Farewell to Aaron Swartz

[Peter Lemkin]

In Memoriam, Aaron Swartz, November 8, 1986 January 11, 2013, Requiescat in pace

A brief message from Anonymous.

Whether or not the government contributed to his suicide, the government's prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it enabling the collective betterment of the world through the facilitation of sharing an ideal that we should all support.

Moreover, the situation Aaron found himself in highlights the injustice of U.S. computer crime laws, particularly their punishment regimes, and the highly-questionable justice of pre-trial bargaining. Aaron's act was undoubtedly political activism; it had tragic consequences.

Our wishes

We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of computer crime laws, and the overzealous prosecutors who use them.
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of copyright and intellectual property law, returning it to the proper principles of common good to the many, rather than private gain to the few.
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for greater recognition of the oppression and injustices heaped daily by certain persons and institutions of authority upon anyone who dares to stand up and be counted for their beliefs, and for greater solidarity and mutual aid in response.
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for a renewed and unwavering commitment to a free and unfettered internet, spared from censorship with equality of access and franchise for all.
For in the end, we will not be judged according to what we give, but according to what we keep to ourselves.

Aaron, we will sorely miss your friendship, and your help in building a better world. May you read in peace.

-

Who was Aaron Swartz? A hero in the SOPA/PIPA campaign, Reddit co-founder, RSS, Demand Progress, Avaaz, etc…:

Aaron Swartz's funeral is on Tuesday.

Remove United States District Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office for overreach in the case of #Aaron Swartz.

-

Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.

"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources students, librarians, scientists you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not indeed, morally, you cannot keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

Aaron Swartz

July 2008, Eremo, Italy



You were the best of us; may you yet bring out the best in us.

-Anonymous, Jan 13, 2013.

-

(Postscript: We tender apologies to the administrators at MIT for this temporary use of their websites. We understand that it is a time of soul-searching for all those within this great institution as much perhaps for some involved even more so than it is for the greater internet community. We do not consign blame or responsibility upon MIT for what has happened, but call for all those feel heavy-hearted in their proximity to this awful loss to acknowledge instead the responsibility they have that we all have to build and safeguard a future that would make Aaron proud, and honour the ideals and dedication that burnt so brightly within him by embodying them in thought and word and action. Original frontpage)

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

The same day they found his body, Verizon's "6 strikes plan" was leaked. Coincidence?


This past Friday morning Aaron was found hanging in his New York (NYPD Intelligence division/ Hmmm.) apartment. He was facing charges stemming from his hacking into JSTOR and downloading a bunch of literary and scientific journals and then posting them for free online.

JSTOR put out a statement telling the world (and more specifically the hactivist community) that they did not turn Swartz in to the Feds.

JSTOR is wise enough to know who not to piss off.

But what JSTOR was doing and what Swartz exposed, was they were literally hoarding mass amounts of the knowledge of the human race, scientific and literary journals that all could benefit from, and ONLY sharing them with those who could afford to pay the subscription price.

If you can afford it, then you are worthy of knowledge. If you can't, you aren't. That is the message of JSTOR.

In response to the negative feedback they've been getting, JSTOR released a piddly few 1,200 journals for "limit" access by the masses. How very humanitarian of them.

I recall him saying that the internet could be the greatest tool to open and free humanity or the most dangerous tool of propaganda and that we are sitting here at a time in history in which this direction will be determined for the next 100 years.

Anyway, those out there suggesting that Swartz killed himself because of this court case are grossly uneducated in the matter. Aaron just recently plead not-guilty in the case and I'm sure he was looking forward to beating it in court. Beating the feds on this would have been a nice way to follow up his efforts to defeat SOPA and PIPA.

But he won't get the chance.

As I wrote a while ago, the feds decided to push for internet censorship via their last best hope: the free markets.

Big telecom companies are coming up with their own means by which to wipe certain people with certain ideas off the "internets". I guess it's payback for all that retroactive immunity they got from the Bush and Obama administrations when they could have been sued out the ying yang for allowing the feds to spy on us.

On the same day Aaron supposedly took his own life, Torrentfreak released a Verizon document detailing their new 6 strikes and your out plan.

The idea is basically this: Verizon will tell it's customers when someone files a claim against them for copyright infringement. Verizon will give their users "x" amount of warnings then reduce their internet speed to something like a dial-up connection which will basically take them off the web for all intents and purposes.

As Aaron pointed out in a lecture he gave a year or so ago, the use of the ubiquitous "copyright infringement" charge is a dangerous and sweeping tool to use to shut down certain people. Everything is copyrighted by someone out there and the laws governing how much of what one can use are mirky at best.

Verizon claims they will set up a review panel with the American Arbitration Association and if you pay them $35 bucks they will review your case and find in favor of Verizon.

I find it very odd that Aaron just happened to take his own life when Verizon was about to launch this new SOPA/PIPA program of theirs own their own customers. I also find it odd that he was going to try his hacking case in court which would have brought tons of negative publicity down on JSTOR, portraying them as the guardians of knowledge for the elites. - Willyloman

[Lauren Johnson]

As I stated in my initial post about Aaron Swartz's death, I don't think it's fair to "blame" the DOJ or others on Aaron's suicide -- just as I don't think it's fair to blame anyone's suicide on a third party, no matter how horrible their actions. That said, the DOJ's actions in this case were quite clearly horrible, and since the case will now never go forward, it seems imperative to highlight just how badly the DOJ acted in this case.

Larry Lessig's post made some clear points suggesting that the feds and MIT were out of line in pursuing this case, which seems like an understatement:

Here is where 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. 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.

Aaron had literally done nothing in his life "to make money." He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good. He 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. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don't get both, you don't deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.

Lessig made it clear that the feds sought to get Aaron to agree to a plea deal, in which he'd plead guilty to some aspect of the charges against him, in exchange for letting him off on the more serious charges. Aaron did an amazing thing and refused, believing that he had not done anything wrong:

In that world, the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a "felon." For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge. And so as wrong and misguided and fucking sad as this is, I get how the prospect of this fight, defenseless, made it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it.

