The “Cat Signal” has gone out, visible to all members of the Internet Defense League. The latest threat to internet freedom is an expanded and strengthened CFAA, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

This is the same piece of legislation that the government has been using to target innovators and activists since 1984. One of those innovators, Aaron Swartz, faced 13 counts under CFAA, up to 35 years in prison, for copying too many files from the online academic resource JSTOR. This threat of overwhelming state sponsored persecution has been regarded as the reason for Swartz tragic suicide January 11th, 2013.

The collective outrage generated from Swartz’s story has brought activists together in an effort to gain support for legislation that would reform and clarify CFAA, referred to as Aaron’s Law.

It appears that the House Judiciary Committee is not interested in Aaron’s Law’s spirit of reform and clarity, instead they prefer to see CFAA expanded and strengthened. The vote on this issue is April 10th, 2013.

Participants of the Internet Defense League have been asked to asked to call attention to this issue and direct traffic to the Fix the CFAA website. C4SS, as a participant, will oblige, but not without a caveat.

We do not want to see the CFAA fixed. It was never broken. It is a success. It was used how all laws are used. It did its job. It cannot be reformed. It is damage that we must identify and route around.

We want to see the CFAA destroyed by rendering it irrelevant. An irrelevance that is the result of its unenforceability and our ungovernability.

If Aaron’s Law buys us the time we need to “route around” or makes the yoke of law rest lighter upon our backs, then we will call attention to it. But we will never regard it as anything more than a temporary paper-thin restraint against psychopaths.

Kevin Carson, Senior C4SS Fellow and Karl Hess Chair of Social Theory, was interviewed today on The Corbett Report: Open Source Intelligence News. You can listen to the podcast here.

C4SS Media presents Charles Johnson‘s “Anticopyright“, read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

This web project is, in spirit and in letter, at war with every aspect of Intellectual Protectionism, in its principles — of monopolizing power, entitlement, social control and economic privilege — and in its operation — through increasingly invasive government policing and legal coercion — and in the disastrous global effects of patent and copyright restrictions.

This machine kills intellectual monopolists.

There’s an interesting series of posts at Quartz about the capital-for-labor replacing effects of technology during the last three decades, but regrettably, it doesn’t even hint on the political-institutional barriers that are making the short-run impact of tech more painful for labor than it need be, or the possiblity that technical progress will empower labor only because it will destroy the enforceability of the institutional mechanisms that enclose its benefits for the elite.

It’s the kind of piece that leaves an uneasy feeling after reading it. In a way it’s like having a meal prepared with high quality fresh produce, by a great chef… who somehow forgot to add a key spice that would have enhanced the overall flavor of the dish to a whole new level.

Anyhow, rumors are that the C4SS kitchen is working already to spice the whole thing up and serve it for dinner at the op-ed section. Stay tuned!

The Mercatus Center recently released its Freedom in the 50 States report, and their analysis reaches some pretty ludicrous conclusions. North Dakota, which just banned abortion, was named the “most free” state. Reproductive liberty did not factor into the Mercatus Center’s analysis at all. Arizona also received a high ranking in spite of their abysmal civil liberties record, partially because immigration freedom was not a category in the Mercatus analysis.

But to see the true vulgar libertarianism in the Mercatus report, one should look at how they evaluate economic freedom. One significant portion of their evaluation of states was based on their “lawsuit climate.”  But litigation is an important way to hold companies accountable for damage in a free society, and has in fact been unjustly limited by the rise of the regulatory state. They also treat “right to work laws” as a boon to freedom, even though the laws are a violation of free contract.

This ranking system is an embarrassment to libertarians. As an anarchist, I am skeptical about whether we can even rank governments on how compatible they are with freedom. However, if I were to develop rankings, I would not use the criteria employed by Mercatus. Their attitude seems to be that the rights  of marginalized individuals are trivial and that “them pore ol’ bosses need all the help they can get.”

