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Friday, January 18, 2013

Private Posts on Facebook Revealed

A post shared among members of a private Facebook group is inadvertently shared on a public site, just as Facebook tries to assure users that its latest privacy settings let them fine tune who sees what.

Private Posts on Facebook Revealed

A post shared among members of a private Facebook group is inadvertently shared on a public site, just as Facebook tries to assure users that its latest privacy settings let them fine tune who sees what.

Live Updates on Armstrong\'s Confession

The Onion's The Onion’s “Cheat to Win” bracelet.

As the second part of Lance Armstrong’s televised confession that he doped and lied his way to seven Tour de France titles is broadcast on the Oprah Winfrey Network Friday night, The Lede will have real-time fact-checking and analysis from New York Times reporters, including Juliet Macur and Naila-Jean Meyers. We will also round up reactions from fans, bloggers, journalists and fellow riders once the broadcast and live stream gets underway, at 9 p.m. Eastern Time.

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Updates on the Gun Violence Debate

The Lede is following the debate on gun violence in the wake of the shootings in Newtown, Conn., with reports from our correspondents and from around the Web.

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Updates on the Gun Violence Debate

The Lede is following the debate on gun violence in the wake of the shootings in Newtown, Conn., with reports from our correspondents and from around the Web.

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Algerian TV Interviews Workers Freed From Gas Facility

Footage from Algeria’s ENTV news channel.

Algeria’s ENTV news channel interviewed a number of local and foreign workers who had been held captive in a gas facility and were freed on Friday, with some of them expressing relief from hospital beds or a bus in this video.

The footage was some of the first of its kind to be broadcast as Algerian special forces continued to rescue the hostages. As our colleague Steven Erlanger reports, some of the workers managed to hide or escape

The interviews were in Arabic and English, with some of the men speaking from what appeared to be a medical clinic or from the In Amenas hospital. The men interviewed were asked repeatedly what they thought of the Algerian Army, and they expressed relief and gratitude.

A man who identified himself as a Turkish worker said: “We were in our rooms. We just heard what was happening. They saved us.”

Some of the workers were injured. “It happened so fast,” said a man with a bandaged head lying on a hospital bed.

Many of those interviewed spoke with British accents. One man who identified himself as Darren Matthews from England, said: “I feel safe at the moment but I won’t feel 100 percent happy until I’m back in the U.K. after I see my family. My heart goes out to the guys that are still there and hopefully everyone comes home safe because, at the end of the day, it’s only work.”

Another British man said he was very reliev! ed to be out. “As much as I’m glad to be out, my thoughts are with colleagues that are still there at the moment.” Asked what he thought about the Algerian military, he said, “I have never been so relieved as when they came and got us off site.”

In Arabic, a number of workers, who said they were employees of BP and Halliburton, described being rescued by the army. “The soldiers hit the terrorists. We were all in a room, all 260 of us, standing there, and that’s when they struck them by plane. We knew there was a back door, so we broke it down and escaped,” one man said.

The man said that a leader of the kidnappers, named Taher, was killed by the Algerian forces. “After that there was very heavy shooting, but we got out and escaped.”

Another appeared to be describing a second army assault on the compound, saying, in part, “The army went in at around 12 or 12 and something, they went in with planes and every part of the army, like the special forces.”

Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.



Algerian TV Interviews Workers Freed From Gas Facility

Footage from Algeria’s ENTV news channel.

Algeria’s ENTV news channel interviewed a number of local and foreign workers who had been held captive in a gas facility and were freed on Friday, with some of them expressing relief from hospital beds or a bus in this video.

The footage was some of the first of its kind to be broadcast as Algerian special forces continued to rescue the hostages. As our colleague Steven Erlanger reports, some of the workers managed to hide or escape

The interviews were in Arabic and English, with some of the men speaking from what appeared to be a medical clinic or from the In Amenas hospital. The men interviewed were asked repeatedly what they thought of the Algerian Army, and they expressed relief and gratitude.

A man who identified himself as a Turkish worker said: “We were in our rooms. We just heard what was happening. They saved us.”

Some of the workers were injured. “It happened so fast,” said a man with a bandaged head lying on a hospital bed.

Many of those interviewed spoke with British accents. One man who identified himself as Darren Matthews from England, said: “I feel safe at the moment but I won’t feel 100 percent happy until I’m back in the U.K. after I see my family. My heart goes out to the guys that are still there and hopefully everyone comes home safe because, at the end of the day, it’s only work.”

Another British man said he was very reliev! ed to be out. “As much as I’m glad to be out, my thoughts are with colleagues that are still there at the moment.” Asked what he thought about the Algerian military, he said, “I have never been so relieved as when they came and got us off site.”

