Aaron Swartz, 26-year-old genius, computer prodigy, co-creator of RSS and Reddit, is dead.
Swartz committed suicide in the wake of relentless bullying and persecution/prosecution by Eric Holder's Department of Justice. Swartz was "driven to the edge" by the government's aggressive prosecution of a non-existent legal case. Swartz made public documents available to everyone -- this was his crime. “It’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”
Put this in context. Obama's DoJ, headed by Eric Holder, refused to prosecute the Black Panthers who violently threatened voters with billy clubs and night sticks at polling places on election day. The case was dropped, despite the fact that the case "was already won." This was so gross a violation of voters' rights and the proper function of the Department of Justice that one of its best and brightest senior lawyers resigned in protest: J. Christian Adams.
Obama's Department of Justice policy is that "no voter intimidation cases will brought against a black defendant where the victim is white."
Obama's pro-jihad Department of Justice refused to prosecute Muslim Brotherhood groups, including Hamas-CAIR, ISNA, MSA, MSU, et al, despite the "mountain of evidence" entered into evidence in the largest terrorist funding trial in our nation's history. Documents linked these groups to the funding of terror and murder of non-Muslims, and conspiring toward "eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within."
Obama's pro-sharia Department of Justice department is pursuing cases against cities and towns to enforce sharia in the schools, prisons, and workplace. Obama's Department of Sharia filed an unusual lawsuit against the school system in December 2010, not to ensure that the kids get a good education, mind you, but more importantly, to ensure that the Muslims get special rights and extraordinary accommodation.
The DOJ is creating Muslim majority legislative districts by converting a religious class into a racial one.
The DOJ's Holder sued a New Jersey county demanding that a correction facility accommodate a Muslim employee's khimar, a religious head covering.
Further, Obama's Department of Justice dropped the "charges" against the Muslims who blew up the USS Cole.
But Obama's Department of Justice is targeting Jews for prosecution of non-existent crimes. The lawless, immoral, and unjust Department of Justice went after an innovator, creator, inventor ...... Jew.
Aaron Swartz, 26-year-old genius, computer prodigy, co-creator of RSS and Reddit, is dead.
Swartz made public documents available to everyone -- this was his crime under "the most transparent" regime. Chalk that up as another big, fat Obama lie on "transparency."
Harvard University Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, a friend of Swartz, wrote a withering blog post attacking the Department of Justice for its misplaced zeal:"We need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior," Lessig wrote. "[Aaron] was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying."
Times of Israel: Experts puzzled over the arrest and argued that the result of the actions Swartz was accused of was the same as his PACER program: more information publicly available.
The prosecution “makes no sense,” Demand Progress Executive Director David Segal said at the time. “It’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”
Swartz faced 13 felony charges, including breaching site terms and intending to share downloaded files through peer-to-peer networks, computer fraud, wire fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer, and criminal forfeiture.
JSTOR announced this week that it would make “more than 4.5 million articles” publicly available for free.
That echoes a criticism made by Swartz's friend Larry Lessig, the Harvard University professor and well-known authority on Internet law, who called the government prosecutor in the case a "bully" and said that Swartz had been "driven to the edge" by the government's aggressive handling of the legal case.
Here's the full statement from Aaron's family, which was also published on a site the family created to memorialize Aaron, rememberaaronsw.com:
Our beloved brother, son, friend, and partner Aaron Swartz hanged himself on Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. We are in shock, and have not yet come to terms with his passing.
Aaron’s insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitable—these gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter. We’re grateful for our time with him, to those who loved him and stood with him, and to all of those who continue his work for a better world.
Aaron’s commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life. He was instrumental to the defeat of an Internet censorship bill; he fought for a more democratic, open, and accountable political system; and he helped to create, build, and preserve a dizzying range of scholarly projects that extended the scope and accessibility of human knowledge. He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place. His deeply humane writing touched minds and hearts across generations and continents. He earned the friendship of thousands and the respect and support of millions more.
Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.
Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.
_____
Aaron’s funeral will be held on Tuesday, January 15 at Central Avenue Synagogue, 874 Central Avenue, Highland Park, Illinois 60035.
