Renewed debate on digital access
The government comes under fire for prosecuting hacker Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide.
The suicide of Reddit cofounder Aaron Swartz has reignited the debate over digital openness and intensified a controversy over the government’s determination to send him to prison.
Swartz, 26, hanged himself in New York on Friday. In addition to Reddit, a news and entertainment website, he helped start RSS, the information distribution service.
He was also a formidable hacker, which led to a federal indictment in Boston for wire fraud and the possibility of 35 years behind bars.
According to his girlfriend, aggressive prosecution and the embarrassment of asking friends for help and money as part of a defense campaign wore down Swartz, who had a history of depression.
“I was never as worried about him as the last few days of his life, and there’s no doubt in my mind that this wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for the overreaching prosecution,” Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, 31, said in a phone interview. She added: “He couldn’t face another day of, ‘Have you done this, have you asked people for money?’ I think he literally rather would have been dead.”
The U.S. attorney’s office in Boston did not respond to a request for comment Monday.
According to the indictment, Swartz physically broke into a wiring closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to download millions of academic articles from an expensive database, JSTOR. Authorities said he planned to distribute them for free.
In a 2008 manifesto, Swartz wrote: “The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.... We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world.”
JSTOR — the nonprofit academic database Swartz plundered — declined to press charges. Prosecutors pushed ahead anyway, quietly supported by MIT, whose president has since ordered a review of the university’s actions.
Swartz’s attorney, Elliot Peters, told the Wall Street Journal that prosecutors declined to offer a plea deal last week that would have spared Swartz from prison. On the same day, JSTOR released the 4.5 million articles Swartz had taken for free use over the Internet.
George Washington University’s Orin Kerr, in a blog post Monday evaluating the government’s case, wrote, “I think the charges against Swartz were based on a fair reading of the law.”
But much criticism elsewhere was aimed at the U.S. attorney in Boston. On Monday, the hacker collective Anonymous raided MIT’s website and placed a message alongside a tribute to Swartz: “We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of copyright and intellectual property law, returning it to the proper principles of common good to the many, rather than private gain to the few.”
Stinebrickner-Kauffman had been dating Swartz since a few weeks before his indictment in 2011. She said their “entire relationship was under the shadow of this prosecution.”
“He had dug himself into a financial hole, and there were ways out of it for sure, but none of the ways out were palatable for him,” she said. “He found it so hard to contemplate asking other people for financial help.”