In Arabic, a number of workers, who said they were employees of BP and Halliburton, described being rescued by the army. “The soldiers hit the terrorists. We were all in a room, all 260 of us, standing there, and that’s when they struck them by plane. We knew there was a back door, so we broke it down and escaped,” one man said.

The man said that a leader of the kidnappers, named Taher, was killed by the Algerian forces. “After that there was very heavy shooting, but we got out and escaped.”

Another appeared to be describing a second army assault on the compound, saying, in part, “The army went in at around 12 or 12 and something, they went in with planes and every part of the army, like the special forces.”

Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.



Live Blog: Inside the Fed\'s 2007 Deliberations

Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve.Karen Bleier/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve.

On Friday the Federal Reserve released the transcripts of its discussions in 2007, the year the housing market, the financial markets, and the broader economy began to unravel. Reporters from The Times are sharing their findings on what the transcripts reveal in the blog entries and tweets below.

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Winter Brings Misery to Syria Refugees

Khaled al-Hariri, a Syrian refugee who died on Tuesday in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, according to activists. Khaled al-Hariri, a Syrian refugee who died on Tuesday in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, according to activists.

For Syrian refugees in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, winter has brought bitter new hardship and at least one death.

More than 50,000 people are estimated to live in the Zaatari camp, roughly one-third of the nearly 150,000 Syrians who have sought refuge in Jordan from the 22-month-long conflict gripping their country. As my colleagues Rick Gladstone and Nick Cumming-Bruce have reported, wind and rainy weathe this week wrecked scores of refugee dwellings in Zaatari, where many tents flooded or collapsed. People were left shivering in the cold, and outrage soon boiled over in a riot that injured 11 people, more than half of them aid workers from the charity group Save the Children. It was the latest in at least four violent episodes in recent weeks between refugees, aid workers and the police.

Video of the Zaatari camp on Monday, posted online by Syrian activists, showed an area almost as large as a football field covered in shallow, muddy water. Inside a soaked tent, a young boy told the cameraman that he and his family, including his injured father, “went to a neighbor’s tent because of the water.”

Tents in the Zaatari refugee camp were fl! ooded with shallow, muddy water on Monday.

The suffering in Zaatari was given a human face on Wednesday when an activist uploaded a moving video interview with a refugee named Khaled al-Hariri, an amputee who described the difficulty of getting proper medical care in the camp. According to the activist, Abushakraa Horanee, Mr. Hariri died on Tuesday night before the video was uploaded to Facebook and then copied to a Syrian activist YouTube channel. Mr. Horanee, the filmmaker, called Mr. Hariri “the martyr of negligence and cold.”

Video of Khaled al-Hariri, a Syrian reugee in Jordan, accusing camp doctors of negligence.

In the video, Mr. Hariri, who lost a leg in Syria before fleeing to Jordan, said he suffered from a range of respiratory problems that went untreated by camp doctors. Mr. Hariri broke down crying as he explained his health problems and alleged negligence and poor treatment on the part of doctors in the camp, which is run by the United Nations. “I don’t even want my health to improve,” he said. “I want my brothers’ health, the people all around me, to improve.”

Describing his ill health, Mr. Hariri said: “I have hoarseness, chest pain and mucus. With my leg pain. Here my leg, all of it, is inflamed. My chest also, my chest is inflamed.”

When asked if camp doctors provided a diagnosis, Mr. Hariri responded:

Diagnosed No one diagnosed me. I stayed here for three months and no doctor gave me a proper drug, no doctor told me, ‘here is a drug for that,’ no doctor gave me anything. I j! ust want ! something that will give me some relief. I just want something to give me some relief, that’s all. Painkillers. They didn’t give me that. I don’t know, what can I do

Asked how doctors in the camp hospital responded to his visit, he said:

Their response I would go at night from here to the emergency room and call on them and tell them, ‘My brother, for God’s sake….’ I would tell the ambulance driver: ‘My brother, for God’s sake, I swear I can’t breathe. I need oxygen, I need oxygen.’ So the ambulance would arrive and they wouldn’t even pick me up themselves. My brother, the broken one, would pick me and my uncle. They would pick me up and put me in the ambulance. Is that O.K.

I would go and sit there. I’d be wearing this track suit while it’s cold outside. I would ask, where is the doctor for him to put me in a bed And the doctor would say: ‘There is no bed. You’re going to have to wait a bit for the patient to leave.’ ‘Doctor, Iswear I’m very tired. At least give me oxygen, I want to breathe. I can’t breathe.’ I could not breathe at all.

