Remembering Aaron Swartz: Fighting back against mass surveillance

PARK CITY, Utah—A year after Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz's suicide at the age of 26, a film about this remarkable young man has premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. The film, titled The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz, directed by Brian Knappenberger, follows the sadly short arc of Aaron's life. He committed suicide while under the crushing weight of unbending, zealous federal prosecutors, who had Aaron snatched off the street near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, accusing him of computer crimes.

At the age of 14, Aaron helped develop RSS, "Really Simple Syndication," which changed how people get online content. He co-founded one of the Internet's most popular websites, Reddit. In the year before his death, he helped defeat a notorious bill before Congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which would have granted corporations sweeping powers of censorship over the Internet. Now, another fight for the freedom of the Internet has begun. This one will have to be waged without Aaron.

Strongbox and Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz was not yet a legend when, almost two years ago, I asked him to build an open-source, anonymous inbox. His achievements were real and varied, but the events that would come to define him to the public were still in his future: his federal criminal indictment; his leadership organizing against the censorious Stop Online Piracy Act; his suicide in a Brooklyn apartment. I knew him as a programmer and an activist, a member of a fairly small tribe with the skills to turn ideas into code—another word for action—and the sensibility to understand instantly what I was looking for: a slightly safer way for journalists and their anonymous sources to communicate.

Aaron Swartz Documents To Be Released After Judge's Order

BOSTON (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Monday ordered the release of previously sealed documents in the criminal hacking case against deceased Internet activist Aaron Swartz.

Swartz committed suicide in January before going to trial for allegedly stealing millions of academic articles from a private database using a computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

CFAA: Internet Activists Win First-Round Victory In Fight Over Anti-Hacking Law

WASHINGTON -- Internet activists won a major victory this week when House Republicans put the brakes on an effort to vote on reforms to federal anti-hacking laws. The reforms had become a legislative flashpoint in the wake of the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who was facing a bevy of charges under the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) before committing suicide in January.

A House subcommittee with jurisdiction over the law, chaired by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.), had planned to vote on a reform of the bill next week as part of a House Republican legislative flurry they dubbed "Cyber Week," according to both Republican and Democratic aides on the panel. However, the bill was pulled back because of pressure from the Internet community. "It was going to be part of Cyber Week," confirmed a GOP committee aide. "There were some concerns that we felt were worth going back and addressing." He added that there is "no timeline" set to bring the bill back.

Aaron Swartz Prosecutor Carmen Ortiz Admonished In 2004 For Aggressive Tactic

WASHINGTON -- U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, under fire over her office's aggressive prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz, was admonished by a federal appeals court in 2004 for advocating a harsher jail term for a defendant than she had promised him in a plea-bargain agreement, according to a court document.

MIT Officials Subject To 'Pattern of Harassment And Personal Threats' Since Aaron Swartz's Death

Officials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have faced harassment and personal threats since the death of well-known Internet activist Aaron Swartz, the university's president said Tuesday.

In a letter to the MIT community, President Rafael Reif said he would publicly release documents about MIT's role in the case after the university completes its own investigation into the matter.

Fixing the Worst Law in Technology

On the opening day of this year’s South by Southwest festival, in Austin, an audience gathered in a giant conference hall to remember the life and tragic suicide of Aaron Swartz. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, spoke of Swartz’s curious and restless mind. Swartz’s girlfriend Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman described him as a man who was constantly asking whether what he was doing was the most important thing that he could be doing. The proceedings were yet another reminder that Swartz’s suicide was heartbreaking beyond belief, and that something must be done about the law that he was aggressively prosecuted under, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

As if to underline the point, last Thursday, federal prosecutors indicted that Matthew Keys, a social-media editor at Reuters, under the same law for helping with an online prank. Keys helped hackers vandalize a news story on the Web, messing with the contents of the article and changing a headline to read “PRESSURE BUILDS IN HOUSE TO ELECT CHIPPY 1337”—which was an inside joke. The damage was trivial, yet he is threatened with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in damages and up to twenty-five years in prison.

Aaron Swartz Lawyers Accuse Prosecutor Stephen Heymann Of Misconduct

WASHINGTON - Federal prosecutor Stephen Heymann engaged in prosecutorial misconduct by withholding key evidence from the defense team of Aaron Swartz, the late Internet activist's legal team alleged in a letter to an internal Justice Department ethics unit.

Heymann took the lead in the much-criticized effort to imprison Swartz, who committed suicide in January, and was the attorney who handled the case on a day-to-day basis, reporting to U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz. Swartz' attorney Eliot Peters has filed a complaint with the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), a step that indicates just how egregious the defense team considers Heymann's professional behavior. A redacted version of the letter was obtained by The Huffington Post.

DOJ To Brief Congress On Aaron Swartz Prosecution

WASHINGTON -- Justice Department officials will brief members of Congress on Friday afternoon on DOJ's handling of the case against Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who was facing years in prison when he took his own life, a congressional aide tells The Huffington Post.

'Fire Steve Heymann' Petition Reaches Threshold, Must Be Answered By White House

A White House petition calling for the firing of prosecutor Stephen Heymann, who handled the case against Aaron Swartz, has reached the threshold of signatures needed to warrant an official White House response -- yet the White House has so far been silent.