And, for those who don't think that pushing back against the feds is an amazing thing, you have no clue how much pressure the federal government can put on you when it wants you to plead guilty. Two years ago I wrote about a documentary called Better This World, which is about an entirely different subject, but really opened my eyes to the way the feds handle some of these cases. It's not about what's right. It is entirely about them winning, getting the press coverage and "making examples" of people. And they'll go to amazing lengths, and create pressure that you and I can only have nightmares about, to get people to accept bogus "plea" deals, just so they can notch up another "win." It's scary, scary stuff. Fighting back may have been the right thing to do, but must have created a level of stress unimaginable to most people.

The WSJ has provided more details about the hard line that federal prosecutors had taken with Aaron, including last week's demand that he plead guilty to all counts and spend time in jail:

Mr. Swartz's lawyer, Elliot Peters, first discussed a possible plea bargain with Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann last fall. In an interview Sunday, he said he was told at the time that Mr. Swartz would need to plead guilty to every count, and the government would insist on prison time.

Mr. Peters said he spoke to Mr. Heymann again last Wednesday in another attempt to find a compromise. The prosecutor, he said, didn't budge

In exchange for pleading guilty across the board, Heymann apparently promised that they would ask for a shorter sentence, though that's never a guarantee:

The government indicated it might only seek seven years at trial, and was willing to bargain that down to six to eight months in exchange for a guilty plea, a person familiar with the matter said. But Mr. Swartz didn't want to do jail time.

"I think Aaron was frightened and bewildered that they'd taken this incredibly hard line against him," said Mr. Peters, his lawyer. "He didn't want to go to jail. He didn't want to be a felon."

The report also notes that his girlfriend was unaware of any depressive episodes until right after Wednesday's decision by Heymann to refuse to budge on jailtime and a guilty plea on all counts.

As for the details of the case itself, they were absurd -- and it is no wonder that Swartz refused to plead guilty. Back in September, we delved into the ridiculous details of the final indictment -- which upped the felony count, all of which was based on the idea that he had done some sort of massive computer hacking for the sake of some criminal conspiracy. And yet... that was clearly never the case. As Tim Lee detailed, at worst, it appeared that Swartz might possibly be guilty of trespassing. Yes, he went into a computer closet at MIT, but he got access to a network which was open for all, and he downloaded documents that were made available freely to all on that network.

Many people have reasonably pointed to a blog post from Alex Stamos, the CTO of Artemis Internet, who had been brought on as an expert witness on Aaron's behalf. After demonstrating that his reports have been used on behalf of prosecutors in attacks, and pointing out that he's no friend of hackers, Stamos highlights in detail just how completely bogus the charges against Swartz were:

I know a criminal hack when I see it, and Aaron's downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail.
The facts:

• MIT operates an extraordinarily open network. Very few campus networks offer you a routable public IP address via unauthenticated DHCP and then lack even basic controls to prevent abuse. Very few captured portals on wired networks allow registration by any vistor, nor can they be easily bypassed by just assigning yourself an IP address. In fact, in my 12 years of professional security work I have never seen a network this open.
  
• In the spirit of the MIT ethos, the Institute runs this open, unmonitored and unrestricted network on purpose. Their head of network security admitted as much in an interview Aaron's attorneys and I conducted in December. MIT is aware of the controls they could put in place to prevent what they consider abuse, such as downloading too many PDFs from one website or utilizing too much bandwidth, but they choose not to.
  
• MIT also chooses not to prompt users of their wireless network with terms of use or a definition of abusive practices.
  
• At the time of Aaron's actions, the JSTOR website allowed an unlimited number of downloads by anybody on MIT's 18.x Class-A network. The JSTOR application lacked even the most basic controls to prevent what they might consider abusive behavior, such as CAPTCHAs triggered on multiple downloads, requiring accounts for bulk downloads, or even the ability to pop a box and warn a repeat downloader.
  
• Aaron did not "hack" the JSTOR website for all reasonable definitions of "hack". Aaron wrote a handful of basic python scripts that first discovered the URLs of journal articles and then used curl to request them. Aaron did not use parameter tampering, break a CAPTCHA, or do anything more complicated than call a basic command line tool that downloads a file in the same manner as right-clicking and choosing "Save As" from your favorite browser.
  
• Aaron did nothing to cover his tracks or hide his activity, as evidenced by his very verbose .bash_history, his uncleared browser history and lack of any encryption of the laptop he used to download these files. Changing one's MAC address (which the government inaccurately identified as equivalent to a car's VIN number) or putting a mailinator email address into a captured portal are not crimes. If they were, you could arrest half of the people who have ever used airport wifi.
  
• The government provided no evidence that these downloads caused a negative effect on JSTOR or MIT, except due to silly overreactions such as turning off all of MIT's JSTOR access due to downloads from a pretty easily identified user agent.
  
• I cannot speak as to the criminal implications of accessing an unlocked closet on an open campus, one which was also used to store personal effects by a homeless man. I would note that trespassing charges were dropped against Aaron and were not part of the Federal case.
  

In short, Aaron Swartz was not the super hacker breathlessly described in the Government's indictment and forensic reports, and his actions did not pose a real danger to JSTOR, MIT or the public. He was an intelligent young man who found a loophole that would allow him to download a lot of documents quickly. This loophole was created intentionally by MIT and JSTOR, and was codified contractually in the piles of paperwork turned over during discovery.

That's from someone who clearly had detailed knowledge about the situation. Other legal experts had come to similar conclusions after the original indictment came out. Way back when, we had pointed to an article by Max Kennerly in which he looked closely at the indictment and was left confused as to how it got as far as it did. Kennerly has since updated his post (both after the new indictment and again over the weekend, in which he notes that Stamos' post suggest that his own original analysis didn't even go far enough after discovering the details). Kennerly looked at how the case really revolved around whether or not Swartz's activities violated the terms of service, but given the details of the case, combined with Stamos' comments and the fact that (since Swartz was charged) multiple courts have ruled that a mere terms of service violation is not a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), this case seemed to have absolutely nothing legitimate.

Given the disclosures by Swartz's expert, Alex Stamos, which are linked at the beginning of this post, it seems that Swartz had a strong argument that he did indeed have "authorization." As Stamos says, at the time of Swartz's downloads, "the JSTOR website allowed an unlimited number of downloads by anybody on MIT's 18.x Class-A network" and "Aaron did not use parameter tampering, break a CAPTCHA, or do anything more complicated than call a basic command line tool that downloads a file in the same manner as right-clicking and choosing 'Save As' from your favorite browser."

