Farewell to Aaron Swartz

[Peter Lemkin]

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/1/14/fr...wartz_1986

[Peter Lemkin]

Official statement from family and partner of Aaron Swartz

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.

Aarons 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. Attorneys office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorneys 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.

http://www.rememberaaronsw.com/
12 Jan 2013

[Peter Lemkin]

Family of Hacktivist Aaron Swartz Accuses MIT, U.S. Attorney of Contributing to His Suicide

January 12, 2013 at 3:42 pm PT

Aaron Swartz in 2008, with former Red Hat CEO Bob Young in the background (CreativeCommons)

Update 7:49 PT: Added comment from JSTOR.

The family and friends of Aaron Swartz the famed Internet hacktivist who took his own life on Friday at the age of 26 released a public statement on Saturday, placing some of the blame for Swartz's suicide on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as the U.S. Attorney's office.

"Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach," the statement read. "Decisions made by officials in the U.S. Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death."

Swartz, long regarded as one of the major proponents of a free and open Internet to further the spread of information, was indicted in July of 2011 on federal charges of illegally accessing documents on JSTOR, the online digital library that hosts academic journal articles, books and primary sources. His alleged crime involved downloading nearly 5 million articles off the service from MIT's on-campus network.

He faced upwards of 30 years in prison, along with $1 million in fines.

After Swartz turned over his hard drives, JSTOR decided not to pursue any legal action against him.

"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," JSTOR wrote on Saturday in a statement to the public hosted on its Web site. "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."

But U.S. Attorneys Carmen Ortiz and Steve Heymann, backed by Federal government, continued to pursue the prosecution of Swartz, with the tacit support of MIT behind them.

Said Ortiz in 2011: "Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars."

Earlier on Saturday, acclaimed academic and friend to Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, suggested that Ortiz's steadfast pursuit of Swartz was outlandish and unnecessary, and part though not the direct cause of what brought Swartz to the grim solution he chose.

"From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way," Lessig wrote on his personal blog. "… [A]nyone 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."

Neither the U.S. Attorney's office in Massachusetts nor MIT immediately responded to emailed requests for comment.

[Peter Lemkin]

Technology's Greatest Minds Say Goodbye to Aaron Swartz

The technology community's brightest minds are memorializing Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old programmer and digital rights activist who committed suicide Friday months before his trial over computer fraud was set to begin.
A Prodigal Mind

Swartz was nothing short of a prodigy: at the age of 14, he helped develop the Real Simple Syndication (RSS) standard, paving the way to services such as Google Reader. He worked on the Open Library, which has a goal of putting one page online for every book ever published. He founded Infogami, which was eventually incorporated into Reddit before the sale to Conde Nast, a move that gave him the means to detach and take up various causes at his pleasure.

"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," wrote Harvard academic, activist and personal friend of Swartz Lawrence Lessig.

"He was a kind of 21st century, nerd renaissance man," wrote MSNBC's Chris Hayes in a blog post Sunday.

"Wanderers in this crazy world, we have lost a mentor, a wise elder", wrote World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.
Political Activism

Developing code, however, was far from Swartz's only fixation. He was a dedicated believer in the open-source/open-code/open-web ideology, working on causes such as net neutrality and data liberation while also helping to bring about the Creative Commons content licensing structure. He founded Demand Progress, a digital rights group that played an instrumental role in defeating the Stop Online Piracy Act early last year.

"He had an astonishingly broad range of interests, from health care to political corruption," wrote technology policy reporter Timothy Lee in the Washington Post. "But Internet freedom and public access to information were two recurring themes in his life and work."
Swartz as Suspect

It was Swartz's dedication to that ideology, which Timothy Lee called "aggressive, perhaps even reckless," that contributed to his becoming the target of a federal hacking investigation.

It was Swartz's dedication to that ideology, which Timothy Lee called "aggressive, perhaps even reckless," that contributed to his becoming the target of a federal hacking investigation.

