So, let’s walk through this interesting defense-via-faint-damnation of Aaron Swartz by Timothy B Lee.
- Timothy B. Lee’s article, summed up, is as follows: Aaron Swartz was right to hack into JSTOR and take all those articles without paying for them, but he went about being right very, very stupidly by physically breaking into things while
stealingdownloading other people’s articles. [Somebody on Twitter made the objection that double-quotes suggest a direct quote, instead of me just summing up Lee in a mean and vicious manner. Being magnanimous in victory and all that, I’ll be nice and ‘fix’ it. – ML] This is a standard telecommie (one of my readers at MoeLane.com prefers ‘infosocialist,’ which works too) defense; which is… interesting. - Well, who is Timothy B. Lee? Well, his Forbes profile says that, among other things, he’s an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.
- And when you go over to Timothy Lee’s Cato Institute profile, it notes there (but not on his website’s disclosure statement) that Lee “was the co-author of RECAP, a software project that promotes public access to federal court records.” Continue reading Cato’s Timothy Lee’s conflict of interest with regard to Aaron Swartz?