Thus, all Swartz did was write a script to find and download the files. As a factual matter, that may have been "authorization," rendering it lawful everywhere. Even if the script was "exceeding authorization," if the First Circuit had adopted the same rule as the Fourth Circuit and the Ninth Circuit, then Swartz would likely have been not guilty as a matter of law. All of which further shows why this prosecution should not have been brought in the first place; the prosecutor is supposed to exercise their judgment to do justice.

Separately, it has been pointed out numerous times that the only real party who had any reasonable claim to "harm" was JSTOR, and it had said from early on that it had settled its issue with Swartz when he agreed to turn over his hard drive with everything he'd downloaded. Now, a bit more has come out, as apparently JSTOR itself asked federal prosecutors to drop the case:

Elliot Peters, Swartz's California-based defense attorney and a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan, told The Associated Press on Sunday that the case "was horribly overblown" because Swartz had "the right" to download from JSTOR, a subscription service used by MIT that offers digitized copies of articles from more than 1,000 academic journals.

Peters said even the company took the stand that the computer crimes section of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Boston had overreached in seeking prison time for Swartz and insisting , two days before his suicide , that he plead guilty to all 13 felony counts. Peters said JSTOR's attorney, Mary Jo White , the former top federal prosecutor in Manhattan , had called Stephen Heymann, the lead Boston prosecutor in the case.

"She asked that they not pursue the case," Peters said.

So even the supposedly "harmed" party didn't want the case to go forward. And yet, Stephen Heymann kept pushing.

The case is now gone, so we'll never see how a judge rules on it. We can hope that, given everything above, a judge would have clearly seen what a joke the case was, and dismissed it. But, you never know how judges will rule, and especially when they're not very technically savvy, they'll give a ridiculous amount of deference to federal prosecutors, merely because of their position. But the ridiculousness of the case should be pointed out over and over again to remind everyone of the problems we get when the federal government gets too powerful, and knows that it can use that power against someone it doesn't like.

Whether or not the impending trial contributed to Swartz's death, one thing is undeniable: the case itself was a complete farce, and that should not be forgotten. One hopes that, among other things, one of the legacies of Swartz's death may be to fix broken laws that allowed this prosecution to move forward, and to figure out a way to dial back the aggressiveness with which federal prosecutors take on cases these days.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/2013011...bage.shtml

[Peter Lemkin]

Interesting legal information on just how flimsy and fake a case the USG had!!!! As to the pipedream at the end "to figure out a way to dial back the aggressiveness with which federal prosecutors take on cases these days.", I can only say that is quite naive....the government - or should I say those BEHIND IT - are hellbent on ratcheting up prosecutions, harshness and length of sentences for anyone not with the 'PLAN', while totally refusing to bring any legal action against the real criminals - be they banksters, corporate thieves, genocidal warriors, unConstitutional actions, violations of International Laws, reduction of freedoms and rights, et al. The legal and moral state of the state is totally upside-down and it is no joke.....evil, theft, murder, mass-murder, abridgment of law and rights are REWARDED; attempts to maintain law and order, peace, prosperity spread universally, the sharing of truthful information, Constitutionality and sustainability - not to mention humanity and sanity are all but illegal now and those who practice it or try to point out those who prevent it will soon find themselves on the wrong side of the Police, illegal system and in prison or devoid of all they own and ever will earn.....some, even their lives.

[Peter Lemkin]

HIGHLAND PARK, Ill. -- Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz was "killed by the government," his father told mourners Tuesday during his son's funeral in suburban Chicago.

Swartz, who help create Reddit and RSS, the technology behind blogs, podcasts and other web-based subscription services, was found dead Friday in his New York apartment. He was facing federal charges that alleged he illegally gained access to millions of articles from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer archive.

"He was killed by the government, and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles," he said.

Swartz, 26, was facing charges that carried a maximum penalty of decades in prison. His trial was scheduled to begin in April.

U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz had no comment about Robert Swartz's remarks, Ortiz spokeswoman Christina DiIorio-Sterling said.

Swartz's family also lashed out against prosecutors Saturday, saying the death was "the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach."

Swartz's case highlighted society's uncertain, evolving view of how to treat people who break into computer systems and share data not to enrich themselves, but to make it available to others.

Tim Berners-Lee, who developed the World Wide Web, and Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, director of the Safra Center for Ethics where Swartz was once a fellow, both spoke at the funeral.

"We felt the indictment was nonsense and that he would be acquitted," Berners-Lee told the newspaper after the service.

[Lauren Johnson]

January 16, 2013

Aaron Swartz did not take his own life. He was murdered in order to save the state the embarrassment of losing their trumped up trial against him. He faced a maximum of 6 months in jail, reduced to 3 for good behavior as is the law, not 35 years as the complicit press will tell you. He was killed so that a movement he helped lead would be crippled right before another SOPA / PIPA internet crushing bill is about to take shape. He was killed because he refused a deal and would have stoked the imagination of the opposition by winning in court. Unfortunately, far too few "alternative" activists out there are willing to make this statement. Activists who owe this young man a great deal as they enjoy a free and open internet which is about to close down forever.

Aaron Swartz was murdered and I am sure he won't be the last. Perhaps the most obvious lesson here is too the "hacktivist" community at large: when we bust you and drum up charges against you, you turn and serve "the greater good" or… you get "Swartzed".

Swartz was a leading and effective activist standing opposed to the neo-liberalization of America and the people investigating his death are Billioniare Bloomberg's "mini-CIA". Get the picture? I guess he's lucky he wasn't renditioned to Djibouti like other dissidents as is the custom under Obama.

When I first read the story of Aaron Swartz I have to say I was not all that impressed with the guy. He seemed like just another "tech-geek miracle" made by the Intelligence Department Industrial Complex like so many before him. I based that on what I saw happen to Reddit first-hand when they sold themselves to Conde Nast and began a program of running down important articles on Reddit and totally erasing some as soon as they were posted.

And I am also aware that the shareware and open-software world which Aaron was involved in, is full of Trojans and trackers and cognitive infiltrators doing all they can to put all kinds of interesting software on your computer that does all kinds of malicious stuff.
Top all of that off with his involvement in the "hacktivist' community which is replete with hackers who have been busted and now serve "the greater good" through the FBI and the NSA and you have basically a resume of deception for Mr. Swartz. Wired magazine raves about him, which is reason enough to be suspicious of anyone. If a globalist rag like that raved about my mother I would have to start watching her closely as well. Very closely.

