They share a belief in using the internet to provide easy, open access to the world's knowledge. "He's something to aspire toward," said Benjamin Hitov, a 23-year-old web programmer from Cambridge, Massachusetts who said he had cried when he learned the news about Swartz. "I think all of us would like to be a bit more like him. Most of us aren't quite as idealistic as he was. But we still definitely respect that."
The United States government has a very different view of Swartz. In 2011, he was arrested and accused of using MIT's computers to gain illegal access to millions of scholarly papers kept by JSTOR, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals. At his trial, which was to begin in April, he faced the possibility of millions of dollars in fines and up to 35 years in prison, punishments that friends and family say haunted him for two years and led to his suicide.
Swartz was a flash point in the debate over whether information should be made widely available. On one side were activists like Swartz and advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Students for Free Culture. On the other were governments and corporations that argued that some information must be kept private for security or commercial reasons. After his death, Swartz has come to symbolise a different debate over how aggressively governments should pursue criminal cases against people like Swartz who believe in "freeing" information.
In a statement, his family said in part: "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 US attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death." On Sunday evening, MIT's president, L Rafael Reif, said he had appointed a prominent 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 the fall of 2010 up to the present." He promised to disclose the report, adding, "It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy." MIT's website was inaccessible at times on Sunday. Officials there did not provide a cause, but hackers claimed responsibility.
While Swartz viewed his making copies of academic papers as an unadulterated good, spreading knowledge, the prosecutor compared Swartz's actions to using a crowbar to break in and steal someone's money under the mattress. On Sunday, she declined to comment on Swartz's death out of respect for his family's privacy. The question of how to treat online crimes is still a vexing one, many years into the existence of the internet. Prosecutors have great discretion on what to charge under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the law cited in Swartz's case, and how to value the loss.
"The question in any given case is whether the prosecutor asked for too much, and properly balanced the harm caused in a particular case with the defendant's true culpability," said Marc Zwillinger, a former federal cybercrimes prosecutor. The belief that information is power and should be shared freely — which Swartz described in a treatise in 2008 — is under considerable legal assault. The immediate reaction among those sympathetic to Swartz has been anger and a vow to soldier on.
Young people interviewed on Sunday spoke of the government's power to intimidate. "Using certain people as poster children for deterring others from doing that same action, ultimately it won't work," Jennifer Baek, a third-year student at New York Law School, said by telephone, referring to Pfc Bradley Manning, who has been charged with multiple counts in the leaking of confidential documents, and Swartz.
Baek, a member of the board of Students for Free Culture, said the comments on blogs and discussion boards she had visited since Swartz's death showed that "people aren't afraid to say this is what the injustice was." The ingredients for trouble perhaps lay in Swartz's personal and direct approach to solving problems. As one mentor, Cory Doctorow wrote in a tribute, he was highly impressionable and sought after and was forgiven by those he worked with and worked for.
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