Alex Seitz-Wald at Salon:

Gun owners terrified of nonexistent plans to restrict ammo are buying it all up. The victim: Police departments

Sure, most local police departments don’t regularly rack up body counts on the scale of an Anders Behring Breivik or even an Adam Lanza. But it seems to me that reducing their available firepower might somewhat enhance their discretion in its use.

C4SS Media presents Ken MacLeod‘s “The Star Fraction – Introduction to the American Edition“, read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

Ken MacLeod‘s introduction to the North American edition of his 1995 novel The Star Fraction appears in the omnibus volume Fractions: The First Half of The Fall Revolution by Ken MacLeod (New York: Orb, 2008), and is reprinted by permission of the author and of the publisher, Tom Doherty Associates.

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“History is the trade secret of science fiction, and theories of history are its invisible engine. One such theory is that society evolves because people’s relationship with nature tends to change more radically and rapidly than their relationships with each other. Technology outpaces law and custom. From this mismatch, upheavals ensue. Society either moves up to a new stage with more scope for the new technology, or the technology is crushed to fit the confines of the old society. As the technology falls back, so does the society, perhaps to an earlier configuration. In the main stream of history, however, it has moved forward through a succession of stages, each of which is a stable configuration between the technology people have to work with, and their characteristic ways of working together. But this stability contains the seeds of new instabilities. Proponents of this theory argue that the succession of booms and slumps, wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions, which began in August 1914 and which shows no prospect of an end, indicates that we live in just such an age of upheaval.”

In this episode of Speaking On Liberty’s Jason Lee Byas, Grayson English and Kyle Platt interview C4SS Fellow and Dissenting Leftist blogger Nathan Goodman about the the US prison system.

http://youtu.be/HinltJ-ujX0

With soaring import demand due to double-digit inflation, collapsing local production of almost everything other than the ever-flowing black gold, and increasing regime uncertainty ever since the Comandante’s passing, there seems to be no end in sight for the bizarre efforts with which the Venezuelan government is trying to sustain foreign exchange controls.

If you want to get a good grasp of the whole shenanigan, make sure to read this, this and this, by Francisco Toro and Emiliana Duarte at Caracas Chronicles.

The second issue of The Industrial Radical is on its way to the printers and in anticipation the first issue has been made available as a free PDF.

You can support C4SS and get a hard copy of The Industrial Radical for only $7.00 through our partnership with the ALL Distro. You can also makes sure not to miss out on the second issue, or the third, by subscribing!

$7.00 for one issue. $4 for every additional issue. $14.00 for six months. $28.00 for a year.

The Industrial Radical is devoted to radical libertarian political and social analysis in the tradition of Benjamin Tucker’s 1881-1908 Liberty, Emma Goldman’s 1906-1917 Mother Earth, and Murray Rothbard’s 1965-1968 Left & Right.

For too long libertarians have treated market anarchism almost the way Scientologists treat Xenu, as an “esoteric doctrine” to which one is introduced only after one has thoroughly assimilated some more moderate form of libertarianism — as though anarchism were an impediment rather than an asset in making the case for liberty.

Of course this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: potential converts find anarchism off-putting because they don’t know what it is, and they don’t know what it is because we avoid explaining it. In fact market anarchism can and should be one of libertarianism’s greatest selling-points, highlighting a radical and inspiring alternative to the present system rather than some variant of economic conservatism. It’s time to put market anarchism front and center in our educational efforts, time to start making it a familiar and recognizable position — while at the same time continuing to educate ourselves and exploring new horizons in market anarchist thought.

The Industrial Radical does not impose a party line; we welcome discussion and vigorous debate from all quarters, and in particular from other anarchists and radical libertarians from the left and from the right.

• Purchase titles at individual prices, $7.00 per issue.
• Or get our full print run: 1 Anarchist Classics zines for $7^.00 (or only $4^.00 when you order multiples).

C4SS Media would like to present Kevin Carson‘s “Unequal Contracts, Unequal Power“, read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

“To many libertarians on the political and cultural Right instinctively identify with employers, landlords, and service providers on this issue. They are, in my opinion, fundamentally wrong-headed to do so. The proper position for any genuine advocate of freed markets is not to defend everything that is called “property” or “contract,” but only justly acquired property and valid contracts. Contracts whose terms reflect the systematic intervention of the state in the market on behalf of privileged classes are most definitely not valid, and any self-described “free market libertarian” who defends them is unworthy of the name.

