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US Attorney Chided Swartz On Day of Suicide
theodp writes "The e-mail that Defendant Swartz's supplemental memorandum (pdf) cites as paramount to his fifth motion to suppress [evidence against him] is relevant, but not nearly as important as he tries to make it out to be,' quipped United States Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz (pdf) in a court filing made on the same day Aaron Swartz committed suicide. In the 1-7-2011 e-mail Ortiz refers to, which was not produced for Swartz until Dec. 14th — almost two years after his 1-6-2011 arrest — a Secret Service agent reported to the Assistant U.S. Attorney that he was 'prepared to take custody anytime' of Swartz's laptop, although no one had yet sought a warrant to search the computer. In Prosecutor as Bully, Larry Lessig laments, 'They [JSTOR] declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the "criminal" who we who loved him knew as Aaron.' Swartz's family also had harsh words for MIT and prosecutors: '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.' With MIT President Emeritus Charles M. Vest currently serving as a Trustee of JSTOR parent Ithaka as well as a Trustee of The MIT Corporation, one might have expected MIT to issue a statement similar to the let's-put-this-behind-us one JSTOR made on the Swartz case back in 2011."
Swartz was an American computer programmer, writer, archivist, political organizer, and Internet activist. Swartz co-authored the "RSS 1.0" specification of RSS, and built the Web site framework web.py and the architecture for the Open Library. He also built Infogami, a company that merged with Reddit in its early days, through which he became an equal owner of the merged company.
On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested in connection with systematic downloading of academic journal articles from JSTOR, which became the subject of a federal investigation.[2][3] JSTOR offended Swartz mainly for two reasons: it charged large fees for access to these articles but did not compensate the authors and it ensured that huge numbers of people are denied access to the scholarship produced by America's colleges and universities.[4][5] On January 11, 2013, Swartz was found dead in his Crown Heights, Brooklyn, apartment, where he had hanged himself.
- Wikipedia
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Because the whole case was a sham put forth by the US AGO. Even JSTOR, the "offended" party, didn't want to pursue the matter. It was the US government that butchered this man with their brutal legal system and relentless pursuit of him. Make no mistake about that.
The pursuit was even more vicious and determined than that of the MPAA and RIAA with their letters and lawsuits over copyright violations.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
A lot of people are outraged over the prosecutorial overreach in this case (and, by extension, the tradition of prosecutorial overreach in most cases prosecuted by the federal government), and a petition has popped up to remove the DA in charge of this case: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-states-district-attorney-carmen-ortiz-office-overreach-case-aaron-swartz/RQNrG1Ck
It's a start, though what I'd really like to see is some proper judicial reform, so we can bring some sanity to the judicial system.
Links to the Ars coverage of this story:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/internet-pioneer-and-information-activist-takes-his-own-life/
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/family-blames-us-attorneys-for-death-of-aaron-swartz/
About 30 days in jail and a hundred bucks for trespassing. That'd be the going rate.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/12/aaron-swartz-heroism-suicide1
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
This is not a commentary on right or wrong. We're not talking about a young man with an IQ of 65 on death row for a crime he may not understand. Aaron Schwartz was by every reckoning a very smart man. He must have at least considered there could be consequences and repercussions for his actions. Imagine the idea that zealously prosecuting famous people publicly is a career maker...the Giuliani Axiom, if you will. 35 years? IANAL, but you never see these white collar cases serving or being sentenced to anything close to the maximum of all the charges stacked together. Mr Schwartz was intelligent enough to realize these things. It is highly likely, given his incredible success at such a young age, that he was ill prepared to deal with bad things happening to him. ______________Feel free to mod this down without conscience: I was born poor, stayed that way for a good while, and bad things and I are not at all strangers.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
...and what law was broken?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/family-blames-us-attorneys-for-death-of-aaron-swartz/
Stamos goes on to write that MIT runs an “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.” In addition, he wrote, MIT did not require users of its network to agree to any terms of use, nor did JSTOR take any steps to prevent large-scale downloads of its PDFs.
"millions of dollars".. in ACADEMIC papers? really?
worst case is trespassing because he entered the network closet w/o permission. tresspassing does not warrant 30 years. ever.
overzealous resume padding is the reason the US Atty continued with this sham.