Thanks for posting!
Strange juxtapositions of people. John Cusack, an actor from the Chicago area hooking up with Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden. John Perry Barlow, Electronic Frontier and managing dirctor of Algae systems? (Was this a front business? If so what was going on behind the scenes.?)
John Perry Barlow and Electronic Frontier, Julian Assange & wikileaks; Edward Snowden, Swartz and Dolan.
Focusing on Info On Swartz and Dolan.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/strongbox-and-aaron-swartz
By Kevin Poulsen
Snip
May 14, 2013Aaron Swartz was not yet a legend when, almost two years ago, I asked him to build an open-source, anonymous in-box. His achievements were real and varied, but the events that would come to define him to the public were still in his future: his federal criminal indictment; his leadership organizing against the censorious Stop Online Piracy Act; his suicide in a Brooklyn apartment. I knew him as a programmer and an activist, a member of a fairly small tribe with the skills to turn ideas into code—another word for action—and the sensibility to understand instantly what I was looking for: a slightly safer way for journalists and their anonymous sources to communicate.
In October, 2011, Aaron came to the Wired office and we whiteboarded some of the details. In the intervening years, Aaron’s quiet withdrawal had shifted into a tentative confidence, his sullenness replaced by a disarming smile and a gentle generosity. Before he left, I walked him over to the new, much larger Reddit office next door. He stepped inside, looked around, and walked back out without anyone recognizing him.
Snip....
By then, Aaron had been indicted for bulk downloading four million articles from JSTOR, an academic database, from M.I.T.’s public network, and the case must have been weighing on him. But he wouldn’t talk about it.
In New York, a computer-security expert named James Dolan persuaded a trio of his industry colleagues to meet with Aaron to review the architecture and, later, the code. We wanted to be reasonably confident that the system wouldn’t be compromised, and that sources would be able to submit documents anonymously—so that even the media outlets receiving the materials wouldn’t be able to tell the government where they came from. James wrote an obsessively detailed step-by-step security guide for organizations implementing the code. “He goes a little overboard,” Aaron said in an e-mail, “but maybe that’s not a bad thing.”
By December, 2012, Aaron’s code was stable, and a squishy launch date had been set. Then, on January 11th, he killed himself. In the immediate aftermath, it was hard to think of anything but the loss and pain of his death. A launch, like so many things, was secondary. His suicide also raised new questions: Who owned the code now? (Answer: he willed all his intellectual property to Sean Palmer, who gives the project his blessing.) Would his closest friends and his family approve of the launch proceeding? (His friend and executor, Alec Resnick, reports that they do.)
https://gizmodo.com/james-dolan-co-creator-of-securedrop-dead-at-36-1821921230
James Dolan, former Marine and co-creator of the whistleblower submission system SecureDrop alongside Aaron Swartz and Wired editor Kevin Poulsen, has died. The Freedom of the Press Foundation, which took over SecureDrop, reports that Dolan, age 36, took his own life...Dolan joined the Freedom of the Press Foundation to maintain SecureDrop after co-creator Aaron Swartz took his life in 2013 at age 26, as pressure mounted in a federal investigation against him that many felt was overzealous.