But after seeing a couple of his videos and reading a bit more about him I'm starting to think he may have at least had some good intentions about him. He seems to have the right idea. When he talks about stopping SOPA and PIPA he doesn't talk about what HE did, he talks about what WE did. He rightly says that institutions like GOOGLE jumped on the publicity bandwagon once they knew the game was up as did many lawmakers. And that is true. He says what is important too remember is that we as a community stopped one of the most sought after freedom crushing bills by simply coming together and saying no and in that he is absolutely correct.
The narrative is now that he killed himself due to this pending federal case but is simply bullshit.

From what I can tell of the guy, he was looking forward to beating it on behalf of himself and the cause and it looks like there are many who are much more educated on the case than I am who say it was a weak case at best and he was bound to win it.

In fact, the husband of the over-reaching prosecutor who brought the case against him on behalf of Eric Holder's Justice Department claims that they had offered him a 6 month deal meaning he would have been sentenced to 6 months in jail and probably served half of that.

Swartz was so confident in his ability to beat the charges, that he refused that deal about 2 months ago, preferring to go to trial.
Fact is, he made a mistake. He chose to live in New York City where Billionaire Mayor For Life is in charge of the police department and has his own "mini-CIA" in the NYPD Intelligence Division. And we all know what the CIA does too prominent activists and leaders in other countries when they stand opposed to our "national interests", don't we?

You can expect the investigation into the scene in his home to be, shall we say, less than meticulous. In fact, best bet as too his murders may have actually been the Intelligence Division guys assigned to the investigation. But that's just a guess. Damn sure makes more sense than "suicide".

By all accounts this was a good guy. He was about to poke another stick in the eye of the ruling class and their Vichy politicians once again. The "Justice" Department couldn't back down or that would have ceded more ground to the "extremists" and provided us with more fuel yet again. They couldn't take him to trial, like Gadhafi before him, because that would have exposed them as weak and over-reaching to make a political point.

By offering him a 6 month (3 month really) deal on a case which is being hailed as a 35 year sentence in the complicit media outlets, they were BEGGING to be let off the hook. But Aaron Swartz didn't bite. He had them where he wanted them and he knew it.
He also probably knew that suicide would not only be a coward's way out for him, but would damage the cause he seemed to care deeply about.

Judging from what little I know about him and what little I have seen and heard him say, Aaron Swartz was not a coward. And no matter how many times the Vichy prestitutes wave that "suicide note" in front of you, remember, he wrote that in 2007… basically as a joke.

Swartz died without leaving a note. He died leaving a hole in the cause that he cared deeply for. And he knew in his heart that up until the judge rang down the gavel to start the trial, he could always have taken the 3 month plea deal (which by then would have been even better!) and not faced 35 years in prison.

He also died on the very same day that monolitic and massive Verizon announced it's own "6 strikes rule" which would effectively sensor Verizon's customers by almost completely removing them from the internet if some "copyright holder' filed a "complaint" against them.

Swartz would surely have had a field day with that.

Effectively what has happened is a voice for the people was silenced. He was taken out of the game and the alternative "activist" community is sitting back scared saying very little or next to nothing which is not only a crying shame, it's an insult to the man who seems to have given his life for one of our most basic freedoms.

He won't be the last.

One thing that I really liked about this guy in the little I know about him is his opinion on knowledge and that it belongs to all of us. He said, and I paraphrase "Access to knowledge must not be measured by access to money" and that is why he hacked into the JSTOR files and released those academic journals for all the people for free. That was his major crime against humanity that the Obama Justice Department wanted to prosecute him for and that is ultimately why he died.

I wish to put this bluntly: Aaron Swartz was murdered. All the circumstantial evidence points to it. In the land of the Bloomberg Gestapo, there will be no real investigation, there will be no hard evidence to support that claim. But I feel that is the case and I am sorry and almost ashamed that the alternative community that owes at least partly their current measure of freedom of speech to Aaron, have not come out in droves to protest what has happened.

Aaron's father said the government killed his son. He has a different take on how, but in reality, he is absolutely correct.
He just doesn't know how correct.

http://willyloman.wordpress.com/2013/01/...-35-years/

[Peter Lemkin]

Who Killed Aaron Swartz

Moti Nissani Jan 13, 2013

"How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?"Bob Marley

"It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation . . . shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address, 1863

On January 11, 2013, according to indoctrination organs of the criminal Syndicate calling itself the US government (a Syndicate comprised, for the most part, of big bankers, generals, spooks and, below them, their puppets in the White House and gubernatorial mansions, Congress and state legislatures, and almost the entire judiciary), Aaron Swartz, aged 26, killed himself.

Many on the internet have already traced Aaron's tragic and untimely death directly to the Syndicate. I wish to add my voice to this growing chorus, placing this recent event in a somewhat larger context of historical scholarship.

In relating this story, the Syndicate's propaganda organs conveniently forgot four crucial points:
The Syndicate had excellent reasons to wish Aaron dead.
As in most cases of covert Syndicate assassinations (e.g., Fred Hampton, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway), Aaron's death was preceded by a vicious, totally unjustified, campaign of surveillance, harassment, vilification, and intimidation.
The Central Institute of Assassinations (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Intimidations (FBI) can and do kill people while making the murder look like suicide.
In America, England, and most other countries, painstaking research by people like Kevin Barett, Jim Douglass, Jim Fetzer, Jim Garrison, David Helvarg, and William F. Pepper discloses an unmistakable pattern: influential friends of the people (and hence, enemies of the Syndicate) tend to die before they reach old age, often under bizarre circumstances. This pattern has an obvious corollary: when friends of the Syndicate die prematurely, we can reasonably assume, with a high degree of probability, that the Syndicate killed them.

Let me expound on these four points, one at a time.
1. The Syndicate had excellent reasons to kill Aaron Swartz

In an online "manifesto" dated 2008, Aaron wrote: "Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves." He dedicated his life precisely to the goal of depriving the Syndicate of this power.

According to Wikipedia,

Swartz co-authored the "RSS 1.0″ specification of RSS, and built the website framework web.py and the architecture for the Open Library. Swartz also focused on sociology, civic awareness, and activism.

"Swartz's Web savvy took him from Internet entrepreneur to online activist, co-founding Demand Progress, a group that campaigns for progressive public policy in particular fighting against Internet censorship. His crusades boosted his status as something of a folk hero." Demand Progress had over one million members.