Swartz, having previously wrote an automated program to free court documents from a government paywall using libraries' credentials, used a similar tactic to "liberate" academic articles hosted and charged for by JSTOR. First, Swartz began downloading JSTOR articles en masse over the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's wireless network. After MIT cut him off from wireless access, he sneaked into a network closet and plugged into the school's wired network, a move that was discovered by the school.

In July of 2011, Swartz was charged by the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts with computer fraud and other charges that in total carried a potential sentence of 35 years in jail and $1 million in fines. JSTOR later dropped its charges against Swartz (and has since said it "regretted being drawn into" the case), but MIT was less clear about its wishes (MIT's president, Leo Rafael Reif, said in a statement released Sunday that "it pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy. He also announced an internal investigation of MIT's involvement).

U.S. attorney Carmen M. Ortiz decided to go full steam ahead with the trial, which was expected to begin later this year.

The intensity of the charges against Swartz in combination with Ortiz's decision to proceed despite JSTOR's decision to drop the case became the subject of much controversy, which has only magnified since Swartz's death. Swartz's family in a statement blamed his suicide in part on "a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach" and on the U.S. Attorney's office's decision to pursue "an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims."

Lessig also placed a share of the blame on "the absurdity of the prosecutor's behavior" in a blog post entitled "Prosecutor as bully." An excerpt from Lessig's impassioned post:

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.

As a memorial to Swartz, some academics have been sharing their articles for free with the Twitter hashtag #pdftribute.

Lessig did not, however, completely exonerate Swartz, instead arguing that "Aaron brought Aaron here" through his alleged actions.

"The causes that Aaron fought for are my causes too," wrote Lessing. "But as much as I respect those who disagree with me about this, these means are not mine."
Struggle With Depression

Many commentators have pointed out that Swartz had been suffering from depression since at least 2007, when he wrote about his struggle with "depressed mood" in detail. Some believe Swartz's mental health played some role in his death.

"Depression strikes so many of us. I've struggled with it, been so low I couldn't see the sky, and found my way back again, though I never thought I would," wrote Cory Doctorow, describing his own battle with depression in a moving tribute to Swartz.

The ultimate reason, or combination of reasons, for Swartz's death may never be fully understood. But Wired's's Kevin Poulsen put five simple words to the feeling shared by many this weekend: "His death is a tragedy."

[Peter Lemkin]

Aaron Swartz, Coder and Activist, Dead at 26
By Kevin Poulsen01.12.134:01 PM



We often say, upon the passing of a friend or loved one, that the world is a poorer place for the loss. But with the untimely death of programmer and activist Aaron Swartz, this isn't just a sentiment; it's literally true. Worthy, important causes will surface without a champion equal to their measure. Technological problems will go unsolved, or be solved a little less brilliantly than they might have been. And that's just what we know. The world is robbed of a half-century of all the things we can't even imagine Aaron would have accomplished with the remainder of his life.

Aaron Swartz committed suicide Friday in New York. He was 26 years old.

When he was 14 years old, Aaron helped develop the RSS standard; he went on to found Infogami, which became part of Reddit. But more than anything Aaron was a coder with a conscience: a tireless and talented hacker who poured his energy into issues like network neutrality, copyright reform and information freedom. Among countless causes, he worked with Larry Lessig at the launch of the Creative Commons, architected the Internet Archive's free public catalog of books, OpenLibrary.org, and in 2010 founded Demand Progress, a non-profit group that helped drive successful grassroots opposition to SOPA last year.

"Aaron was steadfast in his dedication to building a better and open world," writes Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. "He is among the best spirits of the Internet generation. I am crushed by his loss, but will continue to be enlightened by his work and dedication."

