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Aaron Swartz's Estate Seeks Release of Documents
theodp writes "The Boston Globe reports that the estate of Aaron Swartz filed a motion in federal court in Boston Friday to allow the release of documents in the case that has generated national controversy over the U.S. attorney's aggressive pursuit of a stiff sentence. The Court filing (PDF) suggests that the U.S. attorney's office is still up for jerking Aaron around a little posthumously, seeking what his lawyers termed overbroad redactions, including names and titles that are already publicly known. Swartz's family also seeks the return of his seized property (PDF). Last week, Swartz's girlfriend accused MIT of dragging its feet on investigating his suicide. Meanwhile, Slate's Justin Peters asks if the Justice Department learned anything from the Aaron Swartz case, noting that Matthew Keys, who faces 25 years in prison for crimes that include aiding-and-abetting the display of humorously false content, could replace Swartz as the poster boy for prosecutorial overreach."
Just like Aaron would have. The suicide means there were other, deeper problems.
but the American people learnt to watch what they do or say online without proxy chaining, onion routing and burner accounts
Lol @ his "girlfriend" being mad at MIT for dragging it's feet....
He killed himself because he couldn't face the consequences of his actions. No one else killed him. He did it himself.
Sheesh.
Too bad Justice doesn't stand for the rule of law, only subverting. see Disparate Impact.
As I said in the previous story about CISPA, the relationship between you and your government is not what you were brought up to believe it is.
Aaron Swartz wasn't attacked because of that nonsense copyright infringement charge, he was attacked because he was very instrumental in the fight against SOPA.
Bradley Manning was not attacked just because of the leaks of some documents, governments leak selective documents all the time. He was attacked because he showed part of the true face, part of the true cost to the military invasion - the US government is involved in destroying individuals, freedoms of individuals around the world.
These people are political dissidents in USA, the system is set to destroy them because they attacked the system.
You can't handle the truth.
Keys quite literally gave away the keys to the store, pun intended. He did this to cause problems with a specific website of his former employer this is criminal activity end of story.
Silence is a state of mime.
Proves how flawed it is.
Amazing that justice can ever be had under our modern legal system and yet I hold out for the rare instances where it does, in fact, seem to be working. Such as the Prenda situation.
Of course the Prenda criminals will likely get off lightly for severe crimes while Swartz (who should have been charged with misdemeanors at most) and Keys (a bit more severe as he shared secure login info) get hammered.
If it were, then it would be responsible for any suicide for someone with an impending prosecution.
Justice is not responsible for Swartz illegally downloading millions of documents in the JSTOR case, nor for his similar behavior two years prior in the PACER case. His reaction in the former case is still posted:
Wanted by the FBI
I got my FBI file today. (Request yours!) As I hoped, it’s truly delightful.
Sadly the only lesson that the DOJ seems to want to teach anyone is "don't fuck with the rich"
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There are real threats to your freedom here in the states, this is not one of them.
Be concerned with big government, abuse of power and failure to abide by constitutional protections on natural rights. Deficit spending and excessive taxation is enslaving you and your children. What happened to this jerk may be distasteful, but he killed himself after making his own choices.
16T in debt was not a choice I made, but I am being forced to pay it off, as are all of you US citizens out there. Why aren't you pissed off about that?
You're much too soft on the DOJ though. They're the ones asking for laws like the CFAA.
We need a detailed list of every federal prosecutor that has ever brought a CFAA indictment so that we can make sure none get judgeships or political gigs.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Uh, the last time documents related to this case were released didn't turn out so good.
Swartz committed suicide because he had depression. If it wasn't this, something else would have triggered it. If people had known he was suicidal, the correct response would have been to commit him and place him under suicide watch, not to drop charges; suicidal people are still adults.
And except for grandiose press releases, he actually faced a few months in prison, if he had been found guilty at all. Granted, the circus of a large public trial is something to be unhappy about, but Swartz was an Internet activist who had deliberately broken laws, not some bystander who accidentally got sucked into the justice system.
The outrage wasn't just over "the U.S. attorney's aggressive pursuit of a stiff sentence"; it was the "aggressive pursuit of a stiff sentence" as a means to get a guilty plea. And pleading guilty and become a felon is something Aaron refused to do, eventually by taking his own life.
Take that government-loving ass-kissing libtard slashfags!
making the SNR ratio way too high to be useful.
I'm picking a nit here... I admit it...
SNR = Signal / (Signal + Noise)
You want good numbers, like 30db or more.. higher SNR is better.
The spammers, sock puppets and shills are LOWERING the S(S+N) ratio asymptotically to zero.
