The suicide of famed programmer and free access advocate Aaron Swartz shocked the world. However, the underlying story of the how the Obama Administration prosecuted — and, in the eyes of many, persecuted — Swartz for seeking to publish academic papers which were later released by MIT without charge. Nevertheless, United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz and the Obama Administration relentlessly pursued Swartz and sought an absurd 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines before he took his own life. His family blames the Justice Department and Ortiz for his suicide. Swartz opposed the Administration’s fight against public access and particularly President Obama’s “Kill List.” The Swartz prosecution was widely criticized for months but the Obama Administration and Justice Department remained committed to putting him in jail.
Swartz was one of this country’s most extraordinary individuals. At age 14, he helped create RSS, the tool allowing people to subscribe to online information. He later was a founder of a company that merged with Reddit where we get many of our daily stories.
Swartz, 26, hanged himself and appears to have suffered from depression. Thus, the prosecution cannot be entirely attributed with his death. However, the Obama Administration hammered Swartz for months over his downloading of academic articles. Swartz has long been an advocate for public access to information. Like many of us, Swartz was critical of increasingly stringent laws balkanizing information in our society from works to words to even common images. He however took that crusade to extraordinary lengths.
In 2008, he took on PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, for its charging of 10 cents a page for documents. I agreed with Swartz about this charge as being a barrier to public access to our courts and important cases. He argued correctly that there should be free access. He co-founded Demand Progress to seek online access and fought for social reforms. The federal government, at the behest of industry groups, shutdown his free library program.
In 2011, Swartz took on JSTOR, the academic repository of papers and research. It is a subscription based service. He broke into the computer system at MIT through a utility closet using a laptop and a false identity. He downloaded 4.8 million documents. Notably, however, MIT chose not to pursue charges — to its credit. For many years, academics argued that such material should be free to the public as a matter of principle. Two days before Swartz’s death, MIT releases all documents publicly free of charge.
However, despite MIT’s position that it did not want to bring charges, Carmen M. Ortiz saw her chance. 
Ortiz is the United States Attorney for Massachusetts and a graduate of our law school who spoke recently at our commencement. Industry groups and lobbyists have long gotten what they wanted from Obama on criminalizing trademark and copyright violations. States have shown the same capture by industry groups. Swartz was a prime target as an advocate of public access and the Obama Administration threw everything that they had at him.
There is no question that Swartz crossed the line and broke into the system. However, given MIT’s position against charging Swartz, it would seem a case for prosecutorial discretion or a deal with Swartz. After all, students commit such acts regularly (though certainly not to the size of this download) without charges. Ortiz, however, sought decades in jail and ruinous fines to the great pleasure of the copyright hawks that run throughout the Administration. To the Administration, Swartz was just another felon who needed to be jailed for decades for his crime.
It is doubtful that the Administration will take any action to reduce the stranglehold on creativity and discussion by these laws. The Administration has brought in copyright hawks into the Administration and appointed them to the courts in a windfall for industry.
MIT has started an investigation into any role the school may have played in the prosecution by the Obama Administration. What is notable is that Swartz’s treatment at the hands of the Justice Department has caused outrage. However, thousands of average citizens have been ravaged by the Administration or industry law firms like the U.S. Copyright Group under these laws without attention or concern.
The abuse of Swartz speaks of industry capture of our government that has now claimed the life of one of the brightest of our country. He is the ultimate personification of how our copyright and trademark laws have been flipped on their head. Rather than protect creativity, they now stifle such creativity. We now have prosecutors and lawyers pursuing people like Swartz to prevent public access to information. His tragic image hanging in his apartment speaks to the dismal state of information control in this country. His was truly a beautiful mind and his death should galvanize his cause to empower citizens in their demand to breakdown the rising barriers to information in this country.
Source: NY Times
justice holmes:
arent you for restricting the right to bear arms?
arent you being hypocritical?
knowledge is power.
But intellectual property belongs to the person who created it.
except if tax dollars were used in the creation.
You have to wonder about this ‘progressive’ President. He makes Nixon with all his paranoia and trampling on the Constitution look like a real progressive.
My props to MIT for investigating its role in this fiasco.
It appears that “we the people” are the enemies of this administration. If you’re a corporate criminal, war criminal or corporate polluter, you get a pass. What a legacy? One hopes that history will be none too kind on Obama and his administration .
Harvard law Professor Lawrence Lessig, faculty director of the Safra Center for Ethics where Swartz was once a fellow, wrote: “We need a better sense of justice. … The question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a ‘felon.’ ”
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Aaron-Swartz-s-family-blames-prosecutors-4191172.php#ixzz2Hy23qNLO
I confess knowing nothing of this gentleman until his death. What I have found interesting in my reading up on Swartz is that there is none of the tiresome left/right on this. From what I’ve read so far the outrage is across the political spectrum.
