Family Of Aaron Swartz: Government Officials Partly To Blame For His Death - MSNBC [View all]

[WillyT]

Family of Aaron Swartz: Government officials partly to blame for his death
By Isolde Raftery, Staff Writer, NBC News
1/12/13

<snip>

In the 24 hours since Aaron Swartz, a prodigy programmer turned Internet folk hero, hanged himself in his New York apartment, his family and a close friend and mentor have not only expressed devastation – they have been angry.

“Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy,” his family wrote in a statement. “It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.”

Swartz, who helped to create RSS at age 14, was indicted in 2011 on charges alleging he improperly downloaded more than four million articles from JSTOR, an online system for archiving academic journals. Swartz argued for transparency -- JSTOR costs more than $50,000 for an annual university subscription -- but court records show that the federal government believed he had, among other felonies, committed wire fraud and computer fraud and unlawfully obtained information from a protected computer.

JSTOR ultimately backed Swartz. But his family’s statement was unflinchingly critical of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Cambridge, Mass., university where Swartz had allegedly registered a ghost computer to download the records:

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.

Swartz’s family described him as entirely committed to social justice. He helped to defeat an Internet censorship bill and “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.”

Swartz, 26, hanged himself in his New York apartment on Friday, his family confirmed.

Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor who described himself as a mentor and close friend to Swartz, took to Tumblr to express his own raw emotions. He wrote that Swartz's actions may not have been ethical, but the government's response was overly aggressive: http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully

From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

<snip>

More: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/12/16485181-family-of-aaron-swartz-government-officials-partly-to-blame-for-his-death?lite