This figure of 1,000,000 is extremely important, for it shows, beyond all doubt, that, like John Lennon and President Kennedy, Aaron posed a real threat to the status quo. This threat is acknowledged by the Syndicate's own indoctrination organs. For instance, National Propaganda Radio put it thus:

"Swartz had an enormous following in the technology world" and was one of the "most influential figures in talking about technology's social, cultural and political effect." The independent Electronic Frontier Foundation concurs: Swartz "did more than almost anyone to make the internet a thriving ecosystem for open knowledge, and to keep it that way."

As well, Aaron spoke against US President Barack Obama's "kill list" and cyber attacks against Iran.

Aaron was "a frequent television commentator and the author of numerous articles on a variety of topics, especially the corrupting influence of big money on institutions including nonprofits, the media, politics, and public opinion. From 2010-11, he researched these topics as a Fellow at the Harvard Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption. He also served on the board of Change Congress, a good government nonprofit."
2. Syndicate harassment

As mentioned, government assassinations of dissidents are often preceded by a campaign of terror, intimidation, slander-mongering, litigation, physical intimidation, and incarceration. Aaron's "suicide" fits this pattern perfectly.

The Syndicate made it clear that Aaron was in its crosshairs. Thus, Syndicate members, especially "the Motion Picture Association of America and United States Chamber of Commerce, have stated their opposition to Demand Progress on numerous occasions, mainly in respect to [its] stance on internet censorship."

In 2009, the FBI put Aaron under "investigation" (a euphemism for harassment of activists) for publicly releasing 20% of United States Federal Court documents. The "case" was closed two months later, without filing any charges but, in the process, making Aaron pay dearly for his idealism.

The entire exercise had nothing to do with breaking laws, or justice, but a warning: "Stop harassing us," the Federal Bureau of Intimidation was telling him, "or else!" And yet, just like a tree standing by the waters, Aaron was not moved. Despite the extreme pressure he was under, Aaron Swartz (like Bradley Manning and many other unsung heroes) remained defiant and, in late October 2009, posted his FBI file on the internet. With this single act of defiance, Aaron probably signed his own lynch warrant.

In connection with his public-spirited Open Library project, whose goal is "to create a free webpage for every book ever published" and to have as many books as possible freely available, Swartz allegedly downloaded four million restricted-access academic articles from the website of a non-profit organization called JSTOR, with the intention, according to the American government, of making these articles freely available to the world's people (as, by the way, they would have been in any half-civilized societycan anyone imagine Archimedes or Aristarchus or Euclid or Sappho copyrighting their works?), for which "crime" he faced a potential 50(!) years behind bars. Swartz, however, denied the Syndicate's allegations.

JSTOR, the organizational "victim" of Aaron's theft, not only declined to press charges against him but, two days before his death, "announced that the archives of more than 1,200 of its journals would be available to the public for free." Yet, that act of generosity and public spiritedness meant nothing to the Syndicate's "justice" system, which continued to turn Aaron's life into a living hell. And there is yet another curious aspect of this act. Most of us spend entire lifetimes without ever accomplishing anything like it: cajoling a huge organization to place the public interest above its own. Are we to believe that, just two days after this momentous victory, instead of being jubilant, Aaron was depressed enough to hang himself?
3. Can the CIA or FBI kill you and make it look like a suicide?





Michael Morrell: On the day Aaron Swartz died, Michael Morell, a junior member of the invisible government, was the acting director of the Central Institute of Assassinations

The obvious answer is: sure they can. One quote, straight from the horse's mouth, should suffice. Jim Marrs and Ralph Schuster

cite a blood-curdling CIA document, a letter from an Institute's consultant to a CIA officer. The letter states:


"You will recall that I mentioned that the local circumstances under which a given means might be used might suggest the technique to be used in that case. I think the gross divisions in presenting this subject might be:

- bodies left with no hope of the cause of death being determined by the most complete autopsy and chemical examinations

- bodies left in such circumstances as to simulate accidental death

- bodies left in such circumstances as to simulate suicidal death."
4. A Historical pattern: Influential enemies of the Syndicate (=friends of the people) tend to die prematurely. The only logical and unspeakable explanation for this pattern is this: These friends of the people have been killed by their own government

I have in front of me a rough draft of a book: License to Kill: The Decisive Role of Political Murders, Scandal-Mongering, and False-Flag Operations in American Politics, a compilation of hundreds of untimely deaths of potentially troublesome dissidents. This compilation conclusively uncovers a recurring pattern of assassinations. In fact, only a handful of influential friends of the people (e.g., Upton Sinclair, Pete Seeger) have so far survived to old age. I can't reproduce the entire book here, for obvious reasons. Moreover, at the moment it only exists as a rough draft. In a few months, hopefully, readers can freely download the book and check this claim for themselves.

In the meantime, readers can, without too much trouble, examine on their own some of the most famous assassinations of the last 100 years or so and ask themselves: What do people like Judi Bari, Fred Hampton, assorted members of the Kennedy clan, Martin Luther King, John Lennon, Louis McFadden, Phil Ochs, Karen Silkwood ,Walter Reuther, and Malcolm X have in common?

Another shortcut to grasping this diabolical aspect of our body politic is asking the converse question: How many friends of bankers, generals, and spooks have, in the same time period, been assassinated? (The answer, to my knowledge, is: ZERO).

All I'm saying has been discovered and re-discovered by hundreds of researchers, activists, and politicians. Here, let me give you the views of just two high-ranking officials.

First, a familiar quote from Woodrow Wilson (28th president of the United states)

"Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the U.S., in the field of commerce and manufacturing, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."

Second, Catherine Austin-Fitts (Assistant Secretary of Housing in the George H. W. Bush's Administration:

"I think at the heart of the matter, Max, is not that the banks are out of control; I think the heart of the matter is physical violence, because a lot of what has happened, particularly as I understand in the United States is you have people who are afraid to say no because the results of saying no is physical violence directed at them or their family. I mean we have had a lot of people murdered or assassinated, etc., etc.. So . . . yes, we have to say no, but the question is, how do we say no? And that's why it comes down to shifting our money, but the reality is we have a force operating in the world, that is completely operating outside of the law and no one yet has come up with a way to stop it. We are talking about violent mobster operations.