United Nations officials said that most dwellings in the camp withstood the recent rainfall and attributed tensions in Zaatari to a range of factors, including fear of worsening weather and a surge of as many as 9,000 new residents in the last week. On Twitter, Unicef, the United Nations children’s agency, said the organization was fully focused on improving conditions in the camp.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January ! 11, 2013

A caption with a video in an earlier version of this post misspelled the surname of a Syrian refugee. He is Khaled al-Hariri, not Khaled al-Zubi.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 11, 2013

A caption with a picture in an earlier version of this post incorrectly said on which day a Syrian, Khaled al-Hariri, died in a refugee camp in Jordan. As the post said, it was Tuesday, not Wednesday.



Mourning Online for Pakistani Rights Activist Killed in Quetta Bombing

Irfan Ali, a Pakistani activist who was killed on Thursday in a bombing, addressed a rally against sectarian attacks in September in Islamabad.Ghalib Khalil, via Tumblr Irfan Ali, a Pakistani activist who was killed on Thursday in a bombing, addressed a rally against sectarian attacks in September in Islamabad.

Last Updated, 3:17 p.m. Bombs in two Pakistani cities killed at least 115 people on Thursday, with the worst carnage inflicted by two explosions a few minutes apart in the southwestern city of Quetta, taking the lives of at least 81 people. As my colleague Declan Walsh reports from Islamabad, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni militant group with strong ties to the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for the attack in a Quetta neighborhood dominated by ethnic Hazara Shiites.

The group maximized the deadliness of the bloody attack by sending a suicide bomber to detonate explosives inside a snooker hall, and then a second attacker blew up a vehicle outside the club a short time later, killing rescue workers and journalists.

Among those killed by the second blast was a rights activist, Irfan Ali, 33, who was helping the injured. Just before his death, Mr. Ali noted on his @khudiali Twitter feed that he had narrowly escaped the first blast. Then he posted another message, registering his dismay that the group behind the attack had also succeeded in driving some Hazara families out of their homes. The families who moved out, he wrote in his final words on Twitter, had “finally succumbed to the genocidal pressure” from the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. It was, he noted, a “sad day for diversity in Baluchistan,” the northwestern province that has Quetta as its capital.

As my colleague in Islamabad explained in a telephone interview with the PBS Newshour, the Persian-speaking, Shiite Muslim Hazara community “immigrated from Afghanistan about a century ago” and “has suffered a series of attacks at the hands of Sunni death squads over the last couple of years.” More than 100 Hazaras were killed last year, and some of the killers are from militant groups believed to have links to the country’s security services.

A PBS Newshour interview with Declan Walsh, the New York Times Pakistan bureau chief, on Thursday’s bomb attacks in Pakistan.

As news of Mr. Ali’s death spread, he was mourned by fellow activists, bloggers and journalists online. Dozens of tributes to him were posted on Twitter; his Facebook page filled with words of sympathy and respect for his battles for peace and against sectarianism.

The journalist and blogger Shiraz Hassan uploaded an image of Mr. Ali wearing a T-shirt that spelled out the word “Coexist” in symbols from different religions, and quoted the dead man’s Twitter biography: “I am born to fight for human rights and peace. My religion is respect and love all the religions.”

His colleagues at the Youth Peer Education Network, a United Nations affiliate, wrote on Facebook:

Today, is a day of great loss for all of us, the entire Y-Peer family, and the whole Pakistani nation. 103 people lost their lives today in different attacks in Quetta and Swat, but out of 69 who died in a sectarian attack on a bustling billiard hall in the southwest city of Quetta, one is Irfan Ali â€" a great human right activist, peace lover and a district focal point of Y-Peer Pakistan â€" who lost his life while taking the victims of the first blast to the hospital. And in the second blast, he become prey of those who want to divide the humanity on the basis of sects, religions, and who kill people for the sake of their own interest. But this shameful act will not let them achieve their objectives, as there are hundreds and thousands of young people like Irfan Ali, who are brave enough to take the lead, and work for peace and harmony in their communities. Let us pray for Irfan Ali and his brother-in-law who lost their lives. May their souls rest in peace. Ameen.

Another activist, Syed Ali Abbas Zaidi, the founder of the Pakistan Youth Alliance, pointed to photographs of Mr. Ali at a demonstration against sectarian attacks on Shiites outside the presidential palace in Islamabad in September. In one image, the activist addressed the crowd through a megaphone; in another he took part in a symbolic protest, lying on the road with fake blood splattered on his chest, as others displayed signs with anti-sectarian messages, including: “Let’s get butchered together!”

