FBI Investigates Coder for Downloading Public Records

Per Wired, 22-year-old programmer Aaron Swartz has been investigated by the FBI because the Government Printing Office experimented with offering free access to its database of public court records, and Swartz made the mistake of accepting their offer.

Swartz downloaded 19,856,160 pages, uploaded them to amazon.com's EC2 "cloud" service, and donated them to public.resource.org, "an open government initiative spearheaded by Carl Malamud as part of a broader project to make public as many government databases as Malamud can find. It was Malamud who previously shamed the SEC into putting all its EDGAR filings online in the ’90s, and he used $600,000 in donations to buy 50 years of documents from the nation’s appeals court, which he promptly put on the internet for anyone to download in bulk."

Prior to the GPO's experimental offer, the records had been available only for a fee of 8¢ per page, or more if purchased through a privately-owned, commercial intermediary. When the gummint figured out what was happening, they abruptly terminated the experiment and notified the FBI that the database was "compromised."

A partially-redacted FBI report shows they ran Swartz through a full range of gummint databases, among other things checking his work history, his Facebook data [see, e.g., here and here], whether his cell number had ever come up in a federal wiretap or pen register, and checking him against a private data broker’s database; they also obtained his driver's license photo and considered a stake-out of his home (which they concluded would be too conspicuous, since few cars parked on Swartz's dead-end, suburban street).

"The feds evidently identified Swartz in the first place by approaching Amazon, which provided his name, phone number and address. . . . Amazon’s user agreement for its cloud computing solutions gives it the right to turn over customer information to the government on request."

More at Wired. (And for more on Amazon's role, see Amazon EC2 and Amazon VPC.)

(Thanks, Ben!)

"Second Life Performance Night" at Eyebeam

(NY). "Alan Sondheim along with Foofwa d'Imobilite will present a performance using the aesthetics of the Second Life (or see Wikipedia) environment to create an experimental choreography; Lily & Honglei will present The Merry-Go-Around — a virtual installation addressing a series of environmental issues in today’s China; [and] Second Front has discovered a virtual crypt within Second Life and are inviting the public to witness its opening. Together, these three short performances (12-15 minutes each) will sample some of the contemporary trends in Second Life performance art.

"The performances will be followed by a brief panel discussion and a subsequent launch party of Avvie Road — the second DVD of Second Front’s performance works."

More at Eyebeam; wish I could be there.

Exhibition, "Performance/Art": Shonibare, Ahtila et Al. at the DMA

Opening on Oct. 8, and including

British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare’s film Un ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball), based on Giuseppe Verdi’s opera of the same name . . . ; Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s quietly intense and atmospheric evocation of an ill-at-ease mind, the three-screen film work Talo/The House; a new installation work by Dallas-based artists Frances Bagley and Tom Orr based on the spectacular sets and costumes they designed for a 2006 Dallas Opera production of Verdi’s Nabucco; . . . a selection of Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca’s powerful paintings and drawings based on album covers and seating charts of major theaters and opera houses; and David Altmejd’s spectacular sculpture, The Eye, . . . created in conjunction with a recent Metropolitan Opera production of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic.

Through Mar. 21, 2010. More at the DMA; or for more on Shonibare, see my previous post.

Grayson: Has the Fed Ever Tried to Manipulate the Stock or Gold Markets?

(For more, see Grayson make Bernanke squirm here.)

Save Us

Roger Beebe's "Films for One to Eight Projectors"

This shows part of his set-up. At the McKinney Avenue Contemporary today (only); presented by the Video Association of Dallas. A few more pics here.

Update: "The 24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project"

by Liz Glynn, at the ArtHouse; looks like it was a success (see my previous post on the project here). Lots more pics, or upload your own, here.

Who Killed Bear Stearns & Lehman?

First, if you don't know what a "naked short" is, see here and here. It involves the same kinds of problems I've discussed in connection with uncollateralized credit derivatives (in my previous posts here and here), in that there's no requirement of an "insurable interest."

Per DeepCapture, Matt Taibi reports as follows in an article in Rolling Stone that's not yet online:

Taibbi writes:

“On Tuesday, March 11^th, 2008, somebody – nobody knows who – made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half of their value in nine days or less. It was madness – “like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets,” according to one financial analyst.”

Bear’s stock would have to drop by more than half in a matter of days for the mystery figure to make a profit. And that is what happened.

As Taibbi explains, “the very next day, March 12, Bear went into a free fall . . . . Whoever bought those options on March 11^th woke up on the morning of March 17^th having made 159 times his money, or roughly $270 million. This trader was either the luckiest guy in the world, the smartest son of a bitch ever or . . . . Or what?”

Taibbi speculates (as has Deep Capture) that these options might have been purchased by somebody who was abusing the options market maker exemption to engage in illegal naked short selling. And Taibbi goes beyond speculation to state, as an obvious fact, that illegal naked short selling helped bring Bear Stearns to its knees.

Presumably operating under that assumption, the SEC issued more than 50 subpoenas to Wall Street firms in the wake of Bear’s collapse, but “it has yet to indentify the mysterious trader who somehow seemed to know in advance that one of the five largest investment banks in America was going to completely tank in matter of days.”

Taibbi continues: “The SEC’s halfhearted oversight didn’t go unnoticed by the market. Six months after Bear was eaten by predators, virtually the same scenario repeated itself in the case of Lehman Brothers – another top-five investment bank that in September 2008 was vaporized in an obvious case of [naked short sellers engaging in] market manipulation. From there, the financial crisis was on, and the global economy went into full-blow crater mode.”

Taibbi notes that there were many other factors that made the economy weak. But he says that naked short selling is what pushed Bear and Lehman over the edge. If it weren’t for naked short selling – a massive “counterfeiting scheme,” in Taibbi’s words — those banks would likely have survived, and we might have avoided an all-out financial catastrophe.

* * * * *
The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fortune, BusinessWeek – they have all known about naked short selling since Deep Capture reporter Patrick Byrne began hollering about it in 2005. But none of them write about it. Instead, we find a competent financial journalist, and the only major story about one the greatest financial crimes of all time, published in a slightly alternative magazine about music.

More at DeepCapture.

UPDATE: The same lack of a meaningful "insurable interest" constitutes the problem with "Dead Peasant" insurance, which has become a focus of outrage since Michael Moore's Capitalism, A Love Story opened; see Daily Kos for details (and don't forget to rate the video up on YouTube).