Have gun? Word won't travel

• Gun control legislation set to pass in New York state "would allow gun permit license holders to petition to not include their names on a public list if they believe the exposure is a danger, according to a legislative source briefed on the draft bill," YNN reported. "A statewide database of pistol permits from counties would not be subject to the Freedom of Information Law."

  The New York Times' Bill Keller notes how ill-equipped our current understanding of privacy is when it is under attack from all sides: Public information becoming more functionally "public" as well as the increasingly encroaching eyes of a government that has eroded the beachhead of judicial review when it comes to monitoring electronic communications:

  When it comes to privacy, we are all hypocrites. We howl when a newspaper publishes public records about personal behavior. At the same time, we are acquiescing in a much more sweeping erosion of our privacy — government surveillance, corporate data-mining, political microtargeting, hacker invasions — with no comparable outpouring of protest. As a society we have no coherent view of what information is worth defending and how to defend it.

Around the web

• Parsing the response to Aaron Swartz's death, your First POST editor writes:

  The people who knew Swartz best make it clear that he was too complex to be defined only by his criminal case, or by its affect on him. But after Swartz's death, one of the clearest cries from his friends and supporters is that not only did the proposed punishment not fit the alleged crime, the crimes he was charged with seemed not to fit the actions he was accused of taking.

• Ron Conway is rallying the tech community to support a new lobbying effort called the Sandy Hook Promise.

• More reactions to the death of Aaron Swartz come from David Karpf, Ian Millhiser, Adrian Chen, James Allworth, Maxwell Kennerly, Cyrus Farivar, Mike Masnick, the Economist, Tim Wu, the Sunlight Foundation, Orin Kerr, Gabriella Coleman, Gideon Lichfield, Peter Ludlow, Ben Adida, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Democracy Now, Matt Stoller,Andrew Leonard and Muckrock. A We the People petition demands the "Reform [of] the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to reflect the realities of computing and networks in 2013."

• Some online activists have created an Aaron Swartz Memorial JSTOR Liberator, "a JavaScript-based bookmarklet that lets Internet users 'liberate' an article, already in the public domain, from the online academic archive JSTOR. By running the script — which is limited to once per browser — a public domain academic article is downloaded to the user’s computer, then uploaded back to ArchiveTeam in a small act of protest against JSTOR's restrictive policies," ars technica reported. Engine Advocacy, Electronic Frontier Foundation and craigconnects are planning an Internet Freedom Day on Friday in San Francisco marking the anniversary of the SOPA protests and in memory of Swartz. Librarians have nominated Swartz for the ALA James Madison Award.

• The official smartphone application for the Inauguration has been released.

• Some Obama staffers have been complaining on a Linkedin group about their frustration with the Presidential Inauguration Committee, a staffer told Buzzfeed.

• Fed chair Ben Bernanke took some questions from Twitter during a Q & A following a speech at the University of Michigan. The Washington Post explained how the Twitter questions came about.

• Ilyse Hogue, formerly of MoveOn, will become president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

• Banks are seeking help from the NSA in connection with attacks on their computer systems.

• Luke Fretwell, founder of GovFresh, offeres nine suggestions for improving government websites.

• The New York Times reports on how Hollywood productions are increasingly previewed for Chinese officials and edited to change content that could be objectionable in the Chinese market.

• The Washington Post highlighted a new analysis of why electronic health records are expected to produce savings. Use of electronic health records for Medicare has also been challenging.

• IP addresses associated with congressional offices have been found to be illegally downloading movies and TV shows, U.S. News reported.

• Derek Khanna, the author of a withdrawn controversial Republican Study Committee report on copyright, believes reform is still possible.

• Tom Morris blogged about MapRoulette, a tool that encourages users to fix OpenStreetMap errors.

• Daniel Schuman from the Sunlight Foundation analyzed House Republican leadership's recent advances in opening up legislative data.

• Buzzfeed looked at police departments' use of Pinterest.

• The Texas Tribune has launched a Lawmaker Explorer data app.

• New Hampshire's house is considering legislation that would give control over social media accounts to the executor of the person's estate after the account holder dies, WMUR reported.

• Nieman Lab reported on massive open online journalism courses being offered at the University of Texas’ Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.

• Wired explored why Google Fiber remains an anomaly and what cities are doing to start their own high-speed Internet initiatives.

International

• An Iranian satellite channel broadcasting illegally into the country from Dubai appears to have been blacked out without explanation, and its website is also down.

• The Economist suggests that Google is being hypocritical for putting pressure on North Korea while holding back in China, and also looked at how the controversy over a a Chinese newspaper played out online.

• A U.S. supported disaster monitoring and response system for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations was recently completed: "The system provides streams of data on hazards such as earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, typhoons, forest fires, and other natural disasters from all over ASEAN, combining them into one interface for disaster monitoring and decision making. AHA Centre operators can immediately see the big picture, which improves response times and leads to more efficient use of relief resources," a press release from the U.S. mission notes.

• A Swedish authority is seeking to make online defamation punishable by law.

• A British court sentenced two hackers to 100 hours of community service for stealing unreleased music from Sony's servers.