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Aaron Swartz Prosecution Team Claims Online Harassment
twoheadedboy writes "Members of the legal team responsible for prosecution of Aaron Swartz have claimed they received threatening letters and emails, and some had their social network accounts hacked, following the suicide of the Internet freedom activist. Following Swartz's death, his family and friends widely lambasted the prosecution team, who were accused of being heavy-handed in their pursuit of the 26-year-old. He was facing trial for alleged copyright infringement, accused of downloading excessive amounts of material from the academic article resource JSTOR. U.S. attorney for Massachusetts Carmen Ortiz, who headed up the prosecution, and another lead prosecutor, Stephen Heymann, have reportedly become the target of 'harassing and threatening messages,' and their personal information, including home address, personal telephone number, and the names of family members and friends, was posted online. Heymann also received a postcard with a picture of his father's head in a guillotine."
they recommended this if he accepted a plea bargain declaring himself gulty of several felonies.
Afterwards he would be a convicted felon with limited rights.
And the judge would not be bound by the six month recommendation
It involves a noose.
Going even further, they had the discretion to say 'effected parties do not with to prosecute, the case will be dropped'. They were not under a legal obligation to continue prosecution in the first place.
What civil disobedience? What the hell was the crime?
He downloaded a lot of documents. Documents that were public and not copyrighted in the first place. Public court documents that anyone could download any time from anywhere. Hell, I could have, and I'm not even in the US. He (allegedly) had the intent to spread them using P2P software. Again, where's the crime? Distributing non-copyrighted documents is afaik (ok, IANAL) not a crime either.
The documents were stored on a server that charged you a few cents per page you wanted to see. That's ok, someone who makes something available can ask to be compensated for this service, for his expenses and his running costs, but again, this someone has no right to the documents not being republished because the documents were not "his", they were public.
Swartz' crime, it seems, was to step on someone's toes who has found a neat way to make money with government documents, and that someone had a few "friends" where it matters. That's the crime. There wasn't even any "civil disobedience" in the whole deal. What did he do? He saw public information being "sold", he knew the information doesn't belong to the person selling them, he most likely assumed (as would I, to be honest) that the service only charges this to keep the operation running, so he thought he'd do his country a service actually by making the (public, government!) information information available for free and take the burden of keeping it available off their shoulders. It sure as hell looked like a service the government (or a subsidiary) provides to its citizens and such things are usually not done with the intent for profit, quite the opposite, they tend to cost more than they produce in revenue.
Quite seriously, I fail to see the crime, or even the criminal intent, here.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.