And what Woosty and Justice Holmes said.
Follow up to myself – you know, it takes a special kind of mind to seize the opportunity of a suicide to get a few digs in against the Obama administration, despite the utter absence of any role by cabinet members or presidential staff in this whole debacle.
As much as Ortiz missed the perfect chance to appropriately use her discretion by letting this case go, or reducing the charges, it hardly involves Obama to the extent necessary to justify using his photo and repeating his name five times and referring to “the Administration” separately another four times.
(also, Ortiz is USA, not AUSA, my mistake)
Aaron in action:
http://youtu.be/Fgh2dFngFsg
Sane people understand that bullying someone to death….whether death comes by illness, suicide or accident, is murder. The faction that uses this manner of treatment to have their way with people are just another arm of the mob….certainly not people you want in positions of ‘governance’ and most certainly not people who you want to see in ‘law’….for they’ve made it very clear that they have no belief in ‘law’.
Obama apparently has never been on the side of transparency in government or on the side of progressives. The death of Mr. Swartz is a tragic example of a government that protects corporate interests above all else.
Prosecutorial overreach is a serious disease that infects every level of our criminal justice system, particularly when the target is defenseless. Win and lose not justice is the measure the Justice department applies. Few average people can ever hope to win against the massive resources of the government that is why we are supposed to have constitutional rights to protect us from government overreach but I am so quaint and obsolete.
A sad loss on so many levels.
http://www.rememberaaronsw.com/memories/brian-mcconnell.html
Brian McConnell
I first met Aaron at Foo Camp. He was a teenager then, and even then, he stood out compared to the people there, people at the highest levels of the technology industry.
His death is deeply shameful, and should forever mark the careers of the people who bullied him into suicide. His crime was basically to photocopy obscure academic articles, not to make a profit, but to make the point that rent-seeking “publishers” shouldn’t be granted a monopoly to charge for access to other people’s research that the public has already paid for.
His passing should also be a warning to all of us that we now live in a security state where anybody can be targeted by an ambitious prosecutor, for any reason, or no reason at all, beyond his or her own advancement to higher power.
If you can be faced with 50 years in federal prison for “stealing” academic papers, you can be thrown in jail for anything. Nobody is safe.
Brian McConnell, Worldwide Lexicon Project 13 Jan 2013
Grinding an axe much, to repeatedly describe the decisions of the Mass AUSA as “the Obama Administration”? Do you really think the White House, or even the AG, weighed in on charging decisions in the Aaron Swartz case? Give me a break.
http://www.rememberaaronsw.com
http://www.rememberaaronsw.com/memories/brian-mcconnell.html
Brian McConnell
I first met Aaron at Foo Camp. He was a teenager then, and even then, he stood out compared to the people there, people at the highest levels of the technology industry.
His death is deeply shameful, and should forever mark the careers of the people who bullied him into suicide. His crime was basically to photocopy obscure academic articles, not to make a profit, but to make the point that rent-seeking “publishers” shouldn’t be granted a monopoly to charge for access to other people’s research that the public has already paid for.
His passing should also be a warning to all of us that we now live in a security state where anybody can be targeted by an ambitious prosecutor, for any reason, or no reason at all, beyond his or her own advancement to higher power.
If you can be faced with 50 years in federal prison for “stealing” academic papers, you can be thrown in jail for anything. Nobody is safe.
Brian McConnell, Worldwide Lexicon Project 13 Jan 2013
What’s that story line in the emperors new clothes……
This dude had it exactly right and you can tell by the reaction from the feds. And he is not alone, not by a mile. This is setting off a chain-reaction within the Reddit community. The feds are forcing the assembly of armed resistance where the battles are for data. Lousy bits, little 1s and 0s that have the power to do the most wretched thing in all of human existence: the power to Embarrass.
Watch interest in meshnets now explode. The ISP model must be brought to its knees now. It is how we will flush out the torturers, sadists, and thieves, all practically medieval references, but this is what we have,
Rest Well, Prince!
Other issues may be aired. All is fair in love and war.
It is time to march on Washington this May Day. Shut Down The War Or We Will Shut Down The Government. (May Day is May First).
“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.” Statement made by the family and partner of Aaron Swartz
Another example of prosecutors using existing laws to go beyond society’s original intent.
While judicial overreach is a common issue, prosecutorial overreach is probably a more serious problem.
Part of the problem is the myriad of laws on the books – that gives prosecutors the opportunity to charge defendants with numerous crimes (just look at your recent column about the burglar who attempted to strangle the Rottweiler).
Faced with the potential for decades in prison, most defendants take a guilty plea that gives them a few years (and that ignores the ruinous cost of defending against a tsunami of criminal charges).
Justice in America is being subverted – don’t know what the ultimate result will be, but common American have less access to justice than is commonly believed.