"I hate to use a personal example, but I was a former Assistant Secretary of Housing. I had my own business in Washington, and I was helping the Department of Housing and Urban Development, essentially run things clean, and you had to get rid of the clean team to run the housing bubble and I was targeted, I was poisoned, I had dead animals left on my doorstep, and my home had been broken into and people trying to run me off the road. You know it was very, very violent and it went on for years. So people who try to run the government clean or run Wall Street clean are targeted, and literally have to fear for their lives. I mean, people have been dying, so you know, it's a very, very dangerous situation and the challenge is, if you have people who can kill and physically harass with impunity, how do you run a governance process?
Conclusion

The bankers, generals, and spooks who comprise our invisible government had plenty of reasons to kill Aaron Swartz, especially because the internetalong with a well-armed citizenryare the last remaining obstacles on the road to their totalitarian horizon. He was creative, idealistic, and unbendable. He was young and admired by many. If not checked, he might have slowed down the Syndicate's attacks on the biosphere, freedom, peace, justice, free flow of information, and common decencies. So the invisible government probably did kill him. They did so either indirectly through constant harassment, as his loved ones publicly state, or, most likely, directly by hanging him and alleging that he hung himself.

All this raises a dilemma for those of us possessing both conscience and a functional brain: "How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?"

Postscript: Michael Ivey has kindly drawn my attention to the views of an ex-CIA official: "Anybody can commit a murder; it takes a real pro to commit a suicide" (see Peter Janney, 2012, Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace).

Moti Nissani is a Jack of all (academic) trades and Professor Emeritus, Department of Biology, Wayne State University. He is currently assembling a Revolutionary's Toolkit.

[Keith Millea]

"Veterans Today" is a shameless rag that will not only use this tragic event,but also will use the deaths of all those little school children to promote their agenda....spit!

[Peter Lemkin]

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today's show with more on the death and prosecution of Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz, who killed himself last Friday. At the time of his death, he was facing up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine, if convicted at trial, for using computers at MIT to download millions of academic articles provided by the nonprofit research service JSTOR.

Aaron Swartz was 26 years old. At the age of 14, he co-developed Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, the key component of much of the web's entire publishing infrastructure. By the time he was 19, he had co-founded a company that would merge with Reddit, now one of the country's most popular websites. He also helped develop the architecture for the Creative Commons licensing system and built the Open Library.

Aaron Swartz's death has prompted an outpouring of frustration and anger at U.S. prosecutors. On Capitol Hill, Democratic Representative Zoe Lofgren of California has introduced a bill dubbed "Aaron's Law" to modify the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by decriminalizing violations of "terms of service" agreements. Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, chair of the House Oversight Committee, is launching a probe into the possible prosecutorial overreach in his case. At Aaron's funeral, his father blamed prosecutors for his son's death, saying he was, quote, "killed by the government." Earlier, his family released a statement saying, quote, "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."

AMY GOODMAN: On Wednesday night, the United States attorney for the District of Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz, broke her silence about the case. In a written statement, she wrote, quote, "[T]his office's conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case. The career prosecutors handling this matter took on the difficult task of enforcing a law they had taken an oath to uphold, and did so reasonably," unquote. Ortiz said her office offered Aaron a plea bargain of six months in prison. When the case first came to light, Ortiz was quoted saying, "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars."

Ortiz issued the statement a day after her husband used Twitter to fire back at his wife's critics. Tom Dolan, an executive with IBM, wrote, quote, "Truly incredible that in their own son's obit they blame others for his death and make no mention of the 6-month offer," he tweeted.

In a moment, we'll be joined by Aaron Swartz's girlfriend, but first let's turn to Aaron Swartz in his own words. This is part of a speech he delivered last May in Washington D.C., when he explained the challenges he sees the Internet facing.

AARON SWARTZ: There's a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands. Is sharing a video on BitTorrent like shoplifting from a movie store? Or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend? Is reloading a webpage over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in or a violent smashing of shop windows? Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech or like the freedom to murder?

AMY GOODMAN: Aaron Swartz, speaking last May. To watch the full speech, you can go to our website at democracynow.org.

For more we're joined by Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman. She's Aaron Swartz's partner, as well as the founder and executive director of SumOfUs.org. That's S-U-M-of-Us.org, a global movement for corporate accountability. This is her first television interview since Aaron's death.

We'll also be speaking with Alex Stamos in California at Stanford University, chief technology officer of Artemis Internet, a computer security and forensics expert. He planned to testify at Aaron Swartz's trial. During the upcoming trial, he would have been the chief defense witness.

And we did invite representatives from the U.S. attorney's office and MIT to join us, but they declined.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Taren, let us begin with you. First of all, our condolences on the loss of Aaron. Aaron committed suicide last Friday. The funeral was just two days ago. And, Taren, it was you who found him. He hung himself in theyour Brooklyn apartment that you shared. Taren, talk about Aaron. Talk about what Aaronwho he was and what he wanted and the effect of this upcoming trial.

TAREN STINEBRICKNER-KAUFFMAN: Well, Aaron was the mostperson most dedicated to fighting social injustice of anyone I've ever met in my life, and I loved him for it. He used to sayI used to say, "Why don't youwhy we do this thing? It will make you happy." And he would say, "I don't want to be happy. I just want to change the world."

Open access to information was one of the causes that he believed in, but it was far from the only one. He fought forduring the course of this two-year ordeal, he led the fight against SOPA, the Internet censorship bill, which no one thought could be defeated when it was first introduced and which Aaron and millions of others, together, managed to fight back. And he did that all while under the burden of thisthis bullying and false charges.

He was just the funniest, most lovely person. Hesorry. Hehe loved children. He loved reading out loud. That was one of his favorite things. He loved David Foster Wallace. He started trying to read me Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson out loud from the first volume. We didn't get that far because it's very, very long. One of his favoritefavorite books was Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a fanfic. We would read it to each other as chapters came out online.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk a little about what he went through, his initial reaction to the arrest and this zeal of the prosecutors in Massachusetts to go after him on the downloading of these JSTOR research articles?

TAREN STINEBRICKNER-KAUFFMAN: Yeah, I mean, I wasn't with him; we didn't start dating until a few weeks before the indictment was announced publicly, which was several months after his initial arrest. He tried really hard to wall it off. It was obviously very stressful for him, but he tried to keep his friends and family, as much as possible, sort of isolated fromfrom this. He was very good at protecting other people. He was very distressed by the fact that the prosecution had called two of his closest friends as witnesses at the grand jury, and so he tried to protect everyone else by not giving us any information that would warrant being called as witnesses.