Video of Mr. Ali at that protest is posted on his YouTube channel with a note explaining that the protesters demanded “sectarian harmony and peace in the country,” and “also condemned ‘Talibanization.’” The only options, Mr. Ali wrote, are to “save Pakistan from the Taliban, or leave Pakistan to the Taliban.”

Video of the activist Irfan Ali, in glasses, taking part in a demonstration in Islamabad in September, from his YouTube channel.

An 18-year-old activist, Ghalib Khalil, posted a photograph on Tumblr of Mr. Ali speaking to the rally that day with the caption: “I share this picture proudly today in remembrance of a soldier for peace, who had a microphone not a gun in his hand.”

In a tribute to Mr. Ali on her blog, Beena Sarwar, an activist filmmaker, wrote: “I met Irfan in July in Karachi for the first time at the Social Media Mela, but we had been in touch for some time via email. Such a bright, smiling, courageous, committed young man.” She added: “Irfan was vocal and outspoken on many platforms. His presence will be sorely missed but his legacy of fearless activism remains. The best tribute we can pay him is to continue fighting those very forces who killed him.”

She also uploaded an image of the activist flashing a peace sign at a rally.

The Washington-based Afghan analyst Ahmad Shujaa, recalled a recent conversation with Mr. Ali over dinner “when he was part of a Pakistani contingent of civil society and human rights activists touring the United States under a State Department program.”

It took me a while to notice, but somewhere during that conversation Khudi had broken down, silently crying. I had imagined him as a hardened activist who had grown used to conversations about loss because he dealt with it so often. But that night he seemed just as hurt and vulnerble as the rest of us, pained by the memories of the friends he’d lost, the distances the attacks had created between the Shia-Hazaras and the non-Shia, non-Hazara residents of Quetta. In some ways, he was more hurt than me because, while I reacted to the bloodbath from the safety of Washington, he was in the middle of it, occasionally picking up the dead bodies and, as every so often happened, pieces of bodies….

Activism in Pakistan, as in many developing countries, tends to be an elite preoccupation. People who worry about their next meal rarely lead campaigns, rarely go on hunger strike and almost never coin revolutionary Twitter hashtags. People who have a family to feed and clothe are usually too busy to go to attack sites and rescue victims, to hospitals and give blood, to protest rallies and chant slogans.

So, in a way, Khudi was an elite. But he was in the thick of it everyday. He wasn’t a dual citizen, didn’t have a safe perch, didn’t content himself with online petitions or after-work sit-ins.

Here, in chronological order, are just some of the many messages of mourning and condolence posted on Twitter on Thursday night.



Jan. 11 Updates on the Gun Violence Debate

The Lede is following the debate on gun violence in the wake of the shootings in Newtown, Conn., with reports from our correspondents and from around the Web.

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Palestinians Rally Support Online for West Bank Protest Camp

About 200 Palestinian activists set up camp, and a Twitter feed, on Friday in a part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank just east of Jerusalem known as E1, where Israel plans to build homes for thousands of new settlers. The activists described their encampment as the start of “a new Palestinian village named Bab al-Shams,” Arabic for “Gate of the Sun,” after a book by the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury.

As my colleague Isabel Kershner reports from Jerusalem, Israeli military authorities served the protesters an eviction notice, but the activists said they had preempted that action with an appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court for a delay and would be allowed to stay for at least six days.

The protesters openly acknowledged that they were copying the successful tactics of Israeli settlers, who have helped to expand existing settlements in the West Bank by setting up small outposts without permission and then resisting the efforts of the occupation authorities to evict them.

In a statement, the grass-roots Palestinian Popular Struggle Coordination Committee said: “For decades, Israel has established facts on the ground as the international community remained silent in response to these violations. The time has come now to change the rules of the game, for us to establish facts on the ground â€" our own land.”

The construction of the tent camp was broadcast on social networks, in the form of photographs and text updates from activists at the site.

! E1 Palestinian camp, West Bank, 11.1.2013

Before long, the protest encampment had electricity, enabling the activists to charge their phones and continue posting updates about their protest on the new @Bab_Alshams Twitter feed and a dedicated Facebook page.



Video of Aleppo University Bombing

Last Updated, Wednesday, 3:54 p.m. Video posted online by Syrian opposition activists appeared to show the moment one in a series of deadly explosions struck the campus of Aleppo University on Tuesday.

Video said to capture an explosion on the campus of Aleppo University in Syria on Tuesday, uploaded to the Web by opposition activists.

