The government has decided to re-haul our education system
and as well as banning a lot of US authors from the English syllabus (what the
hell?) they have also decreed that all school kids should be able to write
computer code. This, of course, is in
the hope that, like Estonia, a bunch of these youngsters will come up with
something like Skype and bring riches to the nation’s coffers. Their present attempts to get their hands on
the pensions of so many workers (See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2326105/Teachers-NHS-staff-pension-income-slashed-third.html)
continues unabated but such tinkering with the education system has not a good
history. Educational reforms usually end
badly. Throwing away phonetics eventually
spelt illiteracy (forgive my pun), not requiring times tables left innumeracy
in its wake. So what about code
writing? Would creating a generation of
programming geniuses end well?
Jonathan James was an exceptional programmer and became a
hacker. He was caught up in a raid by
the US secret service involved in an identity theft scam of TJX. It is unsure if he had any involvement but
probably, some of his older acquaintances did. Being raided was a big thing, as was the threat of prosecution. Suddenly, the cool skills he’d cultivated
got him in deep trouble. It seems,
behind a console, hackers like so many of us, feel that the boundaries
between make believe and real life blur.
Most of us would never dream of stealing but a high percentage of us
will happily download a favourite series/film and feel secretly smug and not as
guilty as we should. This weird virtual
world of the web has its own laws but the general public has yet to register
that this ‘anything goes’ frontier has no go areas. Downloading the wrong images can lead to imprisonment at a time
when most of the public has a naïve attitude to kids and friends using their
computers, fail to install effective firewalls and have loads of unsolicited
files on their hard drives they are totally unaware of.
Back to Jonathan, two weeks after that raid by the secret
service, he took his own life and left a suicide note which read,
“I honestly, honestly had nothing to do with TJX. I have no faith in the justice system. Perhaps my actions today will send a
stronger message to the public. Either
way, I have lost control over this situation and this is my only way to gain
control.”
Of course Massachusetts Assistant US Attorney Stephan
Heyman, who pursued Jonathan, was also the one who hounded Aaron Swartz until
he too took his own life on Jan 11 in 2013.
Aaron, like Jonathan, was a technological genius. At the age of 14 he authored the RSS web
syndication, at 19 he co programmed the social news and entertainment website
Reddit. He founded Demand Progress, a
group advocating against Internet censorship bills. By the age of 24, Swartz was a Harvard research fellow conducting
studies on political corruption. One
colleague spoke of Aaron’s motivation,
“What kind of millionaire founder of a tech website chooses
to spend time sitting in a congressional office (as Aaron did) to really
understand the work flow? No one. That doesn't happen. He was a basic technocratic liberal who
thought that if you worked really hard and approached a problem with openness
and curiosity, then it was possible you could make life better for people.”
It was in pursuance of that goal that he downloaded academic
journals from a JSTOR database in MIT.
This crime, and it is undoubtedly a crime, did not justify the 35 years and
1 million dollar fine that the US Attorney Stephen Heyman sought.
Aaron Swartz once he knew imprisonment was inevitable took
his own life. To be frank MIT/JSTOR are
left tainted along with the US Justice system.
Another young coder dead, at the hands of a system that needs honest
self-examination. As long as
governments enthuse about the possibility of young coders they should also be
honest about the deadly big stick awaiting brilliant nerds that step out of
line. The ‘over the top’ reaction
becomes even more obscene when one realises, in hindsight, that these
institutions are often frighteningly more corrupt than those they hound to
death. http://www.boston.com/news/politics/gallery/massachusetts_indicted_politicians/