Aaron Swartz, Internet Pioneer, Found Dead Amid Prosecutor 'Bullying' In Unconventional Case Huffington Post (thanks to Van)
Open democracy advocate and internet pioneer Aaron Swartz was found dead Friday in an apparent suicide, flooding the digital spectrum with an outpouring of grief. He was 26 years old.
Swartz spent the last two years fighting federal hacking charges. In July 2011, prosecutor Scott Garland working under U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, a politician with her eye on the governor's mansion, charged Swartz with four counts of felony misconduct -- charges that were deemed outrageous by internet experts who understood the case, and wholly unnecessary by the parties Swartz was accused of wronging.
Swartz repeatedly sought to reduce the charges to a level below felony status, but prosecutors pressed on, adding additional charges so that by September 2012 Swartz faced 13 felony counts and up to half a century in prison.
Swartz had long lived with depression and a host of physical ailments, which made his accomplishments that much more astonishing. Barely a teenager, he codeveloped the RSS feed, before becoming one of the earliest minds behind Reddit.
Ortiz's office declined to comment for this article. Late on Saturday, Swartz's family issued a statement mourning the loss of their loved one's "curiosity, creativity" and "commitment to social justice." They also put some of the blame for Swartz's death on federal prosecutors.
"Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy," the statement reads. "It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims."
That sentiment was echoed by Harvard University Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, a friend of Swartz, wrote a withering blog post attacking the Department of Justice for its misplaced zeal:
"We need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior," Lessig wrote. "[Aaron] was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying."
Swartz's friend Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University, also pointed at the DOJ. "His last two years were hard, thanks to the U.S. Department of Justice, which engaged in gross prosecutorial overreach on the basis of stretched interpretations of the law," he told HuffPost. "They sought felony convictions with decades of prison time for actions which, if they were illegal at all, were at most misdemeanors. Aaron struggled sometimes with depression, but it would have been hard not to be depressed in his circumstances. As Larry Lessig has rightly said, this should be a cause for great shame and anger."
In the fall of 2010, Swartz downloaded millions of academic journal articles from the nonprofit online database JSTOR, which provides such articles free of charge to students and researchers. As a faculty member at Harvard University, Swartz had a JSTOR account, and downloaded the documents over the course of a few weeks from a library at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
JSTOR typically limits users to a few downloads at a time. Swartz's activities ultimately shut down JSTOR's servers briefly, and eventually resulted in MIT's library being blocked by JSTOR for a few days.
This was inconvenient for JSTOR and MIT, and a violation of JSTOR's Terms of Service agreement. Had JSTOR wanted to pursue civil charges against Swartz for breach of contract, it could have. But JSTOR did not, and washed its hands of the whole affair. In 2013, JSTOR made several million academic journal articles available to anyone, free of charge. Academic research is designed to be publicly accessible and is distinct from the research of private corporations, which assert aggressive intellectual property rights over activities they fund. Last June, Swartz told HuffPost that both JSTOR and MIT had advised prosecutors they were not interested in pursuing criminal or civil charges.
But the government pressed on, interpreting Swartz's actions as a federal crime, alleging mass theft, damaged computers and wire fraud, and suggesting that Swartz stood to gain financially. Federal prosecutors describe Swartz's downloading too quickly from a database to which JSTOR granted him and millions of other scholars free access as:
"Aaron Swartz devised a scheme to defraud JSTOR of a substantial number of journal articles which they had invested in collecting, obtaining the rights to distribute and digitizing," the indictment reads. "He sought to defraud MIT and JSTOR of rights and property." The prosecutors seem unaware that if an article is downloaded, the original copy remains with the owner.
The indictment also says that, "Swartz intended to distribute these articles through one or more file-sharing sites." JSTOR has just released 4.5 million articles to public this week.
The indictment does briefly acknowledge that Swartz had legal access to JSTOR's database. "Although Harvard provided access to JSTOR's services and archive as needed for his research, Swartz used MIT's computer networks to steal millions of articles from JSTOR." But the indictment does not note that Harvard and MIT have an explicit library sharing arrangement, granting scholars at one school access to many of the works and titles at the other. JSTOR has no specific academic allegiance. Its titles are available to all students at all universities at all times.