The brief clip, uploaded to the YouTube channel of the ANA New Media Association (formerly the Syrian Activists News Association), begins with a view of smoke rising from behind a university building as students mill about. Moments later, following a very loud eplosion close to the camera, students run for cover and a much larger plume can be seen above the building.

The building visible in the video looks similar one pictured in a photograph of the campus uploaded to the Web in 2010, which suggests that the clip was recorded by someone standing outside the university’s college of education, looking in the direction of the school of architecture.

A description of the video posted on YouTube by ANA, which is run from Cairo by the British-Syrian activist Rami Jarrah, said that the video was filmed by an activist just after the university was hit by a missile fired from a S! yrian Air Force MIG fighter jet, and captured the impact of a second airstrike.

Another video clip, uploaded to the Web earlier in the day, appeared to offer a more distant view of the plumes of smoke above the campus. Mr. Jarrah, who blogs as Alexander Page, suggested that one part of the video showed the fighter jet’s contrail in the sky over the damaged buildings.

While opposition activists insisted that the blasts, which killed more than 80 people according to the government, were the result of arstrikes by President Bashar al-Assad’s air force, state-controlled television channels claimed that “terrorists” had fired rockets at the campus.

An English-language news bulletin from Syrian state television started with a minute of raw footage showing the aftermath of “the terrorist explosion at Aleppo University.” The pro-Assad satellite channel al-Ikhbaria also broadcast video of the aftermath, showing extensive damage to the campus and victims being rushed from the scene as on-screen text blamed the attack on rebel forces.

Video from the pro-government Syrian satellite channel al-Ikhbaria showed the aftermath of bombings at Aleppo University! on Tuesd! ay

Restrictions on independent reporting in Syria make it hard to confirm who was responsible for the explosions, but the university is in a government-controlled area of the city and large anti-Assad demonstrations there last May were harshly dealt with by the security forces, despite the presence of United Nations observers.

Opposition activists claimed that witnesses saw the bombs drop from jets, and one antigovernment Facebook page posted what it said was a copy of a statement from the univesity’s own press office accusing Syrian Air Force MIG fighter planes of targeting the campus in two “criminal” missile attacks three minutes part.

A blogger in Aleppo who supported peaceful protests against the Assad government but has been fiercely critical of the armed rebellion, Edward Dark, described the carnage as a result of an air attack that was “probably a mistake, not an intentional bombing.”

Activists Document Sit-In by Families of Bombing Victims in Pakistan

A video report on a protest in the city of Quetta on Friday, from the Pakistani channel Geo News.

Last Updated, 8:31 p.m. Hours after it started on Friday night, Pakistani television began to report on a protest in the city of Quetta, where relatives of scores of people killed in bomb attacks one day earlier sat beside coffins in the street, refusing to bury their loved ones until they received assurance that the state would protect them.

As my colleague Salman Masood reports, most of those killed in Thursday’s twin bomb attacks were Shiite Muslims from the Hazara ethnic group. Hazaras in Pakistan have been the target of a murderous campaign by Sunni Muslim extremists from the Taliban and a related militant group, La! shkar-e-Jhangvi, which claimed responsibility for Thursday’s massacre of 86.

Pakistani activists, angered that the protest was ignored for so long by local media, attempted to draw attention to the sit-in near the site of the attack on Quetta’s Alamdar Road. In a series of Twitter messages, they called on the international press to cover the demonstration and shared photographs of the sit-in as it continued late into the night. The attention of journalists and bloggers in other parts of the country was focused more firmly on Quetta on Friday by the death in Thursday’s second bombing of the well-known Hazara activist Irfan Ali.

Remembering Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz addressed the Freedom to Connect conference in Washington on May 21.

Last Updated, 9:02 p.m. Friends, colleagues and admirers of Aaron Swartz, a digital activist and innovator, posted tributes to him online on Saturday, after an early-morning report of his death by The Tech, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology student newspaper. An uncle, Michael Wolf, told The Times that Mr. Swartz, 26, had apparently committed suicide in ew York on Friday.

Later on Saturday, his family and partner said in a statement posted on a memorial site dedicated to collecting memories of Mr. Swartz, “Our beloved brother, son, friend, and partner Aaron Swartz hanged himself on Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. We are in shock, and have not yet come to terms with his passing.”

In a blog post for Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow recalled becoming friends with the young man shortly after Mr. Swartz helped create RSS as a 14-year-old. That post is illustrated by video of Mr. Swartz describing his more recent efforts to battle against copyright law at a conference in Washington last year.

Another friend, the legal scholar and copyright activist Lawrence Less! ig, wrote an angry post, describing the federal government’s decision to indict Mr. Swartz in 2011 â€" when he was charged with downloading 4.8 million articles and other documents from JSTOR, a nonprofit online service for distributing scholarly articles, and plotting to make them available online for free â€" as a kind of “bullying.”

