canada now.