In 2006 Aaron was part of a small team that sold Reddit to Condé Nast , Wired's parent company. For a few months he worked in our office here in San Francisco. I knew Aaron then and since, and I liked him a lot honestly, I loved him. He was funny, smart, sweet and selfless. In the vanishingly small community of socially and politically active coders, Aaron stood out not just for his talent and passion, but for floating above infighting and reputational cannibalism. His death is a tragedy.

I don't know why he killed himself, but Aaron has written openly about suffering from depression. It couldn't have helped that he faced a looming federal criminal trial in Boston on hacking and fraud charges, over a headstrong stunt in which he arranged to download millions of academic articles from the JSTOR subscription database for free from September 2010 to January 2011, with plans to release them to the public.

JSTOR provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals online. MIT had a subscription to the database, so Aaron brought a laptop onto MIT's campus, plugged it into the student network and ran a script called keepgrabbing.py that aggressively and at times disruptively downloaded one article after another. When MIT tried to block the downloads, a cat-and-mouse game ensued, culminating in Swartz entering a networking closet on the campus, secretly wiring up an Acer laptop to the network, and leaving it there hidden under a box. A member of MIT's tech staff discovered it, and Aaron was arrested by campus police when he returned to pick up the machine.

The JSTOR hack was not Aaron's first experiment in liberating costly public documents. In 2008, the federal court system briefly allowed free access to its court records system, Pacer, which normally charged the public eight cents per page. The free access was only available from computers at 17 libraries across the country, so Aaron went to one of them and installed a small PERL script he had written that cycled sequentially through case numbers, requesting a new document from Pacer every three seconds, and uploading it to the cloud. Aaron pulled nearly 20 million pages of public court documents, which are now available for free on the Internet Archive.

The FBI investigated that hack, but in the end no charges were filed. Aaron wasn't so lucky with the JSTOR matter. The case was picked up by Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Heymann in Boston, the cybercrime prosecutor who won a record 20-year prison stretch for TJX hacker Albert Gonzalez. Heymann indicted Aaron on 13 counts of wire fraud, computer intrusion and reckless damage. The case has been wending through pre-trial motions for 18 months, and was set for jury trial on April 1.

Larry Lessig, who worked closely with Aaron for years, disapproves of Aaron's JSTOR hack. But in the painful aftermath of Aaron's suicide, Lessig faults the government for pursuing Aaron with such vigor. "[Aaron] is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying," Lessig writes. "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."

Update: Aaron's parents, Robert and Susan Swartz, his two brothers and his partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, have established a memorial website for him, and released this statement.

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 inevitablethese 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.

Update Sunday 1/13/13 16:45: MIT President L. Rafael Reif has issued a statement on Aaron's death.

To the members of the MIT community:

Yesterday we received the shocking and terrible news that on Friday in New York, Aaron Swartz, a gifted young man well known and admired by many in the MIT community, took his own life. With this tragedy, his family and his friends suffered an inexpressible loss, and we offer our most profound condolences. Even for those of us who did not know Aaron, the trail of his brief life shines with his brilliant creativity and idealism.

Although Aaron had no formal affiliation with MIT, I am writing to you now because he was beloved by many members of our community and because MIT played a role in the legal struggles that began for him in 2011.

I want to express very clearly that I and all of us at MIT are extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many. It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.

I will not attempt to summarize here the complex events of the past two years. Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT. I have asked Professor Hal Abelson to lead a thorough analysis of MIT's involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present. I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made, in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took. I will share the report with the MIT community when I receive it.

I hope we will all reach out to those members of our community we know who may have been affected by Aaron's death. As always, MIT Medical is available to provide expert counseling, but there is no substitute for personal understanding and support.

With sorrow and deep sympathy,

L. Rafael Reif

[Keith Millea]

Published on Monday, January 14, 2013 by Common Dreams

Anonymous Hacks MIT Calling for Systemic Reforms

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

- Lauren McCauley, staff writer

In response to what has been described as prosecutorial bullying, inflated sentences, "grotesque miscarriage of justice" and subsequent tragedy of Aaron Swartz's suicide, the hacker collective Anonymous broke into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology website over the weekend and replaced the homepage with a tribute, "In Memoriam, Aaron Swartz."