Even though, Mr. Lessig wrote, he disagreed with the concept of downloading copyrighted material and distributing it for free, he was appalled by the federalprosecution of his young friend. “Early on, and to its great credit,” Mr. Lessig noted, JSTOR “declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. M.I.T., to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the “criminal” who we who loved him knew as Aaron.”

He continued:

Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” â€" with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a li! ar. It wa! s clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

Aaron had literally done nothing in his life “to make money.” He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good. He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying.

In their statement posted online Saturday evening, Mr. Swartz’s family and partner did blame the government and M.I.T. for contributing to his decision to take his own lfe, writing:

Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at M.I.T. contributed to his death. The U.S. Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, M.I.T. refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

Tributes also appeared on Twitter, where Mr. Swartz had recently posted a note drawing attention to the campaign for the Treasury to mint a $1 trillion platinum coin to avoid a showdown over the debt ceiling.

John Schwartz, a New York Times correspondent, chronicled Mr. Swartz’s fight to make more information available online. In 2009, he wrote an article and a Lede blog post about the young activist’s efforts to “liberate” documents and records from federal databases. In 2011, he was again in touch with Mr. Swartz after his arrest by the federal government.

Below is the reporter’s personal recollection of the young activist.

Aaron Swartz made a deep impression on everyone he met â€" whether it was his obvious brilliance, his cutting wit or his ardent dedication to issues concerning the Internet, public rights and civil liberties.

Susan Crawford, a professor at Cardozo law school in New York and a former technology adviser to the Obama administration, said that on a visit to Boston during her time in the government, “I remember Aaron walking quickly beside me through Cambridge, his arms held stifly at his side, urging me to change the the nation’s technology policy. I could never live up to his expectations of me.”

Many who knew him felt the same way. Still, no matter what, however, the humor was there.

After my article appeared in the New York Times in 2009, describing his cloak-and-dagger efforts to release some 20 million pages of federal court documents to the Internet for free access by the public â€" a feat that got him investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation â€" Mr. Swartz blogged about the report in a typically puckish manner, announcing the story in the form or a personal ad:

Attention attractive people: Are you looking for someone respectable enough that they’ve been personally vetted by the New York Times, but has enough of a bad-boy streak that the vetting was because they ‘liberated’ millions of dollars of governm! ent docum! ents If so, look no further than page A14 of today’s New York Times.

I liked him. He was about the age of my daughter; I told him that my own father is Aaron Schwartz, so I felt funny talking with him. I then joked that if she hadn’t been in a committed relationship at the time of our interviews, I might have tried to set them up. He smiled awkwardly at my old-guy gaffe.

Two years after that article appeared, Mr. Swartz wrote to me again to say that he might have news. “Do you have any free time this week or next” he wrote. “I might have a followup story for you if you’re interested.”

When I asked what was up, he responded, “I have a friend who may get indicted (there’s a grand jury out).”

And then he sent a lengthy document with title, “EMBARGOED FOR USE ONLY IF AND WHEN AARON GETS ARRESTED.”

I responded: “wait â€" you’re the ‘friend’”

“Yeah,” he replied. “It’s a very close friendship. :)”

After the indictmen, I checked in again to ask how he was holding up. It was, “a crazy roller coaster,” he wrote back, “but I’m doing pretty well.”

John Schwartz writes as @jswatz on Twitter.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.



Jan. 14 Updates on the Gun Violence Debate

The Lede is following the debate on gun violence in the wake of the shootings in Newtown, Conn., with reports from our correspondents and from around the Web.

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Jan. 15 Updates on the Gun Violence Debate

The Lede is following the debate on gun violence in the wake of the shootings in Newtown, Conn., with reports from our correspondents and from around the Web. On Tuesday, New York lawmakers voted voting on changes to gun laws that would expand the state’s ban on assault weapons and limit access to guns by the mentally ill. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s recommendations include multiple steps that President Obama can take without legislative action. And religious leaders, including the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, is expected to weigh in on the debate.

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Jan. 16 Updates on the Gun Violence Debate

The Lede is following the debate on gun violence in the wake of the shootings in Newtown, Conn., with reports from our correspondents and from around the Web. On Wednesday, President Obama announced a push for new laws to restrict the availability of guns and to embrace a series of executive actions that he can take without seeking congressional approval.

