March 2013

Attorney General Eric Holder denied that agency officials acted inappropriately in their prosecution of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist and co-creator of Reddit who killed himself earlier this year. During a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing, Holder said that prosecutors initially offered Swartz a plea deal of three months in prison for allegedly stealing articles from a computer archive, and that they later said they would seek up to six months. The hacking charges carried a maximum penalty of 35 years in prison. "I think that's a good use of prosecutorial discretion to look at the conduct, regardless of what the statutory maximums were and to fashion a sentence that was consistent with what the nature of the conduct was," AG Holder testified, adding that Swartz and his attorneys had rejected the plea offers.

"Does it strike you as odd that the government would indict someone for crimes that would carry penalties of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million fines, and then offer them a three month prison sentence?" Sen John Cornyn (R-TX) asked. AG Holder insisted that the charges themselves are less important than the penalties sought by prosecutors and said several months in prison would have been appropriate based on the crime. But Sen Cornyn worried that such harsh potential penalties could empower prosecutors to "bully" defendants into pleading guilty.

Holder also said that communications would be one of the sectors on which Justice's antitrust division would focus.

The U.S. Department of Justice has no objections to the merger between T-Mobile USA and mobile operator MetroPCS Communications, according to Deutsche Telekom. Approvals from the Federal Communications Commission, the Committee on Foreign Investment and MetroPCS shareholders are now the remaining hurdles for the merger. MetroPCS shareholders are set to vote on the merger on April 12.

Writer Nate Thayer set off the media equivalent of a fragmentation grenade, with a lament about the state of freelance writing that sent virtual shrapnel flying in all directions. The main target of his ire was The Atlantic, which he says asked him to rewrite one of his pieces and offered to pay him nothing — and this was seen by many as a symbol of the parlous state of online writing, not to mention the general decline of the media. Is that fair? Not really. But there’s no question the economics of content have changed.

The Chinese version of Twitter is a microblogging service called Weibo which launched in 2010. Dan Wallach at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and a few pals reveal the results of a detailed study of censorship on Weibo.

Their method has allowed them to reconstruct the censorship techniques used by the government, to calculate the number of workers who must be involved and even to discover their daily work schedules. Wallach and co say their data point to a number hypotheses about what’s going on. Since the highest volume of deletions occur within 5-10 minutes of posting, Weibo must be censoring them in near real time. If an average censor can scan around 50 posts a minute, that would require some 1400 censors at any instant to handle the 70,000 posts pouring in. And if they work 8 hour shifts, that’s a total of 4200 censors on the payroll each day. Even then, this work force must have some technological help. Wallach and co say the data suggests Weibo has a number of techniques in operation. The first is keyword alerting. When a keyword appears, the post is immediately flagged for censors.