Sometime between Feb. 8 and Feb. 10, the petition reached 25,000 signatures, an achievement that a video on the White House's website says is enough to have it forwarded to administration officials and to earn it a response. (The threshold was raised to 100,000 shortly after the creation of the Stephen Heymann petition.)

Why Did the Justice System Target Aaron Swartz?

Hundreds of mourners filled the Great Hall at New York's Cooper Union on January 19th to honor the life of Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who took his own life earlier this month at age 26.

Swartz was well-known in technology circles for helping develop the RSS web feed format and the popular site Reddit, among other accomplishments. At the time of his death, he was facing 13 felony charges and up to 50 years in prison: Prosecutors had accused him of using MIT's network to download too many scholarly articles from an academic database called JSTOR.

Swartz's friends and family have said they believe he was driven to his death by a justice system that hounded him needlessly over an alleged crime with no real victims. "[He was] forced by the government to spend every fiber of his being on this damnable, senseless trial," his partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman said at the memorial, "with no guarantee that he could exonerate himself at the end of it."

Aaron Swartz Case Draws Letter To Eric Holder From Darrell Issa, Elijah Cummings

WASHINGTON -- The top Republican and top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee sent a joint letter late Monday to Attorney General Eric Holder posing pointed questions about the prosecution of Internet pioneer and political activist Aaron Swartz.

Swartz committed suicide this month after fighting federal hacking charges for two years. The letter from Issa and Cummings is the first clear bipartisan response to Swartz's prosecution, heavily criticized by computer and criminal justice experts as unwarranted and excessive. Swartz would have faced up to 35 years in prison if convicted of hacking charges stemming from mass downloads of academic journal articles from the online database JSTOR. Although Swartz had legal access to all of the articles, he was accused of violating the database terms of service by downloading so many at once. JSTOR had opposed his prosecution.

Internet freedom and the ghost of Aaron Swartz

Was Internet ‘saint’ and prodigy Aaron Swartz harried to death by prosecutors? Is the United States planning another scorched-earth campaign against online freedom?

Whatever the answer, this much is obvious to anyone who has been following the ongoing battle between democracies (which are rapidly turning into national security states) and information-hungry citizens clinging to an open Internet: The skirmishing is now a war.

Aaron Swartz, Financial Fraud and the Justice Department

Many people have been asking about the Justice Department's priorities in the wake of the suicide of computer whiz and political activist Aaron Swartz. As has been widely reported, the Justice Department was pressing charges that carried several decades of prison time against Swartz. He was caught hacking M.I.T.'s computer system in an apparent effort to make large amounts of academic research freely available to the public.

Anonymous Takes Over Sentencing Commission Website

WASHINGTON — The hacker-activist group Anonymous says it hijacked the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide. The FBI is investigating.

The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch, was taken over early Saturday and replaced with a message warning that when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago "a line was crossed."

Honouring Aaron Swartz, Internet Activist

The Internet community has been reeling for the past week as it grapples with the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a prominent digital rights activist who left a remarkable legacy for a 26-year-old. Swartz's contributions are used by millions of people every day as he played a key role in developing the specifications for RSS (which makes it easy to syndicate online content), Creative Commons licenses (which makes is easy to make creative works freely available), and the popular website Reddit.

Aaron Swartz Tribute: Hundreds Honor Information Activist

NEW YORK — Portraying his suicide as the product of injustice, friends and supporters at a memorial Saturday for free-information advocate Aaron Swartz called for changing computer-crime laws and the legal system itself.

At a New York City ceremony that was part tribute and part rallying cry, Swartz – who killed himself this month as he faced trial on hacking charges – was painted as a precocious technologist, erudite activist and hounded hero. One speaker called him nothing less than an "Internet saint."

Aaron Swartz Prosecution Sparks Push For Changes To Law By Top Tech Representative

WASHINGTON -- One of the top tech experts in Congress, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), told HuffPost Thursday that the case against Aaron Swartz shows that federal laws need to be changed to prevent prosecutorial abuses. Demand Progress, the liberal activism group Swartz co-founded, is marshalling support for Lofgren's effort, and on Thursday endorsed a concurrent investigation by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) into the prosecution's behavior in the case.

Aaron Swartz Prosecutor Defends Charges, Days After Activist's Suicide

WASHINGTON -- U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz on Wednesday defended her office's prosecution of Aaron Swartz as "appropriate," days after the 26-year-old Internet activist took his own life.

Ortiz, the top federal prosecutor in Massachusetts, broke her silence for the first time since Swartz killed himself on Friday. His family and supporters have blamed the government for playing a role in his death, while members of Congress have questioned the Justice Department's aggressive prosecution of Swartz on computer fraud charges.

Aaron Swartz’s Partner, Expert Witness Say Prosecutors Unfairly Targeted Dead Activist

Outrage is growing over the U.S. Justice Department’s prosecution of the 26-year-old who committed suicide last week just weeks before he was to go on trial. Pioneering computer programmer and cyber activist Aaron Swartz was facing up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted for using computers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to download millions of academic articles provided by the nonprofit research service JSTOR. As the chief prosecutor Carmen Ortiz defends her actions, we speak to Swartz’s partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, and computer security consultant Alex Stamos, who would have been the chief expert witness at Swartz’s trial. We invited representatives from the U.S. attorney’s office and MIT to join us, but they declined.

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Source: Democracy Now!
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