7:07 P.M. |Superintendent Wary of Using Armed Personnel

The schools superintendent from Newtown, Conn., called for a ban on military-style assault rifles when she spoke to lawmakers in Washington on Wednesday

Speaking to a Democratic Congressional panel, Superintendent Janet Robinson, whose district includes Sandy Hook Elementary School, also disputed a claim by the National Rifle Association that use of armed school personnel is the best safeguard against mass violence, The Danbury News Times reports.

“I come from a military family,” she said at the hearing, in response to a question. “My dad was career military. My husband was a Navy pilot. We don’t keep guns. You know, I have great respect for guns. My dad used to take me on his old ranch in New Mexico and teach me how to shoot. I have great respect for them.”

But, she said, arming teachers wouldn’t work.

“How many little kids could get injured with inexperienced elementary teachers walking around with guns” Robinson said. “It’s not even logical.”

â€" Jennifer Preston

6:55 P.M. |Sandy Hook Promise Responds to White House Plan


Sandy Hook Promise, a group made up of Newtown residents, including families who lost loved ones in the Dec. 14 mass shooting, issued this statement in response to the actions taken by President Obama on Wednesday:

Sandy Hook Promise welcomes the broad focus of the President’s proposals. We appreciate his decisive action to help address through Executive Order immediate opportunities for reform, and we applaud his broader commitment to finding meaningful common sense solutions to help prevent similar acts of violence in other communities in America. Hopefully this will begin a thoughtful debate in Congress on how best to prevent future inci! dents of ! gun violence.

However, a solution won’t happen just in Washington. We encourage everyone, citizens and politicians, to make and uphold the Sandy Hook Promise, to engage in a constructive national dialogue on all of the important issues involved. As an organization, our purpose is to ensure that we have that dialogue and take action, not just in Washington but in our communities and our homes.

The organization, which began shortly after the shootings, announced its intention on Monday to start a national conversation about reducing gun violence and asks people to join what they call The Sandy Hook Promise.

I Promise to honor the 26 lives lost at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

I Promise to do everything I can to encourage and support common sense solutions that make my community and our country safer from similar acts of violence.

â€" Jennifer Preston

6:53 P.M. |G.O.P. Criticism of Obama’s Executive Actions

Over on The Caucus, our colleague Charlie Savage rounds up some of the criticism from Republicans of the 23 executive orders President Obama signed Wednesday. Read more…

6:52 P.M. |White House Social Media Campaign: #no! wisthetim! e

The White House digital communications team unveiled a social and digital media campaign Wednesday to help build support for the legislative proposal and executive actions that President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. outlined to help reduce gun violence in the aftermath of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Macon Phillips, director of the White House Office of Digital Strategy, shared a link on Twitter to a new Web page created to explain the proposals, provide social tools for people to share information with their networks and get people involved in lobbying elected officials at the state and federal level.

On the page, the message reads: “Now is the time to do something about gun violence.”

By midafternoon, #NowIsTheTime was trending on Twitter in the United States and generating thousands of posts.

People on the other side of the debate used the hashtag to make their point, as did this Twitter user.

6:12 P.M. |Southern Baptists Want Background Checks

The nation’s largest evangelical church, the Southern Baptist Convention, has taken a stand in support of universal background checks for gun buyers.

The Rev. Richard D. Land, who leads the church’s public policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, sent a letter to President Obama endorsing universal checks, while condemning what he called any “knee jerk policy responses” that would infringe on the Second Amendment.

The Southern Baptists often serve as a bellwether for evangelicals, and Reverend Land is an influential voice among Republican policy makers.

In the letter, Mr. Land wrote:

While no set of policies or gun restrictions can inoculate us from future Newtown-like killing sprees, we believe our nation can and should take some preemptive actions to quell gun violence in ways that do not infringe on the Second Amendment. Among legislative actions we support are! mandator! y criminal background checks for all gun sales. Such a policy should close existing loopholes, including the so-called gun show loophole, which enables private sales of firearms without background checks. Additionally, we support making gun trafficking a federal crime. Under present law, a gun trafficker can be convicted only if proven to have knowingly transferred a gun to a felon. A strong federal gun trafficking statute is needed to address this weak standard. Taken together, these reasonable steps would better prevent, though certainly not guarantee, guns from flowing into the hands of felons or others with malevolent intent.

Further, we urge you to take into consideration regional differences regarding the possession of guns. We consider an effort to apply the same gun restriction laws across the entire populace to be unworkable and of considerable offense to many. We recommend that you allow the individual states’ elected representatives to decide whether to implement any restrictions you may hoose to enforce or to enact their own restrictions based on the needs and interests of their own citizens.

The organization was not part of the group of 40 national religious leaders who announced Tuesday, as we reported on The Lede, that they supported a universal background check for gun buyers to help reduce gun violence.