Swartz, an outspoken advocate of open information, had been recently embroiled in a legal battle over digital copyright for allegedly harvesting four million academic papers from MIT's JSTOR online database.

Salon's Natasha Lennard adds that, "although JSTOR told federal prosecutors it had no interest in pursuing charges against Swartz, the DoJ, led by a harsh and zealous Boston prosecutor, threw everything they could at the young activist."

'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.' Calling for computer crime law reform, Anonymous's statement decried the lawsuit, writing:

The government's prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting forfreeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for itenabling the collective betterment of the world through the facilitation of sharingan ideal that we should all support.

Additionally, a statement released by the web pioneer's family and partner on Sunday directed their grief over Swartz's tragic suicide towards the institutions the U.S. government and MITthat threatened the brilliant technologist and social justice activist with jail for, by some counts, up to 50 years:

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.

In a blog post this weekend, Swartz's longtime friend and mentor Lawrence Lessig called the prosecution a "bully," writing:

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.

For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House and where even those brought to "justice" never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled "felons."

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.

Swartz's trial was set to start this spring and his attempts to reach a plea-bargain with the government recently fell apart after Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann told Swartz's lawyer, Elliot Peters, "Mr. Swartz would need to plead guilty to every count, and the government would insist on prison time."

The Washington Post reports, in an update to the statement (which has since been taken down), Anonymous said it "does not blame MIT for Swartz's death," citing a letter from MIT President Rafael Reif that said the school would investigate the role MIT played in Swartz's case.

In response to the tragic news, supporters have started a White House petition to remove U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, who supervised the prosecution of in Swartz's case, saying that "a prosecutor who regularly uses the threat of unjust and overreaching charges... is a danger to the life and liberty of anyone who might cross her path."

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/01/14-2

[Peter Lemkin]

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petitio...z/RQNrG1CkRemove United States District Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office for overreach in the case of Aaron Swartz.

It is too late to do anything for Aaron Swartz, but the who used the powers granted to them by their office to hound him into a position where he was facing a ruinous trial, life in prison and the ignominy and shame of being a convicted felon; for an alleged crime that the supposed victims did not wish to prosecute.

A prosecutor who does not understand proportionality and who regularly uses the threat of unjust and overreaching charges to extort plea bargains from defendants regardless of their guilt is a danger to the life and liberty of anyone who might cross her path.

http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/4034746304...r-as-bully

[Magda Hassan]

I thought Kafka was dead?

US court drops charges on Aaron Swartz days after his suicide



Published:15 January, 2013, 02:14
Edited:15 January, 2013, 09:44

A federal court in Massachusetts has dismissed the hacking case against Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide on January 11 while facing decades behind bars and a $1 million fine.

The dismissal follows an investigation into Swartz's involvement in the theft of content hosted on JSTOR, a digital archive used by universities and other research institutions. Swartz, who was living in New York City at the time of his death, had accessed JSTOR through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's library, which is why the case was being heard in that state.
Though JSTOR decided not to press charges and even urged the US government to drop the case MIT went ahead with a civil suit. As a result, Swartz faced serious legal consequences, which observers believe led to his suicide last week.

According to a Huffington Post report, Swartz's defense team suspected federal attorneys were using Swartz as an example to show how serious they could be with online crime cases.

US attorney Stephen Heymann pursued Swartz because the case "was going to receive press and he was going to be a tough guy and read his name in the newspaper," Swartz's lawyer Elliot Peters said.
[COLOR=#999999 !important]
Document from Scribd published by ArsTechnicaDocs
Even though Swartz is now dead and the charges have been dropped, the repercussions of the case are ongoing.