Hehe felt, you know, the whole thing was just this big mistake, and he hoped that the prosecutor's office would realize it, thatyou know, that they didn'the had done nothing illegal. I mean, as he put it in his pressyou know, in the very few press releases and work that he did around this, he likened it to arrestingcharging somebody for borrowing too many books from the library, whichyou know, all of the articles, he had the right to access individually. The onlythe only confusion here was that he had just accessed a lot of them. And he hoped the prosecutors would see the injustice and the unfairness of what they were doing. But they weren't interested in that. They weren'tSteve Heymann and Carmen Ortiz's office were interested in winning; they were interested in a notch on their belt; they were interested in taking a scalp. But they weren't interested in justice; they weren't interested in does it actually makes sense for this young man to be labeled a felon for the rest of his life and to go to prison for years and years.

AMY GOODMAN: Taren, we're going to break, and when we come back, we'll also be joined by the person who would have been the chief defense witness in this case. Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman is our guest, Aaron's partner, head of SumOfUs.org. And we'll be joined by Alex Stamos, who would have testified at the trial, to explain what it is that Aaron did and was fighting for. Usually, our next guest is a consultant for corporations, protecting them from break-ins on the Internet. Today, he will talk about what that means in Aaron's case. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking about the life and the suicide of Aaron Swartz, 26-year-old cyber activist, social justice activist, who committed suicide last Friday. I want to turn to Aaron's comments made at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in October 2010. He was talking about the nonprofit subscription service that so many college students and others use around the country called JSTOR.

AARON SWARTZ: I am going to give you one example of something not as big as saving Congress, but something important that you can do right here at your own school. It just requires you willing to get your shoes a little bit muddy. By virtue of being students at a major U.S. university, I assume that you have access to a wide variety of scholarly journals. Pretty much every major university in the United States pays these sort of licensing fees to organizations like JSTOR and Thomson and ISI to get access to scholarly journals that the rest of the world can't read. And these licensing fees are substantial. And they're so substantial that people who are studying in India, instead of studying in the United States, don't have this kind of access. They're locked out from all of these journals. They're locked out from our entire scientific legacy. I mean, a lot of these journal articles, they go back to the Enlightenment. Every time someone has written down a scientific paper, it's been scanned and digitized and put in these collections.

That is a legacy that has been brought to us by the history of people doing interesting work, the history of scientists. It's a legacy that should belong to us as a commons, as a people, but instead it's been locked up and put online by a handful of for-profit corporations who then try and get the maximum profit they can out of it. Now, there are people, good people, trying to change this with the open access movement. So, all journals, going forward, they're encouraging them to publish their work as open access, so open on the Internet, available for download by everybody, available for free copying, and perhaps even modification with attribution and notice.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Aaron Swartz in 2010, speaking at the University of Illinois. Our guests are Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Aaron's partner, head of SumOfUs.org; and Alex Stamos, Artemis Internet, planned to testify on Aaron's behalf during his trial, would have been the chief defense witness. Alex, talk about the significance of what Aaron was saying two years ago.

ALEX STAMOS: Well, Aaron believed very strongly, as he said, that the scientific and cultural background that has been built over the centuries belong to everyone. And obviously, he was willing to risk a lot to test that and to test the walls that had been put up around this continent, he called them.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how you came to be involved in this case. I mean, usually, you're working for companies like Goldman Sachs, protecting them. Talk about why you were going to be the chief defense witness.

ALEX STAMOS: I actually knew very little about Aaron's case other than what I had read online casually, until I was contacted last fall by his new attorneys that were here in San Francisco. As you said, we mostly do corporate work. Aaron was actually our first criminal defendant. And generally, this is not the kind of work that interests us or has an interesting computer security aspect. But when we were contacted by the lawyers, it did intrigue us that he was facing such serious charges foreven if you believe all the facts in the government indictmentactions that are very difficult to really qualify as computer hacking. And so, we decided to join the case as expert witnesses. And as the case went on, that belief that what he did is very hard to fit into that box that they tried to fit it in of criminal hacking activity, you know, that feeling grew as we saw the evidence and went to MIT, talked to witnesses, and saw the case the government was laying out against him.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And again, what exactly was it that he did that you would say does not qualify as computer hacking? And why would you say thewhat would be the line that you would draw on this? And also, your speculation as to why the government even pursued this case, if you have a theory, why they felt so strongly that they had to pursue him?

ALEX STAMOS: So, Aaron was accused of, as been discussed a couple times, downloading too many files, or checking too many books out of the library. He found a loophole that hethat was a convenient way for him to get access to a lot of the JSTOR documents. And that loophole is the fact that MIT made two interesting decisions. First, MIT decided to license the JSTOR database in a way where access was provided to the entire MIT network without asking for any kind of individual authentication. That's often not true with JSTOR databases. At a lot of universities, and actually today at MIT, if you want to access JSTOR and you have that affiliation, you have to say, "I'm Bob Smith. I'm a student. I'm" and the university authenticates that you are, and so now you have an identity with JSTOR where they can monitor what you're doing and see how many downloads you have. MIT didn't have that setup. They wanted a setup that was completely open for people just to go to the JSTOR website, be able to click on a document and read it. And that's the deal they made with JSTOR.

The other decision that MIT made was that they decided to run an extremely open, unmonitored network, and in a method that allowed people to jump on from wireless or wired access points all over the campus and take on the identity of somebody affiliated with MIT. This is an intentional decision. They allow visitors, they allow people who just happen to be on campus this access. And they do so with very little need to authenticate or say who you are. And so, those things combined, Aaron realized, would allow him to go onto campus and to download articles from a variety of locations.

You know, I can't actually condone everything Aaron did. I thinkas I have written online, I think what he did was perhaps, you know, discourteous or inconsiderate of taking advantage of the, you know, library privileges that he was basically granted. But at no time did he actually do any actions that I would consider hacking. What Aaron did is he went to MIT, and he started downloading documents. And JSTOR, at some point, noticed a lot of documents were being downloaded from one address at MIT, and so they would cut off that address. Aaron would notice and then just ask the MIT network to give him a new one. That's a pretty common thing. That's something that people do, you know, all day at university and corporate or even like on a Starbucks Wi-Fi network. And it's that action, though, of going and requesting a new identity that the government seems to consider wire fraud or computer fraud.