The group, Faiths United to Prevent Gun Violence, sent a letter to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. that also asked that “high-capacity weapons and ammunition magazines should not be available to civilians.” It also asked for gun trafficking to be made a federal crime.

Other leaders on the list, include:

- Aidsand F. Wright-Riggins III, executive director, American Baptist Home Mission Societies
- James Winkler, chairman, Faiths United to Prevent Gun Violence, General Board of Church and Society, United Methodist Church
- Rabbi Steven Wernick, executive vice president and chief executive, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism
- Jim Wallis, president and chief executive of Sojourners
- Jacquelyn Dupont-Walker, director, Social Action Commission, African Methodist Episcopal Church
- Sayyid M. Syeed,national director for interfaith and community alliances, Islamic Society of North America
- Rabbi Gerald Skolnik, Rabbinical Assembly
- Rajwant Singh, chairman, Sikh Council on Religion and Education, USA
- Suhag Shukla, executive directr and legal counsel, Hindu American Foundation
- Rachelle Lyndaker Schlabach, director, Mennonite Central Committee, Washington office
- Rabbi David Saperstein, director and counsel, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism
- Djamillah Samad, national executive, Church Women United Inc.
- James Salt, executive director, Catholics United
- Fred Rotondaro, chairman, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good
- Rev. Craig C. Roshaven, witness ministries director, Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations
- Diane Randall, executive secretary, Friends Committee on National Legislation
- Rev. LeDayne McLeese Polaski, program coordinator, Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America
- Sister Patricia McDermott, R.S.M., president, Sisters of Mercy of the Americas
- Walter L. Parrish, II, executive minister, American Baptist Churches of the South
- Sister Margaret Ormond, O.P., and the leadership team of the Dominican Sisters of Peace - Har! riett Jane Olson, chief executive and general secretary, United Methodist Women
- Stanley J. Noffsinger, general secretary, Church of Brethren
- Rev. J. Herbert Nelson, II, director for public witness, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Office of Public Witness
- Janet Mock, C.S.J., executive director of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious
- Bryan Miller, executive director, Heeding God’s Call
- Pastor Michael McBride, PICO Network Lifelines to Healing
- Kevin E. Lofton, president and chief executive, Catholic Health Initiatives
- Rabbi Mordecai Leibling, Jewish Reconstructionist Movement
- Sister Gayle Lwanga, National Advocacy Center of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd
- Sister Carol Keehan, president and chief executive, Catholic Health Association
- Rabbi Steve Gutow, president, Jewish Council for Public Affairs
- Rabbi Marla Feldman, executive director, Women of Reform Judaism
- Marlene Feagan, president, Health Ministries Assciation
- Matthew Ellis, executive director, National Episcopal Health Ministries
- Very Rev. John Edmunds S.T., president, Conference of Major Superiors of Men
- Rev. Ronald J. Degges, Disciples Home Mission, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
- Shan Cretin, general secretary, American Friends Service Committee
- Patricia Chappell, SNDdeN, executive director, Pax Christi USA
- Patrick Carolan, executive director, Franciscan Action Network
- Simone Campbell, S.S.S., executive director, Network, a National Catholic Social Justice Lobby
- Carol Blythe, president, Alliance of Baptists
- Rev. Geoffrey A. Black, general minister and president, United Church of Christ
- Peg Birk, transitional general secretary, National Council of Churches
- Carroll Baltimore, president, Progressive National Baptist Convention

â€" Laurie Goodstein

5:39 P.M. |Obama Presses Senate to Confirm A.T.F. Director

Our colleague Michael S. Schmidt reports on President Obama’s plans to rachet up pressure on lawmakers to do something they have refused to do for the past six years: confirm a permanent director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The president said would he nominate the agency’s acting director, B. Todd Jones, to be its permanent leader.

4:28 P.M. |Boston Mayor Issues Statemnt

Mayor Thomas M. Menino of Boston on Wednesday joined in praising President Obama for his proposals to try to reduce gun violence in America.

“In nearly 20 years as Boston’s mayor, I have watched with frustration as our government has been bullied by special interests and ignored its duty to protect our citizens from gun violence,” Mr. Menino said in a statement.

“At long last,” he said, President Obama’s “historic” proposal shows Washington is listening to the people, who believe schools and movie theaters should be places of safety and joy, â! €œnot con! flict and mass murder.”

Mayor Menino is co-chairman with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York of Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

â€" Katharine Q. Seelye

4:18 P.M. |Senator Coburn Praises Obama’s Review of Gun Laws


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