On Monday, global hacktivist collective Anonymous broke into MIT's website and replaced its front page with the simple line, "In Memoriam, Aaron Swartz." The group also left a statement calling the Department of Justice's pursuit of charges against Swartz "a grotesque miscarriage of justice" and "a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for."
"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," the statement continued.

Swartz's funeral will be held in Chicago on Tuesday, and members of Anonymous will be in attendance.

The Westboro Baptist Church, whose members are known for bringing offensive signs to their funeral pickets most famously, 'God Hates Fags' has expressed intent to protest at Swartz's service.
Anonymous responded, saying in a statement, "Twenty-four hours after the death of Aaron Swartz was announced to the world, a heartless cult announced their intention to picket his funeral. In response, Anonymous has launched Operation Angel."
The Anonymous statement calls on "organizations who would like to form protective human shields near Aaron's funeral to listen closely for any announcement by the family on this action and respect their wishes… We are encouraging the public and any members of Highland Park law enforcement with intel on the cults to e-mail that information to OpAngel@hushmail.com."
[/COLOR]
In closing, the collective said, it "intends to pursue reform within the DoJ and other government agencies to prevent the kind of unnecessary harassment that Aaron Swartz was victim to. Some of the brightest men and women in the fields of information technology and security are being targeted by agencies that lack a basic understanding of the so-called crimes they are accusing people of."

http://rt.com/usa/news/swartz-suicide-co...arges-997/

[Magda Hassan]

Internet Activist's Prosecutor Linked To Another Hacker's Death

Prosecutor Stephen Heymann has been blamed for contributing to Swartz's suicide. Back in 2008, young hacker Jonathan James killed himself in the midst of a federal investigation led by the same prosecutor.

Justine SharrockBuzzFeed Staff




Posted about 8 hours ago
One of the prosecutors in the case of the online pioneer who killed himself this weekend, Aaron Swartz, was accused in 2008 of driving another hacker to suicide.
Some of Swartz's friends have accused Assistant United States Attorney Stephen Heymann of contributing to Swartz's suicide, with his unwillingness to compromiseon the prosecution of Swartz in a case involving scholarly journal articles.
Back in 2008, another young hacker, Jonathan James, killed himself after being named a suspect in another Heymann case.
James, the first juvenile put into confinement for a federal cybercrime case, was found dead was two weeks after the Secret Service raided his house as part of its investigation of the TJX hacker case led by Heymann the largest personal identity hack in history. He was thought to be "JJ," the unindicted co-conspiratornamed in the criminal complaints filed with the US District Court in Massachusetts. In his suicide note, James wrote that he was killing himself in response to the federal investigation and their attempts to tie him to a crime which he did not commit:

"I have no faith in the 'justice' system. Perhaps my actions today, and this letter, will send a stronger message to the public. Either way, I have lost control over this situation, and this is my only way to regain control."
...
"Remember," he wrote, "it's not whether you win or lose, it's whether I win or lose, and sitting in jail for 20, 10, or even 5 years for a crime I didn't commit is not me winning. I die free."

Heymann received the Attorney General's Award for Distinguished Service for "directing the largest and most successful identity theft and hacking investigation and prosecution ever conducted in the United States."
Swartz's family has accused Heymann, U.S. Attorneys Scott Garland who was the lead prosecutor, and Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz of contributing to their son's death, who was known to have suffered from depression. "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 M.I.T. contributed to his death."
While Ortiz ultimately holds the responsibility for the department, Heymann was the lawyer handling the negotiations with Swartz and his attorneys.
A petition has been put up online demanding that Heymann be fired because of his "overzealous prosecution of an allegedly minor and non-violent electronic crime led to the suicide of Aaron Swartz."
Christina DiIorio-Sterling, spokesperson for the United States Attorney Office said neither Heymann nor Ortiz would comment. "It is not appropriate to make a public comment," she said. "We want to respect the family's privacy at this time."
In 1998, Heymann also helped bring the first federal prosecution of a juvenile hacker, who brought down air traffic control communications at a Worcester Massachusetts airport. The unidentified teen plead guilty in return for two years probation, a fine, community service and was banned from using a computer with a modem for two years.
Heymann created one of the first computer-crime units in the country. Back in 1996, he prosecuted and supervised the electronic surveillance of the first case using a court-ordered wiretap on a computer network. "Harvard balked at the request," according to an article in Network World magazine (May 6, 1996). "We don't monitor the network, and we respect the privacy of our users," Franklin Steen, the Harvard network director told the magazine. To tap into the system, the DOJ had to get a court order, which came with a gag rule to keep anyone from tipping off the suspect.
The case found Argentinian Julio Cesar Ardita guilty of breaking into the Harvard University computer system, which he then used to break into numerous government sites, including the Department of Defense and NASA.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/...-another-h

