US Prosecutors Turned a Blind Eye to Drone Code Piracy
Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old Internet activist and the co-developer of popular web tools like RSS feeds and Reddit, ended his life earlier this year at the end of a long battle with federal prosecutors in Boston — who had accused him of engaging in digital piracy.
Under the umbrella of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the prosecutors in Swartz’ case, led by US Attorney Carmen Ortiz, piled multiple criminal counts on him that collectively could have locked him up for a quarter century. His alleged transgression: Stashing a laptop computer in a closet of a building on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus (where Swartz was a research fellow) and using it to download several million academic articles — many the product of taxpayer funding — from the archives of a nonprofit online library called JSTOR.
Nobody was harmed in Swartz’ alleged crime, and JSTOR itself argued against pressing charges, but federal prosecutors pressed forward zealously, seemingly looking to make Swartz a stepping stone for their careers. However, US Attorney Ortiz, and her team of legal hounds, sparked international outrage for their actions when the target of their prosecutorial persecution, by then a cult hero in the tech world, on Jan. 11 committed suicide by hanging himself in his New York apartment.
But there is far more to this sordid tale of justice gone awry that so far has remained suppressed by the very powers that ultimately destroyed Swartz’ life.
It turns out that the same prosecutors who chose to bury Swartz under an avalanche of computer-fraud charges chose not to pursue prosecution of another far more serious alleged corporate computer crime that came to light only months prior to Swartz’ January 2011 arrest by MIT and Cambridge, Mass., cops. In the corporate caper, lives did hang in the balance, as did the financial fortunes of a major US corporation, IBM — where US Attorney Ortiz’ significant other was employed as an executive.
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/bill-conroy/2013/03/us-prosecutors-turned-blind-eye-drone-code-piracy
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