And probably one of the things that he did that brought it to a head was, in the end, AaronI believe this was his motivationwanted to find a place that he could leave his laptop for several days to continue downloading without him having to be there, and so he opened up and went into an unlocked wiring closet and plugged his computer into a switch. That, MIT was calling trespassing. And that's kind of the activity that allowed them to catch him, and seems to be where they believe he massively overstepped the line. But at no time even during that would he do anything that I would consider hacking.

AMY GOODMAN: We should say that JSTOR refused to endorse any prosecution of Aaron Swartzthe not-for-profit service, member of the Internet communityand said, "Aaron returned the data he had in his possession and JSTOR settled any civil claims we might have had against him in June 2011." And earlier this week, before Aaron died, they announcedJSTOR announced that 1,200 journals from its archive had been opened for limited reading by the public. Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Aaron's partner, still with us from Washington, D.C., just flew back from Chicago, where she attended Aaron's funeral. Can you talk about the broader issues here?

TAREN STINEBRICKNER-KAUFFMAN: I think that there are a couple of broader issues that Aaron's, you know, senseless prosecution and death highlight. And one is, of course, this freedom of information issue and open access issue, that theas the clip you played of Aaron says, you know, the scientific legacy of academics and researchers from over the centuries, often most of it funded in one way or another by taxpayers and by the government, ought to be available to everybody in the world. It ought to be available. And that's one of the things thatyou know, that I thinkthat I hope will somedaynot just research going forward, but all research ever in history ought to be put up for open access online.

The second is this issue of how the law addresses computer crimes or alleged computer crimes, and that, you know, the law, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, is so broadly written and so ambiguous that prosecutors, like Steve Heymann, who just wantas I said earlier, just want notches on their belt, can throw the bookcan charge somebody like Aaron with 35 years in prison for mildly inconsiderate behavior.

And the third issue is the broader problems in our criminal justice system. Why does someone like Steve Heymann have the power to do this, unbridled power? Why would you charge somebody with up to 35 years in prison if you actually think that all they deserve is six months, as the plea deal suggested that? And this happens to people every day in our system, and most of them have many fewer resources than Aaron and much less support, and don't have the option necessarily even of considering hiring a lawyer and going to trial over the course of two years, and are forced to take the plea deals when they're not guilty or when the plea deals are completely unjust. And I think that we needwe need broad criminal justice reform in this country. We incarcerate more people per capita than any other country in the world, and we don't see lower crime rates because of it. There'sthere's justice, and then there's justice. And right now, we're notour system does not promote justice. Our system is punitive. Our system is Kafkaesque. Our system is unfair. And Aaron and millions of other people suffer because of it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I wanted tofollowing up on that, wanted to refer to comments of the House Oversight Committee chairman, Darrell Issa, who's a Republican of California, who says he wants to launch into an investigation into how the U.S. attorney's office pressed charges against Aaron for downloading these articles. He told The Huffington Post, quote, "Had [Aaron] been a journalist and taken that same material that he gained from MIT, he would have been praised for it. It would have been like the Pentagon Papers." And this whole issue of prosecutorial overreach on computer crimes, I'm wondering if, AlexAlex Stamos, you might want to comment on that.

ALEX STAMOS: Yeah, Taren's got a good point. One of the key problems here are the definitions in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. And there's this one word that is very difficult for even those of us who work professionally in this area to understand, and that word is "authorized." Multiple of counts in the indictment against Aaron existed because they said that he had exceeded what he was authorized to do either on the MIT network or the JSTOR network. And the term "authorized" in an Internet context, it makes a lot less sense than it does in the real world. You know, for example, I'm sure there are thousands of people right now going to democracynow.org watching the live stream. Did you authorize any of those people to do that, to interact with your computer, to take on the cost that you are taking of streaming that video to them? No, you didn't. And of course they're allowed to, and you want them to, but how you express that authorization to them is a very difficult thing.

And at what point does somebody doing something that is allowed become in excess of authorization? What Aaron was doing was exactly the same activity that thousands of people do at MIT every year: He was going and looking at documents. Now, he was doing it at a much wider scale. He did it more than they seemed to want. But at what point does he exceed authorization? And by having these incredibly broad definitions and a word that doesn't really mean anything, like "authorized," we end up in a situation where if a prosecutor doesn't like you or doesn't like what you did, if it happened to use a computer, they can find a way to call it "hacking" and an abuse of that system.

AMY GOODMAN: Just as we went to broadcast today, the grassroots organization Demand Progress, which Aaron Swartz helped found, launched a new campaign calling on Congress to end prosecutorial abuses and to pass Congressmember Zoe Lofgren's bill amending computer fraud law. The group sent a letter to members, reading, quote, "We are sad. We're tired. We're frustrated and we're angry at a system that let this happen to Aaron. We and Aaron's friends and family have been in touch with lawmakers to ask for help. We're asking them to help rein in a criminal justice system run amok. Authorities are encouraged to bring frivolous charges and hold decades of jail time over the heads of people accused of victimless crimes," unquote. More information on the campaign is at DemandProgress.org. And as we wrap up, Taren, what your plans are, what this campaign will mean? I know there will be a memorial service for Aaron Swartz at Cooper Union at 4:00 on Saturday here in New York City. Where this campaign is headed?

TAREN STINEBRICKNER-KAUFFMAN: Well, look, I think that the best legacy thatthe best tribute we can pay to Aaron's legacy is to continue to fight as hard as we can to make this world a more just, fairer place. That's the thing that he cared most about. And I'm going to keep doing that. I think that, you know, that Aaron's Law, we've yet to sort of look at all of the details of the law, and I want to make sure that it coversthat it's as sweeping an amendment as possible, but clearly, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act must be amended.

And I also hope that this can serve as a wake-up call for the broader issues in the criminal justice system. It's not just this one act. Our system is deeply, deeply unfair. And as I said earlier, millions of people suffer because of it needlessly. And I hope thatyou know, in this country, it's very hard for people tofor politicians to look weak on crime, but that's not what this is. This isthis is about justice, and nobody should have to face what Aaron faced. And I hope we can help save people in the future.

AMY GOODMAN: Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Again, our condolences on the death of your partner, Aaron Swartz. Taren is head of SumOfUs.org.