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January 15, 2013

Prosecutors Drop Charges Against Late Cyber Activist Aaron Swartz as Tributes Flood the Internet 
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Federal prosecutors have dropped the charges against computer programmer
and cyber activist Aaron Swartz following his suicide on Friday at the
age of 26. In an email to The Boston Globe, his attorney wrote the
dismissal was "too little too late," saying it, "would have been welcome
this time last week." Aaron was facing up to 35 years in prison for
sneaking into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and downloading
millions of articles provided by the non-profit research service JSTOR.
His family had said prosecutors were partially to blame for his death. A
petition on the White House website to remove U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz
from office over alleged overreach in the case has received more than
25,000 signatures, reaching the threshold needed to demand a response
from the Obama administration. Tributes to Aaron Swartz are continuing
to flood the Internet. Academics have posted links to PDFs of their own
copyrighted work using the hashtag "#PDFtribute." The group Anonymous
hacked the MIT website and posted a statement calling the prosecution "a
grotesque miscarriage of justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the
justice that Aaron died fighting for."

 

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