JSTOR issued a statement late on Saturday expressing regret at Swartz's passing, criticizing his prosecution.
"The case is one that we ourselves had regretted being drawn into from the outset, since JSTOR’s mission is to foster widespread access to the world’s body of scholarly knowledge," the statement reads. "At the same time, as one of the largest archives of scholarly literature in the world, we must be careful stewards of the information entrusted to us by the owners and creators of that content. To that end, Aaron returned the data he had in his possession and JSTOR settled any civil claims we might have had against him in June 2011."
All 13 counts against Swartz rest on the idea that he stole or damaged JSTOR and MIT property.
The final count alleges that Swartz caused "reckless damage" to computer systems owned by JSTOR and MIT. While both JSTOR and MIT suffered interrupted service to JSTOR's archive as a result of Swartz's downloads, there was no permanent technical dysfunction.
The prosecution's case ultimately depended on whether or not breaking a Terms of Service agreement can be deemed a violation of the 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act -- the principal federal anti-hacking statute. While the law was designed to ban hackers from spreading viruses and stealing property, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that such activity includes violating Terms of Service agreements.
The Seventh Circuit's decision was widely mocked by internet experts, who noted that nearly anyone could become criminally liable for reading blogs if a blog owner simply set up an outrageous terms of service agreement.
In addition, a more recent decision by the Ninth Circuit rejected the Seventh Circuit's reasoning in 2010, and the Obama administration chose not to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.
Although JSTOR opposed prosecuting Swartz, MIT did not speak out against the prosecution's case as aggressively as JSTOR did. Swartz's family criticized the school on Saturday for failing to intervene.
"Unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles," the statement reads.
The FBI had investigated Swartz prior to the JSTOR incident in 2009, when Swartz wrote a script mass-downloading many U.S. court documents held in the pricey PACER database. Although court documents are in the public domain, PACER charges a premium for collecting the documents and making them searchable. Swartz paid PACER for mass downloads, then sent the documents to another free database.
The FBI monitored Swartz and then concluded that because the documents were in the public domain, no charges could be filed. After receiving several phone calls from the FBI, Swartz submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for his own FBI file. The agency was legally compelled to comply with the request, and Swartz published the file on his own blog in 2009.
On Saturday, WikiLeaks tweeted about Swartz: "The brilliant Aaron Swartz (@aaronsw), long time WikiLeaks friend, age 26, is dead after two years of harrassment by US prosecutors."
Swartz was found dead in his New York apartment Friday after apparently hanging himself.
In addition to earning the ire of PACER, the FBI and the office of U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, Swartz wrote the programming for RSS 1.0, an extremely common and useful computer tool. He helped start Reddit and also helped launch Creative Commons -- a special intellectual property license allowing anyone to use creative work, provided it is not sold for profit.
He was the founder of the progressive political advocacy group Demand Progress, which was extremely active during the legislative battle over the Stop Online Piracy Act. He co-founded the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, though he has not worked with the organization in some time. More recently, he was working with Matt Stoller, a writer and former aide to Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), on a longterm project aimed at ending the drug war.
"What people saw in public was a fearless advocate of open information, who was nonetheless realistic about the limits to what open information could do without radical political reform," Farrell said.
He added: "He shared the urgent concern of his friend, [MSNBC host] Chris Hayes, to address what economic inequality was doing to this country. What many, many people saw in private was his extraordinary generosity with both time and resources. He had made enough money from the sale of Reddit to Conde Nast to live without working for several years, as long as he was reasonably frugal. So what he did, was to spend his life trying to figure out ways in which he could be helpful to people and causes he liked. Since his death, I've heard an outpouring of stories from people whom he helped set up websites for, read and critiqued work and so on. He combined technological brilliance with enormous amounts of energy, and a real understanding of politics."
This story was updated to include comments from a statement from Swartz's family and a statement from JSTOR.
