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Mega Up Yours
Your files could be forfeit in the government's attack on Megaupload. Can the Entertainment industry take down cyberlockers entirely?
This week, some 50 million users may begin to permanently lose whatever it is that they stored on Megaupload.

Nor are the files disappearing because they've been seized by the government. With its assets frozen, Megaupload can't pay the two companies it uses to store its customers' files ? and as a result, those companies could begin deleting files as soon as today. If you were among the uploaders, bad news: Megaupload is working on a reprieve, but those files might be gone forever.

Now that an indictment has been handed down in the case, the DOJ asserts the government has no legal right to access the files, much less protect them. Absurd as it sounds, the government can get away with claiming that it has not technically seized the private property of potentially millions of users. It's a boondoggle of Kafkaesque proportions. At the same time, other filesharing sites are running scared, disabling their services before the government comes gunning for them, too.

But this situation isn't new, and it isn't unique. It's part of a pattern that is becoming more and more apparent: what people take to be public platforms turn out to be anything but, and our spaces for free speech are not necessarily so free.

A MAYOR IN LOVE WITH HIS CITY Mayor Kevin White visits a public school.

The wake was a belated celebration of the Irish-Catholic Democratic culture that reached its zenith during White's 16 years in office, but which began to decline even before White left office in 1984.

White, like his fellow Democrat, President John F. Kennedy, and Republican conservative ideologue William F. Buckley, was a member of the Irish-American ascendency. For this generation, an elite undergraduate education ? Harvard for Kennedy, Yale for Buckley, Williams for White ? tinctured their careers with the perfume of the establishment.

While at heart these men never lost their ancestral taste for a good street fight, their public behavior had more in common with Teddy or Franklin Roosevelt than James Michael Curley.

The Irish dominated Boston politics since 1909, when Kennedy's maternal grandfather John Francis "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald beat Yankee James Jackson Storrow in an epic battle for mayor. But the persistence of class conflict with the upper-class Protestant power structure did not to fade until the 1950s.

During the '50s and into the '60s, good-government Mayors John Hynes and John Collins ? technocrats, not backslappers ? lowered the temperature of public life.

With White, drama returned.

The state-owned park was designed in the 1890s by landscape architect Charles Eliot, as part of what he called the "crown jewel" of the city's park system. Since then, TEA points out, the park ? with its three million annual visitors to such events as the Hatch Shell concerts and the massive July 4 celebration ? has degraded. The park, they say, has been "loved to death." But TEA's plan calls for more than a buff and shine to the old park's infrastructure. In "Esplanade 2020," they call for the reclamation of paved-over parkland, new structures (and redesigns of old ones), and new facilities that could help the park sustain year-round use.

A few months ago, Boston hip-hop vet Marco Antonio Ennis stepped into a home studio in Dorchester to cut a verse for an old friend's teenage son. The young MC was trying to break into hardcore rap, and a verse from Ennis could help build that credibility. Having once belonged to the infamous Hub outfits Made Men and the Almighty RSO, Ennis has spit more murderous rhymes than most.

Beats got played, and everyone got writing. But after a half-hour, Ennis came clean: he couldn't conjure any relevant rhymes. With three decades in the game under his belt, he'd exhausted the shoot-'em-up rhetoric that earned him a rep as one of Boston's most dangerous artists. Despite grief from the guys in the studio, Ennis respectfully bounced, hopped in his weathered minivan, and rolled home.

It was an unusual case of writer's block for the 45-year-old. Since the late '70s, Ennis has been a high-profile roughneck rapper, famous for explicitly illustrating Boston's foulest gutters. Members of his crew have been shot and killed. He himself has been brutally stabbed, and once served state time on weapons charges. If those street credentials fall short, Ennis's urban fashion line, Antonio Ansaldi, attracted major controversy in the mid-2000's with a line of STOP SNITCHIN' T-shirts.

Despite all those stripes, though, Ennis couldn't muster up a deadly medley.

"It's crazy to think that some of the dudes I used to run with have sons who are making gangsta songs now," says Ennis, a father of six girls. "Gangsta rap is a bunch of lyrics and wordplay, and I done fucked with them every way you can. How many times can I talk about popping off a gun? I'm 45. I have grown daughters who listen to my shit now. I have other things to worry about."

As you read this, Beacon Hill is debating a "three-strikes" crime bill, while waiting for the US Attorney's Office to hand down indictments in the scandal over patronage at the probation department. The common thread connecting those two items is this: wherever the Massachusetts State Legislature gets its fingers into the criminal-justice system, the results are not pretty.

In the case of the three-strikes bill, they are pushing for a feel-good law that, if history is a guide, will unnecessarily exacerbate the state's overcrowding problem. The State Senate and Governor Deval Patrick are trying to make the best of the situation by attaching a piece of long-needed sentencing reform, but the House of Representatives is so far refusing to accept it.

As for the probation scandal, one thing it exposed was how little the legislature cared about actual performance or results in criminal-justice agencies, as long as their own personal interests were met. That has led to some reform, but only a bare minimum.

Lawmakers should, of course, play a vital role in the criminal-justice system. But too often, that involvement has meant pandering to loud agitators for knee-jerk crackdowns on criminals, or wielding budget power over courts and agencies.

The result has been a state system stuck woefully behind the times. Much like climate-change deniers, lawmakers refuse to accept the overwhelming body of research and best practices that show the benefits of a more thoughtful, evidence-based reform in criminal justice. That means less reliance on punitive mass incarceration, and more focus on rehabilitation, treatment, and supervision.