The way to combat this is with well designed and run forums, and other computer mediated systems.
He would have stand by Rand Paul, a highly demonized figure here on /.
Defund DOJ until Eric Holder resigns for both Fast & Furious and Aaron Swartz incident. This lawless administration only understands money & force, because that is how they do things.
New Economic Perspectives
There are two quite different perspectives in the set of speeches at this conference. Many on our morning panels – Steve Keen, William Greider, and earlier Yves Smith and Robert Kuttner – have warned about the economy being strapped by debt. The debt we are talking about is private-sector debt. But most officials this afternoon focus on government debt and budget deficits as the problem – especially social spending such as Social Security, not bailouts to the banks and Federal Reserve credit to re-inflate prices for real estate, stocks and bonds.
Government deficit spending into the economy is the solution. The problem is private debt. And in contrast to Federal Reserve and Treasury bailout policy, we view the problem not as real estate prices too low to cover bank reserves. The problem is the carrying charges on this private debt, and the fact that debt service is eating into personal income – and also business income – to deflate the economy.
Mortgage debt that is still leading to foreclosures, evictions, and is depressing the real estate market for most buyers except for all-cash hedge funds;
We have been urging a write-down of mortgage debt in line with the debtor’s ability to pay, or to bring debt service in line with current market prices. The administration has bailed out the banks for their bad loans, but has kept the debts in place for most of the population. Its promise of debt write-downs has been empty.
Student loan debt, now the second largest debt in the US at around $1 trillion, is the one kind of debt that has been growing since 2008. It is depriving new graduates of the ability to start families and buy new homes. This debt is partly a byproduct of cutbacks in federal and local aid to the universities, and partly of turning them into profit centers – financializing education to squeeze out an economic surplus to invest in real estate and financial holdings, to pay much higher salaries to upper management (but not to professors, who are being replaced by part-time, un-tenured help), and especially to create a thriving high-profit, zero-risk, government guaranteed loan business for banks.
This is not really “socializing” student loans. Its social effects are regressive and negative. It is a bank-friendly giveaway that is helping polarize the economy.
The character of the stock market has been turned upside down. Instead of raising equity capital to reduce corporate debt ratios, corporate takeovers are being financed with debt.
Business debt service is still crowding out the use of corporate cash flow for new tangible investment and hiring. This is especially the case for companies bought in leveraged buyouts for corporate or management takeovers. Shareholder activism is forcing industrial companies to yield financial returns, such as using earnings for stock buy-backs to bid up stock market prices (and thereby increase the value of management stock options). We thus are seeing a buildup of financial capital, not of industrial capital.
The result of the private-sector debt overhang is a self-feeding spiral of debt deflation. Revenue earmarked to pay bankers is not available to spend on goods and services. Lower consumer spending is a major reason why firms are not investing in tangible capital to produce more output. Markets shrink, shopping malls close down, and empty stores are appearing for rent on major shopping streets from New York City to London.
Slowing employment is causing a state and local budget squeeze. Something has to give – and it is largely pension plans, infrastructure spending and social programs.
However, the one kind of debt we are not worried about is government debt. That’s because governments have little problem paying it. They do not need to balance their budget with tax revenue, because their central bank can simply print the money. On balance, the overall public debt rarely needs to be paid down. As Adam Smith noted in The Wealth of Nations, no governme
Twitter: @dainsanefh
The Justice Department knows they went overboard on this case. The fact of the matter is, although Aaron Swartz's crime was pretty major, it was still white-collar.. stealing a bunch of documents doesn't really justify a 7-year prison sentence, which is what they were going to hit him with before he committed suicide. They were looking to make an example of him and got caught with their pants down going overboard. Serves them right. The a**hole lawyers on the case wanted to make a name for themselves. Now they're backing off.. hopefully they do learn something from this, although knowing the way the judicial system operates, maybe they did and maybe they didn't.
She was going after him tooth and nail because it would look good on her if she won. The so-called "victim" wasn't pressing charges.
Read "The Hacker Crackdown" In there they charged a bunch of kids with "Hacking" to obtain "Secret" information that could destroy the nation's telecommunications grid. After coercing several into a plea deal to plead guilty and take 18months to testify against the remaining defendant who faced something like 30Years, it became known that AT&T actually SOLD the "Stolen" information that REALLY COULDN"T DESTROY THE NATIONS telecom grid in a bound manual for $12.50 if you called their 800 number. SO, the "dangerous hacker" who had spent 2 years in solitary waiting for trial was released with a misdemeanor petty theft and everybody who cooperated went to Fed prison and have a felony record that they plead to . This cost the Gov't several million to prosecute.