[Peter Lemkin]

I thought Kafka was dead?

US court drops charges on Aaron Swartz days after his suicide



Published:15 January, 2013, 02:14
Edited:15 January, 2013, 09:44

A federal court in Massachusetts has dismissed the hacking case against Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide on January 11 while facing decades behind bars and a $1 million fine.

The dismissal follows an investigation into Swartz's involvement in the theft of content hosted on JSTOR, a digital archive used by universities and other research institutions. Swartz, who was living in New York City at the time of his death, had accessed JSTOR through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's library, which is why the case was being heard in that state.
Though JSTOR decided not to press charges and even urged the US government to drop the case MIT went ahead with a civil suit. As a result, Swartz faced serious legal consequences, which observers believe led to his suicide last week.

According to a Huffington Post report, Swartz's defense team suspected federal attorneys were using Swartz as an example to show how serious they could be with online crime cases.

US attorney Stephen Heymann pursued Swartz because the case "was going to receive press and he was going to be a tough guy and read his name in the newspaper," Swartz's lawyer Elliot Peters said.
[COLOR=#999999 !important]
Document from Scribd published by ArsTechnicaDocs
Even though Swartz is now dead and the charges have been dropped, the repercussions of the case are ongoing.

On Monday, global hacktivist collective Anonymous broke into MIT's website and replaced its front page with the simple line, "In Memoriam, Aaron Swartz." The group also left a statement calling the Department of Justice's pursuit of charges against Swartz "a grotesque miscarriage of justice" and "a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for."
"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," the statement continued.

Swartz's funeral will be held in Chicago on Tuesday, and members of Anonymous will be in attendance.

The Westboro Baptist Church, whose members are known for bringing offensive signs to their funeral pickets most famously, 'God Hates Fags' has expressed intent to protest at Swartz's service.
Anonymous responded, saying in a statement, "Twenty-four hours after the death of Aaron Swartz was announced to the world, a heartless cult announced their intention to picket his funeral. In response, Anonymous has launched Operation Angel."
The Anonymous statement calls on "organizations who would like to form protective human shields near Aaron's funeral to listen closely for any announcement by the family on this action and respect their wishes… We are encouraging the public and any members of Highland Park law enforcement with intel on the cults to e-mail that information to OpAngel@hushmail.com."
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In closing, the collective said, it "intends to pursue reform within the DoJ and other government agencies to prevent the kind of unnecessary harassment that Aaron Swartz was victim to. Some of the brightest men and women in the fields of information technology and security are being targeted by agencies that lack a basic understanding of the so-called crimes they are accusing people of."

http://rt.com/usa/news/swartz-suicide-co...arges-997/

In America Kafka and Kafkaesque things are very much alive...but causing death and destruction!
I hope now his friends, family and supporters worldwide will file an unlawful death and unlawful prosecution suit against MIT and the USG!!!! They literally hounded him to death and he and his family to the brink of financial ruin [estimates are one million minimum needed to defend himself!]. There are many ways to kill someone....this is but one used - often.