Aaron Swartz Hacker Case Ends With Suicide
For those of us who have covered white-collar crime cases, we know that prosecutors and defense attorneys play for keeps. In our justice system there is only one victor, one loser, one verdict … and in the middle of it all is a defendant, a person. One of those defendants arrested and charged in 2011 was Aaron Swartz (26), who chose to end his case on his own terms … he hung himself in his Brooklyn apartment last weekend.
When Swartz was indicted in July 2011, I recalled reading about but his case and found it unworthy of blogging about here. What turned me off? Swartz was portrayed by prosecutors as a computer hacker who had wrongfully accessed some free documents from an on-line academic journal repository at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). My first thought was that a guy like Swartz was going to get suspended from school (I believed him to be a student). So why would I think about writing about this case when I had insider traders scrambling around New York to find a lawyer at the time? However, I should have paid attention, because what I forgot about in the Swartz case was that he was an innocent man until proven guilty who was charged with a crime that could have put him in prison for 35 years, 3 years of supervised release and a $1 million fine. So what was this terrible crime that Swartz was charged with that would send him away for so long?
In a press release by the U.S. Attorney (Carmen Ortiz) in the District of Massachusetts on July 19, 2011, there was no mention of Swartz’s programming skills, his genius or his contributions to society (co-developed RSS, a system of constantly updating subscription feeds, at age 14 – instrumental in creation of Reddit – a proponent of free information – etc.). According the federal indictment, he was charged with hacking a not-for-profit organization (JSTOR) from “a restricted computer wiring closet in the basement of MIT to download millions of articles from academic journals” (many of which were available for free). JSTOR archives academic journals and institutions, like MIT, pay an annual fee for its students and professors to use the system to download articles for research. For some reason, Swartz, who was at the time a fellow at Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics, felt that he needed every academic article housed on JSTOR. There was no evidence ever presented as to what, if anything, Swartz planned to do with the data (sell it or give it away) … all we know is that he downloaded it … but, his plot, if there was one, did not go far. He was found out in early 2011, the documents turned back over to JSTOR who was satisfied that justice had been done. JSTOR issued a statement about Swartz over the weekend stating:
However, the full force of the U.S. government was not satisfied and an investigation involving the Secret Service, the U.S. Attorney’s Cybercrime Unit and the Cambridge Police Department ensued … as did a lengthy court battle which was to conclude with a trial in 2013. A review of the legal docket for Swartz’s case on Pacer shows that there was much legal wrangling over evidence, the merit of the case and the severe penalties sought by the government for an infraction that the computer world considered innocuous. Alex Stamos, who was to be an expert witness for Swartz, wrote a blog about the case:
“… what Aaron did [allegedly did] would better be described as “inconsiderate”. In the same way it is inconsiderate to write a check at the supermarket while a dozen people queue up behind you or to check out every book at the library needed for a History 1o1 paper. It is inconsiderate to download lots of files on shared wifi …. but none of these actions should lead to a young person being hounded for years and haunted by the possibility of a 35 year sentence.”