Our strategy on the free market Left should be to encourage as many people as possible to look at the man behind the curtain, and to see through the corporate state’s claims that the present system is natural and inevitable.”

C4SS Senior Fellow Kevin Carson, Karl Hess Chair of Social Theory, was interviewed March 14th on the Truthdig radio program, Pacifica Radio, on his recent column “15 Benefits of the War on Drugs.” You can listen to the podcast here.

C4SS Media would like to present Kevin Carson‘s “Bring on the Drones!“, read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

In every conceivable way — agility, resilience, feedback/reaction loop — the emerging networked successor society runs circles around the old hierarchical corporate and state dinosaurs it’s replacing. As I’ve said many times, the twentieth century was the age of the large, hierarchical institution. By the end of the 21st, there won’t be enough left of them to bury.

Hat Tip: Antiwar.com

From the Markets Not Capitalism audiobook read by C4SS fellow Stephanie Murphy.

I believe that liberty and equality will usher in a fraternity that will annihilate commercialism and the greed of gain. With the land and opportunity free, the laborer will no longer work for others, but supply his own needs with his labor. With the wonderful facilities for manufacturing, the immense aids inventive genius has placed at our disposal, but usurped by government agents, every man could be independent, and the fear of poverty would be unknown, the incentive to accumulate wealth for any other purpose than use would be gone. –Ross Winn

—How Will a Free Society Come, and How Will It Operate? by Celia B. Whitehead and Ross Winn,

In this episode of Speaking On Liberty’s Jason Lee Byas and Kyle Platt interview C4SS Senior Fellow, C4SS Trustee Chair and Free Association blogger Sheldon Richman. Sheldon is also the VP and editor of The Future of Freedom Foundation and former editor of The Freeman. In this interview they discuss the future of libertarianism, war, climate change, Murray Rothbard, Jeffrey Tucker, as well as other topics!

http://youtu.be/MZVPVCrY_Po

C4SS Media would like to present Kevin Carson’s “A (Brief) People’s History of Gun Control“, read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

“From its beginnings the state has been an executive committee of the economic ruling class and an instrument of armed force by the owners of the means of production, enabling them to extract surplus labor from the rest of us. I can’t imagine why anyone would expect the state’s gun control policies to display any less of a class character than other areas of policy. Regardless of the “liberal” or “progressive” rhetoric used to defend gun control, you can safely bet it will come down harder on the cottagers than on the gentry, harder on the workers than on the Pinkertons, and harder on the Black Panthers than on murdering cops.”

Arthur Silber, of the Once Upon a Time… blog, as usual, has a brilliant and scathing critique of the recent clamor for more “transparency” and “oversight” regarding the United States on going “murder programs”.

…about the question of oversight, and the related pleas for “accountability” and “transparency”: keep in mind what the Murder Program is. The executive branch claims that it can murder anyone it chooses anywhere in the world, for any reason it wishes. Someone needs to explain to me how oversight, accountability and transparency will make such a program better. But they can’t explain that — because it cannot be done. A program that is evil in the manner the Murder Program is evil cannot be “improved,” or “managed” so as to make it decent and humane. The Murder Program is an abomination. You don’t “fix” abominations of this kind. You end them. You end them this very moment. As I said about this issue last November:

Evil does not become less evil because people are “open” about it. It is not miraculously transformed into good through some mysterious process of alchemy. Evil becomes only worse, infinitely worse. …

So if certain “critics” of the Murder Program get what they want, the State will be blessedly open about its programs devoted to evil. It will torture and murder regularly, perhaps every day, but in broad daylight, with all of us watching.

And a lot of people will be very pleased indeed. Pleased, hell. They’ll be goddamned thrilled.

… where Ron Paul really comes down on issues like world government and “intellectual property,” you’ve got your answer:

Ron Paul Calls on United Nations to Confiscate Domain Names of His Supporters